I was stuck where I last left off in Sam & Max, but got unstuck today when I tried shooting Jurgen’s Monster and got things rolling again. That led to freeing Grampa Stinky, and then I was able to free Bosco and the Desoto, though I had to look up the nitrous puzzle solution (it wasn’t exactly intuitive). And finally I got the right combination on the toy, freeing Santa and his elf, and finishing off all of the dioramas.

Unfortunately, this got Sam sent to his own personal hell, with Peepers from the Soda Poppers replacing Max as his sidekick, causing much anguish. Getting out was fairly simple though, and after confronting Satan again, the big secret behind who really runs hell was revealed, and Satan gets fired.

We had to stop *them* now, as they tried to carry out their strange-but-nefarious plan in three different locations, involving a fiddling contest, seducing Sybil, and tempting Girl Stinky. Stopping them required breaking up a rather disturbing bachelor party for Lincoln’s Head, but was mostly just a matter of finding the right object for each spot.

Now that they were really mad, they banished both Sam and Max to a flaming lake, but here it crossed over with a previous episode again and they immediately escaped, since technically we already performed that escape in the other episode. That led to the final confrontation in a now-rather-frosty office of Hell, but this ending bit was fairly easy.

The wedding takes place, Satan gets his job back as head of Hell, and all is uh, well, I guess. OR IS IT? Well, probably not, whenever Sam & Max are involved.

The final Season 2 episode of Sam & Max was released today, continuing on from the cliffhanger at the end of the last one. I have to get Bosco’s soul back, and it’s going to take a little trip to Hell to do so…

Hell is apparently a rather placid-but-dull office building, where I encountered some of the villains I’d defeated so far, like Hugh Bliss and Jurgen the vampire (now working reception). In the back I found a room honouring Sam & Max, who unsurprisingly apparently contribute more than their fair share to the soul collection process. There, I found some dioramas containing the personal hells of a few other people I’d met, including Santa, Grampa Stinky, the old Desoto (apparently cars have souls, who knew), and Bosco, and could enter each of them.

I obviously have to help them out somehow, and I’ve collected a few items, but I’m a bit stumped at the moment as to what to do next. Being the last episode for a while, I’d prefer not to have to resort to a walkthrough for this one. The humour is pretty good so far though, with plenty of chuckle-worthy quips.

(I also couldn’t resist ordering some more S&M merchandise, including the new DVD collection of the animated episodes, and the reprint of Surfin’ The Highway, since it has some new material. Yeah, I’m a fanboy…)

For once, I managed to actually play a Sam & Max episode just as it came out, and this one (“Chariot of the Dogs”) turned out to be pretty good.

Bosco had gone missing at the end of the previous one, so it was time to track him down, after an introductory bit where we finally got to see inside his store’s bathroom. We were soon abducted by aliens, where we discovered Bosco had been turned into a cow. Fixing him up required a whole bunch of time-travel to previous locations, putting twists on them like meeting both younger and older versions of ourselves, Bosco’s mom (whom we had to unseduce), an abusive computer, and multiple Superballs.

After returning Bosco to normal, the aliens were revealed and were…not quite what you’d expect. After a few more puzzles, involving meeting ourselves again (with a nice in-joke in that the other pair were acting like they were in adventure game, occasionally saying things like “I can’t use those together…”) and traveling to the beginning of the universe, we got rid of the ‘alien’ crew, accidentally destroyed the ship, and fled to…I’m not sure, because it was left there as a cliffhanger ending.

There were some good chuckles, and the puzzles this time were pretty reasonable. There was only one near the end that I had any real trouble with (getting the recording contract), but overall it was a really good episode. The only unusual bits were that there was no driving or minigames at all involving the Desoto, for the first time in the series, and Sybil didn’t make an appearance.

Sam & Max: The Next Generation:

I finally got around to playing the latest installment of Sam & Max today — The Night Of The Raving Dead. It started out as a mid-crisis flashback for a twist, and then put me back in the familiar old office.

There was the obligatory driving game, this time set up somewhat like the old Paperboy game, except this time I was chucking CDs at zombies. After that it was off to the new location in this episode, a gothic castle in Stuttgart, populated by some more zombies and the most Eurotrash vampire you’ve ever seen.

The puzzles were fairly elusive this time around, making sense in hindsight but still sending me to check for a hint or two a few times. The humour still wasn’t really laugh-out-loud, but there was still a good chuckle here and there. An average episode overall, with a few decent digs at the whole goth/emo subculture.

Although they sent out an announcement email a while ago, I didn’t get around to actually downloading and installing the next episode of Sam & Max, Moai Better Blues, until today.

It’s another typical installment, with a mix of old and new places and characters, and so far the puzzles have made sense most of the time. I’m stuck right now at the ‘sea chimps’, but I’ve got a whole ton of items I can fiddle with yet. I was able to do most of the previous episodes in a single sitting, but I think I’ll finish this one off tomorrow.

Despite the decent puzzles, this one hasn’t really been as funny as the others though, without very many memorable jokes. The minigames also make a return, with a pointlessly easy driving one and a balance test that I’d heard people complain about, but it turned out not to be that bad. Not one of the best episodes so far, but not the worst either.

Today I received an e-mail announcing that the first episode of Season 2 of the new Sam & Max games was now available to regular, non-GameTap subscribers. So, of course, I had to immediately buy and download it…

It’s largely the same engine as the Season 1 games, with the big new feature being proper widescreen support, the lack of which annoyed me a bit in those first episodes. It also adds a few new settings for the North Pole and reopened diner nearby, though this time Sybil’s place is inaccessible. It also reintroduces Flint Paper, from the comics and original game, but he doesn’t really have a full role in this first episode.

It’s still your standard collect-and-solve adventure game, of course, though this time they added a boxing action sequence in addition to the usual driving challenge. It seemed a bit out-of-place in an adventure game, and was difficult to control since it didn’t seem to respond properly in some cases (when the mouse is on the edge of the screen, perhaps), but it didn’t take too long to beat, either.

The game as a whole did seem a bit longer and less linear than the previous episodes, though. Some of them could be solved in as little as 1.5-2 hours, but this one took me four. It’s a pretty good start to the season, in any case.