Point-and-click adventure games were the first genre I truly fell in love with, as I spent hours mulling over the mysteries that Maniac Mansion had to offer, a game that I still consider my favorite. Sam & Max Hit the Road came out at the perfect time for me, as I was discovering what other similar games the genre had, while it also matched my strange sense of humor.
When point-and-click adventure games started becoming popular again at the end of the 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s, thanks to Telltale Games, I was ecstatic about Sam & Max returning. I played the first Sseason of Sam & Max on my Wii and while I enjoyed it at times, I found it underwhelming. It's taken me almost a decade to get around to playing Season Two, which I also bought on the Wii years ago, and I'm completely underwhelmed again, but for an entirely different reason.
The Wii release of Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space is arguably one of the worst ports I've ever played. The game skips and moves glacially. The animations are either too slow or too fast, as if it's a YouTube video that paused, then fast-forwarded to catch up with the viewer. It's just a mess, especially as a game that is all about clues and the story at hand, and it's almost impossible to play the many minigames scattered throughout. Even playing the port-of-a-port-of-a-port of Maniac Mansion back on my NES wasn't this slow, and I don't remember Season One being this bad either.
Apparently, Atari handled the distribution for this second season and I wonder if that's why this is such a mess. This shoddy port would've been an embarrassment, even if I had played it when it came out in 2010. It's a shame, because in each episode of Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space, I found myself laughing out loud - a rarity for me with video games.
I also find myself frustrated often with comedic point-and-click adventure games, as frequently the different combinations of items to solve a particular story point make no sense. I like the humor, but the mental gymnastics required to figure out some of these puzzles is ridiculous. But what makes point-and-click adventure games so fun is the exploration and trying out different combinations and seeing how the characters or world reacts to these combinations. Yet with a game as fundamentally broken as this, I didn't want to explore and experiment, I just wanted to get this over and done with as soon as possible.
It's a shame, as I imagine on another system that could handle this game, Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space would've been a joy to play, and not a struggle to make the game work as it should. I know this game is the least of Telltale's worries (especially now), but this would be the perfect series for an update that fixes all the problems that make this a nearly unplayable game.
