Sam & Max’s triumphant return to gaming now available
Posted by inpheaux on October 17th, 2006 at 10:40 am
As promised, the long-awaited new Sam & Max game will be available today. Unfortunately, it's temporarily exclusive to the North-America-Only GameTap subscription gaming service thing. Their exclusivity ends on 1 NOV 2006, when you'll be able to buy the first episode straight from TellTale Games' website. This means you won't be seeing a review of it from us until then, unless one of us cracks. We here at Directional Pad aren't incredibly keen on the whole "subscription gaming" thing unless you're talking about World of Warcraft.
Couple things to mention about this new Sam & Max game. First (and most importantly), this is one of those newfangled "episodic" games, similar to the Half Life 2 episodes and Sin Episodes. The good (or at least ambitious) thing that sets TellTale apart from Valve & friends is that they apparently have some concept of time management, and expect to release new episodes in this 6-episode "season" rapidly. Monthly, even. GameTap will always get stuff 15 days early, but they expect to be releasing a new episode every month starting in December.
The second big thing is that it's pretty affordable, especially if you buy the whole season in advance. We don't have any indications of length yet, but the six individual episodes are going to cost $8.95 a pop when you download them individually, or $34.95 for a whole season. Oh, and if you get the whole season in advance, TellTale will give you the option to get a physical copy of the whole season once all episodes are out, for only the cost of shipping.
Also, in between episodes TellTale plans on shipping little standalone machinima shorts to keep the story rolling while we're all waiting for a new episode to get released.
So . . but . . is it good? Is it fun? Is it still hilarious? All indications seem to be pointing to yes, but we won't know first-hand for another two weeks. But when we do know, we'll tell you. At the very least, it seems like TellTale is committed to treating us right, with no delays, a constant stream of new content, cheap prices and several options for purchase methods. But all of these can be made irrelevant if the game isn't fun. We'll keep you posted.
Discuss this article on the forums.