When I reviewed Sam and Max Season One last December, I said I was pretty underwhelmed with the game from a technical standpoint, but the writing was top-notch so I was going to give the second installment a shot, at least for completion's sake. Here it is, and my review is basically the same. The first complaint is the shoddy controls. The Wii would seem to be a natural fit for a point-and-click adventure, but it just didn't work too well. Often I would try clicking on an item only to find my Wiimote start bugging out and click something halfway across the screen. You need to click the ground for Sam to walk to a specific point, which led to a lot of unnecessary difficulty moving him around. I mean, everyone with a Wii has at least one nunchuck, why not make use of that analog stick, or even just the D-pad on the Wiimote itself? Second is the choppy graphics. When I want Sam to run to a point, I click the A button rapid fire, causing Sam to seizure his way across the screen, just barely starting into his walk animation before starting over again a fraction of a second later. I got small freezes all the time, and while none of them were permanent so I can't fault the game much, it's definitely an inconvenience. I realize it's the Wii, not exactly a processing powerhouse, but I've seen so much better. What's the source of these problems? Perhaps the unnecessary jump to 3-D character models. Or maybe I should be playing the game on my PC, where the games originate, rather than the Wii. But after all these complaints, why would I bother continuing with the series? That's no rhetorical question, because the answer is simple- the game did a lot of other things right. The dialog is plenty funny, probably more so than the first season. The plot is very well-crafted too. You might remember my complaints about how Partners in Time wasted its time-travel setup- Beyond Time and Space is so much better about this. You time travel in a few of the five episodes, and events that seem innocuous early in the season gain new significance when revisited later, producing some nice "A-ha!" moments. The puzzles themselves are pretty clever as well. Though a kid's t.v. show was produced out of the same source material, the puzzles here were definitely not child's play. The solutions were tough and often required me to take a look at a walkthrough, but it was pretty fun just to try giving the wrong item to people to see what happens. The game really shines with its completely optional conversations- the bizarre directions and wild tangents some of the dialog trees can take were always gratifying in the end, regardless of whether the story was moved forward or not. So yeah, the writing (the most important part!) here was up to snuff but the poor graphics and controls mean I can't really recommend a playthrough. You'd probably be better served by one of the classics, and so would I. I'm probably gonna eventually pick up the third season of Sam and Max, but before then maybe I can branch out to something along the lines of Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle. I just wouldn't expect it this year.
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