Let’s End the Nightmare of Peace and Tranquillity

“Kindness? Charity? Understanding? When will this hellish nightmare end?” It’s a fair question inside the cynical world created in the Sam & Max adventure game series from Telltale Games. And in Sam & Max Episode 6: Bright Side of the Moon, the two work diligently to end a nightmare of peace and tranquillity.

Moon is the final episode of the first season of Sam & Max, a satirical series about an anthropomorphic dog and rabbit who bill themselves as “freelance police.” The series is an experiment in monthly episodic game content that, depending on its success, will either inspire a series-driven style of game design or become an interesting historical footnote.

Each month an episode has been released on GameTap, a gaming service that lets subscribers play all of the games in its library, and then a week later the episode has become available for download on Telltale’s Web site.

While other episodic games have had a few episodes strung out over a long period or are more frequent but lack a cohesive narrative, Telltale’s series is like a situation comedy with individual episodes connected by a story arc.

Like a sitcom, the series has wacky neighbors and running jokes. The paranoid proprietor of a corner bodega called Bosco’s Inconvenience Store wears a new disguise in each episode to elude his persecutors. Just down the street is Sybil, whose office displays a placard on which job openings have been written and then crossed out.

Sybil has a new career in each episode; she has been a therapist, a tabloid publisher and the head of a dating service that was later transformed into a carbon-dating service.

In episodes like Situation: Comedy and Abe Lincoln Must Die, Sam and Max dealt with a variety of cases involving crazed talk-show hosts, animatronic politicians and rebellious obsolescent machinery, but as each episode ends they notice a certain similarity between the cases that cannot be pure coincidence (I won’t ruin the surprise for those who haven’t played any episodes by telling you what that similarity is).

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In Episode 6, the villainous mastermind behind Episodes 1 through 5 is revealed, and the heroes must drive to the moon to stop his dastardly plan to make everyone mindlessly cheerful.

To prevent this appalling utopian civilization, Sam and Max must complete an odd variety of tasks, including helping a chicken magician pull a recalcitrant rat from his top hat and making the decapitated head of the Lincoln Memorial vomit. Other times they have to do things that are even weirder. Each success offers a new useful object or entry to a new part of the game.

Most of the puzzles in Moon, as in the rest of the series, are on the easy side, although some are quite clever and most are amusing. The series’ main appeal lies not in its devious brain twisters but rather in its twisted sense of humor.

As the series has progressed, the designers have put in more and more jokes. At first many of Sam’s comments on objects were the same from one episode to the next, but in the later episodes Sam comes up with new witticisms regarding his roadkill calendar and Bosco’s advertisement stating “buy 1, get 1” (which Sam declares a much better deal than the preceding “half off if you pay twice”).

While not quite as brilliant as the series’ best episode, Virtual Reality 2.0, a parody of video games that concludes with an inspired tribute to old-style text adventure games, Moon is still a wonderful way to end a season.

I hope Season 2 is not a long time in coming. It is just so nice to know that every month you will have another three or four hours of sardonic humor and amusing puzzles to get you through a world that is often a bit short on kindness, charity and understanding.

I love adventure games because I like figuring stuff out, which is why I was so charmed by 3D Ultra MiniGolf Adventures, a miniature golf game from Wanako Studios that gives each green some particularly clever alternate route to the hole.

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I loved miniature golf as a child, but in spite of fitful searching, I haven’t played a really good miniature golf course since a Manhattan art gallery commissioned sculptors to create artistic greens for a show many years ago. But MiniGolf has what I want in miniature golf: crazy, colorful putting greens with bizarre obstacles and tricky shortcuts.

The game has three courses, one with a Wild West theme, one at a carnival and one set in outer space. Being a video game, MiniGolf has much you wouldn’t see on a real golf course. In outer space you can shoot a ball from one planet to another, while the Wild West is populated with scorpions that attack the ball (which I hope is not the case with real Southwest courses).

Greens are also littered with items called power-ups that will make your ball jump or turn the hole into a vacuum. One power-up will subtract a stroke from your score, making it possible to get a hole-in-zero.

While fun, the single-player mode is terribly brief. I played through all three courses a couple of times and found the hole-in-one technique for most holes in well under three hours.

The game gets some extra mileage from a multiplayer mode. There are more power-ups in multiplayer games that let balls create a wall of flame to block an opponent or explode to send one back to the tee. Multiplayer mode can accommodate two to four people, but you need four to get much use out of these special abilities; with only two players you are rarely in close proximity to another player’s ball.

Whether MiniGolf is worth buying depends in part on whether you want the version for Windows or for the Xbox 360, since the PC version is inexplicably double the price of the 360 version. This is especially odd because the 360 version has an extra feature not available on the PC: you can play multiplayer games online if you subscribe to the Xbox Live gold service. MiniGolf is also in the GameTap library, which makes the issue of cost moot for its subscribers.

Brevity has also been raised as a criticism of the Sam & Max games, both because gamers like to get their money’s worth and because short episodes are less immersive than a 15-hour game played over two or three days.

Many of us would be overjoyed if Sam & Max episodes lasted for weeks and cost pennies each. This would make us so content that we would begin skipping down the streets and hugging our neighbors. Then Sam and Max would have to find a way to get us back to normal yet again.