No company takes my money as reliably as Telltale games. Every month I can be assured something is coming to leave me sitting in front of my computer, usually pondering the proper applications of a maladjusted lagomorph. Soon I may be pondering how to properly handle a wererabbit situation, but now I have one goal.
To beat the snot out of Homestar Runner! Come on, you know you want to.
Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People:Homestar Ruiner is all about that goal, and as simple as it sounds it doesn’t stay that way. You’d think it’d be easy to punch a guy with no arms, honestly, but it’s just like boxing a snake. Sure the target looks easy, but it just keeps moving on and on, and gets lost in all that stupid grass, and its girlfriend gets mad at you.
What’s a shirtless cool guy in boxing gloves to do? Well, it turns out he’s to do whatever it takes. Free Country USA is yours to explore. Finally tour the House of Strong! Kick the Cheat! Hang out by The Stick, in all its polygonal glory.
All of the important Homestar Runner characters are accounted for, well voiced and tolerably animated (there are occasional keyframe jumps and jitters) for you to talk to and, more importantly, do things to. Be mean, be nice but still mean at the same time, distract them with delicious cake and then dash their dreams! It’s everything an adventure game should be, minus some of the adventure. There aren’t any dangerous caverns or grues around, although Coach Z’s locker room isn’t an inviting place. It’s very bright, and looks clean, which is the case with the graphics at large for the game, but you just know something slimy is lurking. Probably in the jagged edges the game suffers from. It told me it was running at 1680×1050, but the aliasing looked like the game had scaled up from an embedded shockwave object. I suppose it counts as being true to source, but it’s mighty distracting in a game that looks perfectly true to the source material otherwise; it’s rare I think something makes a 2d to 3d leap well, but this is one of those cases.
Homestar Ruiner is one of the funniest games I’ve played in a long time, but that’s expected from Telltale and The Brothers Chaps, isn’t it? No psychopathic rabbits this time, but there are still violent individuals and Homsar to deal with. None of the puzzles are overly complicated, and there are sufficient hints towards the solutions. It’s not difficult by any means, but it isn’t meant to be, for that matter. The extras in the game are fun, it’s fun to solve the puzzles, and to interact with the world.
Telltale really knows how to work the comedic timing in the video game format, that’s for damn sure. Anything one does to advance the story or solve a puzzle comes with a joke, as do most failings at a puzzle. There are even a few jokes about arbitrary inventory use, which are quite entertaining. I think I might have woke my roommates a few times laughing at this game, the seemed rather annoyed in the mornings. Or maybe they secretly played it, and shared one of my complaints. Keyboard shortcuts are apparently unheard of in Strongbadia, as inventory access is always a mouse lifted up to the top left corner and back over to whatever item in the list you want. Oh what I’d give for some hotkeys, even if it’s a seemingly minor inconvenience. Clicking on a spot and taking the long way to walk there, or going away entirely sometimes ends up being a pain as well, leaving me wanting for WASD movement. I suppose it is only appropriate that the game is designed to be played with boxing gloves on, but my irritation only increased toward the end of the game once I got a large inventory accumulated.
The end, well, that came abruptly even if it was an appropriate end to the game. There’s no complaints about length to be had here, I got my fill and I’ll play again certainly, but when the end comes it feels like it was arbitrarily placed there, like the author intended to put another small chapter in there; nothing came out though when he was trying to fill the gap, and he said “Alright, cut it here with what we had planned. We’ll put the rest in the next episode.”
SBCGAP gets 4 out of 5 canes.
