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Hector: Badge of Carnage – Episode 1: We Negotiate With Terrorists

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 06/13/2012

Posted in: iOS, Mac, Mobile Reviews, PC Reviews, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification. Tagged: adventure, badge of carnage, episode 1, funny, hector, humor, pc, point and click, we negotiate with terrorists. Leave a comment

Publisher: Telltale Games

Developer: Straandlooper

Release Date: 4/27/2011

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Hector is an adventure game for adults, which there aren’t many of. Most have cutesy, colorful graphics, crappy voice acting, and a cheesy story to keep teenagers and unknowing casual gamers interested. This game may be shallow in gameplay, but it makes up for it with crass British humor that is disgusting and funny at the same time. The game is about a deadbeat police investigator who has to deal with a hostage situation. Instead of storming in and dealing with it the right way, he does everything the terrorist says. This leads to the three main areas of the game where you have to solve puzzles.

You start by just clicking on everything and seeing what you can take, interact with, and talk to. This is a standard adventure game affair, and there’s nothing different at all. This is a by-the-books adventure game and doesn’t try anything fancy or new. The three areas are a park, a clock tower, and a porn shop, which all need to be dealt with as demanded by the terrorist. The porn shop needs to be shut down, the clock tower needs to be up and running again, and the guy at the park needs money to restore it. What makes the game interesting are Hector’s comments and the wisecracks and gross jokes thrown between characters. The game even makes fun of Brits themselves with chavs, overall British terms, and inside jokes.

Most of the puzzles are decent, but the hint system is there to help you and insult you. Instead of just simple hints, you have to read all the insults the game throws at you, which is entertaining. Thankfully, the areas can be completed in any order, so that adventure game quirk is out the door here. Most items are so absurd that you know there’s only one thing you can do with them. The entertainment value also comes in the form of what you need to solve the puzzles, like a garter belt for a fan belt in a beat-up police car. The battery is also dead, so you use the chav in the station as teaser bait on a psycho old woman at a bus stop. Push him down into the hood of the car, and you have a charged battery. This is funny, disgusting, and entertaining. The graphics are nicely drawn in a flash animation cartoon style, but the voice acting is spotty. Overall, Hector Episode 1 is an entertaining adventure game, but not for the lighthearted.

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Keyboard & Mouse

Back-to-the-Future-Episode-1-Its-About-Time

Publisher: Telltale Games

Developer: Telltale Games

Release Date: 12/22/2010

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Back to the Future hasn’t really done well when it comes to games. There were a couple of bad games in the 8 and 16-bit eras, but Telltale Games finally picked up the license and injected its excellent adventure formula into the beloved series. You play Marty McFly, who has to go back in time and save Doc Brown from his own deadly fate. He gets a message from Doc to save him, and Marty must find out how to do it with the help of young Emmet Brown.

The story is original but uses the BthF license very nicely. The voice actors sound almost spot on, and everything from the DeLorean to Doc’s dog Einstein and even Marty’s relatives is voiced well and resembles their live-action selves. It’s great to explore the BthF universe with the same clever writing and storytelling. There is a simple adventure game interface where you click around on objects and listen to Marty explain them, but the puzzles are more involved than just slider puzzles or matching symbols. The puzzles are broader and story-driven, and that’s what Telltale is famous for in their Sam & Max games.

You can have items in your inventory, but you don’t just wander around and use them for every pixel in the game. It’s usually pretty obvious to use your recorder to record young Doc’s mumblings so old Doc can solve them. You aren’t overburdened with a ton of items that you have to constantly use a million times on everything, so it’s straightforward and simple, but you do have to think a bit. One great feature to resolve pixel hunting is a button that will show every icon you can interact with. This saves time and frustration, so you’re not wandering around and missing that one item that’s almost off-screen.

While the interface and interaction are smooth and simple, the game is very short, and it’s still lacking some gameplay depth. I would like more cerebral puzzles, but Telltale is more about the story than anything else. The game doesn’t get super exciting until the last 30 minutes of the last two sequences. You can beat the game in one to two sittings (about 3 hours), so for $25, the game is highly overpriced and not worth the money unless you’re a die-hard BthF fan. I would wait for the full season to come out and not spend a ton of money on each episode. Also, the graphics are pretty horrible considering the nice art style. Telltale really needs to upgrade their 8-year-old engine to something more modern.

Reviewed On

Keyboard & Mouse

Publisher: Telltale Games

Developer: Telltale Games

Release Date: 8/11/2008

Available On

Everyone knows Strong Bad from their famous song on Guitar Hero II!!! What have you never heard of them? Well, that’s ok, we all forgive you, but now’s your chance to meet the almighty only-cool-enough-to-look-at-unless-you’re-an-attractive-women, sometimes known as “Flexapecs” Strong Bad. The game’s main attraction is the crazy humor and the nice graphics style. The game is basically a flash point-and-click adventure where you try to show off your strong badness by making Homestar (the town’s “cool guy”) look like a total jack. With great voice acting to support these neat characters, the basic gameplay element always stays the same: click on this thing, hear what Strong Bad says, laugh, wander around aimlessly trying to figure out where to go next with no hints, rinse, and repeat.

My biggest gripe is the fact that you never really know where to go, and most of the game is really a guessing game. You slowly unlock different locations, and warping to these places on the fly is easy via your map. Go around collecting special items and even take photos! But seriously, even though the game has strong humor, it doesn’t save the gameplay. Just double-click and hold the mouse button to make Strong Bad run here, go into your inventory, and try to make certain things work, but I guarantee most of the time you’ll resort to an FAQ. The beginning of the game starts out easy enough where you just follow the plot of the game, then about halfway through it lets go of your hand and you sort of get lost in everything. Trying to spoil Homestar’s fame isn’t really easy since it takes lots of different running back and forth to and fro collecting things to make this work over here. With no quest log or anything like that, you never know what to do, and there are really no hints to help you. Some parts of the game I didn’t even know existed until I resorted to a FAQ, and that was after over an hour of trying to figure out where this one inventory item goes. Trying to go around experimenting isn’t really fun and makes you really annoyed and frustrated.

With all of that aside, the game’s dialog and writing are hilarious and fit the characters very well. The humor is more random, stupid, and full of bathroom jokes than witty and smart. This works just as well, and somehow the game pulls it off cleverly without making you feel like you’re playing something lame. I just really like all of the details that went into this game, like the Snake Boxer 5 mini-game and all of the extra dialogs when you talk to someone more than once. It just really makes things that much more interesting. Now, this is meant for young teens and kids, so there is no mature humor, even though you’d expect it from this kind of character. I really feel these characters should have been given more mature dialog, but what’s here works and works well if you can get around the annoying hunt and seek. I really do recommend this game on the Wii or PC because you’ll love the hilarious dialog, great art style, and funny characters.

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Keyboard & Mouse

Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness-Episode 1

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/05/2009

Posted in: Mac, Microsoft, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, Retro Consoles, Sony, Xbox 360. Tagged: adventures, episode 1, pc, penny arcade, rainslick precipice of darkness, rpg, steam. Leave a comment

Publisher: Valve

Developer: Hothead Games

Release Date: 5/21/2008

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I was so certain this game was going to bomb, but I have been proven wrong. Penny Arcade is about Gabe and Tycho, who try to stop an evil and mysterious robot. The robot crushes your house, and you are then sucked into the adventure. I have to say, first off, that the game is hilarious. PA actually makes fun of RPGs throughout the game. While you run around everywhere, you can click on things and read funny notes about them, but what really is great is the combat.

While the game isn’t random, it is turn-based once you get into the fight. Instead of selecting your attacks or magic, you have to wait for the three icons for each character to “boot up.” You have an inventory icon, then your basic attack icon, then your super attack icon. Each of these boots up at faster rates. Some enemies may be vulnerable to your created character’s rake attack (yes, a rake!!), some may be to Gabe’s fists, and some to Tycho’s machine gun. This gives the game a great element of strategy, so you can concentrate on who attacks who (some are even invulnerable to super attacks, and some are weak to even basic attacks).

The enemies are just great: hobos, mimes, clowns, and fruit fuckers. The mimes use invisible weapons to hit you, such as a pretend grenade, a pretend bow and arrow, etc. You can block these attacks with timed space-bar presses. Among the other funny shenanigans, you get items for combat such as slick oil (which reduces speed by 50%), items to increase defense, decrease enemies, increase health, etc. The combat is just so fun that you never get bored of it because you constantly level up, and if you’re lucky, you may get an overkill bonus by doing super strong super attacks. You can upgrade your weapons by finding weapon upgrade parts throughout the game.

The visuals are really great because they look just like the comic. They are vibrant yet dark (they look more or less like a Cthulhu setting). There are no voices in the game, which is a disappointment, but then again, it could have ruined the comic feeling. The cut scenes are flash animations, yet there aren’t enough of them, which is too bad. On that note, this game isn’t worth $20—maybe $15—because you can beat it in one long sitting or about 6 hours. No matter what, everyone who has a sense of humor and loves RPGs will totally dig this game.