homestar runner |

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.