You might have nostalgia glasses for Sam & Max Hit the Road, that I simply don't have. But hear me out. The game's alright. It just has some flaws you might not have noticed as much back then.
Sam & Max Hit the Road was released, when I almost exclusively played on SNES. My Amiga days were over and only few friends had a PC where we rarely played, as we just started to see them as gaming machines with Doom, which we discovered in 1994, even though it came out by the end of 1993, the same year Sam & Max hit the shelves, but also Day of the Tentacle. Guess which one was the point'n'click we spent our time with, having warmed up quite a large number of hamsters for Edna before.
Times had been different. I bought 2-4 console magazines a month, but no PC related press. Occasional internet use just started around 1996/1997 for me and even that was at the youth centre or a friend's place. Online resources had potential and changed a lot, but life just wasn't focused around them.
So instead of today, when you abandon a game easily, because the next one is available as swiftly as your next encounter on Tinder, if you played a title like Sam & Max Hit the Road, it probably had a whole different impact and with a narrower selection, you stuck with it differently, just like we enjoyed a random rental tape for details only noticable, because we watched it over and over with friends and family to get our money's worth out of it.
If you couldn't read up on a program, find it at the store or hear word of mouth on the schoolyard, games didn't exist and if there even wasn't a hotline for it, which there weren't as many in Germany as there have been overseas, you might have been lost at something like Sam & Max Hit the Road forever. Often the challenge rather would be how far you'd come this time instead of even thinking about finishing and you might just run around and try out stuff for days.
See, I know all that, I've been there when it happened. But I also just developed a ring for the names Sam & Max over the years, because I noticed them in Lucas Arts ludographies. Little did I know Steve Purcell, brought in the company to work on the cover art of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, got handed over the Sam & Max characters for his birthday after he constantly mocked his kid brother's drawings by writing sarcastic, often self-referencing balloons.
I had no idea Purcell developed the anthropomorphic private investigators Sam & Max further to be released in the college newsletter years before he got to publish his first Sam & Max comic book in 1987. Not having even known Lucas Arts had a printed newsletter back in the day, also the Sam & Max presence on those pages passed my attention naturally.
Apparently Steve Purcell snuck in Sam & Max to internal testing platforms, so the dog and rabbit became an in-house staple, paving a way to follow his comic strips with a full adventure game and with increased attention a cartoon show in the later nineties up until he received an Eisner award for the then revived franchise in 2007. Ignorant me missed all of that.
In conclusion I could at least play Sam & Max Hit the Road with the same knowledge I would have back in 1993. And here the problem begins, I think. We get thrown into the story with a rudimentary introduction of the two characters as a private investigator grotesque. They crash a crime scene, beat the villain and leave the victim unreleased.
I have a heart for film noir and hard boiled detectives, but I also can't stand some of the comedic adaptations. The 1987 movie Dragnet quickly came to mind and I feared I could hate Sam & Max Hit the Road just as much for its absurd decisions. After all, humor is a very individual thing, but loving the Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island franchises, I wanted to trust Lucas Arts for their trademarks.
As I played Sam & Max in its German dub, just as I would have back in the day, I even watched an English walkthrough afterwards just to make sure the German voice for Bart Simpson as Max didn't distract me too much. I still have mixed feelings about the dialogue, but in its day it sure was exceptional to have a fully voiced game, simply shown by the fact Sam & Max Hit the Road still was released on floppy disk in an undubbed version along with the dubbed CD ROM for MS-DOS.
Starting at a worn down office, the setting has potential even for me with my doubts. Sam & Max seem to be a good team with the rabbit bringing in hilarious absurdity the way he retrieves an order from a cat just after handling a guy hanging from a stair railing, playing the hyperactive comic relief to the composed wittiness of the fedora sporting wolfhound.
What Sam & Max Hit the Road lack though is an engaging development instead of just being sequences of cartoonish events even the protagonists show little enthusiasm for. It sure is the gritty humor emerging from the eighties underground to become famous with kids in the nineties, but as much I might have just grown out of it, the game just uses American tourist traps as backdrops for a shallow parody instead of presenting a motivation to draw in the player.
Sam & Max Hit the Road is starting to refine the Scumm engine by incorporating icons rather than text menus, but despite being an improvement to concentrate on the graphical surface, it's also rather clumsy than comfortably intuitive in retrospect. Instead of the Curse of Monkey Island dial we often see today, we need to click through a larger number of commands with the right mouse button and the use of items seems ponderous.
Controlling binoculars for example is not very self explanatory, even after consulting the handbook and a guide. One item to get them running doesn't behave like others, as you can pick it up, but not put them in the inventory. Once you set up the binoculars correctly, you're supposed to control the turning by clicking left or right. What's not said is you have to do that on a switch, not just on the image like you might have thought.
In a featurette about the franchise, the creators have reacted looking back at some puzzles like finding the mood ring as they might have just wanted to fuck up people with it, but I think that still had the typical internal logic of Lucas Arts adventures of the time. Those things just have to be absurdly weird to satisfy the player once solved and as far-fetched some occasions are, I think it's not even a shame to seek help here and there, if the overall experience makes up for it.
What fucked me up a lot more was in situations like when I clearly wanted to enter an elevator and Sam comments on it one should rather "use" it. Having read up on Sam & Max history I now understand it matches the mocking kid humor the franchise spawned from, but it doesn't change that sometimes being too picky on what command to use for a simple movement action interrupts the game's flow.
In a balanced combination of trying things until I got stuck too long and reading up hints to help me speed up the process of roaming around cluelessly until I finally manage to find a solution by accident, I barely needed five and a half hours to finish. Compared to a rather short The Secret of Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road still simply doesn't feel at the same epic proportions due to its comic strip nature, but we might also have to factor in that additional effort for complete voice dubs had been new to the industry.
On the other hand, please count in the only exposure I had to the elements of American culture Sam & Max Hit the Road parodies was through media, for the plot offered the time I spent was fairly enough. In the end there's probably a limitation on what you could draw from a Yeti missing from a Hall of Oddities and Sam & Max seems to have maxed that out quite well.
The inclusion of minigames on the other hand could be taken as evidence the creators knew how little they had in store just as much as assuming their overflow in creativity. I see it as a nice gesture to offer something that is playable should you not get any further, just as much as it is good you only really have to play the quite entertaining Wak-a-Rat to receive an item. Being able to shoot R2-D2 in the credits is a bonus, but I couldn't care less for most of the minigames, maybe except for the battleships adaption, which was fun for a one off.
Basically I ended on a note like: "Ok, I played it now." And that may be worse for Sam & Max Hit the Road than hating it for whatever reasons. As I said, there are a lot of factors for it to have been intriguing at its time and I can totally understand if you remember it that way, but the reception of art and media is always part of a personal journey and this time, I might have entered the boat too late to enjoy the ride enough to be interested for more. Not only that games are technically designed better these days, the presentation of edgy jokes just isn't enough for me.
For its time, meaning the resolution isn't the highest, Sam & Max Hit the Road uses beautifully drawn backdrop and character designs, but as intentional sloppy a game like Edna & Harvey looks, though it is clearly inspired by the Maniac Mansion Franchise and Sam & Max, it is so much more elaborated when it comes to guiding the player through its puzzles, whilst simultaneously allowing for more freedom of exploring.
Even though I tend to be nostalgic myself as much as I agree on unreasonable nostalgia criticized by The Return to Monkey Island validated by the backlash its announcement produced before anybody had seen more than a few snippets, I like to return to most old games despite their flaws for the familiarity with the characters and the adventure we've already been through. Playing old games often is trying to recapture a memory, but dismantling transfiguration in the end.
So if you haven't played Sam & Max Hit the Road at all, it might not be your first choice if you're not playing the Lucas Arts games chronologically or have enjoyed enough old point'n'click adventures recently to have an idea how to categorize the game.
If you loved Sam & Max back in the day and you enjoy newer point'n'clicks, you might want to think twice if it's not better to remember it as you do. You might have grown out of it and might be used to more comfortable gameplay.
As a newbie, I can appreciate its values from a historical position, but I just didn't enjoy it as much as I would have liked to. Sam & Max Hit the Road didn't age too well and simultaneously I progressed out of the target group it seems. It just wasn't meant to be, but it's ok.
Sam & Max Hit the Road was released, when I almost exclusively played on SNES. My Amiga days were over and only few friends had a PC where we rarely played, as we just started to see them as gaming machines with Doom, which we discovered in 1994, even though it came out by the end of 1993, the same year Sam & Max hit the shelves, but also Day of the Tentacle. Guess which one was the point'n'click we spent our time with, having warmed up quite a large number of hamsters for Edna before.
Times had been different. I bought 2-4 console magazines a month, but no PC related press. Occasional internet use just started around 1996/1997 for me and even that was at the youth centre or a friend's place. Online resources had potential and changed a lot, but life just wasn't focused around them.
So instead of today, when you abandon a game easily, because the next one is available as swiftly as your next encounter on Tinder, if you played a title like Sam & Max Hit the Road, it probably had a whole different impact and with a narrower selection, you stuck with it differently, just like we enjoyed a random rental tape for details only noticable, because we watched it over and over with friends and family to get our money's worth out of it.
If you couldn't read up on a program, find it at the store or hear word of mouth on the schoolyard, games didn't exist and if there even wasn't a hotline for it, which there weren't as many in Germany as there have been overseas, you might have been lost at something like Sam & Max Hit the Road forever. Often the challenge rather would be how far you'd come this time instead of even thinking about finishing and you might just run around and try out stuff for days.
See, I know all that, I've been there when it happened. But I also just developed a ring for the names Sam & Max over the years, because I noticed them in Lucas Arts ludographies. Little did I know Steve Purcell, brought in the company to work on the cover art of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, got handed over the Sam & Max characters for his birthday after he constantly mocked his kid brother's drawings by writing sarcastic, often self-referencing balloons.
I had no idea Purcell developed the anthropomorphic private investigators Sam & Max further to be released in the college newsletter years before he got to publish his first Sam & Max comic book in 1987. Not having even known Lucas Arts had a printed newsletter back in the day, also the Sam & Max presence on those pages passed my attention naturally.
Apparently Steve Purcell snuck in Sam & Max to internal testing platforms, so the dog and rabbit became an in-house staple, paving a way to follow his comic strips with a full adventure game and with increased attention a cartoon show in the later nineties up until he received an Eisner award for the then revived franchise in 2007. Ignorant me missed all of that.
In conclusion I could at least play Sam & Max Hit the Road with the same knowledge I would have back in 1993. And here the problem begins, I think. We get thrown into the story with a rudimentary introduction of the two characters as a private investigator grotesque. They crash a crime scene, beat the villain and leave the victim unreleased.
I have a heart for film noir and hard boiled detectives, but I also can't stand some of the comedic adaptations. The 1987 movie Dragnet quickly came to mind and I feared I could hate Sam & Max Hit the Road just as much for its absurd decisions. After all, humor is a very individual thing, but loving the Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island franchises, I wanted to trust Lucas Arts for their trademarks.
As I played Sam & Max in its German dub, just as I would have back in the day, I even watched an English walkthrough afterwards just to make sure the German voice for Bart Simpson as Max didn't distract me too much. I still have mixed feelings about the dialogue, but in its day it sure was exceptional to have a fully voiced game, simply shown by the fact Sam & Max Hit the Road still was released on floppy disk in an undubbed version along with the dubbed CD ROM for MS-DOS.
Starting at a worn down office, the setting has potential even for me with my doubts. Sam & Max seem to be a good team with the rabbit bringing in hilarious absurdity the way he retrieves an order from a cat just after handling a guy hanging from a stair railing, playing the hyperactive comic relief to the composed wittiness of the fedora sporting wolfhound.
What Sam & Max Hit the Road lack though is an engaging development instead of just being sequences of cartoonish events even the protagonists show little enthusiasm for. It sure is the gritty humor emerging from the eighties underground to become famous with kids in the nineties, but as much I might have just grown out of it, the game just uses American tourist traps as backdrops for a shallow parody instead of presenting a motivation to draw in the player.
Sam & Max Hit the Road is starting to refine the Scumm engine by incorporating icons rather than text menus, but despite being an improvement to concentrate on the graphical surface, it's also rather clumsy than comfortably intuitive in retrospect. Instead of the Curse of Monkey Island dial we often see today, we need to click through a larger number of commands with the right mouse button and the use of items seems ponderous.
Controlling binoculars for example is not very self explanatory, even after consulting the handbook and a guide. One item to get them running doesn't behave like others, as you can pick it up, but not put them in the inventory. Once you set up the binoculars correctly, you're supposed to control the turning by clicking left or right. What's not said is you have to do that on a switch, not just on the image like you might have thought.
In a featurette about the franchise, the creators have reacted looking back at some puzzles like finding the mood ring as they might have just wanted to fuck up people with it, but I think that still had the typical internal logic of Lucas Arts adventures of the time. Those things just have to be absurdly weird to satisfy the player once solved and as far-fetched some occasions are, I think it's not even a shame to seek help here and there, if the overall experience makes up for it.
What fucked me up a lot more was in situations like when I clearly wanted to enter an elevator and Sam comments on it one should rather "use" it. Having read up on Sam & Max history I now understand it matches the mocking kid humor the franchise spawned from, but it doesn't change that sometimes being too picky on what command to use for a simple movement action interrupts the game's flow.
In a balanced combination of trying things until I got stuck too long and reading up hints to help me speed up the process of roaming around cluelessly until I finally manage to find a solution by accident, I barely needed five and a half hours to finish. Compared to a rather short The Secret of Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road still simply doesn't feel at the same epic proportions due to its comic strip nature, but we might also have to factor in that additional effort for complete voice dubs had been new to the industry.
On the other hand, please count in the only exposure I had to the elements of American culture Sam & Max Hit the Road parodies was through media, for the plot offered the time I spent was fairly enough. In the end there's probably a limitation on what you could draw from a Yeti missing from a Hall of Oddities and Sam & Max seems to have maxed that out quite well.
The inclusion of minigames on the other hand could be taken as evidence the creators knew how little they had in store just as much as assuming their overflow in creativity. I see it as a nice gesture to offer something that is playable should you not get any further, just as much as it is good you only really have to play the quite entertaining Wak-a-Rat to receive an item. Being able to shoot R2-D2 in the credits is a bonus, but I couldn't care less for most of the minigames, maybe except for the battleships adaption, which was fun for a one off.
Basically I ended on a note like: "Ok, I played it now." And that may be worse for Sam & Max Hit the Road than hating it for whatever reasons. As I said, there are a lot of factors for it to have been intriguing at its time and I can totally understand if you remember it that way, but the reception of art and media is always part of a personal journey and this time, I might have entered the boat too late to enjoy the ride enough to be interested for more. Not only that games are technically designed better these days, the presentation of edgy jokes just isn't enough for me.
For its time, meaning the resolution isn't the highest, Sam & Max Hit the Road uses beautifully drawn backdrop and character designs, but as intentional sloppy a game like Edna & Harvey looks, though it is clearly inspired by the Maniac Mansion Franchise and Sam & Max, it is so much more elaborated when it comes to guiding the player through its puzzles, whilst simultaneously allowing for more freedom of exploring.
Even though I tend to be nostalgic myself as much as I agree on unreasonable nostalgia criticized by The Return to Monkey Island validated by the backlash its announcement produced before anybody had seen more than a few snippets, I like to return to most old games despite their flaws for the familiarity with the characters and the adventure we've already been through. Playing old games often is trying to recapture a memory, but dismantling transfiguration in the end.
So if you haven't played Sam & Max Hit the Road at all, it might not be your first choice if you're not playing the Lucas Arts games chronologically or have enjoyed enough old point'n'click adventures recently to have an idea how to categorize the game.
If you loved Sam & Max back in the day and you enjoy newer point'n'clicks, you might want to think twice if it's not better to remember it as you do. You might have grown out of it and might be used to more comfortable gameplay.
As a newbie, I can appreciate its values from a historical position, but I just didn't enjoy it as much as I would have liked to. Sam & Max Hit the Road didn't age too well and simultaneously I progressed out of the target group it seems. It just wasn't meant to be, but it's ok.