[GDC 2010] It's Like A Demonic Fort!
We take our first peek at Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse and come away very excited for the duo's PS3 debut.
Published: March 16, 2010
Plenty have talked about episodic gaming as the future of small-time development, allowing a relative skeleton crew of hard-working folks to crank out bite-sized chunks of a game at regular intervals, thus allowing fans to get a constant taste of an ever-expanding storyline. Thing is, most episodic outings have been sporadic at best and at worst have spiraled out into successive entries that have taken as long as most normal-sized games to get to market.
There is one very important exception, however: Telltale Games. The creators of no less than four episodic adventures have not only stuck to their promised schedule, delivering a piping hot new addition to the ongoing series they start, but they've done it on a monthly schedule as promised. The only problem was that, at least until now, they'd released entries into the Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit, Tales of Monkey Island and Strong Bad series on just about every gaming platform but ones with PlayStation in the name.
Again, that was until now.
Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse, the third season of the duo's ongoing adventures, will finally grace the PSN day and date with the PC and, for the first time, Mac versions of the game. The decision to bring the pair's third story to the DualShock 3 wasn't one taken lightly, however; updates to the game's interface include the ability to directly control the characters, as well as a complete overhaul of the interface to encourage careful forethought into how inventory items can be used with clearly defined interaction points in the world.
If this sounds like a graduation of the ideas that were introduced on PCs back in the 90s, there's a good reason for that: Telltale was literally formed from the ashes of Sam & Max: Freelance Police, which LucasArts canned rather unceremoniously back in 2004. After ditching their LucasArts overlords and jumping ship, many of the start-up staff at Telltale had a direct hand in some of the biggest adventure games of the point-and-click era, and it shows in what we finally saw up and running at the Game Developers Conference last week.
The first thing we saw was the very same trailer that you can check out rah cheere, helping to sort of introduce the series to newcomers (like us) and setting up the tone of the game with a Rod Serling-esque narrator. Though The Devil's Playhouse is indeed the third season of the show, it was deliberately designed to be consumable to those who never played the first two (which is good, since they obviously couldn't if they were PS3-only gamers). Telltale tweaked the controls and basic interface so much anyway that those previous seasons don't play nearly as controller-friendly as these PS3-bound five episodes, so rest easy in knowing you can head into the game cold.
In fact, if you're feeling truly brave, you can pre-order the game -- a first for the PSN -- directly on the PlayStation Store starting this Thursday the 18th, getting all five episodes up front (you can only order them as a whole package, not per-episode) for just under thirty greenbacks. Wait until the game goes on sale proper on April 15th and that price shoots up by $5 to $34.95 for the kit 'n caboodle. Not a bad little reward for early adopters, and trust us, from what we've seen so far, it's well worth shaving off a couple bucks to get in early -- to say nothing of showing Sony that we're interested in this whole pre-order directly from the PSN business.
There is one very important exception, however: Telltale Games. The creators of no less than four episodic adventures have not only stuck to their promised schedule, delivering a piping hot new addition to the ongoing series they start, but they've done it on a monthly schedule as promised. The only problem was that, at least until now, they'd released entries into the Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit, Tales of Monkey Island and Strong Bad series on just about every gaming platform but ones with PlayStation in the name.
Again, that was until now.
Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse, the third season of the duo's ongoing adventures, will finally grace the PSN day and date with the PC and, for the first time, Mac versions of the game. The decision to bring the pair's third story to the DualShock 3 wasn't one taken lightly, however; updates to the game's interface include the ability to directly control the characters, as well as a complete overhaul of the interface to encourage careful forethought into how inventory items can be used with clearly defined interaction points in the world.
If this sounds like a graduation of the ideas that were introduced on PCs back in the 90s, there's a good reason for that: Telltale was literally formed from the ashes of Sam & Max: Freelance Police, which LucasArts canned rather unceremoniously back in 2004. After ditching their LucasArts overlords and jumping ship, many of the start-up staff at Telltale had a direct hand in some of the biggest adventure games of the point-and-click era, and it shows in what we finally saw up and running at the Game Developers Conference last week.
The first thing we saw was the very same trailer that you can check out rah cheere, helping to sort of introduce the series to newcomers (like us) and setting up the tone of the game with a Rod Serling-esque narrator. Though The Devil's Playhouse is indeed the third season of the show, it was deliberately designed to be consumable to those who never played the first two (which is good, since they obviously couldn't if they were PS3-only gamers). Telltale tweaked the controls and basic interface so much anyway that those previous seasons don't play nearly as controller-friendly as these PS3-bound five episodes, so rest easy in knowing you can head into the game cold.
In fact, if you're feeling truly brave, you can pre-order the game -- a first for the PSN -- directly on the PlayStation Store starting this Thursday the 18th, getting all five episodes up front (you can only order them as a whole package, not per-episode) for just under thirty greenbacks. Wait until the game goes on sale proper on April 15th and that price shoots up by $5 to $34.95 for the kit 'n caboodle. Not a bad little reward for early adopters, and trust us, from what we've seen so far, it's well worth shaving off a couple bucks to get in early -- to say nothing of showing Sony that we're interested in this whole pre-order directly from the PSN business.
