Sam and Max: Season 2

Sam and Max: Season 2 continues the antics found in Season 1. Max continues his presidential administration, but a robot sent from Santa has started tearing up the place. Not that it mattered, but the whole place could have needed some cleaning up when Max got elected. Sybil's place has been thrown to the next block, and a pile of rubble sits next to the office.

Screenshot of Sam and Max talking to an Easter Island Moai head statue.

I'm not going to go into much detail about what happened. There's plenty of humor here. Stinky's Diner is finally open, but Sam and Max constantly wonder where "the real Stinky" is. This "grand-daughter" of his is hardly a suitable replacement. Our friends, the C.O.P.S., return, and they usually offer some sort of car upgrade. Bosco continues to be paranoid about THEM, and eventually gets abducted. I'm not sure how connected that is to his mom's ghost hanging around upstairs. In the end, you discover that Sam and Max have a room dedicated to them in Hell.

Screenshot of Sam and Max's room in Hell.

The graphical quality is subpar. This came out in 2008, when everyone was asking about Crysis. Granted, Telltale isn't Crytek, but even by then, this looked dated. The sound is even worse. The dialog sounds like they forgot to turn up their MP3 encoder's bitrate, then streamed it over dialup.

The puzzles are the usual LucasArts style affair. They are almost always straightforward, but sometimes, there is an element of timing involved. There's no King's Quest style weirdness going on. Some of the episodes involve generous amounts of time travel, which are good to find out character's backstories.

Screenshot of the Mariachis.

There is a backstory that's supposed to tie everything together, but in some episodes, I think it lost the plot. Whenever someone has a birthday, a mariachi band appears for a few seconds. There's an entire episode that is all about the Mariachis, but I'm not sure how it ties into the season's plot. There's another episode that's all about zombies. Considering that zombies were the hot thing back when this season was made, I think they did it just to ride the wave. Again, not sure how it adds anything to the long term story.

Overall, this is more of the same. At one point, Sam and Max leave future Sam and future Max in the past. When they meet again, they're kind of mad that they had to redo the past few cases again. Considering that I've played through this season twice, I only sympathize a little bit. It's worth at least once through.

Since you've made it this far, you might be interested in reading:

Sam & Max Save the World
From way back when point and click adventure games ruled PC games, there was a dog and a rabbit. These buddies went around as private investigators solving stuff. I'm not sure which stuff in particular, because I missed the boat. The series wasn't a blockbuster take-over-the-world smash hit, but it had a dedicated following.
Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse
The game opens and closes every episode with a narrator. He doesn't do much, and only explains obvious things that I could figure out myself. He has a slight British accent, but he isn't Stanley's. The office that Sam and Max uses is unavailable for the entire game. They were kicked out between the last season and the first episode of this one. The C.O.P.S. have moved into the Desoto, and Sam uses it as a mobile office.
Tales from the Borderlands
Borderlands 3 has been out for almost a year, but I haven't bought it yet. Yes, I'm aware that it's on Steam these days, but I haven't been that enthused about it. I'll probably get it in the next Steam sale, along with the Halo collection (because I threatened a long time ago to buy it if it came to Steam). I intended to play through all the Telltale games in order of release before I got to Tales from the Borderlands (and all that before Borderlands 3), but that hasn't happened. Even without that, I recognized lots of tropes of the latter Telltale games (Walking Dead and afterwards) that I've heard told over the years. I'm pretty sure that there's no kind of continuity to spoil by not playing through them in order of release.
The Wolf Among Us
Like the Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us is a series based on comic books. (I'm not familiar with either comics.) The setup is simple: all the fairytale characters were forced to leave whatever kingdoms they lived in, and are holed up in New York City scraping by. You play as Sheriff Bigby Wolf. (Bigby Wolf -> Big B. Wolf -> Big Bad Wolf) Because I've portrayed this guy in school plays, I'm immediately on his side.
The Walking Dead
Hey look, a game for Halloween! (Yes, I planned this one, unlike last time.) I've finished playing through The Walking Dead, the game that Telltale Games got popular on. This is one of those games from the zombie craze that reached its height around 10 years ago. I think this rode the coat tails of a Netflix series based on the same comic series, but the game has different characters and story. It merely takes place in the same world.
Yobi's Basic Spelling Tricks
Yobi's Basic Spelling Tricks is a spelling game that came with my family's old Compaq 486 back in the 90s. I'm not sure what prompted me to dig this up. I suspect that seeing a blog that's trying to list every videogame that features Moai jarred my memory, but this isn't listed there (despite Moai being in this game). (I'd like to submit this game there, but I can't find any way to do that outside of Twitter.) After about 3 minutes of searching, I found this game and fired up Twentieth Century.