Sam & Max 203: Night of the Raving Dead
Score: 88% ESRB: Not Rated Publisher: GameTap Developer: Telltale Games Media: Download/1 Players: 1 Genre: Adventure
Graphics & Sound: Sam & Max 203: Night of the Raving Dead continues the freelance police's second season with an adventure that starts off with a zombie attack, and ends up dealing with a vampire, a Frankenstein monster and a bit of soul-swapping. It's just another day in the life of Sam & Max, and like the previous episodes, it catches the duo's charm and style perfectly. Visually, this episode looks like the past ones. Both Sam and Max, as well as their trashed office and street, look just like they always have (or at least, just like they did by the end of Moai Better Blues) and the new location, Stuttgart, Germany, is a great homage to the classic vampiric-Transylvanian castle (well, with a disco dance floor added for effect). The host of main characters also returns for not only great Sam and Max sound bites, but also Sybil, The Lincoln Monument's head and Flint Paper reappear in Night of the Raving Dead, and the voice acting for all of these characters is as solid as always.
Gameplay: Sam & Max 203: Night of the Raving Dead, like most of the episodes, starts off just after the events of the previous game. Here Sam and Max have just returned from Easter Island where Max (who has already been declared President of the USA from a previous adventure), is now a High Priest. No sooner does the duo get settled in when a zombie breaks in and steals their valued Hand of Jessie James and they get a phone call of rampant zombie attacks. So, of course, it is up to everyone's favorite pair of freelance police officers to solve this mystery and put everything right again... or at least slightly less wrong than it was when the game started. In a very Sam & Max manner, the game will focus primarily in a remote location, this time an area of Germany known as Stuttgart, but there will also have to be a good bit of investigation that will have to take place on Sam and Max's own street. It seems that Sybil and Lincoln are still broken up, and Sybil is looking for new suitors, while Bosco has closed up shop and Flint Paper is out looking for him. While these events not only help with this individual episode's plot and puzzles, followers of the series will recognize these events as also being a part of the series' overarching storyline of relationships and crazy shop owners. Eventually, the pair will find a castle in Stuttgart known as The Zombie Factory, and they will have to confront the emo vampire, Jurgen, in order to stop the zombie attacks. But of course, nothing is ever straightforward in this series as Sam and Max will have to enlist the help of old friends Bessie the Cow and Philo Pennyworth before the adventure is done. As for this episode's driving-based mini-game, at some point, you will have to play a Paperboy-styled game that has you lobbing SOL discs (a new Internet Service Provider) at zombies standing on the side of the road. As always, this is a nice distraction that, while you will have to complete it once, you might find yourself playing a few more times before the game is over, just to distract yourself from some of the puzzles.
Difficulty: Sam & Max 203: Night of the Raving Dead, like the other games in this series, is designed to be played through in a relatively short amount of time. In the end, it took me about eight to ten hours to run through the entire story, but the developers don't make these games short by making them easier than any other adventure title, the story itself is just shorter. Like the other Sam & Max titles, I found that there was a solid mix of logical steps that seemed really obvious and tricky conundrums that would only make sense in the Sam & Max Universe (like trying to trick Jurgan into sucking Max's blood after the rabbit has downed some holy water). Either way, it seems like this series continuously shows how episodic content is supposed to be done by making each release a nice, manageable size.
Game Mechanics: Sam & Max 203: Night of the Raving Dead doesn't change much in the mechanics department since the underlying engine doesn't change between episodes. The interesting mechanics of note that are unique to this episode involve specific puzzles like the DJ Booth and The Zombie Factory, but even then, there isn't anything too special. It's still point-and-click. As for the previously mentioned driving mini-game, even that fits the basic control scheme of the previous adventures. You are driving the DeSoto down an endless street (this time it is suburbia) and you will use the right-mouse button to fire SOL discs out the side of your car. Zombies will be placed at different distances from your car and you will have to time your shots, as well as move the car left or right in order to make sure you hit the appropriate number of ghouls in the allotted time. I've said it before, I'm a big fan of this series and have enjoyed pretty much every episode that has come from it, and like those previous adventures, there is always something that is said that I never thought I would hear. In this case, it's the phrase "Thank you zombie Abraham Lincoln for teaching our kids more about irony." Long-time fans of the series will, of course, find this statement could easily make sense in a Sam and Max game, and those are the people that should get this game. Players who haven't jumped onto the DeSoto Police Car yet might not want to start in the middle of the season like this, but look at earlier episodes before tackling Night of the Raving Dead.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Minimum System Requirements: Windows XP/Vista, 800MHz Processor (if using a video card with hardware T & L); 1.5GHz processor (if using a video card without hardware T & L), 256 MB RAM, 32MB 3D-accelerated video card   Test System: Alienware Aurora m9700 Laptop, Windows XP Professional, AMD Turion 64 Mobile 2.41 GHz, 2 GB Ram, Duel NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS 256MB Video Cards, DirectX 9.0c
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