Sam & Max Hit the Road

Though toning down the anarchic spirit of the original comics just a tad for the gaming medium and its more strict regulations, Sam & Max Hit the Road effortlessly captures Steve Purcell's uniquely strange love-hate relationship with American consumer culture. Through a barrage of increasingly cheesy and niche roadside attractions (The World's Largest Ball of Twine, a Gator Golf course using actual live gators, Celebrity Vegetable Museum, etc.), Purcell taps into a sense of Americana that is irreverent, yet strangely loving towards its subject. Featuring wacky, out-there puzzles that run on Sam and Max's... unique.. sense of logic, it gives Day of the Tentacle a run for its money in the zaniness department. And that patented Purcell dadaist humor suffuses every precious piece of dialogue, resulting in something as immensely quotable as any movie on the subject. Mix that up with one of the greatest, catchiest, most eclectic, and strangely atmospheric soundtracks in the history of gaming (courtesy of Mssrs. McConnell, Land, and Bajakian, whom you may have heard of) and you've got yourself a bonafide classic adventure game. Give yourself to the experience and you'll walk away richer for it.

Sam & Max Hit the Road est génial ! Du pixel en veux tu ? En voilà ! Des mécaniques de gameplay vieilles comme le monde et qui n'ont pas prisent une rides. Des personnages extravagants baignés dans un monde farfelue. C'est tout ça Sam & Max, et c'est ce que l'on aime. Le scénario est à l'image de sont univers : ni queue, ni tête. Les gags marchent bien, chaque personnages que l'on croise reste gravé dans la tête du joueur. Si l'on peut lui faire une petite critique (bien que cela a trait à tout les point&click, en général), la résolution de certaines énigmes qui manque de logique et donc qui peut perdre le joueur à la longue.

I tried playing this when I was a kid, and I thought it was too hard. I played through this time and somehow the answers feel more intuitive than I remember! Finally got some closure and figured out what that game was actually about! Great voice acting, fun artwork (although a remastering would have been nice) and hilarious writing :D

... to give this game 5 stars, the dialog writing was top notch, the design, the slap stick sequences were great. But then I remembered how I felt when I played this game for the first time (I have finished it at least 4 times). There was a lot of frustration involved. It's not one of the best adventures out there. There hardly is any guidance how to achieve anything, you just try to combine this with that over and over and over again. That you can visit so many scenes from the beginning does not help either. It also hardly has any story, just some random pieces stuck together - or at least that's what it feels like. Then again, every time you actually manage to solve a puzzle you get rewarded with these great dialogs. If you didn't play this game back then, be sure to have a walkthrough ready or you probably will get very frustrated at times.

Sam & Max était mon premier jeu CD-ROM. Il m'avait bluffé avec les voix digitalisées en français ! A côté de cette claque technique, le jeu en soi était très bon. Pour moi qui suis fan de DOTT et Monkey, Sam & Max s'incrivait dans la même veine : des situations absurdes, des personnages grotesques, et de l'humour à foison. Incarnez Sam et son compagnon Max afin de retrouver le fameux "Big Foot", et visitez l'amérique. J'aimerais qu'ils en fassent une version remaster de la même qualité que les "monkey island special edition". En attendant, cette version originale avec ScummVM fonctionne très bien.