It’s like Decemberween in your Wii

by Jon Erik Ariza

Fun factor: Fun

Worth to: Buy/Rent

Even though it’s not very long, ‘Homestar Ruiner’ recreates the same charm and feel of the online animated cartoons.

TellTale Games, makers of the Wii game, Sam & Max: Season 1, brings Homestar Runner’s most popular character, the wrestling mask-wearing Strong Bad, to the Wii in the first installment of his cool game for attractive people. The game combines Strong Bad’s voice and humor with TellTale’s now familiar point-and-click adventure formula.

For those unfamiliar with classic point-and-click adventure games, they are typically low on action and rely more on collecting items and using them in the correct places in order to advance the story. These games, made popular by the likes of Myst, and games by LucasArts and Sierra almost two decades ago, had grown out of style in this post-Halo, run-and-gun-and-explosions game industry. TellTale Games brought the genre back to public attention when they resurrected the Sam & Max video game franchise, which was produced by LucasArts in the early ‘90s, though they had been working on episodic adventures for some time before.



After CSI: Hard Evidence, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People is the developer’s second effort on the Wii and the first episode, Homestar Ruiner, shines as one of the best games on Nintendo’s WiiWare service.

A deuce-click type of game

As stated above the point-and-click nature of the gameplay is fairly straight forward. You click on a location on the screen and Strong Bad will walk there, double-click and he’ll run. If you click on a character, he’ll talk to them, if you click on an item, he’ll examine it or pick it up. The point of the game is to progress the story through conversations or utilizing the correct item at the correct place to trigger an event.

Adventure games are notorious for having long roundabouts and sometimes illogical solutions to seemingly simple tasks. Fotunately Homestar Ruiner avoids this pitfall for the most part. Few puzzles are terribly vague and if you’re a fan of the online flash animations, you’ll likely understand the world’s inner logic to further demystify the game.

For a WiiWare game, Homestar Ruiner has a surprising amount of collectibles and extras. For example, Strong Bad’s video game system has a playable game that has you punching snakes. It’s a simple game but still entertaining. There is also a comic strip which you can direct given a few simple options. More options can be found hidden about, along with pages from Strong Bad’s lost game manual, trophies for completing optional objectives, costumes for dressing up Strong Bad in the photo booth, and a camera used for taking in-game stills. These stills can then be sent to friends on your Wii’s friend list. It’s a surprising amount of features for what could easily have been a quickly done downloadable release.



The game itself looks and feels like one of StrongBad’s animated shorts come to life. The adaptation of the characters into 3D was handled beautifully and the cell shading further adds to the game’s cartoony appearance. The voice acting sounds just as it does in the web animations and there’s a surprising amount of it. There’s a great volume of voice work just on Strong Bad describing items and the necessary dialogue in cutscenes but there is also additional voice work for each character’s dialogue trees. There is little, if any, dialogue that isn’t fully acted out and it’s made all the more impressive by the fact that it’s made to fit Nintendo’s relatively small WiiWare file size.

Summary

Homestar Ruiner, the first episode of Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, is almost indispensible for fans of Homestar Runner. The storyline feels right at home in the game’s universe and the look and feel of the cartoons has been impressively translated into game form. The only people I wouldn’t immediately recommend this to are adrenaline junkies that can’t live without unloading a machine gun every two minutes and those who just don’t like Homestar Runner. Even then, I’d urge them to at least try it.