Post by Afgncaap5 on Apr 2, 2011 14:04:19 GMT -5
Hey, all! I saw an offer in my emailbox from Telltale Games yesterday. Given that it was April 1st, I was a bit hesitant, of course, but the gist of the deal was that for a brief time, the first episode of their Back To The Future game was available for free download.
So I gave it a shot. I have to say, I was impressed with this game. It managed to strike all of the correct comedic motifs of the series without feeling like just a rip off of the movies (in fact, the temporal setting is completely different this time, as it's set in Hill Valley in the early 1930s rather than 1955, the Future, or The Old West.) Christopher Lloyd naturally manages to do a perfect impersonation of Doc Brown in the voice over cast, and while Marty McFly isn't being voiced by Michael J. Fox, the voice actor they got for him is very, very, very good.
Unlike most Telltale Games that I've played, this one was less puzzle based and more story based. Sure, there were a few head-scratchers here and there, but I was rarely stuck for very long on anything (there was a sequence in a soup kitchen that I feared was building up to become as complex as the infamous Babelfish Puzzle from Infocom's old Hitchhiker's Guide game, but it stopped a bit shy of that, much to my relief.) Making it less about puzzles and more about stories is actually a strength to it, I think. I seriously couldn't stop playing the game once I started. I finished in a few very engaged hours because I kept telling myself "Okay, just a little bit more."
Fans of Back to the Future should really try it, the game was clearly made by people who knew how to be true to the series. My only real complaint is that the camera occasionally had this odd habit of shifting based on items that my mouse was hovering over. This was justified a bit by Marty turning to look in the direction of whatever I was mousing over, but it made for a few odd times when it took a bit of concentration to actually click on whatever I was aiming for.
Minor glitches aside, it was fantastic. I'm going to rate it as A- due to the little glitches, but it kills me to put the minus there (I just know that some people in the world take little things like that really seriously in their games, so I felt it was worth mentioning.)
If you read this while it's still free to download, I highly recommend getting a Telltale Games account and giving it a spin. I'm just a bit cash poor to invest in the rest of the series right now, but I'm hoping that after the whole series finishes I'll be able to pick it up at a reduced price like I did with their Tales of Monkey Island games.
So I gave it a shot. I have to say, I was impressed with this game. It managed to strike all of the correct comedic motifs of the series without feeling like just a rip off of the movies (in fact, the temporal setting is completely different this time, as it's set in Hill Valley in the early 1930s rather than 1955, the Future, or The Old West.) Christopher Lloyd naturally manages to do a perfect impersonation of Doc Brown in the voice over cast, and while Marty McFly isn't being voiced by Michael J. Fox, the voice actor they got for him is very, very, very good.
Unlike most Telltale Games that I've played, this one was less puzzle based and more story based. Sure, there were a few head-scratchers here and there, but I was rarely stuck for very long on anything (there was a sequence in a soup kitchen that I feared was building up to become as complex as the infamous Babelfish Puzzle from Infocom's old Hitchhiker's Guide game, but it stopped a bit shy of that, much to my relief.) Making it less about puzzles and more about stories is actually a strength to it, I think. I seriously couldn't stop playing the game once I started. I finished in a few very engaged hours because I kept telling myself "Okay, just a little bit more."
Fans of Back to the Future should really try it, the game was clearly made by people who knew how to be true to the series. My only real complaint is that the camera occasionally had this odd habit of shifting based on items that my mouse was hovering over. This was justified a bit by Marty turning to look in the direction of whatever I was mousing over, but it made for a few odd times when it took a bit of concentration to actually click on whatever I was aiming for.
Minor glitches aside, it was fantastic. I'm going to rate it as A- due to the little glitches, but it kills me to put the minus there (I just know that some people in the world take little things like that really seriously in their games, so I felt it was worth mentioning.)
If you read this while it's still free to download, I highly recommend getting a Telltale Games account and giving it a spin. I'm just a bit cash poor to invest in the rest of the series right now, but I'm hoping that after the whole series finishes I'll be able to pick it up at a reduced price like I did with their Tales of Monkey Island games.
