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Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People - Episode 3: Baddest of the Bands By: Josh Adachi If "location, location, location" are the three keys to Real Estate then a similar axiom could probably be made about comedy's reliance on timing. And if "timing, timing, timing" rules our funny bone, then designing a comedic video game, where the comedian does not control the flow, is inherently a challenge. Enter Mike and Matt Chapman, contributors and writers of TellTale Game's Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, episode 3: Baddest of the Bands, the third installment of a humor-centric point-and-click series based on the brother's internet cartoon site, Homestarrunner.com. The Brothers Chaps (as they like to call themselves) have proven their ability to rise above expectations, having turned a random flash cartoon into a career and something of a media sensation. The brothers also have experience creating game content, as Homestarrunner.com features a number of satirical video games. To their credit, Baddest of the Bands delivers on its promise of high-quality writing, and features some laugh-out-loud hilarious moments. The game itself is well crafted, with a few genuine "aha!" moments as you solve situational puzzles necessary to advance the plot. The fundamental problem of the game is that the comedic elements and the gameplay aspect compete for the player's attention in a way that is less than harmonious. While this may be a minor complaint, depending on the player, it can be a deal breaker. In Baddest of the Bands, it your job as the surly, luchador mask-wearing, Strong Bad, to navigate the world of Homestarrunner.com in a quest to host and win the "Battle Royale of the Bands" and use the prize money to fix Strong Bad's Atari-esque game console. As with the earlier installments of the series, the action is point-and-click, meaning that you advance the plot by clicking on people and things, as you attempt to have the right conversations (in Strong Bad's case this usually means insult the right people), and make the right items interact with characters or surrounding objects. Think Zack and Wiki, only with a lot more talking and a lot less attention paid to timing. By nature of the game's mechanics, it's a puzzle game, and it works. The puzzles are less obtuse than they are in episode one, and even though i got through the new puzzles faster, I didn't feel that they were necessarily easier, just more logical. The graphics seem to have improved since episode 1 (although it's hard to tell since i played episode 1 on a wii and episode 3 on PC), but they are still not as good as the original flash cartoon. Although the graphical artifacts are oddly distracting, especially in the close ups (and especially when compared to the flash cartoon), the overall look of episode 3 fits perfectly with the web-cartoons simplistic grass and sky universe and it's easy to see this game as an extension of the Homestarrunner.com universe. But is the game fun? This is a difficult question to answer. As I said before, there are moments in this game where I was laughing out loud to the ridiculousness being played out on-screen, but most of the time I was something between bored and anxious. The reason for this, I believe lies in the struggle between the comedic content, and the player-controlled nature of the game. Ask yourself this: would a stand-up comedian be more or less funny if, before every joke, he paused and waited for you to choose somebody in the audience to make fun of? Objectively, this should be a more pleasing experience, however it suffers from the fact that the comedy never catches you off guard. Now imagine that if you select the audience members in the correct order everybody will shout "Hooray for you!" and you will go home feeling like you accomplished something. In all likely-hood you will have to try multiple times to get the correct order, which means, in this alternate reality, that you will have to hear any given person get made fun of with the same joke multiple times. If, in this scenario, the comedian's jokes would be absolutely as funny to you as if told in a conventional setting, then congratulations, you have mastered objectivity. Jokes are funny to you based on quantifiable properties, and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People is made for you, because the jokes are at your fingertips (literally) to use as you see fit. For me, though, playing this series is like trying to do two things that I like at the same time, but that don't compliment each other. Kind of like trying to play basketball while eating a steak. It's not that making a successful humorous video game is impossible. Beavis and Butthead, Toe-Jam and Earl, and several of the video games on Homestarrunner.com are humor-based games and they are both funny and fun; however, the humor delivered in those games is not based on punchy insults or one-liners. The humor in the funniest video games rely instead on the incidental build-up of the games' ludicrous elements. For example, in Toe-Jam and Earl you might not laugh the first time a giant hamster in a ball comes rolling towards you, but you may laugh when you find yourself throwing tomatoes at an evil dentist while the same hamster flanks you from the rear. Chances are you'll be too busy trying to avoid getting killed to enjoy the ridiculousness (though you may chuckle about it years later when writing about it), but Toe-Jam and Earl is funny in a way that suits videogames. Homestarrunner.com's, Stinkoman 20X6 understands too, that a videogame is funniest when it sets up a surreal, satiric world, and just allows the player to run around freely in it, allowing the humorous qualities of the game to catch the player off-guard as he or she becomes absorbed in the game. This may never result in actual, physical laughter, but the flow is always there, and the humor can be enjoyed or ignored depending on the occasion. Baddest of the Bands, like it's predecessors requires that the player actually has to listen to jokes in order to accomplish his or her goals. And with the amount of jokes packed into this game, the player must pummel his or herself with jokes to level up. If you are a cutscene person this is probably ok, but I found myself both wanting to enjoy the humorous dialog and wanting it to be over so that I can move forward with the task at hand. Even for a cutscene person, I would imagine this game could get tiring, as basically every action prompts a cutscene. It's not that the humor isn't top-notch and it's not that the game itself isn't fun, it's just that they detract from each other, and although eating a steak while playing basketball might actually be the most fun one could ever have, your shooting percentage will drop, and you won't be able to enjoy the steak in those little cubes you cut so carefully. So, if you're anything like me, you'll play a game like Zack and Wiki to satisfy your point-click puzzle-game appetite, and veg out pressing the "random toon" button on Homestarrunner.com; you'll play a game of pick-up basketball at dusk and eat a steak later in the evening, savoring each well-cut morsel and forgetting entirely who it was you were supposed to be guarding. final verdict: 2.5 out of 5 well-cut morsels (1/2 point added for the Theromax, one of the funniest Brothers Chaps ideas of all time).
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