Great Gobs of Jellyfish Guts Smothered in Chocolaty Goodness!

It’s Sam & Max Episode three!  Could the Curse of the Episodic Game finally have come to an end?  For those of you not familiar with The Curse, let’s have a quick review:

1999 – The Forgotten – A sort of H. P. Lovecraft meets Nine Princes in Amber which promises to be a huge game whose story is already written.  It plans to be released as a series of games starting with a quick intro, It Begins.  Unfortunately, people don’t like quick intros and sales are too weak to fund the first episode.

2002 – Zelenhgorn – A Boy-Who-Never-Fit-In must solve the mystery of an empty ship and unite the Tribes.  Again, we are treated to an intro which barely introduces the plot and the characters.  And nothing is heard from the developers again.

2003 – Agon – A Professor at The British Museum is tasked with finding twelve ancient board games which will only be revealed when someone finally says to their caretakers, “I have come for the Agon.”  To prevent Death by Publisher Shutdown, the developers released the game directly from their site in Hungry for only $10 US per download.  Incredibly, this was enough to keep them going and episodes two and three followed two and fourteen months later.  But that was two and a half years ago and we have not seen any sign of episode four.  The web site says “coming later this spring” but does not say of what year.

2003, November – Uru – The great city of D’ni which housed the civilization which spawned Myst has been uncovered.  People are invited from all over to come and explore in a multi-player environment which will offer a new Age (world) every month.  Unfortunately, Cyan could not get it to work on time and they lost their funding.  The company almost closed its doors.  They did eventually get funding from Turner Entertainment and have been converting Uru to run under GameTap.  The good news is that it has been running as an open Beta for all GameTap customers since December 2006 and it is due to go Live February 15, 2007.  But we have yet to see whether they can make enough money to keep the episodes coming on a regular basis.

And finally, we come to Sam & Max.

Sam & Max had their own little hit way back when.  Then nothing was heard until Lucas Arts decided to fund sequels to some of their old classics.  And then decided to pull the plug once 90% of the game was complete.  Ouch.  But just like Cyan and Uru, they found a new home at GameTap.

So far, the first three episodes have come out right on time.  This ties Agon for previous best run.  Only one more episode to go and the Adventure Gaming World will have a new record.  And hopefully a broken curse.

But what about this third episode?  It is right on track.  The characters, story and humor are all consistent with what has come before.

This time our Unlikely Heroes  are sent in to infiltrate the Toy Mafia and find out what happened to the Mole who hasn’t been heard from in weeks.  All of the old faces are back and we get to meet a few new ones.  And the office closet is beginning to fill up with mementos.

I can’t say much more without ruining punch lines or the joy of discovery.  Let me just say that this is all consistently good B to B+ material and an excellent excuse to subscribe to GameTap (as if you needed another one).