{"id":21481,"date":"2021-08-20T00:01:20","date_gmt":"2021-08-20T00:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=21481"},"modified":"2021-07-28T22:28:24","modified_gmt":"2021-07-28T22:28:24","slug":"sam-max-this-time-its-virtual-oculus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/20\/sam-max-this-time-its-virtual-oculus\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam & Max: This Time it’s Virtual (Oculus)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>OK I\u2019m going to tell you a couple of things about myself that you may or may not already know.\u00a0 First, I\u2019ve been blind in my left eye since birth.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t keep me from doing much, but I can\u2019t drive because my lack of depth perception and peripheral vision wouldn\u2019t be safe.\u00a0 I also can\u2019t catch thrown objects to me very well, also due to the lack of depth perception, and I can\u2019t see 3-D effects in movies and such.\u00a0 This means I can\u2019t see the full effects in VR games either.\u00a0 Anyway, another thing about me is that I\u2019m a big fan of Sam & Max.\u00a0 Sam is a genial 6-foot tall talking dog wearing a suit, and Max is his maniacal rabbity razor teethed sidekick thing.\u00a0 Together they dispense their wacky brand of justice as the Freelance Police, and have starred in comic books, point and click video games, and even a Saturday morning cartoon!\u00a0 And now they have their own VR game with Sam & Max: This Time it\u2019s Virtual.\u00a0 Even though I can\u2019t use VR to its fullest potential, I just had to play this game since I\u2019m such a big fan of Sam & Max.\u00a0 So thanks to the help of my brothers and their Oculus Quest, I was able to review it!<\/p>\n

In the game, Sam & Max are recruiting a new member of their Freelance Police\u2026YOU!\u00a0 After a brief encounter out in the streets, you\u2019ll start by doing some training missions in their office.\u00a0 You know, mostly \u201cJob Simulator\u201d type stuff.\u00a0 Although the fanboy in me was saying to myself, \u201cOh boy, oh boy, oh boy, I get to make Sam\u2019s coffee and heat up Max\u2019s breakfast corn dog in the microwave and give it to him?\u201d\u00a0 After you finish those, it\u2019s off to more training missions out in the field.\u00a0 Sam & Max have set up nine training stations in an abandoned theme park.\u00a0 These training activities play out more like mini-games in other VR titles like Job Simulator or Carnival Games.\u00a0 As long as you complete them, you\u2019ll be able to move on, and you\u2019ll be scored a grade from A to F depending on how well you do.\u00a0 Three of these nine activities are obstacle courses, but you\u2019ll do other things too like play Fizzball, a sport featured in the comic book.\u00a0 Fizzball plays a lot like baseball, except you pitch shaken up cheap beer cans and the other player tries to hit them with a bat to see how they\u2019ll explode.\u00a0 Naturally that would be unsafe to play in real life, so it\u2019s cool that you get to do that in the game.\u00a0 Of course, since that one requires a bit of depth perception to play, I didn\u2019t do too well at it (I got mostly F\u2019s and D\u2019s on the games), but at least I got to play it!<\/p>\n

After doing three mini-games, you\u2019ll be whisked away to a \u2018boss battle.\u2019\u00a0 Here you\u2019ll use all the skills you learned in the prior mini-games, so that\u2019s kind of neat.\u00a0 My favorite is when you have to cast out demons that were summoned in a convenience store, and you must use junk food items to get rid of them!\u00a0 You don\u2019t get to progress until you complete these missions, though, which brings up some of the game\u2019s problems, but we\u2019ll get to that later.\u00a0 After you do the third set of mini-games, you\u2019ll have to do battle with the main antagonists of the game: microscopic water bears!\u00a0 You see, the abandoned theme park Sam & Max is using was actually an aquatic park featuring those indestructible microorganisms.\u00a0 But now the water bears have found a way to enlarge themselves to take over the world, so now you must use point and click skills as well as the \u201dJob Simulator\u201d and \u201cCarnival Games\u201d skills you learned in the mini-games to defeat them!<\/p>\n

Easily the best part of this game is the humor, which Sam & Max are definitely known for. \u00a0And there are so many obscure references for Sam & Max fans. \u00a0Like the aforementioned Fizzball, a lunar shooting gallery stage with the title \u201cBad Day on the Moon\u201d (also from the comics), and a box of Glazed MacGuffins in their office, which was the topic of one of the Saturday morning cartoon episodes!\u00a0 \u00a0But the game has so many problems that it\u2019s hard for me to just ignore them, no matter how big of a Sam & Max fan I am.\u00a0 And because of that, I really hated giving this game a bad review, but I have to do what I have to do.\u00a0 Even though some of the problems I had with the game come from my disability, there were many other instances where my brothers agreed with me where the game is lacking.<\/p>\n

The first problem is the controls, which my brother Nathan coined as having \u201ctoo much jank.\u201d\u00a0 It also doesn\u2019t help that the game is extremely buggy.\u00a0 You can get stuck behind walls and one time I dropped a gun and it never came back, so I had to restart that battle again.\u00a0 The game could\u2019ve also used more clues so you know what to do next.\u00a0 For instance, in the convenience store one of the demons must be defeated by making a red slushie and putting bottled holy water in it.\u00a0 Then you must give it to him so he gets the \u2018mother of all brain freezes\u2019 then you open a cereal box with a dagger inside as the prize and throw it at the demon to defeat it.\u00a0 But the game gives you no clues in that is what you\u2019re supposed to do, so I had to look at a guide several times.\u00a0 And that\u2019s only one of the demons you have to beat in a crazy way, there are three more in that same area!\u00a0 Plus some activities last way longer than what they should, and wear out their welcome, like shooting drones in another boss battle.\u00a0 Really the game needed a few more months in the oven to iron out some of the issues.\u00a0 Tweak the controls, fix some of the bugs, maybe a few more voice clips to give you hints on what you should do, and visual cues to lead your eyes to where you should be looking next.<\/p>\n

Really I wouldn\u2019t have gotten very far in the game at all had I not had help from my brothers.\u00a0 I\u2019d say this game is probably for advanced VR gamers only, as I have played other VR games before and didn\u2019t have too much trouble with them.\u00a0 It was a little disheartening to play this game and learn that I really can\u2019t play VR games very well because of my disability.\u00a0 When things go totally VR, that\u2019ll be the day I have to stop playing new games, which makes me sad.\u00a0 But on the bright side, if you folks with two eyes really depend on depth perception as much as you do in the game, maybe I\u2019m doing a lot better for myself in real life than I think I am!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sam & Max have no problems using guns to solve their problems, and you\u2019ll use guns in the game, too, both realistic and silly.\u00a0 But you\u2019ll only use them to shoot cartoony monsters, cardboard targets, drones, and cockroaches.\u00a0 There is some alcohol reference as you hit cans of beer in Fizzball, and the duo let loose a curse word a time or two in the adventure.\u00a0 As well as a bit of moral ambiguity here and there.\u00a0 But otherwise, I\u2019d say the game is OK for older kids and preteens.\u00a0 That\u2019s about the time I was introduced to Sam & Max anyway (yeah they\u2019ve been around that long).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK I\u2019m going to tell you a couple of things about myself that you may or may not already know.\u00a0 First, I\u2019ve been blind in my left eye since birth.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t keep me from doing much, but I can\u2019t drive because my lack of depth perception and peripheral vision wouldn\u2019t be safe.\u00a0 I also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":21465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews","category-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21481"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21483,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21481\/revisions\/21483"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}