LucasArts/Good Old Games
Sam & Max Hit the Road might have been the epitome of old LucasArts, the one that made zany point-and-click comedies, not the one that made cancelled Star Wars games. It’s really a timeless classic of the genre, a quest with surprisingly endearing characters, tightly scripted laugh lines and gorgeous pixels.
And you haven’t been able to buy it legally for over a decade. That atrocity ended this week, as a variety of Lucasarts games including Sam & Max are now available, DRM-free, from Good Old Games. At $6, Sam & Max is quite the bargain. It even includes nice full-color digital versions of the game’s manual and hintbook, which are worth reading through for the comic strips scattered throughout. These are by Steve Purcell, who created Sam & Max as indie comic book characters before co-designing this game with Lucas. (More recently, Purcell co-directed Pixar’s Brave.)
It looks like Disney’s acquisition of LucasFilm has been an exceptional boon to fans of LucasArts’ classic adventure games. First it was Grim Fandango getting a remastered version, and now this avalanche of classics that Good Old Games says will stretch to over 20 different games when all is said and done. Disney sure seems to care a lot more about LucasArts’ archives than Lucas ever did!
Star Wars fans of a certain bent will also be thrilled to hear that the X-Wing and TIE Fighter action games are also now available as inexpensive downloads. Rounding out this week’s selection are The Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, two classic adventures that have been available on Steam but are DRM-free here, and BioWare’s RPG Star Wars: The Old Republic.
But really: Sam & Max. It’s a work of brilliance, and it’s awesome to have it back again. Or rather, to just be able to tell newbies where to go to buy it for slightly less than the price of an expensive cup of coffee.
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