Might wait for the inevitable Steam sale for this one. Sam and Max started out a little slowly too; perhaps the latter episodes will pick up.
While we're reviving franchises, I'd love to see a Telltale Star Trek game. The new movie series is bringing it back into the spotlight, the casts of four of the TV series are still around and Interplay showed in the early 90s that it can be done and done well.
Still, it's only the first episode and TellTale has a good track record of finding their footing in the second installment of a season so I wouldn't consider this a pitiful failed attempt by Sony licensing to squeeze some more money out of the franchise after 25 years, yet.
Sorry, had a small brain fart and am just realizing it. It is Universal, must have had Sony on the brain after my ma called complaining that the dvd player I got her wasn't working. I'll fix it toot sweet.
Nicholas Donaghy said:
Might wait for the inevitable Steam sale for this one. Sam and Max started out a little slowly too; perhaps the latter episodes will pick up.
The season is currently 10% off on Steam right now as part of their holiday sales making it about $22 to subscribe to the season. I doubt you'd see it go on sale until they've wrapped up the season, put every episode on sale individually for $10 a pop, and then release them in a $40-$50 "season pack". Of course there's always next Christmas to catch it dirt cheap or con a friend into buying it for you as a present. (like I did :3 )
As a fan of the movies I can say I'm actually a little insulted by this game... it's milking an unneccessary sequel out of a self-contained trilogy and not doing it particularly well.
As bad as it may be, it is far less insulting than this abomination and its sequel:
...
OT: My standards were set low and surprise, surprise! It didn't turn out to be a fantastic game. I'm not spending money on it but as a huge fan of the movies I still hope that someday there will be a game that does the series justice.
What it seems like to me, though, is that Telltale is sloughing off the dead skin from their old projects and piling it up in a bin marked "Some other stuff we can make some money off of", and the pickings are getting thinner by the day. Sam and Max was fantastic, clever, well designed, and usually full of unique, bizarre puzzles. [...] This seems like they're just reaching now, and I'm sad.
It should be noted that the Sam & Max series is getting better and better and better and better with each passing installment. I mean, Devil's Playhouse is probably one of the best games of 2010 overall, and certainly the funniest.
This Back to the Future game is really more of Universal Studios trying to push out a cash-cow than anything else; between Back to the Future and the upcoming Jurassic Park coming soon, too, Telltale doesn't have a lot to work with considering the films are tightly crafted, imaginative masterpieces. It feels like they know for a fact - anything they do will be but a shadow of the original IPs, and, while they're trying as hard as they can, there's a sense of admitted futility about it.
As other people mentioned, It feels like this reviewer didn't pay attention. Marty did play around with his guitar, Doc was arrested for arson, and Marty did get on his skateboard briefly. He also said you use the dog for the same thing over and over again. If I recall you interact with the dog 3 times, twice for a similar thing, the third time for nothing similar at all.
Although, yes. It was easy, and most of the characters were uninteresting, other than a young Doc.
I'll say it again: the guy making Marty's voice sounds more like Marty than Michael J. Fox. I don't know how it's possible but that's the way it is.
I hope Telltale isn't slacking off. They've done a lot for the revival of the adventure genre but there's more to it than just bringing it back to where they stopped selling because people figured out they were just stories with hindrances.
Anyway the time-traveling episode of Sam & Max is one of my favourites and the next episodes' previews are really freaky so I'm still optmistic. I wonder if the Universal licence will keep Telltale from doing the super cheap packs they're known for doing.
I don't know how cheap is cheap, but on pre-order, and with a discount I got through facebook, I got the whole first season for $20. (and that will include an eventual DVD mailed to me)
Now, sure, I got sam&max season 1 for $5, but it is a new series...
I cant see if this game is worth my money yet. Hearing it is too eazy makes me hesitate. I loved the movies so much! I also played another puzzle adventure game with christopher loyd called TOON STRUCK. it was more cartoony than this game, but really funny and HARD! to the point where you dont know what to do anymore and you just randomly try to give some piano-keys you stole (dont ask why) to people you meet. but making it further in to the game is so much more rewarding. I mis games like TOON STRUCK. and the days where christopher loyd was younger.
I bought into the hype and bought this game as soon as it came out. I also found it disappointing.
The start was wonderful. Not only did they do a great recreation of the famous Lone Pine Mall experiment, they really set you back in the feel of the original movies, with Marty's cool-yet-awkward attitude, Biff's tough-yet-scared demeanor, and George's bizarre intonation in everything he says.
But then the ugly truth of the game play came through almost immediately. I wouldn't say I'm an expert at adventure games, but I had to use every hint I could get to finish every puzzle. Part of the reason is that you rarely know what your goal is.
When you start out, George has you digging through Doc's old stuff, looking for anything interesting that you might want to keep. First of all, what's your goal? I expected something to discover something as I poked around that would set things off, but I had no idea how hard I would have to look. You see the huge amp, speaker, and guitar, and can even try to play it (similar to the scene at the start of the first movie), but Biff steals the guitar and tries himself, though George stops him. You see the dog food dispenser for Einstein, which still works, sans dog food. You see some clocks which you can't do much with. And that's about it. You also see the model of the Hill Valley Town Square, and if you're lucky, you noticed that you can click the courthouse. Hey, Doc's notes are in there! Just as you realize this, Biff scoops it up and takes it from you. Great, now you have to find a way of getting it back from Biff. You can talk to him, but he's not budging. You can talk to your dad, but despite all the other times he has told Biff to stop bugging you, he's not going to help you get back the book. So you go click on everything. Nothing new happens. The only difference now, if you pay attention, is that when Biff takes the guitar from you, he sets down the courthouse, but he picks it back up just as soon as he's done getting yelled at. So now what? Well, there's no better clue than to tell you the answer: tell George that you can fight your own battles (he'll stop interrupting Biff when he bugs you), then when Biff steals the guitar from you, he'll turn it up, blow it out, and knock himself out, leaving the courthouse unattended.
Seriously? I would never have guessed that such a convoluted chain of events would take place. When Biff first took the guitar, I expected this would be a way to get him to drop the courthouse, but I didn't expect he would take it straight back afterwards. This seemed like a dead end. How was I to suspect that talking about "fighting my own fights" would stop George from interrupting Biff? After doing that, I expected Biff would then end up blowing up the speaker, but given what happened the last time he put down the courthouse, I didn't expect him blowing up the speaker to magically change the outcome.
This first puzzle was actually the smallest example of this; each ensuing puzzle gets progressively worse. The two major problems in every puzzle seemed to be that: a) It wasn't clear what you were trying to achieve -- you had to just keep trying things until something happened; and b) many things couldn't be triggered until some amount of time or some other completely unrelated occurrence happened. The result was that I had to click on everything, until something happened, then click on everything again, hoping that at some point I would the right thing and the game would advance. It usually wasn't until I succeeded that I even realized what I was trying to accomplish. How does one solve a puzzle when they don't know what the puzzle is?
Thankfully, the hint system gives you multiple levels of hints, from general pointers on where to look for clues, down to full-blown answers, and there's no penalty for using it. In the end, using the hints, I was at least able to proceed through the story to find out it was largely bland. The town in 1931 is particularly bland, with little populating it and little else happening. The characters were flat stereotypes that were so bad they were funny and the puzzles once again left you with no idea where to begin chasing down your goal. The only thing that I really enjoyed was seeing what happened when you did complete a puzzle, with each one usually resulting in some mildly comedic cutscene.
As a movie, the first episode was short and cheesy, but a fun romp through a setting that brings back great memories from my childhood. The new characters are entirely forgettable, the plot was typical 80s television fare, and aside from those few moments where it brought a smile to my face, it was largely boring, but it did have a few moments.
As a game, it's terrible. I enjoy puzzles, even adventure games (e.g. Machinarium), but the lack of direction and logic in this game was infuriating. I felt lost the entire time, never knowing where to even begin, with all too many things doing absolutely nothing interesting. The objectives were rarely clear and the clues were almost entirely missing from the narrative. It was fumbling around in the dark, waiting for the cursor to light up, like all of the worst of the adventure games that caused their eventual endangerment as a genre.
Telltale Games is starting with great actors, great artists, and a setting and mythos that begs for interesting adventures. Unfortunately, they can't seem to make a two-bit story out of that and, worst yet, can't make a plausible adventure game with it all. After their equally-disappointing "Poker Night at the Inventory" game (which was an interesting, yet shortly-lived set of characters with a terrible poker game stuck in the middle), I wonder if we've seen the last of the zany antics that Telltale produced in such high quality with their series of "Strong Bad's Cool Game For Awesome People" episodes. Though I'm sure the Homestar Runner franchise provided even better story-telling opportunities than Back to the Future, I don't see this as a failing of a tapped-out franchise, but rather a failing to make a half-decent game. What should have been a great adventure in a wondrous setting turned into little more than a dime-store comic serial with a sorry excuse for a game plastered on top.
Let's hope Telltale Games didn't spend all of their budget on voice actors and left a bit for some better story writers and game designers in the next episode.
I would be interested to read a review of Super Back To The Future || on the Super Famicom by Steve. I here it was the best Back To The Future game ever made.
Good thing a friend recommended the game to me. After reading this review, the game didn't look appealing at all.
I enjoyed this game quite a lot. It's the only King's Quest-like game I've enjoyed since those ancient Sierra lines abandoned the text input (besides KQ6, which was amazing).
One reason I was so turned off was I thought this game just re-enacted the BttF storylines. In the first scene, things go differently from the first movie. This is (in effect) the first part of a new trilogy of BttF stories, and even if you don't like this style of gaming, if you enjoyed the movies, you're going to love the way this plays out. I was laughing my ass off at times. I think this game is worthy of being the first part to a new movie trilogy itself.
The key to making this interesting is to disable ALL help/hint options from the start of the game. There will always be a button on screen for you to click if you want a hint. If you're familiar with the Sierra-style games, this game rides the line perfectly between A) not being obvious and B) not leaving you stuck indefinitely (which tends to get boring quickly to me these days). And while the screenshots don't make the animation look appealing to me either, I think it's a lot better when it's animating. It's not the typical Disney/Pixar style that started with The Little Mermaid that has gotten so tiresome and universal.
I wouldn't recommend the game to someone on a budget, but if you're either rich or stealing it online, I think it's a can't miss.
You shouldn't title the review "Back to the Future: The Game" if you didn't review the entire game. Even Wikipedia uses this as a source because they are desperate to have one reviewer that says it sucks.
Also, the game tells you exactly what your goal is, up in the right hand corner. And, at least for the first episode, it was indeed incredibly easy, only marred by the rocket fuel section, which was bad because of Teltale design philosophy of letting the art designers handle the camera angles, and not the people in charge of game elements. In other words, you needed to click on things quickly, and you had to constantly jiggle around to get the camera to let you choose what you needed to use, when the camera angle should have inherently showed all parts at once, and returned to that angle as soon as the action was completed.
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