Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People is my first foray into "episodic" video games, but not into the world of Strong Bad and Homestar Runner. I've been a longtime fan of the HomestarRunner.com website, regularly following the semi-weekly cartoon installments of the whole gang from Free Country, USA. If you've never been to HomestarRunner.com and are a fan of Flash animation and off-the-wall, mostly kid-friendly humor, I'd suggest you check the site out, especially if you have any inkling to download Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (and with a name like that, what attractive person into cool games wouldn't?).
There are two kinds of people this game will appeal to: 1) fans of the Homestar Runner website and 2) fans of old point-and-click adventure games like Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle. I think the folks at Telltale Games, as well as the Chapman brothers who created HomestarRunner.com, are hoping that there's a lot of overlap between the two.
If you're no stranger to HomestarRunner.com then you'll know that this is not the first game to be associated with the characters, but it is the first one you have to pay to play. The Chapman brothers have long been experimenting with ways to create really-old-fashioned games with their characters, creating some fun pixelated diversions (such as Trogdor!, Secret Collect, Rhino Feeder and AweXome Cross 98) but never anything as full and fully-fleshed out as Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People.
Now, I mentioned that this is an "episodic" game, which means that Episode 1 is only the first (duh) of five total adventures that will be released on a monthly basis, all connecting together to form one long story arc. From what I've been told, each episode exists unto itself story-wise (like the new Futurama direct-to-DVD movies, I'm assuming) so you can enjoy just one or two but they also make sense in context transitioning from one to the next.
Episode 1: Homestar Ruiner plops the player right down into the boxing gloves and Mexican wrestler mask of the site's anti-hero, Strong Bad. For the uninitiated, Strong Bad is one of the site's main draws. His "adventures" in checking his e-mail make up the majority of the content on the site. When not checking his e-mail on one of his grossly outdated computers (his current one is an ancient, power-sucking laptop called "Lappy") he's generally causing havoc for the other characters, nearly all of whom he intensely despises but none as much as the "hero" the site is named after.
Article comments
1 - El Bicho
I am in.