This past March, Telltale Games released the first episode of four for a new game along the lines of their Sam & Max series. Based on the Wallace & Gromit series of short and feature-length stop-motion animated films from Aardman Animations, Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures is a shared venture between Telltale Games and Aardman. They've created an interactive computer adventure game where you get to control either Wallace or Gromit working their way through a number of challenges as they try to sell honey, create contraptions, and deal with a variety of odd characters as you would only find in Wallace & Gromit's world.
I would liken this game to something along the lines of the Quest series from Sierra Adventures back in the '80s and '90s (King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, and so on) mixed with the complexity of the Infocom adventure games from the '80s (Zork, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Enchanter, and so on). Somewhere among these games are the virtual parents of Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures. Each episode is being sold not only for PC/Microsoft Windows users, but also will be available on Xbox Live Arcade some time in the future.
The graphics, though computer-generated, is amazingly like that of the Wallace & Gromit animated series. You'd almost swear that you were in fact controlling the characters in one of their cartoons. So as far as the look and feel, they're spot on. But the voice of Wallace in the game is different than the one used in the Aardman features. Peter Sallis has done the voice of Wallace in most of the animated series, but unfortunately he wasn't available for the game. The voice actor in the game is Ben Whitehead and while he can do a close impression of Wallace, it's not quite the same.
The interface to me is a bit dodgy at times. I have to admit that I have not played any other games from Telltale Games, so I'm not sure if it's the same interface they used for Sam & Max, but it involves a great deal of fiddling around to get in the right place so you can click on the right things. You use the arrow or WASD keys to move the character around, the shift key to interact with your inventory, and then use the mouse to interact with objects and characters. My earlier comparison to Infocom was based on the fact that you almost have to be a kleptomaniac to figure things out, stealing things from devices, or on tables or bookcases, and then using them to work around various puzzles.
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