Left 4 Dead got me back into running Steam fairly regularly, and I'm turning into quite a sucker for their cheap weekend deals. All the stuff I wanted to play but just didn't want to afford at full price.
The whole of season 1 of Sam and Max is going for about SGD $24. I decided to be good and buy it legitimately, even though Adam had passed me a pirated version some time ago - just never found the time to play it. (I missed the original one from LucasArts altogether, so had no nostalgic urge pushing me to play something very pop culture-y.)
The Steam download really makes it convenient, and at $4 an episode, that seems a very reasonable microtransaction price.
Eh, it's not bad for four bucks, though I'm glad I didn't buy it at a more expensive price. I can't say that I'm hooked about the world/lore - I liked Zak McKraken, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, but not Maniac Mansion - so it's a personal taste thing.
I spent a while flipping back between nostalgia - no sound, just text, which makes it play more immersively in my head - and modern laziness, where I let the voice-over and music provide all my sound effects and cinematic experience.
I didn't spend all day drilling down through all the interactable objects - time enough for that later, if I wanted to - just about 3-4 hours solving simple puzzles to get to the end of the story.
It's an elegant enough if classically formulaic short adventure / gumshoe detective story. It does make me put the original Sam and Max Hit the Road on my list of classic games to sample at some point, even if it's not a 10 out of 10 epic like Grim Fandango was.
But more to the point, I'm left feeling somewhat positive about episodic content.
Especially after years of the complete opposite - MMOs striving to be the endless game and all.
Yes, episodes will never replace epic experiences, but it's nice to be able to actually complete a game in the space of a few hours. It's like a bite-sized snack. Something on the to-do list that actually got done - and didn't turn into a long treadmill of "Get this. But I need money. So I farm that. And I've run out of inventory space. Make alt. Mail stuff. Transfer things up and down. Then to do that, I need this x 2..." Not a week-long, months-spanning project, in other words.
Left 4 Dead too. Play a round. One chapter. Need more? Play the whole episode. Voila, one complete story. Done for the night.
Works for busy working adults like we've all degenerated into.
Makes me think I ought to try and convert more of my games into episodic content, even if the format doesn't quite fit. Like if I went back to Guild Wars for a bit, I could play two chapters and stop, or some such.
Tricky thing is when you end up from one quest-giver to another, accumulating a laundry list of to-dos that just never seems to go away. :P
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