Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The question everyone’s asking: can LucasArts possibly have two adventure hits on their hands this year? With Day Of The Tentacle due in only two months, Sam & Max Hit The Road is set to appear as soon as November. There are questions to ask. Is the development team spreading itself too thin with multiple titles? Will they be able to match the same standards without Ron Gilbert or Tim Schafer directly working on the game? And what has happened to the SCUMM interface? It’s with these thoughts in mind that we sat down to a hands on with an early build of what LucasArts believe to be the next big step forward for the genre. Read on for our exclusive hands on, and some never before seen screenshots.

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During a bout of iPhone willy-waving down the pub recently, someone observed that there are two things that always get released for any piece of hardware that’s hacked to run homebrew code, and everyone duly installs them. Then doesn’t do anything with them except show them off to people in the pub. The first is Quake. It used to be Doom, but in the 3D age the big Q seems to have become the de facto way of demonstrating that a given piece of hardware has something decent under the hood. Touchscreen controls mean iPhone Quake isn’t hugely playable, but it does look amazing.

The second, and the source of my point, is SCUMMvm, the esteemed emulator for the old LucasArts adventure games. I suspect everyone who installs SCUMMvm, whether it’s for their PC, their PDA, their PSP or whatever, has a favourite game they install alongside it. For many it’s Day of the Tentacle, and God knows there’s a legion of Monkey Island die-hards, but for me it’s always Sam & Max Hit The Road. Except I never play it. I only watch the intro.
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