Animals with badges

Wii-owning point-and-click fans, rejoice—Sam & Max have returned to Nintendo’s little white box for another round of insane adventures. Following the somewhat sketchy release of Sam & Max: Season One on the Wii back in 2007, I wasn’t at all sure that Season Two, or Beyond Time and Space, as it’s known, would be making the trip.

I’m glad that it has. Like Season One, Beyond Time and Space is an episodic series of self-contained adventures involving the eponymous Sam and Max, the dog and rabbit pair of freelance police created by cartoonist Steve Purcell in the late ’80s.

For those not in the know, these two freelance police (yes, that’s about as ridiculous and illegal as it sounds) serve as non-professional private eyes (of sorts), with Sam, the blue-suited dog playing the fast-talking straight man to Max’s borderline-sociopathic tendencies.

Although Sam and Max got their start in the panels of Purcell’s comics, they became really popular after LucasArts’ Sam & Max Hit the Road, a point-and-click during the genre’s golden era (the 1990s).

Call the series an interactive buddy comedy, an homage to film noir (which it is, kind of) or just an adventure game with a twisted sense of humor—whatever it is, it’s damn funny. Season One had the fluffy justice-bringers taking on washed-up child-stars-turned-hypnotists, the toy mafia and a giant statue of Abraham Lincoln (from whom Max usurped the presidency). That was funny enough.

Beyond Time and Space ups the ante, though. Hell, in the opening minutes of the season’s first episode, “Ice Station Santa” (there’s a lot of pop-culture references in these games, too) Sam and Max are assaulted by a giant wind-up robot with an existentialist bent and a penchant for singing poppy ’80s love ballads.

The series has always been silly, excelling particularly in terms of really funny dialogue exchanges. That trend is certainly continued here (“The snow will run red with the blood of the naughty!” a barricaded, possessed Santa screams at the pair in one scene, spraying the walls of his workshop with an Uzi).

Without clever writing, Beyond Time and Space just wouldn’t work. But given that the season’s overarching plot involves a soul-trafficking racket run by Satan, there’s not much to worry about in that department.

In terms of gameplay, this second season plays exactly the way you expect it to: walk around observing scenery, talking to NPCs, interacting with the environment and picking up objects to solve puzzles and get past barriers. This is classic point-and-click gameplay, which, in my book at least, is always welcome.

However, there’s a slight hitch with Beyond Time and Space you should be aware of: The frame rate chugs, badly. This was something I noticed on occasion when playing the Wii port of Season One, mostly when Sam and Max were out terrorizing the streets in their DeSoto. It was disheartening, but didn’t destroy the game.

Choppy animations and pauses are more prevalent in this newest installment, and while they don’t break the game either, it’s really distressing to play what feels almost like an unfinished product (and even more distressing to know there’s not a damn thing you can do about it).

Given the game’s $20 price point, it’s kind of something you just have to live with if you want to enjoy it, at least if the Wii is your only system. But it still bears mentioning that instead of fixing the problem, Telltale seems to have further neglected it.

With season three, The Devil’s Playground, moving to PS3, I’ll be taking my S&M needs elsewhere (yeah, they pun on that one, too) in the future. But if you’re somehow deprived of next-gen hardware or a PC, you should pick this one up, bugs and all.