Strong Bad Episode 1: Homestar Ruiner Editor Review

Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People (Wiiware)





From the hit site homestarrunner.com, many memorable characters and ideas have been (and are still being!) created. Now, Telltale Games has made it possible to roam around with all of your favorite characters from the Homestar world. All from the perspective of Strong Bad himself.

Sounds fun, doesn't it? But just how fun is it? We played this new title to find out.

As Strong Bad starts his morning off with singing, dancing, and choreography, he decides to boot up his lappy and check his e-mail. This e-mail however, was far more motivating to Strong Bad than hist previous emails. It told him that if he really hated Homestarrunner so badly, then why not go beat the snot out of him?

So Strong Bad sets a goal for the day; to beat up Homestarruner. The only problem for Strong Bad is that with all the events that were going on in the day, it will be too easy for him to get distracted from his goal.

The gameplay for Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People is fairly simple. In tradition of the point and click adventures of yore, you point the cursor around the screen and click where you want to go. If you click on an item, Strong Bad will move toward item and make a funny comment about the object in the same vein as his comments on the Homestarruner website.

A cool feature in the game is that you don't have to slowly walk everywhere. Instead of clicking it once to move Strong Bad, click twice and Strong Bad will begin running. In addition, If you accidentally trigger a cutscene, you can press B to skip through.

But don't think the game is completely linear. The game has an interesting simulation-style to it. When you go up to someone, you have a set of options that you can talk with them about. You can chose to be nice to them, or be mean to them. It's your choice!



An unexpected feature in this game is your map. It starts off displaying only Strong Bad's house. As each new location becomes available, you are able to add it to the map. What's interesting is that you can place new locations at random. This works because exiting a particular area simply brings up the map.

The upside to this feature thus allows you to construct the world in your image. The downside is that you lose a bit of the classic free roaming gameplay that would have added a nice touch to the game.

Along with your map, you also have a "Collectibles" screen. This screen displays all the unique and extra things you've collected during the game. You also have a chart called "How much I rule: a Chart". This screen shows you some of your best scores, times, and how many goals you have completed.

Interestingly, when you open Strong Bad's Lappy, you are able to compose e-mails just like Strong Bad does in the Homestarrunner movies. A cool feature of this is that you can attach in-game pictures to these e-mails before shooting them off to up to 8 friends. Emails can be sent to internet e-mail addresses or to Wii friends.

One oddity I encountered was that some of my wii friends were missing from the list of people I could email. I may have an unusually large Wii friend list, but that shouldn't be an excuse to not display all available friends. At the very least, a message stating that there is a limitation on the number of friends available for mailing would have been appreciated. Otherwise it looks like a bug in the game.

As mentioned above, you have the ability to take pictures throughout the game. The computer version of this game saves the pictures onto the computer's hard drive, thus making them available for photo editing. In the Wii version, the photos are part of the game's save data rather than becoming available to the photo channel.

To make this feature more interesting, Telltale has added a special location in the game where you can dress Strong Bad in costumes that he finds throughout the game. Strong Bad will then pose for your pictures in front of a variety of backgrounds.



One of the best extras in the game has to be Strong Bad's video game console. While it only plays one mini-game, Snake Boxer 5, there are some funny episodes that revolve around that game. e.g. Searching for your missing Snake Boxer 5 guide book.

The number of times you KO the snake is also recorded as an achievement on the "How much I rule: a Chart" screen.

The graphics in this game were not as much of a leap as I was expecting. For the most part, the 3D graphics look like the 2D graphics from homestarrunner.com. Which makes me wonder why they bothered making 3D models rather than using their traditional 2D animations. My only guess is that this was Telltale Games' call, since they were ones implementing the game.

The music was fitting, and worked well to accommodate the humor of the game. The wide variation in musical styles (from short metal riffs to calm guitar strumming) helps draw you into the world of Strong Bad.

The game's cutscenes were acceptable, but they could have used some limits on the use of them. It can get fairly annoying to hear the same jokes repeated over and over again, especially when you check back with a character to see if anything has changed.

The main menu was a bit different than most games as well. It resembles the Homestarrunner main menu, save that you can access the menu at nearly any time throughout the game.

The gameplay was definitely fun, but it was somewhat distressing when I couldn't figure out exactly what I was supposed to do. This gave the game a bit of unexpected challenge.

Unfortunately, the game feels very glitchy at times, exhibiting odd behavior while walking, or exiting the Snake Boxer 5 mini-game. At one point the game froze my Wii, requiring a hard reset to restart the game.

The game's many extras within the game make the gameplay far more enjoyable that it would have been otherwise. With the ability to take photos, play a mini-game based off of Teen-Girl Squad, and much more, the game attempts to impresses an open gameplay style upon the player.

This was tempered by the game's attempts to constrain you from visiting particular areas of the available locations. When you hit empty space, the game starts to curve your path back toward the action to keep you away from the edges of the universe. This further reduced the free-roaming feeling of the game.

With the ability to go back and do more extra tasks like playing Snake Boxer 5 and taking photos, you may find some replayability in beating your own scores and earning new achievements. However, the game feels too repetitive to make me want to go back and replay the game from the beginning.

Rating	Description
7.9	Presentation
7.2	Graphics
8.4	Sounds
8.2	Gameplay
7.8	Lasting Appeal
7.6	OVERALL (out of 10 / not an average)

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