Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People - 11/52

     I have a bit of history with this game.  2008, roughly the time this game started coming out, was when I was starting to get involved heavily in Let's Player culture.  This was back in the days where YouTube Let's Play was still a pretty new format and long before it just evolved into a guy with bad facial hair eating up 1/4 of the screen space with a reaction camera regardless of whether or not the game required it or not.  It was at this point I discovered one of my early favorites, one Sonikdude101, now AntDude92.  He was, at the point I discovered him, playing through a hot new point and click adventure series that was destined to revive the genre, a five-part series known as Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People.  This Let's Play inspired me to pick up the game for myself, though at the time only the first episode, Homestar Ruiner, was out.  And after playing it and having a decent time with it, I proceeded to forget all about ever having played it, forget that other entries in the series were soon to come out and didn't remember buying it a second time until it popped up on Cookie.  But it didn't matter to me, as I had only previously played 20% of the entire game and at least 75 to 80% of the game unfinished is my eligibility point.  And it was definitely an experience, to say the least.  But first, some history.

     On January 1st, 2000, Homestarrunner.com launched, spending the next five years dominating the world of online entertainment until YouTube came and killed any and all standing competition.  Originating in 1996 as the main character in a proposed children's book, Homestar Runner took advantage of the rise of Flash animation to create one of the first truly popular websites on the internet.  If you were a middle school to college student between its inception and its hiatus in 2009, you are likely at least somewhat familiar with Homestar Runner.  The site hosted a wide array of different cartoon series, from the titular Homestar Runner cartoons to Teen Girl Squad, a series of crudely drawn webcomics full to the brim with teen comedy stereotypes and wanton violence,  to Marzipan's answering machine, which features the only female character in the original cast answering voicemails and getting prank called by what is very likely the site's breakout character, the host of the most popular series on the site 'Strong Bad E-Mail', the titular Strong Bad.  This is a massive part of internet history we're dealing with today.  So, as one would expect, being such an omnipresent internet cultural phenomenon, I completely missed out on all of it.

     Look, I had heard about Homestar Runner before I picked up Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People Episode 1: Homestar Ruiner.  I had plenty of friends that picked up on it right at its peak and swore by it.  I just never got into it myself, largely because my friends and I had a long-proven dissonance in comedic tastes.  Though none of them would be willing to admit it today, they all found FRED to be the funniest thing in the world in 2006 to 2007 and scoffed at my attempts to show them the comedic brilliance of Nigahiga.  Okay, Nigahiga kind of sucked too and always had, but How to Be Ninja/Gangster/Emo/Nerd are still indisputable classics in my mind.  So, I went into this game knowing absolutely nothing about the characters or their relationships or really anything besides what I saw in the Let's Play and what I saw when my friends had attempted to show me Homestar a couple years prior.  But my belief is that any game, regardless of its relationship to a preexisting IP, should be mostly self-sustaining, with the references to its IP being neat easter eggs rather than in-your-face fanservice.  So rather than educate myself by absorbing a ton of Homestar Runner, I went in blind.  This is more disclaimer than anything because I feel like this decision is why I and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People didn't get along with each other overall.

     But, as always, I'm getting ahead of myself.  Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People puts you in the shoes of the titular Strong Bad, a man who is dressed as a luchador for no adequately explained reason.  He, as far as I can tell, professionally answers e-mails for a living and, if he wasn't self-employed, would've been fired a long time ago because he is just the most unlikable person ever.  This entire game plays out like this: Strong Bad ruins someone's life in some way, shape or form and then decides to fix it so that his life will stop being mildly inconvenienced, normally by ruining WAY more lives in the process.  These range from the simple stuff, like ruining Homestar's athletic dreams, his relationships, and his flawless arrest record, to bigger things like forcing everyone you know into joining a selfish crusade to overthrow their established monarchy and enstate a dictatorship or sacrificing legions upon legions of video game characters to a Dragon shortly after discovering their sentience.  So, all in all, exactly what you'd expect the most popular character on a goofy internet site to behave like.  We're all sociopaths.

     The gameplay of this is classic.  It's basic point and click stuff.  You'll interact with NPCs, solve inventory puzzles, run just a ridiculous amount of errands and have your soul die when you hit seemingly insurmountable obstacles until you finally give up, look it up online and it's some obtuse thing like 'use chicken on watermelon to get chalice'.  All while moving your character across the screen by incessantly clicking with your mouse.  And though it may not seem like it, I absolutely love this kind of game.  Point and clicks are kind of like that, like visual novels or any of the other traditional PC genres.  It's something you either get into or you don't, and I'm fully into it.  It requires a lot of attention to your environment and how it constantly changes and who is currently occupying it.  Don't get me wrong, moon logic puzzles still suck and Strong Bad has an entire episode that's basically full of puzzles that are in no way self-explanatory.  But gameplay wise, it's super fun.

     The humor in this game is, well.  If I were still 14 when I played the rest of this game like I was when I played the first episode, I very likely would've enjoyed the full experience a lot more.  There's a lot of reference jokes and random humor and just puns everywhere.  It's the kind of thing I would've loved as a teenager because I was incredibly unfunny as a teenager.  My favorite comedy series online was a Mario 64 Machinima series that I found hilarious because they made Mario swear and reference Stairway to Heaven.  As an adult, though, I found it difficult to click with the humor of this game.  Like, I'm not going to say every joke was bad, a few of them did get a chuckle out of me from time to time.  But it's a kind of humor I don't especially get along with nowadays and I feel like that, more than anything, killed my enjoyment of SBCGfAP.

     So, I mentioned before that I didn't follow Homestar Runner while it was in its prime.  And, if the characters in this game are any indication, I probably didn't miss a lot.  The cast of characters in this game are so stupid, mean-spirited and obnoxious that it almost feels like I'm watching a Seth MacFarlane comedy.  I've already mentioned that Strong Bad is pretty much the worst person, but you also have Homestar, who at first comes across as a fairly wide-eyed innocent idiot, but inevitably turns into Patrick Star levels of hostile idiocy to the point where you question whether he's actually that stupid.  Strong Sad is Strong Bad's brother who we're all supposed to hate because he's a depressed nerd, rather than the real reason to hate him, in that he's extremely arrogant and acts like he's better than everyone and everything.  Honestly, as the game went on I discovered that the farther removed from the English language a character is, the less I hated them, with my favorite character being Pom Pom, who exclusively speaks in bubbling noises.

     SBCGfAP is an oddity among the TellTale point and click adventure games.  Normally these games are on giant story broken up into five or six parts and released episodically.  Strong Bad, however, is five separate, largely unrelated stories that never really end up tying into each other.  Which, honestly, I'm perfectly okay with.  I already didn't get what was going on since it was primarily Homestar Runner fanservice, I can't imagine how lost I would've been if I had also had to deal with a single interconnecting storyline throughout that was ALSO Homestar Runner fanservice.  However, even back then you could tell this wasn't to be TellTale's style.  The individual episodes don't have especially strong three act structures, creating the same feeling you have in certain old Twilight Zone episodes where it feels like you're missing a chunk of the story.  Episodes two and three in particular have this same formula of spending an hour each on the first two acts and then ten minutes tops on the third act.  And episode five is just three hours of a second Act with the first and third being blips.  Which doesn't especially help when you're already not into the game and certain parts feel like they're just dragging.

     I didn't enjoy my time with Strong Bad, I believe I made this clear.  From a solely gameplay standpoint, I had a blast with this game.  It's really the start of the point and click revival and I highly recommend it as a beginner Point and Click adventure if you're attempting to get into the genre.  I mean, I'd recommend something more along the lines of Putt-Putt or Pajama Sam before this, but if you're not sold on playing games for 6 year olds regardless of how awesome they are, Strong Bad's the game for you.  But the story, the characters, the humor.  It's just not my thing at all.  Like I said, if I were still 14, I might've dug this whole thing a lot more.  As it stands, though, I barely got through this one.  I don't know, maybe it's me.  Maybe I'm neither cool enough or attractive enough for this game.  Either way, not something I'm likely ever going to replay in the future.  I hope you enjoyed this look at Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People and see ya next time where we take a look at Bayonetta.

Ethan's backlog: https://www.backloggery.com/edzoologist