The International House of Mojo

I'm not sure if Strong Bad and myself would get along.

He's the younger brother that never grew-up, who stopped wetting the bed but still drew Power Rangers comics, who dated the prettiest girl in class but never outgrew his tendency to get teary-eyed frustrated every time he got beaten on Madden, who was the party animal but still watched Cartoon Network like religion, and whose taste in rock music never extended beyond the AC/DC-wannabe, big-guitar, my-lyrics-are-as-stupid-as-ballin'-without-a-rubber hair metal.

The difference between us is like the difference between Flock of Seagulls (remember those?) and Pixies. Music is a large part of my life, rock music is a large part of my being, and seeing that my own rock collection has less hair metal than John Lyndon's, the chances of me and Strong Bad getting along are pretty sparse. The only thing that'd keep us together is family. Silly, maybe, but that's avid love of music.

The premise of Baddest of the Bands is an extension of that aspect of Strong Bad's personality. It starts-off with our hero, happy as a fat kid with cake, waltzing through the playroom to his video game console, excited to start Limozeen: Hot Babelian Odyssey. (Limozeen is one of the aforementioned hair metal bands I'm so looking forward to ripping apart in Brutal Legend.) But alas, Strong Bad ends-up with a smoking video game console. He attempts to fix it at Bubs', who, being Bubs, agrees - if Strong Bad can pay him a huge sack of cash.

The way to do it is to start a Battle of the Bands. There's actually several bands around town, not all of them good, and your job is to get them interested in the battle which Strong Bad, rock god of awesome that he is, will surely win. (Surely.)

If this all sounds like a cliché, it's because it is – but don't let that dampen your spirits. While Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People lacks the sucker-punch drive of relentless quality that Sam and Max: Season Two had, it's actually rather excellent. It knows the clichés, knows how to make fun of them, to turn them upside down and make them into something new, and it has a lot of fun doing it. Yet your enjoyment of Baddest of the Bands will largely depend on whether or not you liked Episodes One and Two. This is more of the same, certainly a little different, a little quirkier, and a little harder. It's got some of the same issues as the first two, but also with some major improvements. For one thing, it's got some better puzzles.

The tricky thing with any adventure game is making good puzzles, and Episode Three succeeds admirably. Not a single puzzle feels out of place, or simply there for the sake of being a puzzle. The last is especially good, and is neither too hard nor too easy. I want to address this, actually: Telltale is caught between satisfying some of the hardcore nostalgic among you and the mass market, and it's hard striking a balance between "This is so hard I'd tear my hair out if I still had any" and "a five-year old can solve this." There's a little of both here – actually, that's a lie. There's definitely some of those puzzles that'll cause you to slap your forehead in a "I should have seen this earlier" sort-of way, and those where the solution becomes apparent before the puzzle itself is fully clear. It's a hard line to tread, but Mike Stemmle (he who co-led/designed/wrote Sam and Max Hit the Road, and directed and co-wrote this) does a great job of making sure the game doesn't topple over.

Obviously this is a music-themed game, and there are some pretty cool, actually-quite-nice references to mainstream music. Some are obvious, some are subtle: the cover to one of the album covers you find lying around is a parody of Run-D.M.C's King of Rock. There's a Cobain-proofed speaker. Strong Sad makes a reference to being a snooty rock journalist and then making a movie about it (which he fails at, making him only – sorry for this one – almost famous). There's a lot more, and it's always fun being hit by one you recognize.

But to me, this episode was great for reinforcing why I still love video games. I've said before that I'm a fanatical lover of rock music. And music is beautiful, honest, and thus very often painful. But sometimes you can get too close, and you end-up hurt. Prior to playing Baddest of the Bands, I hadn't listened to rock music in a while – not out of choice, but simply because I couldn't. But watching the characters listening and enjoying, seeing the game love music but also make fun of it cheered me up. It's easy to forget that comedy partially exists to make painful things – honest music among them for those of us who love it enough – sensible again. Episode Three loves music, takes it seriously, and then teases it: "Our love is related to food, and you know that it's true," sings one band. "It's warm and bubbly too, just like a pot of fondue." Cue laughter.

I've also said before that I'm a little embarrassed of the Strong Bad that exists in every young brother. But mauling it over, I realise one other thing: whether he's a little brat with a tendency to make kissy-noises when there's a girl on the phone, or a mischievous Mexican wrestler whose primary concern is to rock harder than Jimmy Page on acid, these games have made me appreciate the guy a little more. In this moment of honest sobriety, I'll admit that I wouldn't have him any other way.

Kroms
8th March, 2009.