Welcome to Tea ‘n History, with your hostess Felicia Angel.
One of the hallmarks of my chidhood was watching a young Michael J. Fox in some movies, as I found him extremely cute and fun.
He just had one of those looks, ok?
Of course, if you watch anything with MJF, you have to see “Back to the Future”, and possibly the sequels (creatively only numbered instead of named, but hey, the original idea called for Marty to travel back in time via refrigerator), and considering how fun the movie is, as well as the sequels keeping the energy (arguments on Back to the Future III only somewhat count, what I’ve seen of it I liked).
So, of course, a movie-licensed game was made of the original “Back to the Future” for the NES…which wasn’t good.
At all. It lives in infamy as one of the worst games EVER.
Which, sadly, most movie-franchise games do. the combined threat of time-constraints and what little they can do within the confines of making it based off the movie or what the movie has often leaves it with a great deal of issues. If you haven’t, go look up the Angry Video Game Nerd and Angry Joe. Both have done movie licensed games, with AVGN doing the various “Back to the Future” games and Angry Joe just finishing up his run of current movie-licensed games.
It’s not pretty.
So then some group named Telltale Games said they’d be doing a “Back to the Future” game, and there was some curiosity about what would happen. After all, Telltale Games had gained the rights to the Sam and Max games, as well doing Tales of Monkey Island and starting to do off-title games to practice or try out new techniques, such as the Poker game they created or the Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent games (which is like Professor Layton…only with the FBI).
So in late December, I was able to try it out on my boyfriend’s Steam account. When I could, I got my own version and played through, as well as getting the other four as they came out.
It’s a good game. Great, really. It keeps the spirit and charm of the original movies, along with much of the mystery that could come with time-travel, as well as creating wonderful ares to explore as well as keeping some of the game logic only to be found in some point and click adventure games (not always, some of it made sense…not all of it, but most of it did). The wait between episodes were similar to having a four-part cliffhanger, which is cool in the same way a season cliffhanger can be cool – most of which being that you have to wait those weeks to see what happens. While the actual gameplay is linear and starightforward to some degree, you can deviate from the path and look around, which makes the game fun and shows off a lot of the sights of the area that you can look into and play with.
As the ending, like any good Back to the Future ending, promised us more to come, I have to only hope the next installment will be as fun and entertaining (as well as curse-breaking) as the first! Now, I’m off to play the sequel to the Puzzle Agent game!
….yes, I’m a mild Telltale Fangirl. They’re doing good, and deserve it. So, until later!
Tea 'n History 