The Stack

[Update: Looks like a lot of what I say in this post is false. See the comments.]

Strife is the only game on my stack that uses the Doom engine, so let’s talk a little about what that means.

Back in 1994, I spent a few months working for one of Id Software’s competitors, Looking Glass Technologies, working on their texture-mapping routines. Given the coordinates of a polygon and their corresponding positions in a texture image, we had to render the the texture onto the polygon in perspective as fast as possible. These days, this sort of operation would be handled in hardware and abstracted through a library like Direct3D or OpenGL, but we didn’t have those things. Instead, we wrote highly-optimized code to loop over the polygon, scanline by scanline, find the appropriate point in the texture, and copy the pixel color over.

Overdraw was our nemesis: each polygon was expensive enough to render that it was a big waste whenever we rendered a polygon that was covered up by something else. Even when a polygon was only partly covered-up, it was worthwhile to try to figure out how much of it was visible and only render that part.

Sometime in the middle of all this, Doom was released. It was clear that it didn’t have all the capabilities of our library — we were rendering polygons in perspective at arbitrary angles, while Doom seemed to be only capable of horizontal and vertical surfaces, and could only rotate the camera about a vertical axis (no tilting up or down). But it was really fast. Faster, in fact, than could be entirely explained by the simplification made possible by using only horizontal and vertical surfaces. Add to this the complication that they were using highly irregular map layouts: instead of using a grid of map tiles, like Wolfenstein 3D or Ultima Underworld or System Shock, the map was a collection of walls of arbitrary length at arbitrary angles, which more or less defeats the means we had been using to eliminate overdraw.

By now, the secrets are well known. They had in fact managed to completely eliminate overdraw through a single stroke of genius: they didn’t render polygons at all. They rendered the entire scene at once, in vertical scanlines. For each horizontal position, the engine goes pixel by pixel, rendering ceiling until it hits wall, then rendering wall until it hits floor. I’m glossing over a lot of details, but that’s the essence of the Doom engine right there.

This has a couple of consequences. For one thing, it’s basically impossible for a Doom-engine game to take advantage of modern 3D hardware, because modern 3D hardware is all about rendering polygons. I can imagine someone making a Direct3D version of System Shock by taking the source code and remapping all the graphics functions to Direct3D equivalents. It might not be a perfect fit, but I imagine it would be doable with a little massaging. But there’s basically nothing in the Doom engine that even vaguely resembles a Direct3D call.

Second, the fact that the view was always horizontal in Doom wasn’t just a matter of the programmers not bothering to implement it, as with jumping and crouching. It is in principle impossible for the Doom engine to tilt the camera, because that would ruin the vertical scanlines — suddenly you’d have them intersecing the edges of walls and so forth.

And yet, Strife allows the player to look up and down. It manages this by cheating: instead of tilting the camera up, all it really does is render a higher-up slice of the same horizontal view. This isn’t quite the same thing as moving the camera upward. Rather, it’s an unnaturally distorted view, more like what you’d get by taking a photograph with the camera tilted and then looking at the photograph at an oblique angle, or something like that. (I’ll try to find or make some illustrations explaining this better.)

It’s easy to interpret this distortion as mere perspective, though, unless you’re really close to something, which makes it more noticable.

With the defeat of the Programmer (is that like the Death of the Author?), I obtained the device he was using to call down those nasty lightning bolts, like Megaman wresting new attacks from his fallen foes. It drains my health when I use it, so I’m not sure whether it’s ever actually worth using — perhaps if I found myself short on ammo and long on healing items. I can only assume that the Programmer had it rigged so that when he used it, it drained someone else’s health instead.

And with this, the game’s overarching goals appear, and start to give the game a structure. It seems this device is just one piece of a five-part megaweapon called the Sigil. Macil, the rebel leader, has tasked me with finding the other pieces, supposedly to keep them out of the Order’s hands. Thing is, putting them in the rebels’ hands might not be much better. Talking to Macil and his troops (the Front, as they call themselves), it’s pretty clear that getting rid of the Order is just phase one of his master plan for world domination. They’ve already gone and moved their headquarters into the castle we just stormed, and are all set to lord it over the commoners like its last occupants. There are supposedly three endings to the game, so I assume that I’ll be called upon to make a decision about what happens to the Front at some point.

Now, even though this is the point at which the overplot kicks off, I’m also noticing the game becoming more and more FPS-ish. The first several missions were rather amenable to combat-light play, with lots of avoidable alarms and guards you could simply outrun rather than engage, and they were relatively short, which meant I returned to the hub to interact with NPCs, shop for equipment, and otherwise engage in non-Doom-like behavior fairly frequently. Now that the missions are longer and the enemies are tougher and more numerous, it all feels much more like a traditional FPS, and that’s affecting how I play. In an RPG-like environment, you typically don’t have the option of pursuing every opportunity: everything you decide means something decided against. So as long as the gameplay felt more or less like a RPG, I didn’t feel like I had to explore every avenue, kill every monster, find every secret. (There aren’t a lot of secrets in the game that are officially counted as such, but there are a lot of hidden caches of equipment.) But once it feels more like a FPS, my sense of completism takes hold. There’s a cave you go through that has two paths through it, one guarded by lots of enemies, the other involving tricky jumps on small platforms. Even when I had finished what I had come to the cave to do, I had to go back and try the other route.

Strife is of course crude by modern standards, coarsely pixellated, made of broad, flat surfaces and low-res bitmaps. One of the first things you see in the game is a bunch of sewage pipes with perfectly square cross-sections, with a texture map that tries and fails to make them look round.

The game plays at a default resolution of 640×480, which is the maximum resolution in the original engine. ZDoom gives you the option of higer resolution, but I haven’t been taking advantage of it — in fact, until I checked for the purpose of this post, the sense of smoothness you get from a higher framerate had me convinced that it was in a higher resolution already. One of those tricks of visual perception, I suppose: once the flow of new data to the brain reaches a certain threshhold, the brain finds it a lot easier to interpolate details that aren’t there. So it lets you interpret the environment with less strain, which helps in unexpected ways. In some places there are doorways with a pale green border, indicating that crossing this threshhold will trigger an alarm and make the guards start shooting you. I don’t remember noticing this mechanism the last time I tried playing, but it seems very clear now, and I think this is mostly because the green border looks better-defined.

Still, the texture maps are coarse no matter how clearly you perceive them, and the enemies and other bitmap objects are even worse. Doom, it strikes me, got away with this better because most of the bitmap objects there were monsters, and for the most part you viewed them from a distance, or tried to. In Strife, you’ve got NPCs, as well as ornamentation like candles set on tables in the tavern — things you see close up and blocky.

But you know something? It still works.

I’ve just got through my first major boss battle, against an entity called the Programmer, one of the key figures in the Order’s hierarchy. He flies around on a little flying saucer with spikes on it and calls down small lightning storms that hurt a lot. He’s small enough and fast enough that you can easily lose track of where he is, and if you ever stop moving for even a second, he will kill you. It’s a very adrenaline-surge-inducing fight, and while it was going on, I absolutely did not care about the blockiness of the graphics. The graphics did their job.

Denied the opportunity to continue with Half-Life 2 Episode 1, I found myself still craving some FPS action. This seemed like as good a time as any to bring out the oldest FPS on the Stack. Released in 1996, Strife was one of the earlier attempts at making a FPS that was more than just a FPS, like Deus Ex four years early. It’s the only game I know that uses the Doom engine for something resembling a RPG: it’s got non-combatant characters with conversation trees, stores where you can buy equipment, even a couple of upgradable character stats (maximum health and shot accuracy). (All of which Ultima Underworld had in 1992, but that didn’t use the Doom engine.) It has a stealth component, with alarms that you can try to avoid setting off. And it’s got a story. Not just a premise that gives you an excuse to shoot stuff, but a story that you interact with and which, to some extent, you influence with your decisions.

That story is, however, pretty comic-bookish. It’s the story of a medieval-looking city taken over by evil cultists with anachronistic technology. The Order (as they call themselves) have achieved their dominance by obeying the voices they started hearing in their heads after a nearby meteorite strike. This sounds like a job for the Meteor Police from Maniac Mansion, but since they’re not around, expelling the Order is left to an underground rebel group that the player joins shortly after the start of the game.

This game is old enough that I had some difficulty getting it working. Setting the executable to use Windows 95 Compatibility Mode got it to stop hanging up my machine, but there was no sound, and sound is actually pretty important in this game — sometimes you get audio-only messages from your contact in the rebel alliance. Even when I set it up with the right IRQ for soundblaster compatibility, the sounds were distorted by micro-pauses. Running it under VDMSound seemed to undo the effect of Compatibility Mode. DOSBox got the sound and music working, but trashed the framerate, unless I turned up the emulation speed a lot, at which point it started becoming unresponsive to the keyboard. Eventually I discovered ZDoom, a very nice modern re-implementation of the Doom engine that’s completely compatible with Windows XP and supports Strife‘s data files. Playing under ZDoom isn’t a perfect replication of the original Strife experience: you lose the ability to examine inventory items, the sound clips on exiting the game don’t play, and a few other minor details assume their Doom defaults rather than their Strife customizations. But it’s a lot closer to the intended experience than I was getting by any other means.

After playing episodic adventure games, it seems only fair that I follow up with the noble failure of the episodic FPS. The confusingly-titled Half-Life 2, Episode 1 has of course been on the Stack since I purchased the Orange Box, and for stack purposes I’m counting it as a separate title.

The episode begins with an intro sequence that essentially says “never mind” to Half-Life 2‘s epilogue and puts you right back into the situation you were in at the end of the final boss battle. Alyx Vance, sidekick and presumed love interest, seems to be a more or less constant companion this time around, and the designers put some effort into coming up with gameplay that takes advantage of her. In one segment, you’re attacked by alien bugs, which can be killed most efficiently by flipping them over on their backs with the gravity gun and letting Alyx shoot them while they’re helpless. Before that are a few scenes in darkness with lots of zombies. You have a flashlight built into your hazard suit, but limited ammo. Alyx has a different gun than you and loads of ammo for it, but no flashlight. So you spend most of that part just shining your light on things for Alyx to shoot. (In restrospect, it would have been simpler to trade guns, but I can’t blame Alyx and Gordon for not thinking of that, seeing how I didn’t.)

These things remind me of using the pheropod to send antlions after enemies in Half-Life 2. Although this is a shooter, you’re not always doing the shooting yourself. Sometimes you’re just directing it.

Another thing that reminds me of the pheropods: If you catch a rollermine with the gravity gun, Alyx can hack it to attack the enemy. This is the sort of thing she’s been doing all along, really — there were scenes in Half-Life 2 where she pulls similar tricks on automated gun turrets — but rollermines are mobile, and seek out things to attack, which makes them seem more like monsters than weapons. So this seems like an extension of a theme I noted before, the enemies switching sides ¹One example of this I failed to note in my previous post: Dr. Kleiner has a defanged headcrab that he keeps as a pet., except this time applied to something purely mechanical.

At any rate, it looks like I’ve gotten as far as I can get in this episode for the moment. From near the beginning, it has sometimes crashed to the desktop when it loads a new area, and now I’ve reached a point where this happens consistently. The worst part is that it crashes slowly. It’ll spend a minute or so with the word “Loading” on the screen, and I won’t know whether it’s actually loading or crashed. Then the screen will go black for a minute, and then, even when the desktop comes up, it’ll be another minute before it actually displays a dialog box with an error message in it. Upgrading my display drivers has not helped, so it’s time to hit the support forums. The slowness is the sort of thing I associate with running out of memory, so maybe slapping another gigabyte into the machine would fix it, but I’d like some confirmation of this before I pony up the dough.

Etherlords is shaping up to be this year’s game that I play between playing other games, like Serious Sam and Throne of Darkness last year. Last night brought some more lack of progress on map 5. I’ll probably wind up ratcheting the difficulty down a notch soon, but there are still a couple of approaches I want to try.

My last failure was based on speculation that the different types of terrain were strategically significant. The Kinets’ home turf, for example, is covered with snow. The enemy heroes are often strangely reluctant to attack me when they can; could it be that walking on their territory triggers aggression? Well, apparently not.

The next thing I want to try is aggressively attacking the Kinet castle ethereally. I don’t even really hope to destroy it this way. If I do, great. But I’m mainly seeing this as a risk-free way to make the Kinets waste resources on defense — risk-free because ethereal combat never kills the heroes involved. I don’t even have to give my attacker any expensive spells, as long as expensive spells are wasted against him.

In fact, I had a near-breakthrough last night with a hero who still had the underpowered default spellbook. My castle came under siege by a level 6 Kinet while I was summoning a new level 5 hero, so the first thing I did with him was attack my besieger. It worked better than I had hoped, because my deck, being low-powered, was a lot faster than his: I had five little monsters nipping his heels at a point when he still had a only a single defender. By the time he brought out his heavy hitters and ended the battle, he was actually down to 1 health. Emboldened, I restored to just before the combat and tried it again twice, but with much lesser success. So it looks like that first try was just unusually lucky.

I’m doing a lot of that these days, restoring to just before the last turn. The game makes it easy by autosaving every time you hit the “end turn” button. Usually I don’t do this to repeat battles in the hope of being luckier next time, but rather, to issue different orders and avoid the battle I lost. Still, the fact that I’m doing it so much is a pretty clear sign that dialling down the difficulty level is warranted.

So, I’ve finished all five cases in CSI: Hard Evidence. All in all, I enjoyed this game more than I expected to. The chief thing to recognize is that it’s not at heart a mystery game, but a treasure hunt. This was clearest to me at the beginning of the fifth case, where you have to spot a number of bullets lodged in walls. I wish more of the scenes were as clue-rich as that, because it was one of the high points of the game.

I mentioned before that the game automatically tags with a green checkmark those scenes and clues that have been exhausted as information sources. This is just one of several “assists” that can be disabled from the options menu. Personally, I kept them all on, despite my complaints about the game being too easy: it seemed like disabling them would make the game harder in the wrong ways, extending the time spend searching fruitlessly in the wrong places and so forth. There was a point where keeping them on actually got me stuck for a while, though, when I didn’t yet understand that a DNA sample got its checkmark simply by being identified, and that this didn’t mean it was no longer of use in comparison to other samples.

So, yeah, it turns out that it is possible to get stuck after all, at least temporarily. Several forms of evidence processing involve comparing two pieces of evidence, and once you have many individual pieces of evidence, the combinatorial explosion makes it inconvenient to just cycle through all the pairs. So you do have to have some idea of what you’re looking for, some of the time.

There are some good things going on in the game’s UI. Like the navigation: I mentioned before that it’s based on clicking between nodes in a continuous 3D environment, but even more than that, the graph of these nodes is a tree, and clicking the right mouse button moves back up the tree towards your point of entry. The nice thing about this is that exactly the same interface is used for other tree-like UI elements, such as cancelling out of a menu. While I wouldn’t suggest that every game adopt an interface like this, it does seem like a good choice for games in settings where the player shouldn’t be able to get lost.

There are points that I definitely think could be improved, though. Nonstandard scrollbar behavior is my perennial gripe about homebrew GUIs, and while this game doesn’t have scrollbars per se, it does have button-based scrolling interfaces which don’t respond to the scrollwheel. It’s not even as if the game engine doesn’t have scrollwheel support: when viewing evidence, you can use the scrollwheel to zoom in and out. And speaking of viewing evidence, the controls for rotating items while inspecting them seem less than ideal. There are four buttons to the right of the view that can be clicked or held to rotate in two directions about two axes. But the axes are relative to the object, rather than the view, with sometimes unintuitive results. Plus, using buttons at all seems a little strained in a game that, in the scene views, normally handles rotation by moving the mouse to the edges of the screen. (Sometimes this even results in keeping an object at the center of your view and circling it, an effect similar to rotating an object in the evidence view.)

There’s also some stupidity in the way the game handles computers: your CSI toolkit contains a “USB data drive” that “detects encrypted data”, which is trivially decryptable by your lab equipment. Furthermore, people in this gameworld seem to be in the habit of encrypting their incriminating emails rather than deleting them. (Heck, just not encrypting them would be enough to escape detection here. It’s not like the game ever gives you the opportunity to read data that isn’t encrypted.) But I’m assuming that this is all inherited from the TV show. Plus, I may just be more sensitive to this than other simplifications made for the sake of gameplay. Goodness knows the fingerprint matching is greatly reduced from how it would work in real life, and the idea of getting a chemical analysis of a substance by sticking it in a chemical analysis machine is probably even more galling to chemists than anything done with computers here.

A certain amount of stupidity of content isn’t the only thing it inherits from the show. There’s the “bumpers”: when you go from scene to scene, you often get a brief montage of aerial views of Las Vegas, signifying “new scene” to the viewer. This is invariably followed by a “Loading” screen, which seems a little redundant, because it signifies the same thing. I suppose the limitations of the technology prevent it from displaying the bumper while loading the new data.

Another thing inherited: product placement. It’s not as blatant as in Lemmings 3D or Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, but one of the cases has a subplot involving possible credit card fraud, and goes out of its way to mention how professionally those folks at Visa dealt with it, as well as just use the word “Visa” in preference to “credit card” wherever possible. (A print ad in the game’s documentation makes it clear that Visa is in fact sponsoring the game, or at least its documentation.)

So, would I recommend this game to people who aren’t fans of the show? No, not really. But perhaps I would as a study of graphic adventure techniques. It’s working with a limited palette, but it does a few interesting things I hadn’t seen before.

Disclosure: I received this game for free from Telltale Games.

CSI: Hard Evidence was apparently made using the same development tools as the Sam and Max and Bone games, but it’s a real contrast in style. For that matter, Sam and Max is pretty different from Bone: wisecracking cynicism and urban decay vs. good-natured fantasy, as well as the contrast in puzzle style mentioned previously. But Sam and Max and Bone are both ultimately cartoons, rendered in a cartoony style. CSI, although pretty close to a cartoon in its exaggerated and stylized story content, tries to be realistic in its visual appearance, including human figures. And this, if you ask me, is one of its weak points. The regulars from the show are passable, but per-episode characters — the victim and suspects — live farther down in the uncanny valley. Mouths in particular seem troublesome, and tend to bunch up in odd ways when characters is talk.

More than that, though, Sam and Max and Bone are both based on the Sierra/Lucasarts paradigm: you have an avatar who walks where you click. CSI uses something more like a Myst-style interface. Movement between scenes is handled through a “locations” menu in your PDA (which also holds the inventory, options menu, and case details), but movement within a scene is handled through clickable hotspots. But the scene itself is rendered in 3D, and even without clicking, you can do some limited shifting around by means of the mouse — or, presumably, the right analog stick in the console versions, which seems like a better fit to the mode of interaction here. It’s not quite like any other game I’ve seen: the closest is Myst V in “panning” mode, but there, the panning was always just a matter of changing the camera’s orientation, not its position. Here, you can use the mouse to do things like circle a car and inspect it from all sides, if that’s the motion that’s scripted for that node.

Disclosure: I received this game for free from Telltale Games.

I have been presented with one more Telltale game, and have something of an obligation to give it a whirl. CSI: Hard Evidence is the fourth game based on the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and the second produced by Telltale. Now, I’m not a fan of this show. I’ve seen only one episode, which struck me as cartoonishly over-the-top. But unfamiliarity with the source material doesn’t always stop me from playing adaptations. For example, I played the videogame adaptation of The Da Vinci Code specifically so that if anyone asked me if I had read the book or seen the movie, I could reply “No, but I’ve played the videogame.”

And, in fact, this CSI adaptation has a certain amount in common with the Da Vinci Code adaptation: an emphasis on hunting for clues, lots of special interfaces, and, most of all, easy puzzles.

My impression may be wrong here: I’ve only completed one of the five cases in the game so far, and you’d expect the first case to be the easiest. But a lot of the easiness comes from user interface features that guide you towards the right things to do. For example, once you’ve gotten every possible clue from an area, a checkbox appears on that area’s icon in the travel interface. Also, the crime lab contains various machines for things like DNA analysis or accessing a fingerprint database, and at any moment, those machines that can be usefully applied to evidence you’ve collected have a special exclamation-point icon on them.

I suppose this is because its target audience isn’t fans of adenture games, but fans of a TV show, and a police procedural, at that: the genre of mystery that’s most about following established procedure and least about brilliant deductions. I’ve talked before about how the payoff in adventure games is the pleasure of figuring things out, of the “moment of realization”. The problem is that this can only come with a certain amount of risk that the player doesn’t figure things out and winds up stuck. This game seems to want to avoid that more than anything else. It’s aiming at an experience similar to the TV show, and no one ever gets stuck watching a TV show. Any brilliant deductions that do occur will be spelled out to the viewer — and so it is here.

So where is the pleasure in this game? I assume that there’s a certain amount of fantasy appeal, of joining the CSI family and having the people who you’ve come to know and love on the screen patting you on the back and saying “Great job!” whenever you follow procedure correctly. (The game is presented in first-person perspective with an unnamed protagonist, the better to aid player identification.) Obviously I’m missing out on that aspect; these people are strangers to me. The processing of the clues also provides an element of ergodic narrative, reminiscent of Portal (1986), but less linear and punctuated by little challenges such as finding a partial fingerprint in one of several possible matches. But the most interactive part — the part that seems most like a game — is simply finding the various clues and traces in the first place. This aspect of the game feels a lot like finding collectibles in an action game: it rewards being an obsessive completist and looking everywhere. The focus is on thoroughness.

In fact, there’s an interesting mechanism called “throughness points”. Every scene has various hotspots you can inspect, and not all of them actually contain clues. But whenever you inspect something that doesn’t hold a clue, you get a thoroughness point instead, and these are taken into account in your evaluation at the end of the case. So, with this mechanism, (a) finding new hotspots is never a waste, even if you discover nothing, and (b) you always know if the place you just clicked on contains a clue, because those are the spots without thoroughness points. More interestingly, your stats for the case indicate how many thoroughness points you haven’t found yet, which turns thoroughness points themselves into a kind of collectible — one that consists precisely of an absence of anything to collect.

Disclosure: I received this game for free from Telltale Games.

Now that I’ve completed all six episodes of season one, I’m wondering if mine was the best approach. Is it better to actually play the episodes episodically? Playing them as they come out undoubtedly lets you participate more in the Sam and Max fan community, speculating about things to come, even influencing the later content (as Merus points out in comments to my last post). But playing through the season all at once probably makes for a meatier experience. At one point in episode 6 (the last of the season), Max plays a videogame within the game, and complains “It was too short and not hard enough. I want my money back!”, an obvious dig at complaints in the forums. I haven’t followed the forums, but it’s inevtiable that people would make this complaint, as each episode takes just a few hours to play.

But I suspect I wouldn’t share that complaint anyway. I’m accustomed to short adventure games, thanks to the Interactive Fiction community and the annual comp in particular, so these episodes struck me as about the right length. Or possessing about the right amount of content, anyway. The episodes actually take longer to play than a typical comp game, but only because of the time spent walking Sam around from place to place — something I grew impatient with at times, and wished for a faster way to travel. (There’s a “warp drive” checkbox in the options menu, but apparently that’s just Telltale’s version of silly clowns.) So I may be one of the few people who wanted the episodes to take less time.

I wonder how much the folks at Telltale are aware of modern non-commercial IF? The Sam and Max games certainly show an awareness of their text-adventure heritage. Episode 5 features a whole scene set in a text-based environment, with Sam and Max themselves as the only graphical elements — a very stylish effect, I thought. It even uses that perennial only-possible-in-text gimmick, treating abstractions as tangible. Plus, there’s a sly shout-out to Zork in the beginning of Episode 4, subtle enough to pass unnoticed by the uninitiated. But the main influence on these games seems to be the classic Lucasarts games. Which may seem too obvious to point out — the first Sam and Max game was Lucasarts, after all, and Telltale seems to have quite a few Lucasarts refugees on staff. But what I mean here is the little touches, like the way responses to significant actions get shorter on repetition, and the way dialogue is used to provide hints disguised as jokes.

That last point reminds me a little of something John Cleese said about writing Fawlty Towers. The audience of a comedy show, according to Cleese, knows that anything that doesn’t lead into a joke immediately is a setup for a joke later on, and this robs the later joke of some of its impact. So he tried to make sure that all his setup material also yielded immediate humor, so that the viewer would be surprised at what was referenced again later. The principle is similar here, except that the goal isn’t (solely) an unexpected joke, but a moment of realization, when the player suddenly understands something’s significance without it having been shoved in their face.

Speaking of disguising your material, I notice that episode 5 keeps the whole business of doing things in threes (despite what I said before about episode 4 breaking the patterns), but tries to hide it by inflating numbers: there’s a group of four machines, of which one is useless, and a quest to obtain five gold coins, of which three are found together.

The threes come back with a vengeance in episode 6, though, with a very satisfying pre-endgame that puts Max in the center of a story. It seems pretty important to me that this happens. Of the two main characters, Max is the more emblematic of what they are, more gleefully chaotic, more disarmingly cute. If you see one of the duo alone in any context, it’s pretty much always Max. But these qualities also make him a difficult player character, and so for most of the story told by these games, he plays the role of Sam’s wacky sidekick. Even after he becomes president of the United States in episode 4, he’s Sam’s wacky sidekick whose wacky features include the presidency. But in episode 6, he becomes for a while the focus of the player’s attention, the thing that the puzzles are about.