                         SAM & MAX HIT the ROAD
                          Reviewed by Chip Cox

    Sam & Max is a children's crime fighting computer game. It
implements the degree of new technology normally associated with LUCAS
Arts. Their method of encoding both digital computer data and digital
audio tracks onto the same CD provides a richer quality of sound both
musical and spoken than I have ever heard in a game before. This quality
was not hampered when running on a 386-33 with a Sound Blaster Pro sound
card. The technology is top notch.
    On the other hand with new technology comes new problems. In my
normal setup my CD-ROM drive is in my fileserver. Not in my desktop
unit. This meant that I had to remove it from my fileserver and move it
to the desktop. Most other games and software I work and play with work
fine from the fileserver. Due to the new technique of mixing audio
tracks with computer data my server was unable to mount the CD. Granted
my situation is unique. Most people have their CD-ROM drive in their
desktop PC. It is howeve something to be aware of. When I called Lucas
Arts technical support to ask about this problem, they immediately
started telling me to make a boot disk because my problem was probably
memory and Sam & Max needed lots of memory. This wasn't my problem, but
it did lead me to think that memory would be a problem on my system. It
turned out not to be a problem at all. Unlike some other games I was
able to use my standard boot configuration and run the game in about
540K of RAM. Sam & Ma x does use a DOS extender to access the required 4
Megs or extended memory. My system had 16 Megs so this was not a
problem.
    Probably due to the speed of my system the characters mouth
movements and the words did not come close to matching. The speech and
video mismatch was probably the most entertaining part of the game for
me. It looked like something out of a Japanese movie dubbed with
English. I really expected more considering the other technological
improvements. In my opinion, the content also left something to be
desired. Seeing someone shot to death and a cat given a tonsillectomy
within the first few minutes just wa ot my idea of a kids game. Again I
would have expected more from Lucas Arts.
    In conclusion, even though the game uses some wonderful technology
it follows the same path as other games. Make the users system conform
to what we want. I had rather see games which tried harder to work
regardless of the system configuration. I do realize that this is
difficult and Sam & Max is not as bad as other games I have played. It
could be better.

                               LUCAS Arts
                             P.O. BOX 10307
                          San Rafael, CA 94912
                            (800) STAR-WARS


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