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In a way, the Strong Bad games have always been about fan service. Cameos by favorite characters, jokes that only the most frequent visitors to the Homstar Wiki would understand, hell, basically everything about the first three episode was one giant love letter to fans of the website. All that comes to a head in the most recent episode, Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective.

Dangeresque, if you didn't know, is Strong Bad's crooked cop (and celebrity pharmacist!) alter-ego, who stars in his own series of films. The premise lends itself well to plotting out an entire game, and it allows the writing team ample room to write some of the best dialog that has been associated with any part of the Homstar universe in years.

I think, in kind of an odd sense of fusion, they finally found an outlet to channel all that unused Sam & Max energy into making an really fun and breezy detective adventure with the Homestar characters. Between the well designed puzzles, the humorous plays on old charactarizations, and the brilliant use of the fourth wall and asides, I think the Strong Bad games have finally gelled with TellTale's strengths.

Extra Features:

To be honest, the extra stuff is kind of at a minimum here. There's a space shooter minigame that wears out its welcome in the thirty seconds you have to play it, but past that there's not much more to do once you've completed the game. I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed the "Extended Gameplay" being presented as a group of DVD Extras though.

There are still hidden items to collect, but to be honest they play a lot smaller role in the gameplay, and you can really ignore them if you want to. At least in the preview build, the metal detector seems to have reverted to letting you use it whether or not there's anything to be found on a particular screen.

Technical:

For the most part there's not much to complain about, as TellTale put their typical polish on this episode. There are a few issues with voices not properly syncing with the characters, and one sort of major thing where even when you're not using the metal detector Strong Bad will sill have it in his hand for a while, but all of that is pretty minor in the end.

Graphics:

For whatever reason, the 3-D characters look much better in costume than they do in their normal "clothes." Marzipan, for example, tended to animate fairly poorly during the previous episodes, but here she looks fine. Strong Sad still looks a bit odd, but

The stages for Dangeresque are well done as usual. The "new" set pieces are entertaining, and the intentionally horrible room redesigns will have you laughing.

Sound:

The voices are typically good, and I like how they subtley change all the voices to fit the Dangeresque theme, and then changing them back again for the fourth wall breaking.

I'm not exactly sure what to tell you about the music. If you like the Dangeresque theme, great. You'll probably get sick of it by the end of the game though, because it plays on a constant loop behind everything you do. Which makes sense, but enough with the Dangeresque theme, guys.

Replay Value:

There are some pretty fantastic jokes, so you might want to replay it again to play, but other than that there's not much to see on a second playthrough. If you've been able to avoid chasing that 100% completion rating in the previous games, it'll be really easy to do that here too.

Final Score: 8.5/10

I think this represents a kind of perfect storm for TellTale. They were able to combine a lot of what made the Sam and Max puzzles fun and interesting with a lot of what people love about the Homestar universe and the Dangeresque character specifically into one extremely attractive and fun game.

Part of that is, of course, that they did away with trying to make some of the series square pegs fit into round wholes and made the whole episode full of fan service. While non-fans might not appreciate the comedy stylings of Dangeresque, it's the best and most fun game of all of them this season, and well worth your time to play through.

And speaking of fan service, check out the trailer after the game for Trogdor and more. They're throwing it all against the wall for the season finale.

If you're interested in taking a look at the game, you can download a copy of the PC Demo at the TellTale Website.