all games are not created equal

Both these games are incredibly hilarious point n' click adventure games and really deserve to be looked into if you're bored on a saturday afternoon.

Sam n' Max Hit the Road follows a detective duo working for the Freelance Police.  Sam is an anthropomorphic dog that dresses and talks like a sarcastic 1930's Chicago detective (i.e. Dick Tracy).  Max is a demonic rabbity thing that always seems hell-bent on biting and breaking everything he can in one way or another.  The two characters really get along well and it makes the game very entertaining.
The story follows the duo trying to track Bruno the Bigfoot, who escaped with his girlfriend Trixie the Giraffe woman.  You'll visit many places including a golf course in a marshy crocodile-filled swamp, the biggest ball of twine in the world, a dinosaur park that features a Mt Rushmore that you can bungee jump out of, a mansion of a sleezy 3 ft tall country singer, and also a resort with a cocktail party for bigfoots (and their guests) only.
The puzzles are generally pretty easy to grasp and won't always leave you incredibly stuck.  However the game suffers by having so many locales that you'll likely forget to pick something up (or not even realize that you CAN pick something up), and then much later you'll realize that you're missing something you need to continue.  Also, you can actually USE Max as an item to accomplish certain tasks, but it won't always make sense how until you do it.  One example is you have to use Max to short out a breaker switch, by shoving his face in it.  It's hilarious to watch but hard to come by without a little help.


Space Quest 6 is so far the final chapter in the equally hilarious Space Quest saga.  The game begins with the protagonist, Roger Wilco, being stripped of his newly acquired rank of Captain down to Janitor Second Class.  He is assigned to the starship Deepship 86, which looks like a giant g-string.  You start off by enjoying shore leave on a nearby planet, and the second you are beamed down to the planet, you are thrown into a puzzle.  When Roger is energized to the land, he is transported halfway into the cement, leaving only his upper torso removed.  Obviously this is a parody of what would happen with the transporters on Star Trek ever went wrong.
SQ6 is full of many jokes parodying Star Wars and Star Trek alike, as well as just about any other science fiction out there.  Roger will take down a Schwartzenagger talking android, beat a guy at an arcade game of Stooge Fighter 3, borrow an eyeball and an arm from an android buddy of his (who talks much like Data in Star Trek TNG), learn the "Vulgan" nerve pinch, steal a space shuttle from the docking bay of Deepship 86 (which immediately comes under fire by "Storm Poopers"), visit the information superhighway (through Virtual Reality), and conclude with Roger being shrunk down to near-microscopic size, where he enters the body of a friend of his to defeat a parasite.
Just a quick note, one of my favorite scenes is where Roger's shuttle dies in the middle of space and he needs a jump-start.  There's a funny montage where he's just waiting out in space for a long time until someone finally flies by.
The game is made hilarious by once again including the narrarator from the previous Space Quest games, which Roger will often get in short arguments with.  The graphics are also great, with a terrific blend of 2D and 3D animated characters and objects.  The puzzles are great, but also suffer from being difficult to comprehend at first (and a couple puzzles require you to either own the original documentation that came with the game, or go online and research the solutions). 

I prefer Space Quest cause I think the dialogue is wittier than Sam n' Max, plus I think the future sci-fi setting is a nice change of pace.  If only I could get the game to run on my new machine...