Ahhh, Hit The Road. Ostensibly very similar game to DOTT, but it's got the fullscreen (albeit 4:3) graphics, a more wry humour and an anarchic hyperactivity. It's packed full of pointless diversions like feeding Max's cockroaches, brutalising a convenience store robber, having one-sided conversations with carny freaks or even just listening to weird answerphone messages, and the animations are surprisingly detailed and fluid. If DOTT is Chuck Jones cartoons, then HTR is Ren & Stimpy or Duckman.
It's nice as well that in this run of games - DOTT, HTR and Full Throttle - that the gameplay matches the story and tone. In DOTT, the Chuck Jones cartoon, you're endless running through the same space performing variations on actions, setting up contraptions and falling from heights, swapping objects for similar objects and pulling pranks. In Hit The Road, the detective story, you're finding clues and interrogating people to open up new locations. In Full Throttle, the biker action story, there's no inventory-combining and you're performing basic actions, mostly to demolish stuff.
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Finished it! There are a few quibbles - the anarchic nature is a bit of a double-edged sword, collapsing into randomness by the end when new locations are opened up because you happen to see a leaflet, or the final puzzle being a fetch quest for four random items; although it's tricky for me to judge the difficulty having completed the game so many times over the years, some of the puzzles are bizarre and sometimes lack the signposting to make them truly fair; there are a few iffy exit hotspots. Overall, though, the shagginess does fit the Sam & Max style, and the game is so wild and funny and stuffed with character that it's not dampened much by these issues. It's nice how it acts as a sister game to DOTT, too, in a similar way that Monkey Island did to Loom - just as Max cameos in DOTT, Bernard cameos (three times, in various terrible disguises!) as a Stuckey's employee, some easy-listening musak and sound effects are shared, and there's a bunch of other stuff like the founding fathers' appearances that make them feel of a piece.
Rating: Green.
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