There was some great news this week. GoG.com released the first batch of LucasArts games they’d managed to secure the rights to.
What’s that mean in English? Well, GoG.com is a website that specialises in “good old games.” They get the rights to games that you can’t buy anywhere any more, make them work on modern machines, and sell them for a bargain.
If you’ve heard of things like Dungeon Keeper 2, Planescape: Torment, or Baldur’s Gate – those are the kind of things GoG specialise in. Basically, they’re just great.
But I’m particularly excited about the LucasArts games that are coming onto GoG. Yes, LucasArts as in Star Wars George Lucas. Actually a subgroup of LucasFilm, LucasArts are/were a video games development studio famous for their adventure games in the 1990s, as well as endless Star Wars games since.
The adventure games were things like Monkey Island and the Indiana Jones series. And they’re pretty much all amazing. It’s a great scoop for GoG, and something a lot of people have been waiting on for ages. And mostly I’m excited because LucasArts made games that were funny.
Video games today have a tendency towards gritty realism. Everything is a grimdark shooter supposed to make you think about depressing stuff. Things like Spec Ops: The Line are great for making you think about the horrors of war and so on (it’s a third-person shooter adaptation of Heart of Darkness, by the way), but it’s pretty light on laughs. Games take themselves far too seriously now, so thank god the LucasArts back catalogue is arriving to remind us all what fun they can be.
So without further ado, I’d like to talk about some of my favourite “funny games.”
Games that just want to have fun.
Sam and Max Hit the Road [wiki]
I start with Sam and Max because it’s the one of the first that GoG have uploaded. And it’s a great example of the LucasArts style.
Recently, remade/rebooted/recarried-on by Telltale Games, Sam & Max is about a dog and a “rabbity thing” who solve crimes. Wow. What a concept. The dog, Max, is a hard-boiled detective with a dry wit, and Sam is just an outright insane psychopath. So lots of the humour comes from the interplay between these two characters.
The story itself is a bonkers tale about a missing bigfoot, with misadventures aplenty along the way. It’s basically just an excuse to visit lots of zany locations (“hit the road”) and comedic set-pieces. But it’s entirely fantastic and the writing is consistently hilarious.
Honourable mentions: I’d like to include pretty much every LucasArts game, for similar reasons to Sam&Max, but most particularly: the Monkey Island series, Day of the Tentacle, Time Gentlemen, Please! and Grim Fandango.
Borderlands 2 [wiki]
Yes, it’s a modern shooter, but the Borderlands series sets itself apart from the crowd with its humour. In a sea of Call of Duty clones, Borderlands games are a breath of fresh air – bringing colour, excitement and humour.
I’ve picked Borderlands 2 especially because the original Borderlands didn’t quite meet the same levels as 2, and was still finding its feet in terms of voice. I also haven’t actually finished the latest game Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (so-called because it is set between 1 and 2). But even that title is great, an admission of the awkward spot the game holds in the series.
Borderland’s humour is based around excess. The gameplay revolves around a random generator of weapons – there are literally millions of possible combinations. So it’s all explosions everywhere, and this carries through into the dialogue. There’s one character (“Mr Torque”) who shouts in all caps all the time, and it’s all amazing. And there’s Claptrap too, the yellow robotic fan-favourite character who sees the world with unbridled optimism and is prone to random outbursts of dubstep. Funtabulous.
Honourable mentions: Bulletstorm, Jazzpunk
Team Fortress 2 [wiki]
TF2 is a game I’ve somehow ploughed 476 hours into. Yes, almost 20 straight days of my life have been spent playing this game. To sum it up, it’s a team-based shooter with a cartoon aesthetic. Oh, and hundreds and hundreds of hats (in the above screenshot, my Heavy is rocking the ‘Hound Dog’ head cosmetic item).
The reason I’ve ploughed so much of my precious lifetime into the game is partly that it’s really fun and addictive, but also because it’s just damn funny. Just the way it looks is great – a timeless wackiness that just screams FUN. And all the playable characters are perfectly designed as full rounded characters; the Heavy is a hard Russian gun-nut, the Engineer a mad texan tinkerer, the Scout an arrogant Boston teen, and so on.
There’s also a whole surrounding universe to the game – most famously, the ‘Meet the..’ shorts that helped promote the game in the old days. Check out Meet the Scout for a great example. They’ve even made a 15 minute short film just about these characters, with almost nothing to do with the game itself.
They even have a comic which is absolutely hilarious. All in all, it’s great.
Honourable mention: Portal 2
Grand Theft Auto V
Everyone’s heard of GTA. It’s famously controversial for being that game where you steals cars and run over old women. But it’s easy to forget that it’s a keen vehicle for social commentary too (some people don’t even know that it even has any humour in it at all, I’ve found).
I’ve picked GTA V as my entry for this list, though the same can be said of any of the games from GTA Vice City onwards (the very originals were most cheeky/irreverent than outright humorous, and GTA 3 was just kind of bleak and depressing. Even the little touches like the in-game radio stations are great, with adverts satirising things going on in popular culture.
Of course, GTA can be a little heavy handed in its approach. Literally EVERY shop is some kind of pun or double entendre. And a lot of it is extremely crass, but it’s the sheer weight of comedy is great. Ricky Gervais even does a standup routine in GTA IV.
Honourable mention: Saints Row
And that’s just the ones I can think of. I’m told that The Stanley Parable is also fantastically hilarious, but I’ve yet to play it.
Humour is an important part of any medium. And it just makes video games so much more memorable as experiences.
So let’s have more of this:
And less of this:
For the lols.
Did I miss a game? Let me know in the comments or maybe even in real life!