Ben There, Dan That! / Time Gentlemen, Please!
Ben There, Dan That! / Time Gentlemen, Please! Even though Sierra and LucasArts gave up on adventure games around the turn of the century, there are still those who hold on to the belief that the genre is very much alive. But without the continuation of games like Monkey Island, Space Quest and Simon the Sorcerer, what we have are, mostly, legions of humorless entries with depressingly dry CG backgrounds, plus the occasional cartoonish adventure that tries to be funny but fails spectacularly. Former adventure creators still make some great work, of course. Tim Schaefer, of Grim Fandango, spent a long time working on Psychonauts and Brütal Legend, both of which were hilarious despite not being adventure games, while Telltale, formed with some of the other LucasArts staff, comes close to the glory days of the genre. But it‟s not quite the same. So it was more or less out of nowhere that a tiny group of Brits called Zombie Cow Studios brought out two of the funniest adventures since... well, since ever, perhaps. Ben There, Dan That! and its sequel, Time Gentlemen Please!, are both low budget hits made with Adventure Game Studio and have a graphical style most consistent with elementary school notebook doodles, but succeed tremendously because they‟re so brilliantly written. One could call it “The British version of South Park!” and that wouldn‟t entirely be wrong, but that‟s a glib summation of it. While both creations have uber low-fi visuals, subversive plotting, and more than just a bit of toilet humor, Zombie Cow‟s games replace South Park's libertarian cynicism with a self aware affection for adventure games, LucasArts in particular.
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