After three years of mysteriously absent email-checking, Strong Bad has lastly smashed his boxing-gloved fists onto the keyboard as soon as extra, returning with a brand-new message for his loyal followers. And in true Strong Bad trend, it is about robots–again–and this time they apparently wish to focus on their favourite sauces. His comeback looks like stepping again into Free Nation, USA itself: chaotic, ridiculous, and someway nonetheless deeply vital to a technology. It additionally provides the proper alternative to revisit the period when Strong Bad and the remainder of the Homestar Runner forged broke out of browser home windows and into full-fledged video video games.
Essentially the most defining gaming second for the franchise got here with the Telltale recreation Strong Bad’s Cool Sport for Enticing Folks, a five-episode point-and-click journey launched all through 2008. The sport performed like an interactive Homestar Runner cartoon, in-built shut collaboration with the Brothers Chaps, who provided writing, design enter, and voice work. Guiding Strong Bad by means of his newest harebrained schemes–from band competitions to clumsy makes an attempt at political takeover–gave followers a brand new method to revel within the character’s larger-than-life character, all whereas exploring acquainted territory just like the Home of Strong and Bubs’ Concession Stand.
A big a part of the sport’s attraction got here from its faithfulness to the unique Flash cartoons. Whereas it adopted Telltale’s conventional journey method, the world was loaded with oddball interactions, surreal conversations, and puzzles that functioned much less on logic and extra on the inner guidelines of Homestar Runner’s absurdity. Every episode got here filled with additional options, corresponding to weird arcade minigames, collectible Teen Woman Squad playing cards, and hidden Easter eggs that rewarded longtime followers who had virtually memorized the previous web site.
The success of that collection helped cement the Homestar Runner universe as a surprisingly adaptable panorama for video games. Past the Telltale collaboration, the franchise had already experimented with interactive experiences by means of its personal iconic net games–Peasant’s Quest, Stinkoman 20X6, and TROGDOR!–and later by means of the revival of Trogdor!! The Board Game and its digital model. Even when Strong Bad wasn’t hogging the highlight, his perspective, snark, and tendency to go off the rails remained woven into the material of those initiatives. With his newest return to the inbox, he is as soon as once more reminding the world that Free Nation, USA is barely an e mail away.