Baddest of the Bands is the third episode in a set of five Strong Bad games called Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People from Telltale Games. If you haven’t read my review of the first two games in this set, Homestar Ruiner and Strong Badia the Free, I recommend you do so. To avoid repetition, I won’t go over the background of the series here. Here’s your synopsis: Strong Bad is lovable and fluffy, in a rude, arrogant and stupid sort of way. Although this is a standalone game, I advise players unfamiliar with the story and characters to start by reviewing the first episode.
What I like about this series are the intuitive interface and simple menus, tutorials with every episode, the customizable map, the minigame (in this case a blatant ripoff of Defender called Hot Babelian Odyssey), and the trophies and other useless items. The humor is crude but not too vulgar. I had no technical issues with gameplay, audio or graphics in this episode. Player ranks were funny and related vaguely to glam rock, such as “Spandex Screamer” and “Big Hair Wailer.” Heck, even Strong Bad’s parody of Judas Priest’s “Breakin’ the Law” in the menu had me rolling (“Save and the Load, Save and the Load!”).
At the beginning of the game, Strong Bad is playing Hot Babelian Odyssey on his old Fun Machine console when it spouts smoke and fries, just like in every gamer’s worst nightmare — or at least in mine. Since the cost of repairing this ancient artifact involves a large sack of cash, and his favorite band “Limozeen” featured prominently in the minigame, Strong Bad comes up with the idea of staging a Battle Royale of the Bands (which he must then win) and using the profits to repair his plastic altar of 256-color gameplay.
This ode to big hair and spandex takes Strong Bad around town trying to put together security and celebrity judges for his show, and then sign bands to play. Coincidentally, some of his friends have started a band called “Cool Tapes” to support an endangered bat. This sparks more insanely convoluted ideas and eventually the whole plan comes together, but not without plenty of side references to various groups popular in the 1980s, from Journey to the Ramones to Led Zeppelin.
During this episode, I also investigated the legendary Teen Girl Squad. These girls are Strong Bad’s own crudely drawn comic figures named So and So, Cheerleader, What's Her Face and The Ugly One. Each of the pieces of the comic strip were drawn on the pages of a Limozeen coloring book, so the theme was naturally their attempt to sneak in to a concert. They were drawn in color (perhaps because they were in a coloring book?), which is unusual for them. The girls were, however, their usual snotty selves (in Strong Bad’s girliest-sounding voice) to Larry, Gary and Perry — the band members — so they kicked What’s Her Face out and up into the blades of a helicopter hovering over the stadium. As it happens, these girls are frequently and viscerally disemboweled in Strong Bad’s comics, saying I am not sure what about his psychological and emotional state. Suffice to say, he’s not fond of the kind of stuck-up teenyboppers he has encountered at the mall.
Even though this episode is no real improvement on the other two, it’s still fun and I’d recommend this game for fans of Homestar Runner or 1980s glam rock. Gameplay is simple, the plot is strange and the jokes are frequently inside, including references to previous and future episodes of the game. This episode only took me about five hours to play, which is about par for the series. It’s still a great deal because you can pay $35 for the full set of five short games, at least on the PC.
The games also are available for the Wii through WiiWare.
