8-Bit is Enough is the fifth and final 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 four games in this set, Homestar Ruiner and Strong Badia the Free, Baddest of the Bands, and Dangeresque 3, I recommend that you do that before proceeding. To avoid repetition and excessive bleeding, I won’t go over the background of the series here. In short, Strong Bad is a funny bad guy who is slightly less than competent as well as generally rude and thoughtless. Although this is a standalone game, I advise players unfamiliar with the story and characters to start by playing the other episodes. Playing the included tutorial also would help.
What I have liked about this series throughout are the simple interface and menus, tutorials with every episode, and the customizable map. This episode has a particularly interesting minigame — in this case, you are inside the game — an American Revolutionary War 2D/3D first-person shooter (you’ll understand why it’s hard to define when you play it). The humor is occasionally rude but never over the top. It is rated E10+ after all. I had no technical issues with gameplay, audio or graphics in this episode ,except when I played on my 4-year-old laptop, which is definitely not a gaming machine.
As a fan of 8-bit games what seems like a lifetime ago, I caught a lot of the references in this game. The mock 8-bit graphics were especially funny, particularly the 8-bit Tea Bag used by a Revolutionary Ghost. If you don't get why that's funny, don't ask. As part of the parody, I was able to add other characters to my "party," just like in a role-playing game. Then I could call them out to perform specific tasks, like getting Boxer Joe from Snake Boxer to break boxes to find goodies, another old game tradition that is still common today. Some of these characters weren't even among the normal retinue of Strong Bad's friends; for example, the Algebros, Boxer Joe, Gel-Arshie, and several 8-bit RPG characters. Even the "regulars" played other roles, as they had in the previous episode.
The rank titles earned in this episode also reflected the plot. I particularly liked Sub-Text Adventure (yay Zork!), 2nd Person Shooter, and the self-aggrandizing SBCG4AP MMORPG!! Punful parodies abounded in other game-related areas, like Marzipan's play on Donkey Kong and Castle Poopenstein for Castle Wolfenstein (which I played as a 2D maze game on the Applie IIE with a green screen long before it was ever made into a 3D game, so it definitely fits in the 8-bit realm!). Side attribution also is made to the Commodore 64's "Load" command, Monty Python's Holy Grail, and The Wizard of Oz. You'll find plenty more, including references to more recent games like Portal ("the ladder is a lie") and Final Fantasy.
The concept of this episode, like the others, is simple. Strong Bad (with Strong Sad's help) accidentally brings his Trogdor arcade machine to life. This machine is half-dragon, has one giant arm and wants nothing more than to "burninate" everything it sees. At first, other games merely intrude on Strong Bad's world as he tries to repair and control the maniacal machine, but he is soon sucked inside of it (a la Tron) and has to go through several different games of differing type and complexity. Having played through most of the original Might and Magic games and others of that ilk, I was particularly pleased with the land of Peasantry and the foolishly repetitive and silly tasks therein. And yes, I played Dungeons & Dragons in high school way back when it first came out, and I still play it today. If you didn't, you probably shouldn't be reading a review about a game that parodies gamers!
I want to mention the side-scrolling "2nd Person Shooter" again, just because this was the most fun minigame yet. Moving from subgame to subgame, I actually felt that there were several minigames in this episode, but this was the "real" one. Not only did it manage to parody a number of games (the ghosts themselves probably an homage to 7th Guest, the Redcoat ghosts similar to Pac-Man or Berzerk, and the historical game concept akin to some of Broderbund's first educational games such as Oregon Trail), but it was actually hard! I was kicked out of the house several times because I didn't pay enough attention to the Redcoats or I didn't have my "Light Musket" ready. The ghosts also made somewhat humorous references to their characters, such as John Hancock's reference to life insurance and Sam Adams' reference to beer.
This episode is the climax of the series and rightly includes some of the best gameplay, although I thought the first episode was better than the middle ones. Gameplay is fast, the storyline is odd and the jokes often cater to the community of fans, including references to previous episodes of the game. This episode took me several hours to play, but 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.
