When I was growing up, one of the coolest shows in the history of the universe was Captain N: The Game Master. It was nothing short of a masterpiece in my mind and had the completely believable premise of a high school kid getting sucked into his Nintendo in order to battle the games’ villains. Now that I’m older, I still think that premise is pretty cool. Wouldn’t it be great to jump into games? Well, in Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People Episode 5: 8-Bit Is Enough the lead character of the game (and the previous four Strong Bad titles), Strong Bad, gets the chance to become a part of his favorite, and not so favorite, games.

In his basement, Strong Bad makes a desperate attempt to leap away from his crowd of friends landing on top of his stand-up arcade machine of Trogdor. The resulting impact causes a malfunction in the game’s logic board. I’m not too sure what the logic board does, but apparently if you screw it up and don’t get it fixed quickly, the real world and video game worlds slowly merge into one. Strong Bad thinks this is a perfectly awesome thing to have happen and doesn’t stop Trogdor, the large beefy-armed dragon, from escaping his game and running amok.

That is, until Trogdor starts breathing fire on and setting fire to various areas throughout his home and the surrounding area of Strong Badia. Needless to say, after Strong Badia is torched, Strong Bad vows to get back at Trogdor. Of course, this isn’t a simple task of getting a light gun and zapping the green-scaled menace.

Nope, the quest of dragon-slaying sends Strong Bad throughout his home that has been changed and other characters warped as the game and real worlds merge. Controls for the game are the same as the previous Strong Bad titles. It consists of item and character interaction to solve puzzles and move the plot along through use of the item inventory and mouse-clicking. Having played the games prior, it didn’t take much time for me to get into 8-Bit.

I’ve played games all my life, and the laughs 8-Bit got from me the whole time I played weren’t forced or small groans at bad jokes (OK some were groans). While traversing his home, Strong Bad must also jump into his favorite games to save other characters and gain important and useful items. The types of games he has to go into and the parodies that ensue were simply, as Strong Bad would say, awesome.

Various genres are poked at including platformers, edutainment, first-person shooters, and action-adventure. I had a lot of fun going through this game, pure and simple. While using a light musket to toast ghost redcoats from Spirits of ’76 and speaking with an 8-bit character about “get rock” and “look tree” in Peasant’s Quest, I came across a lot of jokes and parodies packed into this game that made it hilarious.

If you’re a gamer, you’ll most likely get all of the jokes and just shake your head at some of the references. For example, Strong Bad can’t jump into the Stinkoman game because it’s region locked, and when he does, it ends up being a platforming game with a very obnoxious odd-speaking blue-haired anime-inspired guy for a main character. The enemies are then taunted by Stinkoman in that they’re predictable (since of course they’re on a set path), this eventually leads to problems for Stinkoman.

I can’t really think of a favorite part to the game per se, mainly because I enjoyed it and kept on the lookout for little nuances of gaming and goofiness. The gameplay of the previous games was utilized and felt familiar and would be easily understandable by someone just starting out with the Strong Bad series, though why you’d start with the last one, I’m not sure. The final episode is definitely great with its jokes and parodies of gaming in general.

I remember spending hours with different challenging 8-bit games and reliving those sorts of experiences alongside Strong Bad was a blast. Of course, the game wasn’t without poking fun at itself too, since Strong Bad says all games where you can’t die are lame. Apparently Strong Bad might think his own game was lame, though I’d guess he’d call it awesome despite the “not dying” part of it.

Solving puzzles in the Strong Bad series has always raised my eyebrows at one point or another because of how bizarre they might be. Not that they’re impossible to solve, I mean that things that are puzzles wouldn’t always seem like that. In this installment of the series a puzzle involved a band of space-van flying rock stars and a female character who was angry and threw crates. She’d been transformed into (via the previously mentioned Logic-Board-Video-Game-World-Real-World-Merger) Lady Crate Ape.

When approached with the problem of getting Lady Crate Ape away from a character the answer was an odd one, a funny one, and later on, one that made sense (despite being odd).

All in all, I really enjoyed the parodies, the jokes, the references and a lot about 8-Bit. I didn’t find any parts of it to be frustrating, annoying, or anything of the like. If you’re going to pick up any of the Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, I’d suggest getting this one. It’ll put a smile on your face and will definitely get a laugh. On the site from Telltale Games, they said, “We saved the best for last.” I definitely agree.