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Back on topic: I completed episode 6 yesterday on Switch, and I loved playing this game again! I remember when I first played season one, it was with a bad taste in my mouth. It felt to me like a Sam and Max ‘light’ after the cancellation of the big budget LucasArts sequel. Back in those days, it wasn’t the Sam and Max I wanted, so my focus lay with the different voices, the repeating characters, the returning locations, and not with all the positive things it offers. I completed it once and never touched it again. Now, after so many years, after the moarning period, I must say I do have eye for the positives. The writing is hilarious, I don’t laugh aloud much when I enjoy my media alone, but this made me chuckle multiple times. The plots are really great too, delightfully zany and with very little consideration for reality, just like I like my Sam and Max to be! The remaster has been handled with much love and care, and it really shows. The game has never looked or sounded better. And while I don’t agree with every choice of the developers, it’s very obvious that it’s a labour of love, and that makes me very forgiving. Thank you, Skunkape, for making me give this game a second chance and reigniting my love for this zany duo!

Yes thank you @Lagomorph01, let's stay on topic. I don't think any of us are in the mood for a manufactured argument that tries to suggest recasting a small role in a video game is equivalent to slavery and institutional racism. You'd have to be an idiot or a stooge to even suggest it.

While I liked Season 1 from the start, I do think there is something to the idea that the game was trapped under these absolutely brutal restraints in presentation. The fact that the remaster is such a revelation despite changing none of the fundamentals goes to show that those fundamentals - design, writing, environment art, animation, voice work - were always pretty strong. They just needed to be released from the chokehold.

Your words are kind. We're about the same age, so I know what you mean about feeling like you found the LucasArts web scene just in time to be too late. I wouldn't hold out any hope for Sam & Max: The Lost Cases happening in this reality, but I do think that all the cool Sam & Max material that this particular team was generating, only for it all to be thrown in the trash, deserved to have more sunlight thrown on it than prior retrospectives have been able to. The idea that the Freelance Police team just sort of moved over to Telltale and got their Sam & Max redemption in short order has been somewhat overstated, or has maybe been too liberally inferred. It is true that the game's producer and lead programmer founded Telltale, and there were definitely members of the Save the World team who also worked on Freelance Police, but there was almost no overlap in the design, writing, art and animation teams. It was, creatively, nearly a total turnover. Which doesn't make Telltale's Sam & Max success any less of a comeback story or something to be grateful for. It's still kind of amazing to think that shortly after LEC decided that a Sam & Max adventure game wasn't viable, some of its leads turned around and proved otherwise. There is redemption and unlikely closure in that borderline surreal chain of events, which is kind of unprecedented. Plus, I really do believe the long term health of Sam & Max as a video game property was better served by this outcome. But I thought it would be a worthy pursuit to go back and highlight the awesome work of this particular team, since that work was utterly tossed away by people who did not value it. I didn't emphasize this to bum people out or to renew old outrages, but in the hopes of giving those folks their proper due -- or anyway as proper as one can manage with the limited media we have. This is why it was important to me to name names at the end. Hopefully, we can get that team list even more complete and accurate in the future.

I also hated the voice acting in the SOMI SE. There were some obvious exceptions (the storekeeper, for example), but for the most part everyone seemed to be doing their best to do a "funny" voice. I literally had to stop playing because it drove me up the wall it was so bad. I don't know exactly what happened, or who was to blame. Also I thought Khris Brown was the person responsible for the LucasArts voice-acting from Hit the Road onwards? Or maybe it was just Grim Fandango onwards (ie. Psychonauts, Brutal Legend, Broken Age -- Schafer's titles). There was certainly a marked improvement from the abysmally voiced Fate of Atlantis, whoever it was. The first SE felt like a huge step backwards to me.

It was a serious question. Your argument that the people who study and teach these things have never considered something as obvious as the fact that there are disenfranchised white people implies that you've not really taken time to understand the other side. (Of course such a thing exists, and of course it hasn't been forgotten.) Someone else here talked about how they were surrounded by people who didn't understand what the wider issue is and I wondered if you were the same. What country are you from? How old are you? You talk about your culture, but it's very hard to put your comments into context. I posted a video that touched upon the issue of "white privilege" and puts it in some context. You seem to have ignored it? That's a shame because it does a better job of explaining parts of it than I can. Resorting to insults isn't going to get much of a rise out of me, I'm afraid.

Are you making any effort to understand the arguments, or are you just living in a bubble of people who think like you?

Rum, years ago I wondered about the same, and believe I know where you are coming from. I really hope I don’t come off rude with my post, but have to ask: Are you really sure you want to dive back into this topic, and are you really, really sure you want to do it with that question? The thing is that this question has been (and still is) asked a million times, and there is no quick answer to this that will satisfy. I know I had the same thought in the past, and it took many years for me to understand it. I’m trying to educate myself with reading articles, listening to podcasts and talk to people who know more about this, and I still only scratch the surface. My quick answer would be that the case of the Bosco recasting is not racial discrimination, since reverse racism doesn't exist. And I am certain that this statement, standing on it's own, will ruffle a lot of feathers, but that’s because you have to know a ton of background infos and facts that support this claim. And I think asking a video game forum to deliver these is a lot to ask. Also, it has been explained a million times online, so I would ask you to do a bit of googlin’ to find out yourself. Again, I am happy that you are curious about the topic and want to learn from it, but kindly ask you to do a bit more self education and research. Because you have to understand that, to many people, these questions are extremely exhausting. Too often it feels like having to explain and discuss the rules of soccer before every single match.