Hector: Badge of Carnage

I just finished Hector: Badge of Carnage, this raunchy adventure game from the UK published by Telltale. I got it for free because I had preordered Jurassic Park which was going to come out in April but got pushed back till the fall, so Telltale refunded the money and gave me a free game. Turns out that it would have been worth buying anyway.

Hector's got some in his car

The story is that some idiot has taken hostages and is shooting police, and I guess he's killed enough of them that you're the best negotiator they've got left. The first part of the game is just trying to get to the scene, and the rest is fulfilling the guy's demands where you get to explore several areas at once.

The patented Hector condom-shoelace... ewww.

So yeah, it's a dirty game and lets you know that right from the start. But it certainly doesn't rely on shock value - there's some really funny writing and references.

YEEEAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!

There are also a lot of nice adventure game nods. I'm totally a sucker for getting multiple responses when repeatedly trying to do something the main character just doesn't

At least he's not actually in Hector's pants

want to do, and there's a fun sequence with a brick on the ground that goes through six iterations before repeating (from "It's a brick" to "What is it with you?") with Hector sounding more and more irritated each time.

The controls are pretty good. Basically click once to look, click twice to try to pick up/use/speak to/anything else. Only drawback is that it makes sense to just double-click everything, but that ends up starting the description and then cancelling out of it if you can't do anything with the object in question. Just a small annoyance. The game is fantastic in terms of being able to skip past dialog you don't want to listen to, which is good since you'll end up examining a lot of items multiple times while trying to see if they can be used.

It is a British game after all

The gameplay is also solid. I didn't need any hints but it didn't feel too easy, either. And every action seemed logical, even if the result was not always what I was going for.

Anyway, it was a fun little game and would totally be worth $10.