Back To The Future: The Game (Episode 1 of 5)

Title: Back To The Future: The Game (Episode 1 of 5) 
Platform Played On: iPad 
Release Date: February 17, 2011 
Date Played: August 2011 
Time Played: 3 hours 
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 4/5 


Opinion:

One thing for sure, Back To The Future is one of the best franchises ever invented.  All 3 movies are a ton of fun for all ages and generations, and I always secretly wanted for them to make a 4th movie, not to say it will never happen, it probably will, and it will probably suck (i.e Indiana Jones 4).  But all that aside, I was super stoked when I first heard about Telltale (a notoriously good adventure game developer) announcing its plans to release Back to the Future the game in 5 installments.

The game would take place after the 3rd movie and will tell about the events that followed.  To Back to the Future nerds like myself that meant one thing... for all intents and purposes this was canon, and given the nature of the game (being an adventure/story game) this was the 4th movie that we've all been waiting for in interactive form.

The game starts off shortly after the end of the last movie. Doc is gone (possibly dead), so his lab and all of his equipment is being reposessed, and auctioned off.  Marty is in distress, as he is unable to do anything about the situation. Suddently out of nowhere the Delorean appears with Einstein onboard. Marty determines the time that it came from and rushes to figure out what happened to Doc, and why the car returned without him. The voice acting is spot on and everyone sounds like their original characters.

I am not going to spoil any more of the story, all I am going to say is that it is an interesting little action adventure, that ties in bits and pieces of the universe. The puzzles themselves are not hard at all, and if you find yourself stuck you can always use the built in Hint system, which does not penalize you in any way for using it.  Back to the Future the game does quite good with humoring the player with jokes and bringing up interesting pieces of history behind Doc and his youth, as well as Marty's and Biff's ancestry.

Computer vs iPad Graphics
(Click to Zoom)

I am playing through these episodes on the iPad, and one thing I can say for certain is that it looks nowhere as good as the PC/Mac versions of the game. The computer (Steam) version of the game has prestine graphics that look like they were made for a modern game, while the iPad version of the game has muddy, jaggy (no anti-aliasing), textures, with no reflections or crispness. Refer to the screenshot (click to zoom) for comparison of the title screen on the two platforms.

While I understand that the iPad version had to be optimized for the iPad 1, even still I feel that they could have done a much better job at opitmizing the game. I didnt even mention that at times there are terrible performance issues, where the game will go into slideshow mode or run at very very low framerate for 5-10 seconds at a time. It is a fairly basically set up game with static backgrounds and for the most part staticly positioned people. There is absolutely no reason for the game to perform the way it does.

Luckily the performance issues do not effect the game as much as they would eslewhere since there is no need for fast reactions.  For me personally the iPad is the better medium because I can play it 10-15 minutes at a time before going to bed, for others who like to sit down and play a few hours at a time, Steam version may be the better alternative with its smooth performance and significantly better looking graphics.

Another major issue I ran into on the iPad is the fact that it is way too easy to accidentally skip important dialogue, as accidentally touching any part of the screen skips whatever is going on.

Overall Back to the Future: The Game (Episode 1) is a very enjoyable adventure, I would definitelly recommend it to everyone that likes the movies, although I would advice them towards playing on a PC as opposed to an iPad, especially if they care about the graphics.