Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

After a rough patch with last month episode, Telltale Games and Strong Bad have returned to our gaming monitors to rock out and make fun of all things heavy metal in Strong Bad Episode 3: Baddest of the Bands.

This time around, we have Strong Bad, flying on cloud nine, with everything going perfectly for him, until he decides to play one of his favorite video games, Limozeen: Hot Babelian Odyssey, only instead of the game starting, his beloved video game console starts to smoke, and gives him a Red Ring of Death stops working.  When he finds out that it will take a giant sack of money to fix his console, he decides to put on a band competition contest to make some money.  Of course, nothing works out simply for good old Strong Bad, as the player starts to work their way through the episode.

Baddest of the Bands takes a lot of joy in setting up its jokes this time around poking fun at all the musical clichés that abound in the industry.  The jokes are far snappier this time around, having more to do with the source material, which hits at rap, rock, soul and of course hair metal.  The best joke in here has to be the band Limozeen, a mock up of hair metal bands that become completely into themselves, long past their marketing prime.  Think Dokken sticking around as long as Aerosmith has, and you have a good picture of Limozeen.

Adventure games live or die by their puzzles, and Baddest of the Bands does its best to make you think your way through every puzzle.  Nothing here will stump you for an extended period, but it will make you really think about what you have to do.  A good example here is trying to make an album cover, to win a contest.  The items you need are pretty straight forward, but the way you assemble them is rather clever and well thought out.  You never run into a puzzle that feels out of place, or there for the sake of a puzzle.  As with every Telltale game, a hit meter is built into the game, allowing you to set the hint level from none, to almost telling you your next step in the game.

In what seemed to be a change from the last two games in the series, Baddest of the Bands does not seem to have as much focus on items from the web cartoon.  There are a few inside jokes here and there, but the episode seems to stand on its own, without any real jokes carried over from the website, unless I missed them.  It seems as if Telltale is making a point to try and keep people that may not be fans of the site, but might want to play the game interested in the title.

Strong Bad Episode 3: Baddest of the Bands, is easily the best entry in the series so far, keeping the humor fast paced, and the puzzles sharp and clever.  It does stray away from its web roots a bit, but does give the player a solid 3-5 hours of adventure gaming pleasure, wrapped up in a mild price tag.  Strong Bad Episode 3: Baddest of the Bands gets a 4 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.