Sam & Max Hit the Road — Leisure Suit Conroy

Written by Michael

A surprisingly okay game, considering it was just one big ad for pizza.

I would have been back sooner, but I ordered pizza delivery to the house and this joker in a red outfit kept trying to take it away from me. I just HAD to defend my dinner. Now that I’m fed, I’m in a better mood and I’m ready to stomp out crime (or at least bunny-kick it).

So, after carefully searching Trixie’s trailer with the assistance of a proper search warrant and a crack CSI team, it’s time for our intrepid investigators to head out. At the end of my last post, I made a plan. First, stop at Snuckey’s to get that jar opened, and then on to the World of Fish.

I decided to check out both the other locations of Snuckey’s, to see what was different.

Howdy, Pardner!

So, first I visit the location in the midwest, and I’m treated to a cactus dressed as a cowboy outside the store. The coin-operated horsey ride is identical outside, as are the unexplorable gas pumps.

 I can’t keep my excitement all bottled up.

Inside, not-Bernard, the clerk, has glasses and a ‘stache, but the same voice, and same responses to everything I say. He gladly opens up the jar for me, and although I have no need for it yet, I now have my very own twitching hand of Jesse James exposed to the air and ready at the itch of my own trigger finger.

Since I already bought and used the pecan treats, that spot is still vacant on the shelf, but the spinner rack now has bootleg Sam & Max Dress-Up Books for me to purchase.

I have a craving for gumbo now.

The other location of Snuckey’s, down around New Orleans, has a crawfish in a straw hat out front, and the clerk inside is back to wearing contact lenses again. On the spiral rack is a bootleg Sam & Max Paint-by-Numbers book, which I grab up.

For the halibut, I cod have made more progress, but I floundered and now have to clam up a little so I have more for the next post. I’m sure some of you may feel crabby about that, but I don’t give a carp.

My side mission to the Snuckey’s done, I head to my next destination, the World of Fish. First glances: my puzzle guess from the last post was probably right. There’s a fisherman furiously catching fish and filling nets with them, which is periodically picked up by a helicopter flying by, taking them to the restaurant atop the ball of twine.

Before I do anything else, however, I grab a bucket of fish over at the unmanned stand labeled “fish feed”. This was, unknowingly to me, a hint to the use of the bucket later. But that’s not where we are yet.

It’s not just me, also Hannah and her sisters recognize this actor

The man doing the fishing looks and sounds exactly like a younger Woody Allen. Adding this to Bernard, and I suspect a lot of the people involved with this game just stepped out of the movie theater. He seems to live by the same credos I do, however.

“You must really love fish!”

“Actually, I’m allergic to them.”

“Then why do you work here?”

“Because I’m more allergic to poverty.”

And then, Sam confirms my assumption: “I love all your movies, especially the early funny ones.”

Asking the usual questions by clicking the icons, his only connection to Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) was his great-aunt Lois marrying one, who shed all over the upholstery. When he talks about what the fish are for, he tells us about the Ball of Twine, which would have unlocked the location for us if we had gotten to him first, before talking to Doug.

And then he confirms what most northern Americans know about country music. When asked about Conroy Bumpus, he said that he tries to not listen to country music, because:

Speaking an inconvenient truth about the music genre

I can’t just walk into the net, so there’s an actual puzzle here. To the left of not-Woody is a big giant fish, big enough for me to get into. So I’m guessing that’s how I’ll do this, I’ll be getting caught by the fisherman while inside the large fish.

I climb inside...

...and nothing.

Well, not quite nothing, The thing creeks a little, from the way it is mounted. Guess it wasn’t made for this kind of action. But I’m still here. So, how do I get into the net? Next, I try whipping out the World of Fish magnet in my inventory, thinking I need to catch the fisherman’s hook with it. Doesn’t seem to be the solution. But the creaking sound was a good hint. I have a wrench in my inventory, let’s loosen up the bolts holding me in place.

If the fiberglass fish is a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’...

It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t get the job completely done. So, I check out my inventory for more ideas. And I then stumble upon one of the optional mini games advertised in the manual.

See, I was thinking of using my Sam & Max Car Bomb™ to rock the thing off the hinge, but using that item instead brings up a mini game that you could quit from at any time.

You squished my squad car!

I’m not sure how big the board game Battleship is outside of the United States, but there’s nothing localized about it. It’s a game where both players arrange, unseen to the other, their armada of warships in various sizes throughout a rectangular board, and then, the players take turns lobbying shots at spreadsheet-like coordinates, hoping to sink the other player’s ships. The first one to eliminate the other’s fleet wins. It is almost definitely the inspiration for the Windows 3.1 classic Minesweeper.

In the Sam & Max version, the boats are replaced with Buicks, the sailboats with squad cars. They even added an interesting new feature, two springboards that could randomly be placed as booby traps and lob the ammunition back to the other player. So, when a vehicle is destroyed, you might hear, “You crushed my cab!”, but for the opposing player, the wording might be, “You torched my taxi!” which is a nice touch that they varied the wording between the two players (Sam and Max, mind you) that kept the speech from being too repetitive.

Words not often spoken by other people.

Done with that diversion, let us get back to the main game. I still need to get this fish afloat. And I realize that I forgot to try the most obvious solution. USE MAX. I get him to jump in, and the combined weight, added to the loosened bolts, forces the fiberglass fish to float.

Crikey, mate. My dad once said to me, "if they're biting you, you know you've got 'em".

The fisherman floats away, meaning that this catch might be his last. It’s all our fault. But we’re a fish, inside the net, and as predicted, the helicopter comes.

“What’s that noise?”

“It sounds like you do when you’ve eaten too much Thai food, Sam.”

An uplifting experience

So, the chopper picks up the net and brings us to the top of the twine ball restaurant. The chef takes just one look at us, and walks away. Probably the words in his head: “You’re gonna need a bigger knife.” So, he’s gone, so we can emerge from our stucco shuttle,

We can’t go though the door, there’s nothing to pick up, so the only choice here is to get the rope we couldn’t reach before. Using Max, we get (as I predicted) 91 yards of twine.

And then... company.

This is a knife.

The chef comes out, ready to julienne his jackfish, mince his mackerel, perforate his piranha... oh, I think you get my drift. If I keep this up, I suspect one of you will gut me like a guppy. He’s not happy to see his kitchen contaminated by visitors that failed to wash, rinse, and sanitize as required, so as he approaches the house pets, and they jump off the twine ball.

Suddenly, our entertainment title becomes educational.

“Galileo was wrong.”

“I don’t think we were in a vacuum, Max.”

They get out to the front yard of the attraction, and quite nearly quote an Ashton Kutcher movie word for word. “Wait for it...” And then, suddenly, it plops down from above, into the parking space.

It feels like we’ve done all we can here, even though we never came across Shuv-Oohl. No mention of him either. Oh well, how about we check another tourist trap? Remember, one of the clues we collected from Trixie’s abode was a scorecard for the Gator Golf Emporium in Rheumy Eyes, Florida. You know, somewhere down in the boondocks.

I sure hope they’re not talking about TAG.

There’s a great big statue of a golfin’ gator out front. It seems nearly all of the locations in this game feature big creatures, be they statues or bigfoot. Since I live just a few miles from one, I wholeheartedly approve.

Notice that none of these businesses have customers, except for the food giant in the Snuckey’s ice cream counter? We approach the counter of yet another business that seems to be underperforming, and find a real redneck yokel manning the shop. So, out of curiosity, why did he mix alligators and golf? Turns out, that wasn’t his intention. It was a miniature golf course that got flooded out, and then the gators moved in.

Was the golf course originally based on the “Wonders of the World”? That would have been rather appropriate.

I worry about going Overboard with these movie references, because some of you might get Kurt with me.

With the 10-foot gators in, it became a driving range, and a popular teen hangout as well... until “we had that problem with the Jenkins kid. The court made me destroy my best gator over that.”

Talking to the man, we ask about bigfoots. “Don’t get me started about bigfoots! I used to have a bigfoot. He was my star attraction!”

My thoughts echo Max’s response: “I’m beginning to sense a theme here.”

It seems that he escaped after someone used an acetylene torch to remove his protective anklewear... um, shackles.

Conroy Bumpus? “He’s my idol! I named all my kids and pets after him! I’ve built a beer can shrine to him in the garage! I live for the day when I can meet him in person!” I haven’t seen anyone fangirl like this since vampires sparkled. So, he definitely doesn’t see eye to eye with us on Conroy’s arrogance.

Well, looking around, I see a broken golf ball retriever in the trash, so of course I pick that up. It looks like an accordion stretchy item retriever, with maybe one of the ends broken off.

He’s got nothing on Larry. Look, he doesn’t even have a gold chain!

We walk around the grounds and down to the driving range, and look! There’s Mr. Bumpus! So, we do what any loyal fan would do, and run back to get the owner... nah. We get into verbal fisticuffs with him and his henchman, basically just making fun of the toupee he’s wearing.

It’s a police officer’s tradition to make fun of someone’s wig!

Well, Mr. B doesn’t appreciate our sense of humor, so he has his right hand man do his dirty work.

And then as he’s pretty teed off with us, he uses a balled-up Max as a golf ball, and lands him in the vacant dunk booth in the distance.

And I suppose it’s up to me (as Sam) to save him. What are best friends for, anyway?

So, this booth is usually occupied by that missing Bigfoot, who’s currently missing. It’s surrounded by some former mini-golf destinations, such as a clown head, a windmill, some serpentine-dragon-looking thing, and a giant monkey head. Sadly, I don’t have the key for that, but I suspect it’s not hooked up to the dunk booth anyway.

So, I practice my golf game. Seriously, this isn’t an arcade game. You plant a flag with the mouse, hit the button to shoot the ball, and it lands at the base of the flag. If you hit it into the objects, like the windmill, things happen, like sounds or actions.

If you hit the gators, they get a little annoyed, but stay put.

I land one at the bullseye for the dunk booth, but it only dunks Max, and he’s back up for another shot. It doesn’t rescue him. So, I think I’m going to need to go out there. But how?

I need to get rid of those alligators, most definitely. I look through my inventory, and nothing seems to work. But I look at the bucket of fish, and think of maybe using it to lure them away. Maybe throwing it to them?

No, this is a mini-golf course. I need to golf them. I think that maybe I can combine them with the golf balls, but when I click the one bucket on the other, it just swaps them.

Afterwards, I thought, “Duh!” Swapping a bucket for a bucket should have been an obvious puzzle.

Now I'm just gon' sit, at the dock of the bay, watchin' the tide roll away.

So, sending the fish to their heads, they just eat it, and don’t move. But launch it a few feet away, and they move to follow it. Sometimes not as perfect as you’d like, but it appears to be a bucket of fish from Red Lobster, so I don’t have to worry about running out.

The goal here is to play a game of Frogger, by moving the gators around to make a path to the booth.

Now, now, Max, I don’t HAVE to rescue you.

I soon move them in position, and it’s a hop, skip, and a jump away to the island. But now I have to get him out of the booth up there.

I try things like the golf ball retriever, with no luck. For fun, I hit the bullseye some more and send Max into the water.

And then, I realize, I’m a moron. AGAIN.

I never tried to simply click the “use” icon on the door first.

One small step for dog, a giant leap for anthropomorphic crime fighters.

Sam scales the side of the box, helps Max escape, and then it causes a door at the bottom of the attraction to pop open. Max also says he found another batch of fur at the bottom of the tank, which he saved.

This game is getting me all shook up.

In the storage closet below is an empty snowglobe, for the Mystery Vortex in scenic Gullwump, Washington. Hey, look, another new location on the map! And an inscription on the bottom: “To Elmo the Bigfoot, Keep on Truckin’, Shuv-Oohl the Mole Man”

So a clue! And with that, we will get the truck out of here for now. I’ll leave you with this video mashup, which I found while looking for something else, and just made me smile.

Session Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
Total Time: 3 hour 30 minutes

Inventory: Lots of money, World of Fish magnet, tufts of two different bigfoots’ hair, black light flashlight, carnival pass, Sam & Max™ Car Bomb, Sam & Max Coloring Book, Sam & Max Dress-Up game, stilt walker’s outfit, Gator Golf score card, Jesse James’ severed hand (no longer in a jar), bent left-handed wrench, bucket of golf balls, snowglobe, 91 yards of twine

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!