Sam & Max Season Two, Episode 1: Ice Station Santa - first look

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Kris Kringle goes gun-crazy in the dog-and-rabbit detective duo's latest point-and-click adventure

Some of those ways aren't so subtle. The environments you'll explore are a little bigger and a lot more interesting than before, with even more weird stuff to gawp at than usual. They're also better animated than last season's backdrops, and you'll be able to see them all in whatever insane widescreen resolutions your monitor can support. More entertainingly, you'll now be able to play around with all sorts of seemingly useless background objects, like trampolines, plunked down for no real reason other than that they're cool.

Sam & Max's version of the North Pole has the look of those old Rankin/Bass animated specials that air every Christmas, with Santa and his elves all rendered in a squat, round-headed style. Santa didn't really talk when we saw him (he now prefers to speak in the universal language of bullets, apparently), but his bald, expressionless elves were more than happy to chat at length about their unhappy little lifestyles under Santa's boot.

Sybil's displaced from her usual storefront office for a reason - now that they've got a big, ever-expanding cast of established faces to play around with, the developers at Telltale decided to portray them as slightly more realistic. "[The characters] were a little bit superfluous last season," said Dave Grossman, Telltale's design director. "We wanted to beef 'em up a little bit, make them more interesting and let them move around the world a little more."

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.