I do like when a game forces you to think..because that just doesn’t happen anymore.. Everythings dumbed down, or its just action & killing enemies.

Yeah, I can totally understand people’s frustration when they feel that they’re just sitting and watching a game and not really having to put any effort into thinking about what they’re doing. The trick, I believe, is making the player just think, and not stop and think. You’ve got to be engaged the whole time — not just watching cutscenes or listening to jokes, not just randomly clicking on things to figure out an illogical puzzle, and not just mashing buttons to kill guys.

Since you mentioned Hit the Road: ever since I saw the first Telltale episode, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why I remember Hit the Road so fondly when the puzzles just frankly bugged the hell out of me. I think in the end, it’s because they broke the rule I was talking about, but it worked because it was exactly in the tone of the characters.

That is, the whole point of the thing was seeing what would happen next. You don’t actually see the dialogue choices, so you’re surprised at what Sam & Max are going to say. You don’t really know exactly why you’re using Max with this object, or putting these things together, but you know that some wacky cut-scene or animation is going to happen. And the whole point of the characters is to be completely unpredictable and full of non-sequiturs, so it makes sense.

I’d guess that’s part of why some people have said the Telltale episodes have felt kind of “safe.” And I guess I agree with that to some extent, but I also think it totally fits in with the tone and concept of these games: as I see them (maybe Telltale doesn’t see them that way), they’re more in the spirit of episodic television based on the comics, than the comics themselves. I’m really interested to see what direction Episode 2 goes. (And it’d be nice to get to work on them, natch).