That's not such bad news, of course, because DeathSpank always offers tenaciously acceptable content. The DeathSpank adventures are achingly conservative action RPGs at heart, and even when the storyline and setting change -The Baconing ditches straight fantasy for a sci-fi feel that involves parodies of everything from Tron to the Jetsons - there's a growing sense of the same-old-same-old creeping in. It's witty stuff, and the script can't wait to shoot off on strange tangents, but the game's mechanics remain far more traditional. The first's a balmy, if snobbish, country club where Vulcan fixes you some new golfing irons and Zeus hobbles about on a Zimmer frame built from lightning bolts the second's a dismal trailer trash affair where brutish scarlet-skinned devils rush around clad in orderlies' whites. Towards the end of the adventure, our foolish hero takes a trip through heaven and hell only to discover that they're drawn, with lovely comic clarity, as two competing retirement homes. In The Baconing, the latest instalment, he's burning the fabled Thongs of Virtue one by one in order to defeat a dangerous AntiSpank he accidentally brought to life. Mad Magazine's snarky strain of anarchy flows right through the DeathSpank games, in fact, whether the hero's collecting magical underpants or piecing together a dangerously hot Taco to placate a stubborn villager. Like DeathSpank, they spend a lot of time getting things wrong in the name of doing things right. Like DeathSpank, they have long, bendy legs and barrel bodies, and their faces are contorted with moronic concentration. The Spanish cartoonist has a real legacy at places like Mad Magazine, where he's helped to forge a rich bloodline of brave and idiotic heroes. Although it's Ron Gilbert's adventure game legacy that you see in the dialogue trees and the fetch quests, and the tiniest, most primitive shard of Diablo's design shines through in the looting, I like to think that the secret influence on DeathSpank has always been Sergio Aragones.
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