I guess I don't really have a choice anyway. There is no one else making even half decent retail adventure games.

That wadjet eye indie company has caught my eye however. I've played a couple of the demos and they seem well written.

Go ahead and finish S&M Season 1, and move on to Season 2. It is much better than the first one. Check out this review of the 4th episode: http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,862/.

So taking your collective advice I continued playing Sam 'n Max season 1, I was up to Episode 4, the abe lincoln one.

Man am I glad I played it. Hilarious! I'm continuing into reality 2.0 now and I'm having a blast. I like the fact that they finally changed all the object descriptions, so I can click on all the things in the office and get new responses!

I guess my experience with Back to the future just left a bad taste in my mouth. I think my faith in telltale has not yet been destroyed.

I have only the Abe Lincoln one, since it was free on Steam at one stage. Is is OK to skip straight there or do I need to play the ones before it first?

It's still free, AFAIK, and like most of seasons one and two, it's fairly self-contained. You'll miss a few running gags, but that's about it. And it's probably the pinnacle of the season, too.

EDIT: Apparently, it isn't free anymore. Scratch that part.

Thanks, I'll give it a go then. Good thing I got it back when it was available.

After digging some more, I found it's still free directly from Telltale. Steam removed the product pages for the individual episodes and only has the packs now, so they can't really single out one episode to give away.

I loved their Monkey Island series. It had some low points and the ending was iffy, but overall it felt like a real Monkey Island game and was very fun.

The rest of their stuff has been pretty boring in my experience, but I haven't played all of it. People tell me Sam & Max 3 is better than the first two, but I have yet to try it.

Back to the Future was fucking terrible.

It was actually the superb story and the top actingin Back to the Future that kept me going (hearing Christopher Lloyd as Doc again always does it for me). You could definitely see the hand of Bob Gale in there. The puzzles themselves were rather unchallenging and there was far too much back and forth, although many of them were quite inventive.

TellTale sadly are otherwise slipping into the trap of mainstream-ness as many a company does: Churn out turd that you think will sell with a popular brand as quickly as possible regardless of quality.