Tropes:
- Annoying Pop-Up Ad: Weaponized. The pop-up ads take the form of a large, impenetrable cube originating from a small jack-in-the-box. When Sam gets his hands on one such ad, he can use it as a shield against attacks from Auntie Biotic.
- Artificial Gravity: One of the settings that you can mess with in Reality 2.0 by placing a computer bug onto Bluster Blaster.
- Bilingual Bonus: Bosco's new bank account is hosted on BancoLavadero.com. "Banco Lavadero", translated from Spanish, would be "Laundry Bank". As in, Money Laundering.
- Blob Monster: You can fight blue slimes as they spawn out of the sludgie machine in Bosco's 2.0.
- Celebrity Resemblance: Justified In-Universe by the fact that the Internet modeled several NPCs in Reality 2.0 after celebrities from Sam and Max's real world. In particular, Auntie Biotic, the anti-virus software who guards Reality 2.0's email server, is modeled after Myra Stump, and the Internet Wizard is modeled after Hugh Bliss.
- Cyber Green: The episode's monochromatic opening sequence (in the non-remaster version) is green and black, setting the tone that this episode is dealing with computers and cyberspace and stuff like that. The personification of the internet is a cross between a green-skinned green-haired woman and a computer chip. The text adventure portion, "Reality 1.5", uses green text on a black background in it's starting location, switching to a different color whenever Sam and Max go somewhere else.
- Cyberspace: Reality 2.0 is an elaborate virtual reality/augmented reality landscape connected to The Internet.
- Department of Redundancy Department: In Reality 2.0 Bosco sells an item called the "Wooden Longsword of Intense Longness" for 5 gold coins.
- Digital Avatar: The player characters in Reality 2.0 have these. Most of them look exactly like their real-world counterparts, but "Elboscodril" goes the extra mile (Or at least the extra half-mile) to look like a half-elf.
- Exposition Fairy: The Internet, as well as the Internet Wizard (who is NOT Hugh Bliss).
- Foreshadowing: If you talk to the Internet Wizard and have him predict your future, he claims to see nothing but a mysterious black abyss. Near the end of the game, Sam and Max are trapped in an empty blank void while navigating Reality 1.5, a text-based adventure game/multi-user dungeon version of Reality 2.0.
- Fun with Acronyms: The Computer Obsolescence Prevention Society, or the C.O.P.S. for short.
- Fun with Subtitles: After Reality 2.0 glitches out, Sam and Max are trapped in Reality 1.5, an Interactive Fiction game. The audio briefly cuts out, forcing the two to speak in subtitles for a few seconds before the sound comes back on.
- G.I.R.L.: Discussed. A line from the original release that got
Dummied Out in the remaster involves Bosco describing how people on the internet use avatars, such as "a dwarf, or orc, or a hot young 15-year-old girl curious about the adult world and willing to experiment." - Homemade Inventions: A virulent biological weapon, AKA a handkerchief which Bosco has sneezed into.
- Incredible Shrinking Man: Bugging Bob (the Phone) causes Sam and Max to Shrink down to the size of rats.
- Insistent Terminology: Elboscodril is a half-elf.
- The Internet: Not just the setting of the in-universe Reality 2.0, but also acts as a character in-universe.
- Item Get!: After Sam purchases the Wooden Sword, he holds it aloft, a la Link, much to the confusion of Bosco.
- MMORPG: Reality 2.0.
- Monster of the Week: The Internet and the C.O.P.S.
- New Jobs As The Plot Demands: This time, Sybil is a Beta tester for Reality 2.0. She resigns from her position upon learning that she was trapped online for five days before Sam and Max broke her VR goggles.
- No Indoor Voice: Bluster Blaster shouts all his lines in the same gruff monotone.Bluster Blaster: ALL WILL FALL!
- Paper People: By bugging Curt (the microcomputer), Sam and Max get transformed into 2D sprites. Sam remarks that the experience is oddly familiar.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Bosco, for this episode, becomes Elboscodril, the half-elf merchant. In the real world, this amounts to wearing a single fake elf ear. His avatar in Reality 2.0 is much more elaborate, with half of his model now having blue skin, white hair, a yellow eye, and a shirt with the opposite color pattern of his regular shirt.
- RPG Elements: When in Reality 2.0, Sam can enter into Turn-Based Combat with certain characters.
- Seeking the Intangible: After Sam and Max shut down Reality 2.0 with a virus, the Internet announces it's lost all respect for living things. In the subsequent Reality 1.5 sequence, Sam and Max have to find the Internet's Respect for All Living Things and give it back to her to escape virtual reality once and for all.
- Shout-Out:
- The Internet's design is similar to that of S.H.O.D.A.N.
- Before performing a super-high jump to collect three gold coins, Sam will shout "It's-a me, Sam!"
- Show Within a Show: Reality 2.0 is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game within the universe of Sam and Max.
- Swiss Bank Account: Bosco sets up one of these to protect his finances. Part of the game involves finding Bosco's bank password so you can pay him for his invention of the month.
- Technobabble: Double Subverted. After breaking Sybil's VR goggles, Max remarks that the Rear-Slot Downstream Signal Frammistat Regurgitator Chip is broken. Sybil and Sam naturally dismiss this as being complete nonsense, but the C.O.P.S. confirm that this is indeed the problem with the goggles and give you a new chip in order to fix them.
- Technology Marches On: Deliberately invoked with the C.O.P.S., which consists of four sentient electronic devices which have long since been considered outdated technology: a landline numpad telephone (Bob), an old microcomputer modeled after the Osborne 1 (Curt), an old video game console modeled after the Pong home console (Chippy), and an arcade cabinet (Bluster Blaster).
- The Password Is Always "Swordfish": It turns out that Bosco's super secret bank password is... "Bosco".
- The Three Trials: Sam and Max require 5 gold coins, which are separated into three lots by glitching the system in three different ways.
- You Can't Get Ye Flask: Parodied and inverted in the final puzzle where the graphics fail and the world is rendered as a text based adventure. Sam is somehow able to pick up objects much larger than he should and interact with abstract concepts.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: The Internet Wizard warns Sam and Max that getting injured in Reality 2.0 may affect their physical bodies. One puzzle exploits this, as you have to free Bosco from the hypnotic effect of the VR goggles by knocking out his in-game avatar, Elboscodril.
