Hello all! No, you’re not seeing things, you’ve actually just got a little message on twitter or whatever telling you your very favorite videogaming blog of all time has updated. Let’s get right to business and start talking about some videogames!
So chances are good that you’ve heard of the game Dark Souls which was made by From Software. It is the successor to Demon’s Souls, a game which wasn’t released outside Japan but thanks to having English-language options managed to become a cult hit thanks to importation. Sadly it’s only on the PS3 so nobody has actually played it because who owns one of those, but Dark Souls has been released on 360 and PC as well, and it’s on the latter of these that I’ve been playing the game.
Dark Souls is infamous for its difficulty and this is not a reputation it has gained without reason. This game is difficult in the old-school sense, in that it’s uncompromising and you’re going to have to learn things like enemy attack patterns, how to block and parry and dodge, and level layouts to progress.
Turns out they occasionally do make ’em like they used to
So here’s the thing: Until you have done some of that and get a handle on what you’re doing, this game can be really unfun to new players. It takes time to get into it, to find what works for you, to get into the flow of it. For me I didn’t really ‘enjoy’ the game until a few hours in, in fact I put it aside for a few weeks before being convinced to go back to it. And I’m glad I did, because once I did pass that stumbling block I really got into it – it’s a game that really rewards your investment and is one of the quintessential examples of “What you get out depends on what you put in”.
Of course any game which takes that long to get into is a flawed game, and I won’t say Dark Souls is perfect by any stretch. I enjoy the exploration and learning immensely but I’m not a tremendous fan of just how obscure the game can be about some things. But if you’re looking for an amazing experience and something to really get your teeth into then what you’ve heard about Dark Souls is pretty much all true – it’s a seriously great piece of software which does a great many things right and very few things wrong, and of those things it does wrong much is a matter of taste.
Basically what I’m trying to say is Dark Souls is superb and if you’re not already on the bandwagon you need to join it.
IMPORTANT LINKS FIRST
Here’s hype: http://www.gordonmcneil.com/VGCW_Orch.mp3
Here’s the Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/bazza87/new
Here’s a Wiki: http://vgcw.wikia.com/wiki/Video_Game_Championship_Wrestling_Wiki
Here’s a guy uploading prior matches with chat: http://www.youtube.com/user/VGCWclem/videos?flow=grid&view=0
Okay so here’s the deal: Every now and the a dude named Bazza (AKA Baz McMahon) streams something called Video Game Championship Wrestling on Twitch. The idea is that he sets up matches in THQ’s WWE 2013 where all characters are AI-controlled, and then he lets it go from there while he plays appropriate vidya music and chat goes insane.
If this sounds incredibly stupid, good, because it is. It’s also incredibly entertaining and amusing, but it’s really hard to convey it without watching it, but I really suggest you do so because it’s the highlight of my day when it comes on. Bazza’s got an irregular schedule but he confirmed that there’s a show tonight (Season 2 finale!) that’s going to be seriously epic. So if you like the idea of Donkey Kong and Duke Nukem beating the hell out of each other while Vegeta jobs and Adam Jensen rides into battle on an augmented teleporting motorbike, then THIS IS FOR YOU!
This is Captain Falcon FALCON KICKING Protoman off the top of a cage and through the announcer’s table.This is Ghost Nappa superplexing Gaben so hard the goddamn ring breaks.
Look just take my word for it: You want to get comfy and watch this. Pre-show starts at 10pm UK time, which is 5pm Eastern/2pm Pacific. The show proper starts an hour later.
Perhaps one of the best-known faces among gaming’s antagonists, Dr. Ivo Robotnik (aka Dr. Eggman or just Eggman) is the longtime foe of Sonic the Hedgehog and has grown famous for his lust for the Chaos Emeralds and the quest to roboticize all living things within his empire.
Or that’s the Blue Blur’s official line, anyway. If you are inclined to put aside your prejudices and overlook the propaganda, I’d like to highlight what I believe to be the truth behind these lies, which can be demonstrated by facts that no amount of Sonic’s lies can obscure.
First, and most simply, let us consider the sheer endurance of Robotnik. No matter how many times Sonic’s gang of insurgents sabotages his plans, destroying an absolutely staggering array of material (including several vast space stations) he always returns. Some would say this proves his lust for power; I say it proves his resilience and his capability. How many of us could go through even one loss on the scale of Robotnik’s and recover, let alone do so over and over? He is clearly an unrivaled master of planning and forethought if he always has the necessary resources to rebuild, and in these troubled times I think we can agree someone with a proven record of excellence in planning.
Nothing to lose but your chains!
This leads into the greater thrust of my thesis though. Planning is only part of the story and it can be used to plot evil as well as good. What does Dr. Robotnik use his considerable talents for? Sonic’s cadre claims it is to enslave, which is a handy fiction, but let’s look at who is making that claim. Sonic the Hedgehog is “the fastest thing alive”, capable of unbelievable feats of speed and dexterity. He is, in point of fact, uniquely fast and strong. Few things can even pose a threat for him, and only Robotnik’s most dedicated and specialized units such as Metal Sonic have ever slowed him down. Robotnik, meanwhile, gives us a great clue in his name, whether it’s his true name or a nom de guerre. The term ‘Robotnik’ is a word meaning “Worker” in the Polish, Czech, and Slovak languages. Indeed several underground papers in Polish history have borne the name “Robotnik”, and in 19th century Czech areas, peasants revolting against landowners were referred to as “Robotniks”. Does this by itself prove anything? No; but it does help in providing an understanding of Dr. Robotnik’s operations and motives.
Dr. Robotnik’s roboticization policies are intended to convert the animal population of Möbius into robotic equivalents. This is portrayed as being a truly evil act – but who is responsible for this portrayal, and what do they gain from it? The answer is Sonic, and what he stands to gain is the preservation of his status as an elite. This is the crux of my argument, so let’s make sure it’s properly outlined. Sonic is the arch-bourgeoisie, he is capable of feats unique to any living being on Möbius, and he is special precisely because of this. A couple of his allies are also special, but they have their own unique qualities as well – Tails has two tails and can fly with them; Knuckles can punch like Vodka Drunkinski – and Sonic tolerates them only insofar as they are subservient to him and never steal his primacy in the spotlight. The other animals, the ones ‘rescued’ from Robotnik’s machines, are universally average. None of them have any outstanding qualities which we are shown. They will never be as fast as Sonic or as tough as Knuckles, or able to fly as Tails can – unless they adopt the technological power offered by Dr. Robotnik.
Robotnik’s policies are raising every animal on the planet to parity with Sonic and his cadre’s powers. They are becoming faster, stronger, and gain abilities such as flying or operating aquatically. Robotnik is a revolutionary figure who is trying to overthrow the existing order, and Sonic is a reactionary, counter-revolutionary whose sole objective is maintaining his position of primacy and privilege. Witness, for example, how animals ‘released’ from Robotnik’s exosuits are completely unharmed. They are immediately aware of their surroundings, they are in perfect physical condition, and they are evidently in no way permanently attached to those machines. It is also telling that the second they are ‘set free’ they bound away from Sonic at top speed – except those who have no such luxury, because Sonic destroys a squirrel’s flight units while it is several thousands of feet in the air (cf. Sonic 2, Sky Chase Zone). In short Robotnik’s machinery is painless and its only purpose is to enhance the inhabitants of it. Sonic cannot stand for this.
Sonic also enforces patriarchal values and denies the agency of Amy.
Sonic (tellingly a blue creature, the traditional color of Tories and the phrase “blue-blooded”) is surely a figure of hate to these creatures, who don’t even presume to equal him, but only to exceed their own bodily limitations. He will have none of that. Only he, and to a lesser extent his biologically gifted and ideologically pure allies, may possess any form of exceptionalism. Only he may stand out from the crowd. Only he may be special. By virtue of nothing more than birth he is to be elevated and venerated and he will brook no challenge from Robotnik – the Worker, dressed in red and black, the very flag of revolution. He fights violently and campaigns tirelessly to defeat absolutely any and all technological developments made by Robotnik and to keep Möbius in its pastoral state. This is a handy secondary effect of his oppressive crusade, as it allows him to paint his side as the one supporting a pristine, natural world opposed to the artificiality and machinery of Robotnik’s. These is never any examination on Sonic’s part of why one should be inherently better than the other, never any attempt to seek an agreement with Dr. Robotnik, never any consideration that perhaps those animals are encased in machinery not by force but by choice, to enhance their own capacities and labor in a worker’s collective for the benefit of all. A final damning comparison: Robotnik seeks the Chaos Emeralds to power vast machinery, enhancing again the power of many citizens and providing who-knows-how many jobs. Sonic seeks them in order to enhance his own power, becoming even more superlatively strong and unassailable.
I hope this essay has demonstrated why the presented, official line put out by Sonic propagandists should be doubted and questioned. Robotnik may not be perfect (Though it bears mentioning he is far from paranoid – his objectives have as I said been repeatedly foiled by Sonic and he faces a constant threat from the reactionaries and their running echidnas) but he is clearly the superior moral force in this struggle, one who seeks to ensure equality not by keeping everyone equally subservient but by making them equally capable, equally free.
CROSSPOST from someplace else I say words because I put all this effort into it!
Okay I’ll make an effortpost about mods for y’all, because despite the brilliance of vanilla Morrowind it’s even more mindblowingly amazing with mods installed.
Lātehār Essentials Morrowind Overhaul: As Pike says this includes a bunch of different mods. This is mostly a graphics and sound pack with some unofficial patching but it makes an unbelievable difference and unless your computer can’t handle it, you need it.
Galsiah’s Character Development: GCD single-handedly fixes all problems with vanilla leveling. It makes everything so much more natural and smooth, lets you go above 100 in stats and skills (not without work!), and in the 50~ hours of playing with it since I reinstalled it’s seemed to be pretty much perfectly balanced in most regards. Playing without this is an indicator of the most depraved masochism. Note: There’s another leveling mod our there known as MADD Leveling which has pretty good reviews, but I’ve never used it myself. Consider that if you don’t like GCD. But for Vivec’s sake get one or the other.
Morrowind Patch Project (Formerly known as Unofficial Morrowind Patch): A project which has persisted in one form or another pretty much since release and which aims to fix anything it can, from typos to incomplete quests to actual game-breakers.
Morrowind Code Patch: Going deeper than the above this, unsurprisingly, touches the game’s code itself to make even more repairs and improvements. Fixes a huge number of issues which were in the base game and remained through patches and expansions. Some things are vital like crash fixes, some are quality of life, but this thing is indispensable.
Delayed Dark Brotherhood Attack: Exactly what it says on the tin. In base, with Tribunal installed, you’ll get attacked when you’re a prisoner fresh off the boat in Seyda Neen by elite assassins. Not only does this unbalance things when you kill them because their gear is great and valuable, but it also makes very little sense that the person sending the assassins would even know you exist, let alone care. So with this you’re safe from the DB until you’ve reached a position of power in various guilds or have progressed to a certain point in the Main Quest.
Expansion Integration: Bethesda were lazy fuckers with Bloodmoon and especially Tribunal, and this mod goes a long way to helping that. Basically it brings everything appropriate from those expansions into Vvardenfell, so you can encounter Durzogs in the wild and alchemy ingredients can show up for sale and so forth.
That’s pretty much it for what I would class as essentials, and even the last one of this short list is debatable. Everything else is really up to the player in question, but I’ll link to a few of my favorites and then a couple of the bigger lists and important sites.
Bais Mister Adequate’s favorites Tamriel Rebuilt: I strongly considered putting this in the essentials section because it’s just that good. TR is a project that has been running since the early days of Morrowind with the original aim of recreating all of Tamriel. They’ve since scaled back this absurd ambition to ‘just’ the whole of the Morrowind province, which is still only slightly smaller than Vivec’s Spear. They’ve recently released part 3 of this vast effort and already the game is literally twice the size.
The big peninsula is roughly akin to Vivec’s Spear, come to think of it
Those of you who’ve played the game will realize just how vast an expansion this project is. And although I’ve only seen a very little bit of it so far I can assure you what is there is great. Firewatch is a better-made settlement than any Imperial one in the native game. (Note: The small island south-west of Vivec/Ebonheart is not a part of TR, but a seperate mod named Dulsya Isle.)
Piratelord’s Creatures XI: There have been a great number of creature adding mods over the years but this is the best one currently. Everything added is well-made and fits perfectly with the theme of Morrowind and the aesthetics and stuff.
Executor Zurg’s Merchant Money Mod: Some people may dislike this. Those people are wrong. This mod increases the amount of money carried by merchants (not those added by mods though) tenfold. Very simple, and incredibly welcome, because you don’t have to go traipsing off to Caldera or the Mudcrab Merchant to sell anything worth more than five septims anymore. Don’t worry, when you start getting more expensive gear you’ll still struggle to find places to sell them.
abot’s gondoliers, boats, and silt striders: This triune of mods by abot does something that some of us have longed for for years. It adds the ability to choose a ‘scenic travel’ option from various ports, which means you can actually ride the stuff as it takes you to your destination in real-time! It also adds some ambient stuff like gondoliers paddling around Vivec City and stuff. It’s tremendously good for gigantic nerds like Pike me who just looove to act as if they’re really in the game and write up huge backstories for their characters and stuff!
Traders 300: Adds a locked chest to most merchants, within which will be a leveled list of appropriate goods. The end result is that merchants will be far more variable in what they carry, giving a lot of flavor and life to them and encouraging you to check back with them now and then.
Homes to Let: This is a really nice little addition that does, well, exactly what it says. You can now rent homes on a monthly basis. Excellent alternative to most of the housing mods out there, as this lets you rent something in, say, Hla Oad for all of 60 septims a month. Superb for anyone who can’t afford other houses or who hasn’t progressed enough to gain them, or who fancies a change of pace, or who just wants more housing options.
The Less Generic NPC Project: A huge undertaking which seeks to give unique dialog for most topics to every single NPC in the game. So far they’re up to about 1/3 of the game, which is pretty damned impressive, and most of what I’ve seen so far has been decently written and kept to lore and stuff. It tends to add some minor quests as well, but the general overall effect is to make the world a much richer place. I happened to rent a place in Vivec with the above mod and it was next to a store; I went into the store and the Khajiit in there was affected by this mod, so we sat and talked forever. They worked together superbly to create a great little experience for my character!
Service Requirements: This mod is for masochists. What it does is when you try to trade with a faction-aligned person, they’ll tell you to fuck off if you’re not a member of their guild/house/etc. Want to port to Sadrith Mora? Best be a member of the Mage’s Guild! You can also pay surchages to access their services. Altogether a pretty stupid mod that only makes the game harder, I couldn’t play without it.
Further Reading
Now, this game’s over ten years old now and still has active modders. Unsurprisingly there are an immense number of mods out there, and my little list of mostly personal taste doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. If you’re interested in looking more into what is out there, here’s some resources to do just that!
There are two main download sites these days. There used to be many, many more but most have fallen off the Internet.
Planet Elder Scrolls has a huge repository of mods. Problem is some of them were on off-site hosting, and said off-site hosting has now disappeared. Still one of the most valuable resources for getting mods though, and if you check the comments on a missing mod you’ll often find someone pointing folks to a new upload someplace.
Morrowind Modding History is a place which is trying to salvage and preserve pretty much every Morrowind mod it can get a hold of. If you can’t find something on PES it’ll almost certainly be here. Also great to just browse through and see what’s on offer.
Aside from those there are various lists out there which… list different mods, usually grouped into categories like “New buildings” and so on. Like anything these lists will be based on the personal taste of their authors but you can usually find some pointers towards stuff you’re after. Great House Fliggerty is a good resource anyway and this thread has a list of lists (of lists, in a couple cases). Well worth checking out are Telesphoros’ List, Empirical Morrowind, and BTB’s list. Also try the TESNexus Wiki.
A couple of closing notes! There’s a very widely-used mod named “Necessities of Morrowind” out there, which adds the need to eat, drink, and sleep into the game. I’ve not yet tried it myself though I plan to with my next character. There are also a couple of mods which add NPCs walking around settlements. A lot of people swear by Morrowind Comes Alive but I prefer Starfire’s NPC additions; it really does help add life to towns to see people wandering around and having different people when you leave and return and stuff.
Okay I hope that helps anyone looking for mods get an idea of some of the most important ones currently around and points them to where to look for more! If you’ve got questions go ahead and ask, I’ll probably know the answer or where to find it!
I was recently hanging out with my friend Mike having some drinks, watching some movie (The Raid is amazing seriously go see it) and playing some games. Of course while doing this we were chatting about various things – mostly games – and we turned to stuff from back in the day that we liked, as us old-timers are prone to doing.
Something we both agreed on though was that for all the newfangled graphics and physics engines, and for all the gun games of recent years, gaming seemed poised to go down a particular path and then swerved violently away from it. Probably the best example of this path is Bushido Blade, a fighting game where you choose your character, weapon (such as the Ancient Hanzo Sledgehammer), and have at it. Thing is there are no health bars; you take swings, they take swings, and you might get one-hit killed or cripple their leg or all sorts of things. It’s ropey, because it’s an old game that never had a huge budget to begin with, but it’s honestly one of the best fighting games ever.
You know in Samurai movies when the two dudes stand facing each other for a long, long time before making a single sudden attack that decides things? Bushido Blade is the only game I’ve played where that can happen. You and your friend will be sitting there watching, circling each other, trying to feel each other out, and then there’ll be a sudden burst of violence that decides the round. It’s brilliant – and even by the time the second game came out it was abandoned in favor of health bars and too-crazy characters and so on and so forth. It was a shame, though the original is still worth popping in if you’ve got a copy.
You can also fight in a bamboo forest and chop bamboo down.
But it’s emblematic of a rather broader trend – namely, the reduction in experimentation over the years. Now to be fair this is picking back up a bit again, as indie games gain more and more ways to reach people, as kickstarters let people choose the sorts of things they want to see, and as publishers see the success of games they might not typically consider salable, such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Still, in this day and age you’d think we’d have developed depth that built on the sorts of ideas Bushido Blade seeded – locational damage in a fighter for instance. Or look at the game Sentinel, which had a very ambitious conversational system where you could actually ask NPCs things in a free-form manner. Underdeveloped and ropey, again, but a thing with so much potential. Instead we get yet another Soul Calibur, yet another Tekken, yet another Call of Duty. Nothing wrong with those in their own right, just sad to see there’s so little experimentation and attempts to use computing power for anything other than better graphics.
When we’ve got done with a game, but still want to play more of the game, it’s not uncommon to go back and try and do it differently. Some games build this in in various forms, either because the game has a large random element (For example Civ IV) or thanks to a New Game Plus or the like, but in a lot of them you’ve got to find your own ways to spice things up.
The first thing you might try and do is to master the game, to 100% it, and that’s all well and good, but there’s so much more that can be tried. Interestingly it seems to go in two wildly divergent directions; either you try to find every loophole, glitch, and exploit in order to break the game completely over your knee, or conversely to impose strict conditions on yourself so you make the game more challenging. Of course we probably all try both these routes at times but it still struck me as a curious point.
Some forms of this have taken off and become more popular. There are all kinds of challenges for Final Fantasy for instance, such as No Materia runs in VII, or Nuzlocke runs in Pokemon. Me, I like to pick someone in Kaiserreich and take them to glory no matter the odds. I played a game last week where I was Britain and every other Syndicalist power in the world was gone except for the Bhartiya Commune and Mexico. It was a long, difficult fight that had to be planned carefully and executed well because the longer I took, the longer the gigantic German alliance would have to build themselves up – still, after 20 years of warfare the Red Flag flew not just over London and Calcutta but Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Washington, Ottawa, and Rome, among many others.
That Solidarity feel
What sorts of things do you do to keep games interesting? Do you look for complete mastery, or for a real challenge? Tell us in the comments below!
Hey gang, it’s been awhile hasn’t it? Very sorry about that, but with Pike and myself both writing books, her getting a new computer, and various Christmas stuff we’ve both been somewhat busy. Still, here is a post now, and it’s an important one because it’s about a damn good game!
Soldak probably isn’t the best-known name in gaming, which is a crying shame. They generally work in the ARPG field and two of their previous games – Depths of Peril and Din’s Curse – have been pretty well received by those who have played them. I do not number among those yet but I will soon because Drox Operative is pretty amazing. See, whilst Soldak’s games are very solid ARPGs in and of themselves, they’re also trying to do some new and interesting things with the genre. Let’s talk about Din’s Curse first of all.
In that game, you play a typical adventurer type off to conquer dungeons, kill bosses, and get great loot. So far so normal, but here’s the twist: The world is doing stuff while you are doing stuff. While you’re in a dungeon looking for something, the Big Bad at the bottom might open a portal to the town and kill everyone so you have to rush back to try and stop this. And you can fail, and your quest progress is for naught. Or you can partly succeed and only some people survive. Move on to another (randomly-generated) town and setting and deal.
Drox Operative is even more ambitious.
SPACE IS 4 FITE
You are an eponymous Drox Operative – a secretive and powerful mercenary agent who flies around the galaxy doing stuff. The thing is that the setting isn’t a premade one, nor is it just a regular randomly generated one. The setting is actually a 4X game which is going on all the time no matter what you’re up to, and you’re one part in that. You’re an important, sometimes pivotal part, but you’re not the only one and whilst you can certainly swing things around for a race on the back foot, you may not have the same ability if they’re on the ropes entirely. The various races – and there are an abundance – hire you to do exactly the sort of stuff that tends to not exist in a typical 4X; go clean that pirate nest out. Go deal with this one Space Asshole. Go shuttle some stuff between our worlds. That’s the “early game” stuff, where you’ll do less dangerous and difficult quests to build up relations with a race; then things will likely kick off and they’ll want your help with the big boy fights. Or you can just try to make nice with everyone, or you can go make loads of money instead if you want, as there’s more than one way to win (and lose).
If the game was just a regular randomly generated ARPG it’d be more than worth getting – it’s a damn solid game with a huge amount of things to try and a fuckton of different item types that give you a startling degree of customization options. Putting the player into a dynamic world which can be influenced and played around with and never controlled quite as completely as you’d like elevates it to downright genius territory.
It’s not a perfect game by any means. There are some interface and control issues, a few of the controls aren’t really intuitive, and the graphics, music, and sounds are serviceable rather than particularly good. None of this detracts significantly from the extraordinarily solid game at the core of this thing and if you want a good dose of ARPG after burning out on Torchlight II, this is one of the best options out there right now.
You can buy Drox Operative from the Soldak website for the absurd price of US$20. If you’re like me you’ll feel like you may have committed a crime getting it so cheap.
I’m sure all our American readers are too busy eating and being incredibly full to be able to make the effort to read right now, but we at The Android’s Closet just wanted to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving! Here are some of the things I’m thankful for:
I’m thankful for having millions of zombies to kill with a variety of creative weapons.
I’m thankful for an abundance of Paradox map painting Asperger’s simulators and the believable worlds that ensue.
Vive la Quebec libre!
I’m thankful for those rare games with a great story.
Clementine will remember this.
I’m thankful for all the years of older vidya we can always go back to and play through one more time.
So won’t you come and play with me, here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment.
And I’m thankful for having a wonderful girlfriend in the form of Pike to share all this videogaming goodness with, and to blog with, and to derp around with.
Spawned originally from the comic book, then the TV show, Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead is set in the same universe and, indeed, the same state of Georgia as a zombie apocalypse strikes and overwhelms humanity. Lee Everett is a convicted murderer being driven to prison when all hell breaks loose, setting him free as the world goes completely to hell. Very soon you come across Clementine, a young girl who has survived through this without her parents, who were vacationing in Savannah when the outbreak began. So begins your quest to keep yourself and Clem safe, find other survivors, and to face the various and extreme threats that beset your little group every day.
TWD is a point-and-click game made by some of the masters of the genre, including people from back when LucasArts was making such paragons of gaming as Sam & Max Hit The Road, the Monkey Island series, and Grim Fandango. So they know what they’re doing – and it shows in the game. The Walking Dead is a tense, melancholic affair where even the best outcomes come at a cost, where you feel intensely protective of people even as they’re pissing you off, and where the gameplay is sensible, well-paced, and works excellently with the setting. Even when you know you are safe there is a tension to the gameplay and you rarely, if ever, feel as though you aren’t under pressure to get things sorted out quickly.
What really stands out is the characters, which is damned good news for a zombie game that doesn’t go the action route. Clementine is an example of perhaps the rarest thing in all media – a child who is not annoying. Indeed, she’s incredibly sweet, she’s believably smart but still naive, and she reacts to Lee’s choices in a believable way. Because TWD is episodic and Chapter 5 is not yet out we can’t judge how this all wraps up so far so it may be it all falls apart and TTG will screw up, but so far that seems pretty unlikely. She is the focus of the game, really, and the quest on the part of both Lee and the player to protect her and, as time passes, to raise her well in that hellish world, is the centerpiece of the entire experience. It’s about choices, from the mundane conversations with Clem to life-or-death decisions that have to be made in a snap, and all of them have repercussions.
The game’s major failing is that there is no Daryl Dixon being unbelievably hot.
The game is not without flaws, primarily technical ones that are easily overlooked, and it would be nice to have a broader array of possible paths than exist but that would be a lot more work and is likewise forgivable. Still you can go into Chapter 5 with a variety of setups and people who have your back and it is quite feasible that what happens in the end will open up the desire to replay the game more than once. The game also does some cool little things; at one point you fight a zombie and what occurs is essentially a QTE, but the icons keep popping up and in your panic you keep hitting the buttons, even though the zombie is long ended. It’s a nice touch that makes a lot of sense and is probably the best use of QTEs since they were invented.
I would recommend The Walking Dead for anyone who wants a story-led game that is well-written, well-acted, and has a lot of tension. It’s a superb point-and-click that does damned near everything right and very few things wrong, and TTG have confirmed that a “Season 2” will be on the way at some point when they finish Chapter 5. Just to clarify, buying TWD gives you all of the Season 1 stuff including the soon-to-be-released Chapter 5. You can get a hold of it on Steam for PC, and it’s out on 360 and PS3 as well!
So hi guys, just going to throw something up real quick for the weekend! We’ve been extremely busy with videogames as usual, but even more than usual somehow, so here’s what I’ve been playing lately!
World of Warcraft Yep, still immersed in Pandaland, although these days I can at least drag myself away to play other games for a bit. It’s amazing how great this expac is though, one of Blizzard’s finest hours since the WC2/SC/D2 era. And I want a big strong Klaxxi to chirrup gently while I play with his antennae.
The Walking Dead I know I said there’d be a proper post on this, and I still intend to do that but I am astonishingly lazy so that post is not this post! Still, it’s a genuinely brilliant adventure game set in The Walking Dead world which doesn’t shy away from the sort of grim stuff in the comics and TV show, and it has a whole bunch of well-written and interesting characters, some of who you get really attached to. And then they die.
Liberal Crime Squad This was a game Toady One made before he became obsessed with Dwarf Fortress and, like that game, this is a pretty spergy and incredibly addictive devourer of time. It is a (very) satirical game based on American politics where, as the titular LCS, you set out to demonstrate to the country why the Arch-Conservative trend sweeping the country is a bad idea and to instead institute Elite Liberal laws. The big draw is the sheer variety of ways to achieve this. Break into a Corporate HQ and steal evidence of misdeeds, hack into government websites and deface them, seduce Judges so they act in your favor, go out into the street and protest, the list goes on and on.
Sweet Baby Jesus this kid is hot
Assassin’s Creed III This long-awaited continuation of the AC series is proving to be pretty much everything Pike and myself hoped it would be. It’s an expansion of pretty much everything the previous games had, just as II built on the original massively. It’s also a game in no real hurry; you don’t even get control of Connor until several hours in (But that’s okay because the guy you are instead, Haythem Kenway, is a superbly debonair gentleman) and the game isn’t afraid of throwing some considerable soliloquies at you. The best of which has to be Ben Franklin’s musing on his Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress and why cougars are totally great.
Also there’s some sprinklings of FTL and Project Zomboid in there!
What have you readers been playing lately, and are planning on playing this weekend? Do share your thoughts in the comments below!
