Hey friends, Pike here. Long time, no post… from me, anyway. I do apologize, but writing… and of course lots of gaming… have been keeping me quite busy.
Anyhow! Today I come bearing news that you may have already heard. Basically, there’s a new Humble Bundle in town, and it’s a little different. It breaks away from Humble Bundle tradition in more than one way: The games are certainly not “indie” ones, for starters, oh, and Steam and Windows are both required.
A few people are questioning the wisdom of this move. People don’t like taking the focus away from indie games, and Mac and Linux users are certainly not impressed, either, since Humble Bundle has traditionally prided itself on offering games to users of all “major” operating systems.
As for myself, well, I see little to complain about. It’s still cheap games, money is still going to charity (heck, you can give it all to charity if you want), and honestly with THQ in the financial trouble it is currently in, they may as well be their own charity case.
As a self-professed Linux fan the lack of Linux support does bother me a little, but ultimately if you are a Linux gamer you should probably have accepted a while ago that there are a good many games you’re going to be missing out on. I’m not saying that this is right, necessarily, but I am saying that this is reality. We’re getting a big ol’ bone tossed to us in the name of impending Steam support, and honestly that’s got me happy enough. In the meantime I’m willing to dual boot in the name of vidya gaems.
So anyway, do give it a look if you haven’t already. It’s a solid lineup and worth getting for Company of Heroes alone, not to mention the other games.
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!
