Game review: The Walking Dead - an adventure game from Telltale Games

When I first heard about an adventure game based on zombie apocalypse, I rolled my eyes. Yet another zombie shooter and yet this time, we get to do it by pointing and clicking. I imagined a scenario where the player had to solve a puzzle wherein they "use" cleaver "on"zombie head. This idea is all the more pant-on-head-retarded given that zombie horror is all about tense, immediate danger with little time to think about it; how could you possibly have tense zombie horror when you have to walk around a small area with unlimited amounts of time clicking from one item to the next in an attempt to figure out what to do?

Well I was completely wrong. The walking dead is amongst one of the finest stories I've ever played. the game actually completely burst my expectations with some of the darkest pieces of humour, well scripted dialogue and extremely moving the characters and relationships. It is clear to me now where the adventure genre needs to go – towards storytelling and characterisation.

Plot

The walking dead tells the story of Lee – a middle-class black guy on his way to jail after having been convicted of a crime (funny that: P). The cop driving Lee towards prison accidentally runs over a person and when they both come to they find it was the person – it was a zombie. Cue police officer faced being chewed in. Lee manages to escape and comes across a little girl named Clementine whose parents have met a fate unknown, though it is pretty clear that they would have been eaten in the initial outbreak. Lee and Clem leave the suburbs and try to find others who can help them survive – they find a number of interesting individuals and families along the way, some helpful, some annoying. Players get a great deal of perceived choice in how to deal with any given situation – I say perceived because the plot still goes along certain paths no matter what choices you make. For example, a zombie attacks you and you get the choice of hitting them with a bottle or shooting them with a gun – while the outcome either way will be a dead zombie and you will (in this case at least) get off completely unharmed, the nature of your choice in packs up on the characters around you – notably Clementine.

The walking dead also has a new take on the zombie apocalypse. Traditionally what causes on zombification if the bite from a zombie – you get bitten, you die, you turn into one of them. In WD, the zombie bite is fatal, but all individuals are infected with the zombie virus to begin with. All types of death (excluding those which crush the head) lead to becoming a zombie. This means that death is not just the end of life – it creates a real danger to those around them.

A new type of choice

The use of choice in this game is an unusual one – after playing a dozen games where your choices have an impact on the ending (Mass Effect, Fallout, Alpha Protocol etc.) ultimately your choices don't affect the outcome, just the characters and their emotions. And herein is the true genius of choice in gaming – a method of storytelling in which the players choices impacts only the personality and relationships of the characters. No matter what you do in Mass effect, Shepherd will be regarded as one of the greatest heroes of all time. People will worship him or her regardless of whether they were paragon or renegade. In walking dead, Lee's choices impact extremely highly on Clementine and will leave the others either stricken or sympathetic towards him, and these relationships are all the more believable for it. Many people don't like games where they main character speaks – people enjoy characters like Gordon Freeman because they can fit him on like a  HEV suit - he is whoever they want him to be. This is also much of the rationale behind the awful character Bella in Twilight - a faceless nobody whom everyone likes unconditionally despite the fact that they do nothing. I find a fully voiced an emotive character far more compelling as it allows you to explore what they are feeling and their motivations, something that I find is sorely lacking in faceless-hero games. leaders of flawed person; he doesn't always met the right choice and things don't always work out. He tries to protect Clementine and her innocence, despite the fact that it it is next to impossible post-apocalypse. Half life is a post-apocalyptic world more or less and yet we ultimately know nothing about our hero other than what the other characters seem to think about him – for all we know Gordon Freeman could be a psychotic murderer with a penchant for watching skulls explode who just happens to have a Ph.D.

Gameplay
Quite a lot of the game is focused on solving very simple puzzles such as clicking on a pipe wrench and using it on nuts and bolts. There are a number of quite frenetic sequences where Lee has to quickly pick a weapon and use it on the right part of the zombie and I do have to admit that this is the only weak part of the game. It would be fairer to say that the walking dead is more like an interactive story in which you get to choose the persona of your hero, rather than a survival horror adventure. Most of the gameplay is in fact in dialogue choices, with a few QuickTime events thrown in the amp up the tension level (though all of these are effective in doing so). This is not a game to play if you're looking for a challenge; the solutions to all the problems are fairly obvious and the total amount of actual gameplay over the five episodes is probably about 20 minutes ( not counting dialogue).

Overall, this is one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played. It does something so differently to other games – it's a top tier game which explores all of the grotesqueries of human nature when civilised society breaks down. The characters are all interesting - at more than one point I was seriously annoyed at a character for something cowardly or stupid or just frustrating that they did, and this is a mark of excellent literature – something that makes you feel. Jokingly I've asked people before what their zombie plan was and how they would survive in the zombie apocalypse, not thinking for an instant how I would actually react if the walls of society came crumbling down. Would I resort to dog eat dog? Would I become hardened against the problems of the world? Would I be up to sacrifice a loved one or allow someone to die so that I or others might live?
Ultimately I would probably be one of the first ones eaten due to my scepticism and cynicism. Not that I don't have the skills to survive but I would probably be unlucky enough to be crushed in a stampede filled with bogans.

I would highly recommend this game to all adults – the violence is high impact and extremely gruesome at times. The horror element of this game is also off the charts - the sinister farm from the second episode is a particularly high octane nightmare fuel. Still, this is why we ride rollercoasters - for the thrill and to feel something truly terrifying.

Singapore - Journal log and braindump

This is the journal that I kept while in Singapore - it's unedited.

Day one

Surprisingly comfortable economy flight. I am never going to get used to the terror induced by take-off however.

Our hotel clearly resides in Whore Alley. Every single hotel seems to be cheap block the full. Also the prostitutes aren't dissuaded by polite “no”. I’m going to have to show teeth and growl in the hopes that this overcomes language barrier.

We changed rooms in the middle of the night due to a malevolent entity possessing the air-conditioning. In retribution we stole all the bedding when we moved to a new room.

Day two

Why can't I set the god dam clock right!? The sun has been up for hours and yet it still has been 8 AM for the whole morning. Given the number of taxis here last night, I'm surprised they don't service Whore Alley in the mornings. Walking up and down the Geylang proper and gesticulating wildly traffic has not been a successful method of gathering attention.

I feel bad that my breakfast cost 60 cents and that I gave the poor bastard a $50 note. He wasn't happy but I really didn't have any options.

The shopping centres are much like the one at home. Specialty shops with the same crap but far more Asians on the cover. Those are bothering me though – every single person here has had either a completely vacant "I am dead on the inside look" or scowling through gritted teeth from exertion and work. The smiling faces and bright eyes on the ads tell a lie. They aren't fun and exuberant - their work themselves to death both spiritually and physically.

Mustafas pisses me off. A shopping centre 10 times the size of any Myer and no system of categorisation that a sane man could follow. James and I went to meet in a belt section at the bottom of an escalator but it turns out there are two that match that description. In two different buildings. And one name for both.

The zoo is a fascinating place. Mostly from the series of crude jokes Jasmine and I are making about how the phallic the animals look. I'm puzzled by the souvenir shop filled with glow-in-the-dark skeletons though.

Day three

Breakfast at Orchard Road. The opening of the shopping centre foods section at Takashimaya was very unnerving and impressive at the same time – all of the staff were standing in front of the stalls and bowing to us as though we were kings. And kings we were. Foodcourt hijinks ensued. Everyone goes to someplace different. Loving the sheer variety of cheap breakfast food. Big bowl, porridge, sizzling steak , hamburger.

Taxi driving remains the most stressful activity – cabbies spend more time in between lanes than in them. Indicating is clearly optional. Also honking repeatedly appears to have the message "you're behaving like an ass hole and only I'm allowed to do that.”

I find it really odd that 95% of the population are sour faced bastards. Not sure why the remaining 5% are having a good time considering that they are are doing the exact same things.

The Singapore Flyer is a giant ferris wheel that hasn't had excellent view of the city that takes about an hour. However just across the bay is one of the largest buildings in the world with a bar at the top so given the choice I'd rather go with the one with is. Cost is comparable. Also learn to break 50s ASAP. I accidentally paid an unscrupulous and competent cabbie $65 for a $13 trip because I couldn't sit correctly in the dark.

Day four: food tourism

1.       Roti Prata with curry dipping sauce at al-Jilani Muslim store. A giant platter of mutton flatbread and 8 Prata, with six drinks for $30. A breakfast only four dollars each.

2.       Beef bones in red sauce and bone marrow. Red food dye number two contained everything from clothes to faces and so this became the first meal I've ever had that required plastic gloves to consume. Bone marrow is one of the most disgusting foods I've ever eaten – I can't get over that it is marrow, and calling it hot meat jelly doesn't really help. Slurping hot jelly through a bone or a straw is equally unpleasant an experience.

3.       Sweet pork buns and fried bacon treats at Bay marine sands. A magnificent place to visit – high-class shopping with far fewer of the pathetic or beaten faces that seem to characterise so much of the population.

4.       Chicken rice! Chicken flavoured rice – Chinese greens and poached chicken. The official dish of Singapore. I'm not sold on this one – it is decent but nowhere near the best meal I've had here. The chicken has an odd lumpy texture and having trouble adjusting to having so many meats served warm or tepid in temperature.

There are some truly wondrous buildings here are some fascinating artistic ventures – on the walls of a Marine at 2000 metal rectangles on pivots; the movement of the wind on the gives the effect of waves rippling and water flowing. The MRT is very simple and efficient. And very underground. I'm uncomfortable being underground at the best of times - although it is clean.

Day five

I figured out that Singaporeans are a decent, if self-involved, people and at the Malaysians that are ass holes. They don't look where they're going, regularly try to scam you and generally have the worst jobs and lowest standards of living. It’s these people I see most often hanging about whore alley and loitering about the streets at night. The cultural differences between these ethnicities are quite drastic.

I don't trust any of these people in terms of intelligence and common sense. Getting into a packed train seems that a good way to get killed in an emergency – it’s like being in a meat grinder. I fully expect that should there ever be a collision or fire underground, more would die from the stampede than the incident. They will jam into an elevator without pausing for people to disembark and gridlock the whole process – just like on the roads. The slightest bit of courtesy would solve all of this but they would have to think outside themselves for five seconds to do so.

Singapore is the purest expression of capitalism I'd ever seen. High levels of socio-economic stratification, non-existent social mobility, and little social conscience. I hate it. Socialism FTW!

We walked nearly the entire length of Orchard Road in the evening. After picking up suits for the wedding we picked a direction and just went. Necessarily, we got lost from moment one; it was like turning around and slamming headfirst into a pole, only with more blisters.

Singapore is not a place to be if you are both wealthy and suffer from vertigo. The IMAX theatre here was on the sixth story in a highly steep cinema – at least a 40° incline. I am having serious difficulties dissociating where I am from what I am doing.

Day six: the wedding

Off to the Central Sikh temple in Singapore. The building looks utterly ordinary on the outside and from there it gets bizarre. The ground level has an elaborate antechamber which then moves into an old-fashioned cafeteria – one with a real soup kitchen feel. Dozens of people packed into rows of food hall bench tables eating off rough stainless steel trades. Random volunteers make the food and serve water. Up a single flight of stairs is the place of worship – outside the main room is a magnificent glistening fountain pool which leads into a highly domed carpeted room with a shrine at the front. The room is both spartan and impressive; the emptiness of the room gives a real sense of gravitas and importance to the ostentatious shrine where the Guru sits.

It turns out that the Raffles Hotel is actually a hotel like the shopping district. A real classy old school establishment with polished wood banisters.

Day seven

More hanging around Orchard Road – so far the only place to go for cleanliness. We ate breakfast at the top of the Ion complex – everyone having Burgwiches - extremely tall stack burgers. One would have to dislocate their jaw in order to fit half of this stupidly sized burger into their face – this is the first burger that I've ever had to disassemble into more than three parts in order to consume it.

Taxi riding is still awful. The drivers tailgate as a matter of course and are fairly incompetent compared to Australian drivers. Also not a fan of the driving technique wherein the maximum legal speed is constantly maintained and the foot on the accelerator constantly tops up the speed. The practicality of this driving technique means that every few seconds the car lurches forward in a way guaranteed to smash your head against the front seat headrest every time.

We went to a shopping centre late at night and ate at a pasta shop – some of these guys really know how to cook. I also enjoy the cinemas here – incredibly clean and cheap. The ads here are thoroughly strange – they are ads aimed at families of military officers (particularly the mothers) designed to allay their fears and put them at ease with the idea that their sons and husbands must serve for years. The primary concerns of those in the army are about how hard a life it is rather than any real chance of getting killed – from what I can tell the army engages in peacekeeping exercises rather than participating in any war.

The other odd set of ads is where work life balance is promoted as part of a commercial recruiting campaign. There are obviously using the maintenance of familial connections as a means of ensuring loyalty. Still unclear as to what extent this goes but it is very progressive for an Asian country.

Day eight

I don't think Singaporeans understand the causal links between deforestation and recycling. All over the zoo are banners and signs that raise awareness of the loss of rainforest but in no way do they practically address it. Tour guides will often recite the three “R”s of something which will save something else. All of it is unclear.

I'm sold on the idea that littering should be punished and the recycling reduces waste but they waste so much time with this three “R” straw man exercise. The Singaporeans are destroying rainforests. I'm not sure why a lecture on recycling will mitigate this fact. It all sounds so disingenuous when they drone on and on about recycling and this is clearly one of the most wasteful cities in the world. I guess it's a step in the right direction that they acknowledged as a problem at all.

The Oak and the Blade of Grass

There is an interesting anecdote I heard today that I wish to remember and relay as it really has stuck in my mind of late.

In a clear but verdant plain stood a gigantic oak tree. It was the only feature on an otherwise unremarkable landscape; though the oak was admist a field of lush grass,no other animals or plants were about.

One day a terrible storm came in - a cyclone of epic proportions. The winds blew a titanic gale and the oak was unrelenting; it refused to bend to the will of the wind. Few things in the world can withstand the unlimited power of the elements and the oak was no exception. The tree was uprooted, the branches snapped, the leaves stripped and the bough broken. The grass of the field was flexible and pliant; when the storm attacked the land the grass gracefully bowed and was spared the wrath of the tempest.

The purpose of the story is obviously to illustrate the benefits of flexibility and humility when faced with catastrophe. Rigidity and pride will do you little good against an implaccable foe.

This isn't what interested me about the story however. What fascinated me was the alternative perspective that was offered at the conclusion of the tale - that it was better to be the giant oak than the grass. That it was better to leave this world as a mighty tree; the source of pride and glory of the land, than to live on as some pathetic nameless blade of grass. Why not go out with style and dignity rather than be forgotten and unremarkable?

God isn't dead, he's just bored

The nature of God says that he's omniscient - he knows everything that can and will happen ever.

I've been thinking about this for a while and if God exists and is omniscient, he must be bored stupid. If you have freewill but cannot exercise it, you must feel completely trapped or entirely bored.

So I imagined for a moment that I knew everything and could do anything I wanted (except for throwing away my powers; making myself less than I am) the inevitable place I come to is one of desperation and futility. I know everything that could be, that is, that was. There is no imagination, no creativity to be had, and ultimately, nothing to do.

God was bored.

After creating all, there was nothing left to do. Sure he may have had some fun making the fjords, and definitely had himself a good laugh when he made the platypus, but what is there to do after that? The most fantastic idea then hit him: endow some of the more cunning monkeys with a freewill similiar to that of his own. Without the omnipotent and absolute powers of God, a magnificient experiment was born with wildly unpredictable outcomes: what would the simians do with their powers of reasoning?

I don't think God "knows" everything, in the sense that there is nothing left to experience. If man was truly created in God's image, it was done in order to allow God to experience life from another perspective.

And then something happened that God was not expecting; through knowledge of man he felt something that he could not have fathomed beforehand: wonder. The sublime pleasure of something truly transcendental whenever man looked to the stars or viewed an aurora.

Whether or not God gave mankind meaning to their lives, it seems to me that mankind was made to give meaning to God's. There's only so long that you can laugh at the discomfortiture of whales when they are harassed by packs of mischievous dolphins. It's a long time, but still, not forever.

Chaotic neutral

I think I'm a bad man. Not malicious or mean-spirited but there's definitely something that's gone wrong with my set of morals. This revelation struck me today as I was reading the news, but then was somewhat assuaged by my satisfaction with my new alignment modifier of Chaotic Neutral.

The article I read was about a teenage guy who died because he accidentally fell off the roof of a seven-story carpark. Why am I bad? It's because when I read it my immediate and uncontrolled reaction was of amusement rather than a more compassionate feeling of regret or sadness.

The reason for my misguided mirth was the reason why this guy died - he had had a few drinks and was texting instead of looking where he was going. And it's not that there were no guard railst; that it was a tragic but negligent accident. There was a guard rail, it wasn't negligent on the part of the architect and there was no one else to  blame but his own dumb self.

Tragic? Hardly. I often say that this kind of this is natural selection in action; pure unadulterated Darwinism. A guy literally too stupid to live caused his own death.

However this isn't the issue. The problem is my revelry in the fatal misfortunes of someone I don't know and never would care about. I've run into troubles before with people because of this attitude; on occasion it has even jeopardized my job. Normally these situations are more complicated than the one issue so I've never really thought too carefully about it until today.



Whenever I'm presented with an abstract situation and black comedy I fully enjoy it; I never actually have schaudenfreude when there's someone in front of me who is suffering. Still, it doesn't bode well for my general moral standing. I do wonder whether others actually feel moral outrage at my lack of compassion or just pretend because it's expected someone calls me out of this.

Thus I must concede that my alignment now must move from Chaotic Good to Chaotic Neutral. Not good, not evil, little regard for the law but with a code of ethics. Like Captain Jack Sparrow or Dinobot from Beast Wars - a private agenda and no real allegiance, and hedonistic one way or the other.

Game Review: Pokemon Soulsilver

In anticipation of the upcoming Pokemon White I've been playing Soulsilver fairly religiously. There is a certain satisfaction to be gained by having a perfectly and carefully raised Dragonite laying waste to all my opponents like a vengeful god on insolent villagers.

The gameplay in this game is virtually identical to all of its predecessors, minus a few graphical upgrades. The battle animations look a little better but it still looks like every pokemon has an epileptic fit before chundering all over the unsuspecting foe.

Soulsilver is to Silver what FireRed is to Red; upgraded, prettier, and largely a complete waste of time as it's the same damn game! The addition of the controlling stylus does nothing to improve the gameplay nor does the subtraction of the slot machines make it more wholesome. In it's marvellously absurd wisdom Nintendo decided that gambling avatars made for poor moral examples all while forcing your newly abducted animals to fight and kill for your amusement. In Soulsilver, I beat the divine-protector of the ocean currents into submission and forced it to fly me around the place while it was unconscious. The ethical implications may be somewhat of a wash is all I'm saying.

I have one major gripe with this title, and that is the ridiculous amount of difficulty there is in capturing certain pokemon. I've never liked the stupidly small chance you had to capture the legendaries in the earlier ones - supposedly even after reducing Zapdos to 1 health, confusing it, making it paralyzed and lowering all of its stats as far as they can go and still I only have a 5% chance of catching it with my ultra ball.

All the coolest pokemon require retarded amounts of time and effort to acquire and by that stage, game fatigue has set in and I want to just finish.For example, Lucario is pretty rad being a dark/steel type and looks awesome but requires literally 120 real days AFTER beating the big 4 to capture a Riolu, which then takes like 200 000 steps to evolve through happiness. Mood strikes as being the most contradictory of status requirements, as my personal happiness is inversely proportional to that of my pokemon. Oddly walking around with a level 1 pokemon for days on end makes me crazy with murderous rage rather than entertained.

I think it was a good move to allow for roaming legendaries - makes them difficult to catch without being artificially hard; tactics rather than attrition is required to get them. They still aren't worth getting however as they still have that hair-tearingly frustrating quality of having a 5% catch rate.

There isn't any point in doing the "other" measures of your pokemons' abilities: the dance contest, speed contest and beauty contests seem to be the only reason why you need a stylus and they add nothing to the game. Doing the contests won't improve their stats and won't improve any other battle quality.

Ultimately I have to conclude that it was worth the $70 price tag when I bought it as I'm still playing it and I've poured more than 200+ hours into it. Any game that I'm still play a year after purchase is worth it. Why it makes me spend 175 of those hours walking around with baby pokemon is beyond me though.

Game Review: Halo 1, 2 and 3

Despite fears that I may spoil the rest of this review in the first sentence, the Halo series exemplifies the archetypal standard, or average, first person shooter game.


There are several consistent parts to the series, namely the weapons, the physics and the storyline/characters. These characteristics are really what sets Halo as a true Malcolm in the Middle of FPS'. The weapons are utterly standard - you have the generic battle rifle, the accurate pistol, the noob tube, several rapid fire energy weapons and low-accuracy machine guns. There is also a weapon that can go climb a wall of dicks (the energy rifle, which both refuses to do damage and jams with alarming regularity), and one or two weapons that have a magnificiently visceral quality (the energy sword for swish-swish-stabbery, and the gravity hammer for sheer unmitigated brutality).

The story, I believe, does make sense if you stop to listen to the dialogue but it always happens when you are firing weapons or being otherwise distracted. It's got something to do with a war with lizard-people and their religious fanaticism - they wish to destroy the universe. And there are no anti-semitic implications.


The physics are adequate - there are things you can and can't do but there isn't anything remarkable about it. There aren't any puzzles. The vehicle sections are a little cumbersome - not awful - but in all fairness there aren't any games with good vehicle handling (other than dedicated racing simulators).


In lieu of any kind of coherent ranking system, here are my preferences for the first 3 games.


Lustrous gold: Halo 3
Underrated silver: Halo - Combat Evolved
Shameful bronze: Halo 2

Halo and Halo 3 nearly tie, though 3 wins the race by being less old. 1 hasn't aged as poorly as 2 oddly enough - the graphical upgrade from Halo 1 to Halo 2 was good for its time, but Halo has a much simpler and crisper look.

My thoughts on Halo 2 can be best described this way: I am so glad I only paid $7 for it from a bargain bin. I spent the majority of the game being shot from behind by obnoxious dark creatures in the dark corners of the room. I also generally play my games on max difficulty but the difficulty in Halo 2 goes beyond reason or sanity. You get killed so often that it's more like watching Starship Troopers than playing a game. I like to think the Master Chief becomes a born-again Christian and consequently has learned to turn the other cheek rather than fight back.

It's hard to critique any further because of its sheer averageness. I guess the only thing to keep in mind past that point is that average doesn't mean bad. Getting a C+ is a passing grade, and like most mediocre things there is fun to be had in it if you enjoy it with a few good mates.