Picture of author.
33 Works 68 Membros 2 Reviews

About the Author

Image credit: Telltale Games logo. Grabbed from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Telltale_Games_logo.png

Séries

Obras de Telltale Games

Puzzle Agent 2 2 cópias

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Sexo
n/a
Nacionalidade
USA

Membros

Resenhas

Hey, screw you, man! I like Jurassic Park, and I liked this game! You wanna fight about it? So what if it's a sloppy, choppy game of QTE after QTE after hard-to-see-because-it's-at-the-other-side-of-the-screen-and-blends-into-the-background QTE, gnoamsayin'? It's fun, it's thrilling, it's even pretty dumb and 70% of the 'Cavalry' episode is pointless filler. Spotting the often clever movie references is just so satisfying, too.

If you're a fan of JP, and QTEs don't make you want to murder the entire gaming industry in heartless rage, you might care to check this game out--and then hope they make more, b/c 6 hours is not long enough, tbqh. Hopefully with a bigger budget. And, gosh dang, I'd prefer if the game wasn't riddled with Telltale's goofy characters and writing characteristic of their earlier games, but, you know, it's kind of endearing at some points. The kid was a surprisingly good addition, reminding players of Saturday Morning Cartoons & wotnot, which made me feel even more nostalgic and fancy.… (mais)
½
1 vote
Marcado
tootstorm | Jul 7, 2015 |
N.B. "400 Days" is a short bridge between Telltale's critically-acclaimed episodic first season of The Walking Dead, released over the course of 2012, and the upcoming second season.

Update after playing season 2: The '400 Days' storyline bears no impact on the second season, and getting its original characters to show up again doesn't mean anything other than incidental cameos. One character from this storyline shows up and plays a significant role regardless, however, but her role in '400 Days' doesn't add a significant or interesting backstory.
If you consider yourself a fan of the first season, and intend to pick up the second, I must advise to ignore any negativity had towards the many faults of the "400 Days" episode and get your mitts on this ASAP.

I'm happy I got it; I'm happy I played it, but it's the bottom of the barrel for The Walking Dead's first season, and yet I have no reservations looking forward to seeing how season 2 is impacted by my choices. That said, trying to describe the chaotic mess that is this network of character sketches, The Word is schizophrenic. I can only imagine the difficulty for the writers in trying to condense 5 different characters' introductions into roughly 60-90 minutes (making this the shortest episode) while maintaining a level of believable and attractive development. This is a story- and character-driven series, after all. The concept sounds neat on paper, but given the timeframe of 400 days what we get is a disconnected mess of bad pacing and especially bad dialogue.

The first two chronological scenarios introducing the characters of Vince and Wyatt were the worst offenders, with dialogue alternating between heavy (i.e., forced; unrealistic) character development to this cyclonic action-packed rush to just End the Darn Scenario Already. Like, I liked Wyatt enough from the snippet we get of who he is, but suddenly driving into a possible zam while on the run and lost in the woods does not mean the characters should awkwardly discuss the situation with interrupting and inappropriate jokes for most of the scenario's 15 or so minutes, slowly droning on about the situation one second and checking oneself out the next, followed—finally—by the world's most melodramatic and somehow uninteresting game of rock, paper, scissors—granted, we do get a tense moment afterwards, but it's immediately (!) followed by an anticlimactic headlong rush into Russell's bizarre sketch.

"400 Days" does continue to improve chronologically in sucking you into situations at hand—i.e., not necessarily storytelling, e.g., for those who have played it, summarize the plot points of Russell's story and think about it—up to the beginning of the epilogue. Basically serving as an animated splash page detailing the choices you made throughout the episodes, the epilogue just seemed to highlight the flaws for me. I know playing the Walking Dead, playing Mass Effect, that decisions don't really matter, don't really affect the greater outcome to the level the developers want customers to think—but they feel like they do, and the writers do a fantastic job drawing you into what essentially becomes "your" story centered around "your" relationships even when you know it's mostly an illusion set up by basic boolean flags bookmarking choices either relevant or ir-.

& that's another issue with "400 Days." Every major choice felt like the programming behind it, like a black and white series of decisions that mostly feel disconnected from the eventual outcome, an outcome set so far into the plot's future that it essentially disregards potential character development to rely on a single past decision, restricting Our Hero(ines) to caricature status. Wyatt's flag, for instance, relied solely on whether you win or lose that pseudo-random game of rock, paper, scissors; Vince's, set 399 days before the epilogue, on which undeveloped character you don't have any connection or attachment to is left behind when forced to make an abrupt decision. Those flags, and the accompanying dialogue, just felt lazy, giving me as a player no room to hide behind the impacting illusion I sought as a fan of the phenomenal first season.
… (mais)
1 vote
Marcado
tootstorm | Jul 30, 2013 |

You May Also Like

Associated Authors

Estatísticas

Obras
33
Membros
68
Popularidade
#253,411
Avaliação
3.9
Resenhas
2

Tabelas & Gráficos