The Walking Dead review

Fashionable zombie pop-culture bores me. I have a negative interest in anything to do with zombies. And yet... there is DayZ and now Telltale's latest adventure game series, The Walking Dead.

The Walking Dead is the only adventure game in the last fifteen years that simply must be played. Why?

• The narrative and plot are compelling
• The script is good
• The characterisation is generally quite good
• The puzzles are a balance between tricky, frustrating and satisfying
• The art style is really good
• The interface is one of the best I've seen in an adventure game

But importantly, it's because

• It appears to have meaningful choices at almost every node of the dialog tree
• What you need to do to survive is a great blend of disgust and grotesque fascination. (I think I've said "Oh my God!" more times playing The Walking Dead than any other game!)

Many dialog trees in the game have a timer on them. You often need to respond in moments. This is the most fantastic innovation in adventures games since the dialog tree was created. I doubt The Walking Dead was the first to use it, but it uses it extremely well. It's so tense. I was often locked in indecision. Occasionally, I simply couldn't decide, resulting in awkward silence. I love how not saying anything is an option! Of course, no matter what you say, it can't matter too much, yet it doesn't feel like that at the time. And that's the important thing.

Often events don't go the way I wanted or how I expected, but I just went with it. It's part of the story and it all seems meaningful. Only once have I re-started a section because of the way things turned out. This is great in two ways; 1) even though things don't necessarily go the way you wanted, it's not necessarily bad enough to force you to rewind and 2) I care enough about some events that I simply can't allow the game to continue after an event that was simply too wrong for me to be happy with. That might sound contradictory, but isn't.

The reason why DayZ and The Walking Dead are such good zombie games is because they're not really zombie games. DayZ is about the other people you play with, whether other survivors or bandits that hunt you. The Walking Dead is all about the other characters in the game. The zombies are there in a way that function almost as a relief. Zombies are simple. All you have to do is kill them (again). It's everyone else you have to be worried about. (But that would make a great twist, if zombies weren't exactly as we assume. If they transitioned from a Nazi SS officer to an Itialian fascist infantryman, then you'd have a whole new depth of narrative to explore.)

Episodal format? Seems like a dodgy way to get people to pay for a game that isn't finished. Episodal gaming is a bit of a relic in the era of kickstarter. It's proto-kickstarter, where some of the risks are put onto the consumer rather than all. In effect, I don't mind at all. In fact, I think I prefer it. I don't have the desire or time to sit down and play a game for hour on end. This way I can play it in chunks over a period of months. At episode two of six, I feel like I've gotten all I thought I would get from this game and I'm not even halfway. If quality drops by the end of the season, I don't think it matters. It's already been a whole lot better than many games I've played recently (looking at you Diablo 3).

This is the first game in years that I want everyone to play. I'm not just talking about my friends that don't play games anymore now that they've "grown up." I mean, my mum. She should play it. Sure, it's horrific, but it's done so horrifically well.

DayZ update

It looks like the developer of DayZ is doing all the right things. Latest update notes:

* This is a pretty major update. I don't really know what affect the new sickness and temperature system will have on player behavior especially with antibiotics being so scarce.
* It is the genesis of an idea, so please remember this might cause havoc. You need to be careful.
* To light a fire, you need matches and wood in your inventory. Place more wood in the inventory of a fireplace to keep the fire going.
* A fire that does not have wood in it will go out when you try to light it.
* You can tell you have an infection, because your character will start coughing. The infection causes you to loose blood down to a minimum of 6000. This leaves you with reduced blood until you take antibiotics.

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Here you can clearly see the beginnings of a Minecraft like play. If done right - without the missteps that Minecraft took - could be really good.

DayZ, day 2

Totally different experience today. It was daylight. I found a survivor in a few minutes. We worked together to kill zombies and grab loot off dead survivors. (We didn't kill them!)

After taking-down about seven zombies, I ran out of ammo and had to seek safety on top of a pipe, after climbing a ladder. I lost contact with my buddy. I heard shooting and looked up. Off in the distance, there he was again, taking-down zombies from the top of a tower. They went for him, climbing up the tower. Everything went quiet for a couple of minutes. I couldn't move, still too many zombies to try to risk a run for it. But then my new found friend was back again, in a different spot, drawing the zombies away from me. "Run for it!" he cried.

Why did he care? I was useless. Injured, unarmed, stranded in the middle of a zombie ocean. Yet he helped me anyway.

I ran. I got to a higher place. I was safe for now. I read on the server messages that Cal was dead. I was dismayed. How could I have lasted longer than he did? He had all the gear and the knowledge. I was alone again.

A few minutes later I dropped from a platform. My legs were broken. The zombies feasted on my entrails.

Pictures:

Partner in zombie killing

Site-seeing

The zombies

Safe-zone

Zombies climbing

Death

DayZ

To play DayZ I had to buy Arma 2. After, I followed the installation video-guide on the DayZ download page without a hitch. For mod of a game still in alpha, it was easy to setup.

I started-up DayZ, joined a US server (the Aus and NZ servers were full) and was ready to go.

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It was night time. Real night time. No moon. I could hear the waves crashing on the beach and see stars in the sky. I heard ominous music. That was it. It looked like this:

Hmm... What was I to do? I tried waiting for daytime (that's what you do in Minecraft.) It didn't work. After about a minute it was as dark as ever.

I looked in the menu options to find the key to turn-on my torch. There didn't seem to be a key for that. I looked in my kit. I had ten flares. I threw one. I went from no light to so much light that I was clearly a sitting duck. Having read about zombies and bandits, I was concerned. I tried pressing all the keys on the keyboard to find the key that would turn-on my torch. I didn't find the key for "torch." Hmm... That's unusual.

I picked up the flare. I dropped the flare. I picked up the flare. Was I suppose to walk around with a flare in my hand like a complete chump? There didn't seem to be any other option. I couldn't see a thing without a flare.

Off I went, knowing full well that I'd be dead in about thirty seconds time. I crossed a railway line. I found  a derelict building. See Exhibit B, Derelict Building:

I dropped the flare and went inside the house so I could find a bunch of great stuff I could use. Like a torch. The building was empty. The flare went out.

I threw a flare and picked it up to carry with me. I walked away from the building. The terrain changed from flat to a hill slope. I walked up the hill. The flare went out. "Okay," I thought. "I can deal with this. I'll just walk in the dark. I'll be fine."

I walked in the dark. I saw a building. It was the same building as Exhibit B. Unknowingly, I had double-backed on myself.

Perplexion set in. I couldn't walk in the dark. I didn't want to walk with a flare. What was I to do?

I stumbled back to the railway-line. See Exhibit C, Railway-line:

"Okay," I thought. "I'll walk along the railway line." At least I could still see that in the pitch black. After about a minute, I saw a flare! (It wasn't mine!)

I ran to the other flare. I was really excited. I had been wandering around for about 20 minutes with basically nothing happening. Finally, there were people! I was going to say "hello." Sure, they might kill me, but at least I wouldn't die alone.

I was so close. Then I heard a horrible sound. Oh my God, zombies! It was freaking scary. I didn't know where they were but I knew they were close. I fumbled for my pistol. This was going to be nasty. A zombie charged up on me. I fired away. It went down. Then another came up. I missed and it swiped at me. A few more shots though and it went down and all went quiet.

I decided to crouch-down and move slowly towards the flare. That way no-one would hear me. I'd be like a ninja. After all, there might have been more zombies out there and I was still a long way from the flare. I needed to be careful, the second zombie was almost the death of me.

But crouching is slow. After a minute I still felt like I was a million miles away. I decided to make a dash for it. Surely those two zombies were the last. And if not, I could make it to the light before they caught me. I would be like a cheetah.

I was not like a cheetah. I was a wounded and imprudent sucker. Two more zombies heard me and came for me. This time I was too slow. They knocked me prone and started to feast on my entrails. But it wasn't the zombies that really killed me. What really killed me was my impatience and a fool's hope.

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My first play of DayZ was confusing, short and ultimately tragic. The only goal I'd had - to reach the flare - was never realised. But I'll be back and I'll have a torch.

2012, the year of the computer game

There are a few good computer games that have come out over the last year, with a bunch more to come. My favourites so far are:

Legend of Grimrock

Such a tight old-school role-playing game. Every component of this game has been thought about. The puzzles, the monsters the characters, the items. There is never enough food. You're always just about to run out of health potions. Monsters are always one step away from killing your characters. You're almost completely lost and confused by the puzzles.

The most freaky moment thus far has been when I was adjusting my character's inventory and an ogre came charging out of the murky black. That was the first time I'd seen an ogre. My party was dead ten seconds later.

There is one aspect to the game that at first seemed tedious. You have to click on a combination of icons every time you want to cast a spell. I eventually realised that this is a way of making the combat more tense. You're trying to remember the combinations and click the icons before you get smashed by something like the guy below.

Unity of Command

As gratifying as Legend of Grimrock has been, every moment of my time with Unity of Command has been better. Thus far, it appears to be a perfectly crafted strategy game. You have to look for weak points in the battle line where you break through with tanks and mechanised infantry to either charge through to an objective or surround the enemy. Supply lines have been implemented so simply but so effectively. It's devastating to see the lines cut by a lone enemy unit.

Unity of Command is like chess where you can beat the computer and feel like such a bad-arse as you do it.

Turn 3. The Russian line has been broken.
Russian units have been cut off from their supply.

Turn 4. German tanks charge through to take the scenario objectives.
German infantry deal with the remaining Russian troops that have been overrun.

DayZ

I played this for the first time a moment ago. Wow. It's something pretty special. I'll write up my feelings about the game in the next post. In short, it's a terrifying game. I have no idea if I like it just yet, but I'll definitely play it more.

DayZ at night. The house is lite by one of my flares.

Games still to come

Two sequels to one of my favourite games are being released this year. They are Xenonauts and X-Com. They look like they're going to be very good.

2012 is shaping up to have very different games to the malaise of mediocre to dreadful games that have been around for long time now. Now all I need is Elite 4 (never going to happen) or a new X-Wing game to come out and I'll be set.