// Prometheus: The Movie vs The Walking Dead Game

Or:

 

// How I Learnt To Stop Worrying And Love The Indie Game

Ok, it’s been a while since I last did one of these ‘blog’ things, and in that time I’ve saved up quite a lot of frustration. So, before I talk about The Walking Dead game I’m going to have a long overdue rant. Anyone reading this who just wants to hear my opinion on The Walking Dead, please skip forward to the picture of a man caught in a bear trap… no, really….

Now, modern ‘triple A’ games, much like big Hollywood movies, are starting to tick me off.

Perhaps I am simply becoming jaded; however it would seem that both game creators and movie makers are choosing the easy way out… By taking genuine innovation, believable character development, suspense and the pursuit of a pure ideal and watering it down, strapping on some fancy effects and a whole bunch of clichés, mainstream tripe is effectively killing both industries whilst simultaneously lowering people’s standards.

Sequel after prequel after origin story after re-hash after re-imagining. It’s driving me insane.  What’s worse is that I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who notices! People at large just seem to yum it all up like good little proletariats. “Please can we have another version of Spiderman / Batman / Superman / COD / Halo / anything that sells, please we love being told what to love, please!”, they seemed to say.

I have an example of this, if anyone is willing to listen?

Prometheus.  The movie.

Rant part one: Non-Science Fiction

Now, here was a perfect opportunity for the world renowned director, Ridley Scott, to add to a universe that he helped bring to life, in the form of a prequel. All the ingredients were there for it to be amazing. With a final production budget that would cause professional footballers to blush and with access to special effects that make Ripley’s original Xenomorph threat look like crudely painted sock puppet, how could this film fail to impress?  

Yet, as seems to have become a current trend, the budget must have been blown on animating the over the top graphics, writing larger than life witty quick quips and formulating excuses to retrospectively avoid attending any science lessons at school. The clue, Ridley Scott, is in the genre’s name: Science Fiction. You should know about it, you helped create the damn thing back in 1979. The vast majority of your hard-core fans actually know a thing or two about science, as they include a whole array of geeks and social misfits, like myself, who stuck in at school because they were not cool enough to be lazy.

I don’t want to ruin Prometheus for those of you who have not seen it (besides which, Logan Marshall-Green and Sean Harris have already done a perfectly good job for me, hahaha witty joke), but it is terrible.

The Pits.

The Alien series does not want or need this terrible bit of cannon. It’s a transparent attempt to withdraw money from a classic retro cash cow, maximising its potential by dumbing down to the idiot sheep of today’s crowds (P.S. Please don't beat me up, I'm frail). 

Take this scene for example:

Rant part two: The Head Scene

 

In this scene the rag-tag band of military and science ‘experts’ have just returned from their cursory examination of an alien building, the first expedition of its kind in the known sphere of existence, which took place on an alien planet many, many leagues away. During this orienteering exercise the team stumbled upon the decapitated head of a century’s old alien, again an utterly unique and deeply profound moment in human history. They carefully (read clumsily) brought it back to the lab to preform initial tests, part of a long, long programme of experiments needed in order to identify what made these ancient remains tick, right?

Wrong.

Two minutes into the examination of this one-of-a-kind and priceless archaeological specimen and the team seems to get bored. This I can relate to, as a researcher myself it sometimes can be very dull carrying out careful and time consuming experimentation, however the benefit of remaining professional usually outweighs the short term reward of rushing… Not for these folk though, oh no! Bearing in mind that this ‘team’ is a collection of people hand picked from the top of their field, it seems strange that they collectively elect to pass 50,000 Volts through the alien scull in an attempt to ‘re-animate it’.

Call me old fashioned, but I would have imagined that taking blood slides, X-Ray CT scanning, using qualitative XRD analysis and SEM to get a feel for the mineralogical and organic makeup of the creature… even taking a photograph would come first… attempting to reanimate thousands of year old dead flesh is usually low down on an palaeontologist’s to-do-list… (lets not even get into the fact that the head would have dried out and turned to something resembling an E.T shaped stone by then).

Naturally, the head explodes into a million bits.

Well. Fuck. Me.

Rant part three: The Geologist

One of the team members is a geologist. No problem with that, it seems an important part of a team specialised at investigating alien worlds and looking at intergalactic fossils.

All ok so far. Until he is introduced, as this is what he looks like:

 

That is one rock hard looking geologist (if anyone so much as chuckled at that gag, please kill yourself). This is not what geologists look like. I know, because I am one. This is what a real geologist looks like:

 

Ok, so perhaps that's not quite right either. I'll paint a picture, checked shirt, big beard, often wearing a The North Face fleece and a Gore-tex coat... Some geologists are very charismatic, such as many of the esteemed folk I've had the pleasure to work with, however most are not. In fact they say an out-going geologist is someone who looks at someone else’s shoes when they talk. They don't tend to be a mean, bad attitude, tattooed  mo’fo, as depicted by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof.

His attitude could be forgiven, however, were it not for his innate un-believability. He is at the prime of his career, and yet his only role in the film is to get immediately lost… A professional geologist, with access to real-time 3D mapping and who keeps in constant communication with the rest of his team, getting lost within 5 minutes of entering a cave. This is a person who probably spends their weekends potholing.

Awful.

Rant part four: The Biologist

No doubt you’re getting bored now, so I shall make this the last one. The reasons a biologist would be part of this team are obvious, however once again Weyland Yutani appear to have outdone themselves by selecting someone utterly incompetent.

Upon first contact with this:

The biologist, calling upon everything he knows about this strange alien species that was mysteriously wiped out (nothing), walks over and tried to catch it. No photo. No, “hey, lets back off; we don’t know what it is yet”. Not even the use of a tranquiliser or butterfly net.

He might as well have stripped naked and told the creature he had a lovely box of chocolates hidden inside himself somewhere… Naturally the creature jumps down his throat and kills him.

Good.

I mean what did this guy study? The mixed science of ‘Biology’ and ‘Giving Big Scary Monsters A Kissy Cuddle To Show Them That You Love Them More Than Anything Else In The Whole Wide Worldology MSc’?

Best I could do in the time.

Seriously though, I thought Sci-Fi films had researchers working on them to make sure they don’t talk bollocks.

Immersion ruined, audience pleased, feeling lonely in the world.

Lets talk about something more cheerful. Oh look, a man with his leg caught in a bear trap!!

The Walking Dead
 

The Walking Dead, or 'Winner of over 80 Game of the Year Awards: The Walking Dead, A Telltale Games Series' (WOO80GOTYA:TWD,ATGS), as it now says on the front cover, is not to be confused with the terrible and disappointing The Walking Dead Survival Instinct. No, WOO80GOTYA:TWD,ATGS is made by Telltale Games, which pretty much instantly means its going to be point and click adventure.

You remember point and click adventures right? You know? Use the hammer on the mouse's tail to get it to flat enough to slip under the door of the undertakers office to collect the key for the chemistry lab to mix the… yadda yadda yadda…???

Well, fortunately WOO80GOTYA:TWD,ATGS does not have many of the ridiculous lateral thinking illogical puzzles that were the hallmark of traditional point and click adventures, and it’s all the better for it. By removing the silly trial and error element of old, the game can be much better streamlined and focused on moving forward with the plot.

The plot itself is ok, it’s not great, but it’s passable. What really makes this game shine is the interaction between the characters. In a similar fashion to that of The Walking Dead TV series (TWDTVS), the setting and the zombie apocalypse are secondary to the character relations and development. The zombies serve to add that ‘pressure cooker’ element to the game, always in the background reminding people they are not safe and that you need to keep moving, and causing people to display a wide variety of reactions to the ever increasingly bleak situations they find themselves in. Trust me, its gripping stuff.

Even within the first few minutes of the game, you will realise its cunning and novel direction. Fumbling with that single shotgun shell was a much more nail-biting situation than I ever felt myself in during the endless fights of Tomb Raider or Gears of War 3. Every zombie is a threat, and the characters fear them.

Less, as it turns out, is often more.

The graphics will be like marmite to many. Some will hate them and claim they are unrealistic or that characters are too far down the uncanny valley, other however will smear them all over their eagerly awaiting, hungry, toast metaphor.

Audio is fantastic too. The sound effects and music are used to great effect to generate the correct atmosphere without ever overplaying anything and the voice acting is top notch. I got genuinely attached to several of the games characters, and that can only happen when the voice-over quality is high.

Mechanically, WOO80GOTYA:TWD,ATGS is good, but its far better during the conversations than during the on-rails fighting moments. If you’re playing this game to just mindlessly gun down zombies heroically, then get Call Of Duty, there’s nothing for you here. By and large, events are controlled by multiple choice selections, similar to the likes of Mass Effect and Dragon Age. As for the consequence of your choices though… well, just wait and see…

It’s been a brief review, preceded by a long rant today, however if you, like me, are experiencing somewhat of a gaming drought during the lead up to the next console generation then you could do much worse than give WOO80GOTYA:TWD,ATGS  a try. It may not have all the graphical bells and polished whistles that a full big budget title might offer but it could teach a thing or two about immersion and character development to even the best of it’s competitors. 

And so, as always the verdict comes down to the complete package. WOO80GOTYA:TWD,ATGS has a great story, music and visuals and it evokes a level of raw emotion that 99% of the so called ‘AAA’ games and films absolutely fail to do. It is generally paced well, but feels occasionally padded out to fill the time during some of the episodes, also the odd glitch (once I was on an invisible train, upside down in a cardboard cut-out forest) and jerky-janky gameplay slightly muddy the experience.

Verdict = JUST A GAME

… what can I say? I guess there is just no pleasing some people!