Make a Decision

Indecisiveness is a real killer. It’s good not to be overly headstrong and never consider your options but if you can’t make a clear decision, or if the leader of a group can’t make a choice you could end up with a bad situation on your hands.

On of the hallmarks of modern story telling in television seems to be the indecisive leader. Look at most shows from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s and you’ve got strong leaders making clear decisions. Hannibal on the A-Team, Michael Knight, Captains of the Enterprise. It’s hard to imagine them hesitating in times of crisis. But modern audiences are more accepting of a more complicated dynamic and the idea of characters who hem and haw a bit before finding their way seems a bit more the norm. My classic examples, Jack from LOST and Rick from the Walking Dead. Two leaders who have hardly any consistency in their decision making.

Ah, but we love them all the same.

Creepy Edible Chocolate BABY HEADS

OOOOOh I’m getting hungry!

The Walking Dead Game Season Two

I FINALLY got a chance to finish playing The Walking Dead Season Two Game. Just in case you missed it you can check out my little write up of Season one here.

If you’re interested in playing this and haven’t done it yet, I’d suggest avoiding this write up as there are bound to be lots of SPOILERS!

The Plot:
Clementine! If you played the first game you know how happy I was to see Clementine back in action. The intermediary game 400 Days gave us no hint at how she and the other survivors from the first game were doing so it was a real joy to pick up with her again. This game follows Clem as she tries to make her way in the world without her original group. We start out with her Omid and Christa from the original game but things take turns for the worse and we are left with Clem all on her own.

She meets up with a new group that has all sorts of issues of its own and are shortly after introduced to an even larger group. As the game goes on the survivors find themselves moving from place to place trying to survive as the already horrible world around them just seems to get worse.

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: 
I usually divide those up a bit in my reviews but here I think they go hand in hand in an unusual way.

The Game Play
There isn’t much. As before, you occasionally have to swipe across the screen, push a button or two. This season introduced slightly more complicated gestures or “frustrations” as I like to call them as some of them don’t really go off so well. But basically when you play the game you are watching an episode of the show, or reading a few issues of the comic and choosing the characters lines for them. The game play is minimal at best. It’s nice that the game adapts to some of our choices but it feels like no matter what I choose the ending is going to turn out the same no matter what. The choices that cary over from the previous games don’t seem to make a whole lot of difference here.

The story
I loved the first game even though it really wasn’t very fun to play. In fact, walking away from it I’d say the thing that stuck in my head most was how depressing it was. I actually came to care about those characters and when they died, it was awful. In this game I still cared about the characters but found myself much less attached to them as I was in the first game. As I played, then replayed certain parts I just found that my choices really didn’t seem to mean much so I stopped caring about trying to change the outcome of the game.

The Characters
I’ll admit that when I found out Kenny was alive I was ecstatic. Seeing him again was a breath of relief. I never really warmed up to the new group members and seeing someone from the first game made my loyalty to him stronger and my concern for the new people all the weaker. In fact, I didn’t really like most of the people Clem came across in the game. They were either horrible to her or complete screw ups. I was sick of being around so many screw ups and wanted a few strong focussed people around. Flawed characters are great but it was a bit much in this game. I didn’t care when they lived or died. Characters were completely awful in one scene, then sweet and vulnerable in another. If the writers were trying to develop depth of character it wasn’t working.

The Release Dates Were Awful
Maybe the one thing that actually helped to ruin this game for me more than anything else were the release dates. The first episode was released in December 2013. The final one was released at the end of August 2014. I had forgotten all about it by that point and didn’t find out it had been released until mid October. By which point I forgot where I was and had to go back and start over anyway.

If the point of a staggered release date is to allow some fun waiting and guessing time between episodes with cliff hangers that’s awesome. But the extreme length of time made it annoying instead of fun.

Should you pick it up?
Yeah I guess. It’s not a bad game, but it lost my interest near the end. Play the first one. Check out 400 Days. And maybe during the holidays go through season 2.

Zombie Waldo

Poor old Waldo. Looks like a walker found him.

Incidentally, did you know he’s actually called Wally in most countries? The illustrator who created him , Martin Handford is British and “Wally” is a bit of a geeky name there. So when it was release in other countries his name was changed to make him appropriately geeky in those languages. In the Canadian and U.S. releases he was called Waldo because that’s our equivalent of that geeky name.