Suikoden IV has joined its brothers and sisters in my Suikoden collection

So yeah, the big news was that I bought a PlayStation 3 over the weekend, but there was another purchase that really, for me, hit it big, and I’ve been saving the reveal for its own post. Like this one. Uh yeah, onwards…

My local GameStop in Pennsylvania is probably one of the last to still sell PlayStation 2 games, and because of this, I’m constantly sifting through their standalone shelves for goodies before the store simply stops selling them, and then that’s that. In the past, I’ve found a number of gems, such as Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters and Suikoden III, as well as some real duds, like Monster Rancher EVO, but regardless, it’s helped me fill out my collection nonetheless. Over the weekend, before I asked the dude behind the counter for the “Classic White” PlayStation 3 bundle, I made my way over to the PS2 section and noticed that they were “buy-two-get-one-free” for the time being, a type of sale that I just can’t ignore. And I hadn’t even scanned more then five covers before I saw it, just sitting there all nonchalant, waiting for me to pick it up: Suikoden IV. I found Wild Arms 4 and Atelier Iris 2: The Azoth of Destiny, thus snagging Suikoden IV for free. Whoop whoop!

I understand that, for many, it’s considered the worst in the series–or is that Suikoden Tierkries?–but this isn’t actually about the gameplay, but rather finding the game. A physical copy of it. See, Suikoden II is one of my favorite RPGs, with both the saddest scene and best story, and I find the series as a whole really enjoyable, especially once you get to your castle headquarters and can begin recruiting locals 108 Stars of Destiny to see how they affect everything. It’s a series that I’ve wanted to have as a whole, and once I got Suikoden V I was determined to eventually find the III and IV to round out the numbered entries in the series. That task…is now complete.

And here they all are, one happy family:

Mmm. Love it. Now to figure out if I’m determined enough to pick up the non-numbered spinoffs in the Suikoden franchise and really call myself a diehard fan. Currently, there are three:

• Suikoden Tactics (PS2)
• Suikoden Tierkries (DS)
• Suikoden: The Woven Web of a Century (PSP)

Well, the chances of me getting a PSP are 0.000002%, so there goes that, and I feel like Suikoden Tactics is the rarest of the PS2 bunch. Chances are high I can find a used copy of Suikoden Tierkries though it sounds like a far cry from a traditional experience. Still curious about it though.

Either way, this is exciting. I’m still working my way through Suikoden III and amazing myself over the hilarious dialogue, but I will test out IV some day soon. I wonder if my PlayStation 3 is backwards-compatible. Probably not…

Take me away on a voluptuous Jetpack Joyride

So, yeah, I did it. Bought a PlayStation 3, specifically the new “Classic White” bundle, which is a pretty stellar deal overall. You get the top-loading console, a controller, 500 GB of storage, and a free year’s worth of PlayStation Plus, which is a service that seems, so far, heads and tails above Xbox Live. Alas, the GameStop I was at did not have any copies of Ni no Kuni, and neither did any other local stores. My time for JRPGing will just have to wait, as I’m working on some art projects for MegaCon 2013 that I should get done sooner than later as time is ticking down. So I returned home without any physical game discs to stick in my system, but no worries–with PlayStation Plus’s wide offerings and a number of free-to-play games to download, I had more than enough to try out on the new console for the first time.

And so, yes, the first game I downloaded and played was…Jetpack Joyride. And I kept playing it. Over and over and over again. For the folks that don’t know, I’m generally late to every party–hence me getting a PS3 at the end of its “life cycle”–and so I’ve never used an iPad or iPhone (or any kind of advanced iOS phone) before, missing out on all those popular touch games that are free or like a buck and instantly addicting. Sure, I hear about them a lot, like Temple Run, Space Team, and Canabalt, but that’s as far as it goes. This was my first experience with the cartoonish and silly runner, and it’s pretty great.

Basically, you are a dude named Barry Steakfries and you steal a jetpack from some scientists, trying to fly as far as you can, avoiding electrical charges and missiles. You can never stop moving, but you can change how you move, with different items equipped, new types of jetpacks, and special vehicle pickups. My favorites are the dragon and bird mobiles. As you go and aim for a new distance record, you earn coins and slot machine tokens, as there is a store to buy lots of items, like costumes and new jetpacks and one-use power-ups. To level up and earn coins faster, you always have a trio of missions to complete, and they range from silly challenges like high-fiving 15 scientists to mobile-based, and everything is tracked as it happens, which is really nice. It keeps the not-yet-monotonous running alive with new ways to play, such as not picking up any coins. Now, you can totally spend real money to buy more digital coins to then buy better upgrades, but that’s not me–I’m enjoying this as a free thing, which I will play until I feel I’ve experienced enough.

As I played Jetpack Joyride like a wide-eyed fiend, I downloaded some other stuff in the background, which I will check out later down the road. Namely, Retro City Rampage, Mega Man 9, Mega Man 10, Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, and some foosball game. There’s more to download, but the problem with downloading full retail games is that 14 GB does not happen with the snap of one’s fingers. I think Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One took around six to seven hours to download. Fun times there.

So, in short, I bought a PlayStation 3 and am really enjoying this free-to-play game that was clearly built for touch-based devices as there’s only one button in use. Life is strange. Genesis does what Nintendon’t.

Champing at the bit to play Level-5’s Ni no Kuni

I am champing at the bit, foaming at the mouth, sitting on the edge of my seat, barely breathing properly, raring to go, ready and willing, and/or hot to trot to experience Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. If all those crazy synonyms don’t make it clear, I am extremely excited over this JRPG from Level-5 and Studio Ghibli. And it stems more from the Level-5 aspect than the Studio Ghibli, which might surprise some people. Sure, I love Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service and the amount of wonder and childlike imagination they give off, but I love Rogue Galaxy, Dark Cloud 2, and Dragon Quest VIII ten times more. To be honest, those are three RPGs that really shaped my late teens and early 20s.

Let’s go through them in the order I devoured them.

Dark Cloud 2 really is its own game more than a sequel to a sub-par Zelda wannabe. Which I had and played at some time. Never got very far in it though, but it at least was something to do on my PlayStation 2 other than watching Metropolis over and over. But the sequel…oh man. It was just stuffed with gameplay mechanics, most of which were intuitive and fun and worth the work. Not Spheda though. You had the Georama system, which allowed Max to rebuild villages to your taste. Then you had randomly created dungeons, a camera to snap photos for inventions, breakable weapons, a ride-pod thing named Steve who you can upgrade, and action-based combat. Also, fishing. Plus, colorful settings and a light-hearted story, with some cheese to it. It was a game my sister also fell into, and we’d play together on her save since she disliked the battles, but loved exploring and building towns. Though I never beat it, I do mean to…one day.

I ended up picking up Dragon Quest VIII right as I moved out of my parents’ home and to my own apartment after college and getting my first job in northern New Jersey. It was exciting times, but also poor times, and I ended up not getting cable or Internet installed in my place for two and a half months. This meant a lot of DVD watching and digesting books, but also some serious time spent playing JRPGs, like DQVIII. Which was perfect for eating away at time, with so much to do and see and explore and collect: alchemy recipes, monsters, mini coins, and so on. Funnily enough, I was actually playing DQVIII when the cable guy showed up to install stuff, and he asked me some questions about it, whether it was any good or not. I told him it was brimming with things to do, as well as just a pure joy to explore. That remains true to this day.

Lastly, Rogue Galaxy, a game I’d venture to call underrated. Yes, it has terribly long and drawn out cutscenes, but that’s JRPGs for you. Everything else more than makes up for its sluggish pace at times. You have bounty hunts and skill trees to fill out, as well as a sickeningly deep weapon alchemy system. Oh, and a bug battling championship called the Insectron. All of which I ate up. The combat is all right and has its moments, but towards the end I just found myself able to efficiently spam special moves and clear out enemies in one go. Y’know, I’m just gonna give Rogue Galaxy its own post one day soon so y’all can learn what you missed out on, like a race of shark-people.

In short, Level-5 packs their games full of Stuff, and I love that. It’s not enough that there’s a lengthy plot to follow, but give me miscellaneous tasks and side projects, and I’m in it for the long haul. Looks like Ni no Kuni is following this tradition with familiars to collect, parts of a magical book to piece together, merits to earn from side quests, alchemy, and on and on and on. Plus, it looks fantastic thanks to Studio Ghibli’s involvement, and really presents a magical world that one wants to be in, even if it’s filled with talking cats and cows.

So yeah, I like Level-5’s games a lot. If you need more evidence of my appreciation and confidence in what Level-5 puts out, then there is this: I am buying a PlayStation 3 this weekend so that I can play Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. Specifically, the special classic white bundle Sony recently announced. White for the White Witch. Oh man, I totally fell for it. Too late now.

Restoring the Thieves Guild to its former glory one loading screen at a time

To my surprise, I returned the Thieves Guild to its former glory last night, a task I assumed would take a lot longer, seeing as you have to first do a number of miscellaneous tasks for both Vex and Delvin before getting the chance to do a more important quest to gain the loyalty of someone who will then set up shop in the Ratway, thus making it a better base. It’s a lot of back and forth, and it seems like there’s randomness involved in that you have to do at least five tasks within a specific city to get the loyalty missions to trigger; I just did what I got assigned and soldiered on. Anyways, it is done; check it out in Achievement form:

One with the Shadows (30G): Returned the Thieves Guild to its former glory

Right. Go me. Having just finished up the Dark Brotherhood questline, I can definitely say that the Thieves Guild offered the most quests to do, and you can take that as you will. Granted, in a game like Skyrim, you shouldn’t be lacking for things to do, but this guild questline did seem the most fleshed out and sporting a better base, one you personally invest in and see grow. As a reward for restoring the guild to its heyday reputation, I was made the Guild Master and given a pretty sweet set of armor.

This has been something I’ve been working on for over a year. Granted, not every day, but whenever I’d load up my save and begin running around the world, I’d always keep both Vex and Delvin’s quests in mind, trying to at least do both before returning to Riften to turn them in and pick up the next two. The main reason this task takes so long, at least for me on the ol’ Xbox 360, is due to load screens, which stretch the gap between the beginning of the universe and the end of everything. Vex says to go to Solitude and do this–loading screen. Delvin wants you tooling around over in Dawnstar–loading screen. Fast travel back to Riften to enter the Thieves Guild hideout–loading screen. Enter the actual hideout–loading screen. Enter the Ratway–loading screen. Pick up two more quests from Vex and Delvin, but sit through two more loading screens before you can even get outside to fast travel and experience yet another loading screen. Sure, the easy answers are “play on PC” or “don’t use fast travel” but those responses don’t really work for me. I play how I play, and it’s built around slowness.

Okay, my new Skyrim to-do list, which is mostly based on as-yet-unlocked Achievements, and all of this will hopefully be crossed off before I dig into Dawnguard or Dragonborn:

• Get married
• Hit level 50 (I’m halfway to 48 currently, have to really work on magic and one-handed combat, maybe even more smithing)
• Collect 15 Daedric artifacts (feel like I’ve gotten four or five so far)
• Learn 20 shouts
• Do more quests than acquire more quests

I don’t know if it is possible for me to get a bounty of 1,000 gold in each hold with my current character as he’s too nice of a fellow, despite his deep association with the shadier guilds. Chances are high I’ll never make a second character or play differently, but maybe after I’ve done every single thing I ever want to do and know that Fallout 4 is coming out soon I’ll just go apeshit and put each hold to the torch–figuratively, that is. More or less, Lohgahn will fill every civilian and solider with arrows. Maybe even summon a dragon. But only then, at the end, when I will play no more. Because that’s a one-way street.

Until then.

More like Professor Layton and the Unceasing Daily Download Puzzles

I think I’m nearly ready to take the cartridge for Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask out of my Nintendo 3DS. It’s been in there for…at least over a month, possibly a month and a half. I know that as soon as I finished off Disney Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion I popped that piece of gunk out and dropped in the professor’s latest adventure, and that was some time early in December 2012.  So yeah, a month and a half going by the time of writing. The kicker is that I beat the main game just before the new year hit–so why have I not taken it out of my portable gaming system? Let me tell you, dear readers: daily download puzzles.

That’s right. More puzzles.

Every day since the game’s release, you can connect to WiFi and download a new puzzle. Simple as that. I believe the plan is to do this for one whole year, ending on October 28, 2013. There are twenty puzzle categories, and it seems like you’ll get multiple puzzles within each to ultimately hit a year’s worth. Here’s a list of all the puzzle types and my thoughts for each:

• The Alchemist’s Lair – Connect different colored flasks a specific number of times without overloading the system. Pretty fun, and the later variants get pretty tricky.
• Tile – Match four distinctly different tiles to clear the board. Gravity factors in, with tiles falling into place if you clear ones below them. Not terribly difficult.
• Ghouls and Guards – Similar to The Alchemist’s Lair puzzles, you have to connect light with guards to kill ghosts. Use mirrors to bounce the light around the area. Gets really overwhelming in later difficulty levels.
• Big Block Box – Have to fit a bunch of Tetris-like blocks into a single area, with special rules and limitations in place. A lot of fun though pretty easy to figure out.
• Pen Pals – Have to pen in a bunch of giraffes in a non-breaking fence by moving blocks around in different directions. Can easily solve these through constant trial and error.
• Food Chain – Guide a rabbit to collect all the carrots without getting eaten by the wolf behind it. These are pretty tricky. I used the “undo” button a whole bunch.
• Bewitching Night – Turn on the correct number of lights to guide the witch’s way. With the memo feature, this one is fairly easy to get through.
• Kingdoms – Section of a castle and its grounds from other neighboring castles. Simple and easy, but still enjoyable to solve.
• Vault of the Ancients – Connect one rune to another with a single line, as well as other runes to their respective matches. The larger puzzles are trickier to manage with so many lines everywhere, but one will eventually solve them.
• Perilous Voyage – Guide a boat from start to finish in one single path. Absolutely hate these puzzles, as the inclusion of “invisible” rocks means a lot of guesswork for guiding the boat around obstacles. Have not solved the last four yet.
• Whose Tile Is It Anyway – Place tiles on a board in a specific way to reveal the answer. A bit like Big Block Box, but with new rules to abide by.
• Sweet Truth – Rows and columns of candy must contain only one of each candy type, but no empty spaces next to each other. Nothing terribly mind-breaking to solve.
• A Dish Too Far – Unstack dishes with touching other stacks you’ve cleared out. Just managing space in the end.
• Little Lost Ducklings – Strangely, this puzzle type is nearly exactly like A Dish Too Far, only with ducks and obstacles added on the board.
• St Bronto’s – Lead baby dinosaurs back to mommy dinosaurs. Pretty easy so far, but I suspect later versions will become cluttered and harder to manage.
• Aerial View – Create a runway for the plane to use for takeoff by rotating tiles. Kind of like Pen Pals, but with a few new rules to mix things up.
• Trains and Train Spotters – Direct a train as well as a photographer around a map. Really dislike this as it is not explained very well, and I never much liked that train minigame from The Last Specter to begin with.
• Sun, Sand and Turtles – This one is weird. You have to place water between facing turtles and then also fill in the gaps so the entire board is covered. Not sure if I’m into it or not despite adorable turtles.
• The Barking Beat – Guide a cop along a single path to arrest…animals. It’s okay, but at this point I’ve only gotten to play one puzzle from this category.
• Pipework Patch-up – Connect pipe sections with the exact number of pipes to get the fountain working properly. It’s like The Alchemist’s Lair and Vault of the Ancients, but with water and numbers. Not bad.

Whew. I hope you can see why I’ve struggled with taking Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask out. The content–it just never ends. I don’t remember if there were additional downloadable puzzles in Professor Layton and the Last Specter, but the bonus mini-game London Life kept me more than busy. However, I remember there being additional puzzles for Layton’s first adventure in Professor Layton and the Curious Village, as well as some huff-and-puff over the fact that these puzzles were technically already on the cart and were only being “unlocked” by connecting to the Internet. Also, these were not daily puzzles, but rather one a week, and I got through a few of them, but they were not very exciting. Remember several matchsticks puzzles in there, and nothing more.

Alas, I don’t love every puzzle category, and the second set of categories from Whose Tile Is It Anyway to  Pipework Patch-up feel strangely similar. Most use a small nine-by-nine square grid as their play place, which is a bit boring one after the other. Really, the duck and plate puzzles are nearly identical, and maybe that’s showing that the developers have stretched themselves a little too thin and overshot with promises. And since these categories are the ones to get subsequent puzzles for the next few months, I think I can do without my daily fix and just download them all later on when we return to more enjoyable ones, like Kingdoms.

Now, a choice: what to put into my 3DS after Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask has been removed. I have a few candidates. Such as Pokemon White 2, which I’m pretty far along in, but haven’t played since I bought like three 3DS games all at once back in November 2012. Think I’m on my way to the sixth or seventh gym. Also, there’s Paper Mario: Sticker Star still to eat up, especially since I glanced at a walkthrough guide last time I was in GameStop and kind of have a better idea how to knock down those bowling pins. Lastly, there’s Radiant Historia, one of my five games I want to beat in 2013. Decisions, decisions, so stick around and see what game I’m blogging about next for my answer.

The Night Mother thanks you for saving the Dark Brotherhood

Well, with LEGO Lord of the Rings now completed to 100% and Borderlands 2 a real grind unless playing online with friends and farming for sweet loot, I’m digging back into Skyrim. Even without the Dawnguard and Dragonborn DLC packs–which I will get eventually–there’s still plenty for me to do despite having now logged over 110 hours on my single character of Lohgahn, the stealthy Imperial that shoots from afar with an enchanted bow first and asks questions later. Such as finally finishing up the last of the faction questlines after having become the Arch-Mage, the master of the Thieves Guild, the leader of the Companions, and general greatest hero ever to set foot in the snowy, Norse-themed realm.

I am to believe that the Dark Brotherhood quests were the most enjoyable experiences in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I remember starting that questline and eventually joining the shady circle of assassins and shifty souls, but never really getting any further than that, so I can’t say for sure. What I can say confidently is that the Dark Brotherhood quests in Skyrim have elements of fun and the potential to be darkly delightful–but are not. They play out just like every other quest in the game, and everything is over sooner than you’d expect. Yeah, you get some cool loot along the way–and a horse!–but I wasn’t in it for the loot this time. I wanted to be dark and cruel and set up these crazy puzzle-like scenarios for someone to accidentally die from. That didn’t happen. Let me present an example.

[Spoilers for the quest “To Kill an Empire” to follow…]

Posing as a famous chef known only as the Gourmet, you gain access to Castle Dour in Solitude in hopes of poisoning the Emperor. That sounds really great. You meet with another cook called Gianna, who will help you prepare a special meal for the Emperor and his friends upstairs. This is all done via dialogue options. You are making some French-named potato stew, and Gianna asks you what goes in it, ingredient by ingredient. At the end, you tell her there is one more ingredient, the Jarrin root, and in it goes. Then you follow her upstairs, watch the Emperor eat, slump over dead, and then escape the tower. Your involvement in the quest is disappointingly minimal. It could have been so much more, with you having to drop in the poison root while distracting Gianna…or something like that. Make it more puzzle-based or use a skill like persuasion. As the Dark Brotherhood member fulfilling the contract, let me fulfill the contract. That Emperor turned out to be a fake, and killing the real one is even less imaginative.

That said, the story has some nice twists to it and fantastic dialogue from creepy characters like the Night Mother, Babette, Cicero, and Astrid, but other than that–it’s a big letdown. You assassinate contracts. Sometimes you talk to them before you do that, but the end result is always the same. Overall, I guess the Thieves Guild is the most fun questline Skyrim has to offer, with a range of mission types and a really useful base full of useful merchants.

So yeah, that was that. I am somewhat interested in sprucing up the Dawnguard Sanctuary with some new furniture and features, but with a house in Whiterun and those three houses I built from the Hearthfire DLC, I don’t really need another place to stash my stuff. Just curious to see what it looks like and then move on elsewhere.

Okay, new goals for continuing through Skyrim include getting married, finding more Shout walls, and finishing up the quests I’ve acquired before picking up new ones. Yeah, I know; that last one is just wishful thinking. So wish me luck.

2013 Game Review Haiku, #3 – The Walking Dead, Episode 5 – “No Time Left”

Get Clementine back
Escape city, keep moving
Then Lee can let go

–

These little haikus proved to be quite popular in 2012, so I’m gonna keep them going for another year. Or until I get bored with them. Whatever comes first. If you want to read more words about these games that I’m beating, just search around on Grinding Down. I’m sure I’ve talked about them here or there at some point. Anyways, enjoy my videogamey take on Japanese poetry.

Hunt the varmint that killed your family in Westerado

With a name like Westerado and a colorfully retro look, it didn’t take much to get me interested in this browser-based Western, free to play over at Adult Swim’s gaming subsite. A dastardly bandit kills your entire family, burning your home to the ground as a bonus, and you must go seeking revenge, gathering clues and helping others to learn the true identity of the bastard, in order to shoot him in front of the local saloon. It’s a traditional premise, but the idea of not knowing exactly who the murderer is works amazingly, especially since you can accuse nearly everyone you talk to and even draw your pistol on them. I killed a rancher just because he seemed to be holding back information; I’m not proud of that, just saying it’s something that can be done.

You control your bandit-seeking cowboy with WASD, using J to holster or unholster your pistol, K to both cock it and then fire, and R to reload a single bullet. E is your main action button for speaking and selecting dialogue options. Your cowboy wanders towns, picks up quests, learns clues, and continues on. Oh, and you can even join in a round of poker. I’ve played Westerado now in two separate sessions, with the first lasting an hour, and the second being much shorter than that, eventually breaking itself. It’s a surprisingly deep game that could potentially take several hours to complete, unless you know exactly where to go and who the bandit is from the word go. Not sure if that’s random each time or not, wasn’t paying attention to the details there.

I struggled with the shooting, mostly because there are some faults with it. I like the idea of manually reloading one bullet at a time and cocking the gun each time before firing, but maybe it’s a little too restrictive in execution. Throw in the fact that you automatically holster your pistol when you run and you can find yourself taking out your pistol, running over to an armed bandit, and then standing there empty-handed while your hat gets shot off. Lose three hats and then get shot one more time–you’re dead. Not a huge deal, as some progress is saved, though it’s not entirely clear what is being saved and when. I did die fighting some bandits and returned to the same place to find the ones I managed to kill still on the ground. So, yeah. That’s cool and all, considering it is browser-based, so you kind of have to play it in a single sitting or leave it running when you walk away.

And naturally, as this is me we’re talking about, I ran into a nasty glitch, which I worked my way around, but then it broke Westerado, thus lowering my interest to ever play again and figure out just who exactly shot my mother and brother. Oh well. I know he had a brown hat and is very thin, but that could be a number of men in town. Anyways, the glitch. Tasked with leading a caravan of goods, I quickly had to defend it from bandits with guns on horseback. Well, that’s what the instructions said, at least. No bandits ever showed up. The music was hyper and dramatic, and the caravan and my cowboy continued to race forward. This went on uneventfully for several minutes before I figured out that something broke; no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the bandits to spawn. Ultimately, I shot the caravan’s horse and lost the mission. Was dumped back into the wonderfully named town of Clintwood, where things slowed down and the game hitched up, eventually freezing on the fast travel map. Well, shoot.

So yeah, Westerado. A fantastic name, appropriate and polished tunes, a neat look, and the potential for a great mystery to solve. Alas, I don’t have the time to dig into it all at once, and now I’m scared of more glitches. But feel free to give it a chance, as it’s pretty charming otherwise.

The highs and lows of Telltale’s The Walking Dead

At this point, having completed four out of five episodes for season one of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, I know exactly what I like about it and exactly what is not working. It’s a shame there’s some good and bad here, as the good has the potential to outshine the bad, but then the bad is just so disappointing that it could bury the good. Yeah, that was totally clear writing.

I like adventure games, especially the point and click ilk. Please note that I didn’t say love, as I’ve really only fully experienced a few, such as Wadjet Eye’s The Blackwell Legacy series, Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, The Sea Will Claim Everything, and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, but I had a pretty good time with those. In the past, I’ve tried playing games like Hector: Badge of Carnage, Machinarium, and Beneath a Steel Sky only to get stuck and give up in  obvious frustration. The things I often like in adventure games are the stories and the ability to click on lots of things for fun (or even bland) descriptions, and the parts I often find unwieldy are inventory management, obscure puzzles, and pixel hunting. The Walking Dead does a lot of great story work, but is hampered by none of the previous things mentioned, rather modern day quirks that really take it down a notch. Let’s start with the bad, then the good.

To begin with, the Achievements. Yes, they are meaningless things, but their inclusion in The Walking Dead is so noticeable that they have to be accounted for. Some have funny titles, often silly or referencing pop culture or even snide, especially based on the group’s current situation. The Walking Dead is not a very funny game, though there are the occasional moments or quips, but the premise itself is rather bleak, and seeing how episode four ended, it’s only gonna get darker. So earning Achievements with names like “You Fight Like a Dairy Farmer” and “Too Much Salt Will Kill You” right when emotional moments are trying to sink in is a bit like losing a loved one and then getting slammed in the face with a custard pie. Again, in the end, the Achievements are completely meaningless, it’s just that they are quite invasive when one is immersed in a world overrun by zombies.

The next problem I have might only be related to the Xbox 360, but I don’t know. It could be on other platforms, and it has to do with loading screens. They come up at the worst time, with the worst transitions to them. It’s just a simple cut away to a boring screen that says NOW LOADING… on it. For instance, near the beginning of episode four, Lee is climbing a ladder in a house to see what’s up in the attic. You actually control Lee as he climbs the steps, one by one, music swelling, the promise of something major soon to be revealed. You get to the top step and…loading screen. This is just one example, but the pacing and tone is often knocked aside on most of the loading screens as they often happen during large moments. I dunno, just like with the Achievements, they really took me out of a great gaming adventure.

Lastly, and don’t worry, I’ll get to some good stuff shortly, when you fail an action scene, more often than not, Lee dies and you reset to the start of the action. For me, this was particularly jarring. These moments where you have to shoot a zombie in a particular spot within three seconds are disappointing in that you are just thrown into it with no guidance and will most likely lose the first time. After you fail that first time, then the game tells you what you’re supposed to do. Gee, thanks. In episode two, at the motel, you used the four-pronged cursor to highlight enemies and shoot with the A button, but this time around they switched to a more traditional RT shooting convention; either way, these moments are not the greatest and seem ham-fisted for gamers that want more out of their puzzle games. I could do without, personally.

So those are the things about The Walking Dead I’m not digging. Otherwise, wow. The story is riveting, and each character comes across fully realized from the word go, making every choice a struggle, whether it’s simply a line of dialogue or a heart-breaking decision. Or, in the case of Ben, an easy one. The timer on dialogue options is a wonderful motivator, and my Lee is the kind of guy that cares deeply about Clementine and tries to keep the group happy; at first, he worked hard for Kenny’s respect, but now that matters no more. I understand that a lot of the finer plot points can’t be changed, but the small interactions between characters and the relationships you construct are where this game shines. I do play with the notifications turned on, something I’ve seen others suggest turning off, as they can potentially negatively future decisions. So far, I’m okay with them.

I will most likely be finishing up episode five tonight or this weekend, and I don’t expect any new gameplay twists to really shake up the formula. Hopefully it’s all story to the end, but I’m sure I’ll have to stumble my way through an action scene or two before the credits roll. Regardless, I’ve been pretty impressed with the effect The Walking Dead has had on me, even with a few problems. I’ll definitely be playing season two as it comes out, episode by episode, whenever that is, ready to make some choices.

2013 Game Review Haiku, #2 – The Walking Dead, Episode 4 – “Around Every Corner”

Looking for a boat
Not simple, zombies mew up
Radio taunts Lee

–

These little haikus proved to be quite popular in 2012, so I’m gonna keep them going for another year. Or until I get bored with them. Whatever comes first. If you want to read more words about these games that I’m beating, just search around on Grinding Down. I’m sure I’ve talked about them here or there at some point. Anyways, enjoy my videogamey take on Japanese poetry.