By Alec Meer on November 18th, 2011 at 9:57 am.
Edit: and I’m done. You can rewatch the whole thing below, though.
Hello! I’m about to play (or, depending on the moment in time you start reading this, am playing or have played) The Intruder, the first episode of Telltale’s Jurassic Park pointer-clickerer. As these episodes tend to be relatively short, I thought I’d share my thoughts as they happen, with the below liveblog. If you’d like to watch, that’d be jolly good. If you’d like to read it all when it’s finished, that would also be jolly good. Either way, I’ll see you in a giant text box below.
18/11/2011 at 10:00 fuggles says:
How does the control system work on PC? I saw this played on a PS3 on Giant Bomb, and you seemed to have to thumbstick over a spot before the button queue came up.
18/11/2011 at 10:00 Nallen says:
Old news, I saw this live as it happens content 3 weeks ago.
18/11/2011 at 10:01 fuggles says:
Seriously, I have to watch another advert because I posted a reply?
18/11/2011 at 10:03 Carr0t says:
“10:02 – Not sure how/if reader comments are working, but give it a go.”
“The host has disabled reader comments”
And yet other people are commenting. How? o.0
EDIT: Ahha. Working now.
18/11/2011 at 10:04 Inglourious Badger says:
Wow, it’s the future….today!
18/11/2011 at 10:05 tomemozok says:
Is this worth the time to play it?
18/11/2011 at 10:27 Joe W-A says:
So far the verdict is incredibly bad. I suspected as much
18/11/2011 at 10:58 skittles says:
Well actually the actual verdict seems interestingly split… if you look at the reviews listed on metacritic this seems to be a really decisive game. There are 6 giving it 8-10, and 6 giving it 0-4 (indeed a fair number of the negative are 0, which is pretty rare for a game – even a bad one). Gamespy.com gave it a passing grade, fairly interesting.
18/11/2011 at 12:03 scab says:
Rather shamefully, at least a couple of those high-scoring user reviews have been linked to Telltale Games employees.
You can read fuller details of this sorry business over here: http://uk.gamespot.com/features/jurassic-park-user-reviews-abused-6346288/
18/11/2011 at 12:09 Calneon says:
How fucking stupid do you have to be to post a review of your game under your regular ID that can be traced to RL information?
18/11/2011 at 12:58 grundus says:
Stupid enough to design a game that’s all QTEs and no actual game, presumably
18/11/2011 at 13:06 Oozo says:
But the write-up of the reasons why Gamespot thought the comments to be suspicous is amusing:
“Between the reviewers’ constant lionizing of Telltale Games, complete sentences, proper punctuation, and paucity of spelling errors, we began to suspect that the user reviews were not the product of actual players, but of Telltale representatives.”
So, stupid enough to do stupid wrong?
18/11/2011 at 13:57 zakihashi says:
It isn’t a bad game, you should just play it with a controller, saying your limited to keyboard and mouse on a PC is just so wrong, that’s the advantage of the PC, you can use whatever you see fit. Which in this case is a Xbox, PS3, whatever controller, I use my PS3 controller with MotionJoy DS3 to emulate the 360 pad for convenience. If you play it as intented, the game isn’t bad, but it’s not 10, nor 0, on a realistic scale from 1 to 10 (where 5 is actually the middle and 10 impossible to get) I’d give it a 6.
18/11/2011 at 14:06 skittles says:
Well I was talking specifically about the critic reviews not the user ones.
And personally I have no problem with developers writing reviews of their own product, if they are legitimately fans of it. As long as they are properly reasoned, and they aren’t spamming reviews under fake names, just to inflate scores.
This just sounds like some fan employees writing some reviews, honestly there should not be a problem with it.
18/11/2011 at 15:01 Oozo says:
They are entitled to their opinion, and they are free to utter it to some degree, I guess. Even though, honestly, I don’t like people bragging too much about how awesome the thing they did is, even if their product is awesome. If it is that great, it can speak for itself, no?
In this case, there are other reasons that make it problematic, though:
a) they didn’t say that they were employees, which, frankly, would only have been honest
b) according to Gamespot, they put their “reviews” online before even the professional reviewers could do so, and before any actual fans could have gotten their hands on the game. So they must have been aware of the fact that it would create a rather big bias
c) The fact that their reviews sound like PR-speech, are really hyperbolic, and do clash with the opinion of most of the professional reviewers does not make them look particularly honest… or at least not like reviews that could be very helpful for any customer in deciding on wether or not they should purchase the game
So… it’s bad practice in the best of cases, and this here is not the best of cases by a long shot.
18/11/2011 at 16:28 Jackablade says:
Yeah, everyone knows you’re supposed to write them posing as a seven year old with poor spelling and grammar… but I’ve said too much.
20/11/2011 at 05:30 Shadowcat says:
Sorry, but no. “Conflict of interest” is the phrase that should have sprung to mind instantaneously. The fact that they could be offering completely un-biased opinions is entirely irrelevant.
18/11/2011 at 10:49 Heliocentric says:
Why is that T-rex biting the Triceratops’ horn? Isn’t that an epic fail?
18/11/2011 at 10:57 skittles says:
.
18/11/2011 at 11:02 konrad_ha says:
Oh my, this is quickly going down the drain. A shame.
18/11/2011 at 11:38 Milky1985 says:
So far its looknig a bti bad, but i kinda expected as much.
The most recent series of sam and max didn’t seem as good as the first one (control system aside, i still don’t believe the not being able to click to move your character BS they came up with, since other games have done it fine). I don;t know why they have move way frmo the items and using items on things, it was a system that worked as long as there was clues and enough silyl answers when you tried things on people. (adventure game logic is an issue, but its still an issue with the newer games!) What still kept me playing is the humour and flat out sillyness, it was fun becasue of it.
This is a series that is a bit more serious with a bit of campyness, but I had a feeling it wouldn;t be enough to get me throug th egame. Finding out its effectivly a train with QTE’s tho :/
18/11/2011 at 11:59 P7uen says:
This makes me so sad.
18/11/2011 at 12:06 Calneon says:
QTEs are fucking dreadful. They’re the epitome of all that’s wrong with current gameplay trends. “Just sit there and do this when I tell you!”. Ugh. Looks like this game is basically a collection of QTEs?
18/11/2011 at 13:38 Diziet Sma says:
To repurpose a quote from the late great bill hicks:
“You are free to do what we tell you!”
18/11/2011 at 12:45 Zeewolf says:
Sad but so predictable. Telltale really went down the drain after Sam & Max Season 3. They need a serious rethink of their current strategy if they want to stay alive.
18/11/2011 at 13:05 stahlwerk says:
Thank you for doing this, john.
18/11/2011 at 15:46 Groove says:
John?
18/11/2011 at 16:48 sneetch says:
John Walker actually posts under the name of Alec Meer, Alec posts under Jim Rossingnol, Quinns posts as John Walker and Jim Rossignol never actually existed, I thought everyone knew this?
18/11/2011 at 17:54 briktal says:
Does time work the same way?
18/11/2011 at 19:39 deadpan says:
Imagine four replies on the edge of a post…
18/11/2011 at 13:06 Zelius says:
Wow.. That bad, huh?
18/11/2011 at 13:11 caddyB says:
Haha.He is a martyr.
18/11/2011 at 13:26 grundus says:
I’ve already lit a candle for his W key.
18/11/2011 at 13:13 AbyssUK says:
Watching this was like watching a friend get water boarded….
18/11/2011 at 13:37 Diziet Sma says:
** Grr, login lose reply… comment redacted **
18/11/2011 at 14:16 JKjoker says:
i dont mind this kind of WOTs but i’d really like a bit of “final thoughts” text
18/11/2011 at 15:44 Fox89 says:
I think ‘insultingly terrible’ was the second to last thing he said. What more do you need? :)
18/11/2011 at 16:39 Shooop says:
That last line is one of the reasons I enjoy this site so much.
18/11/2011 at 18:15 sinister agent says:
Aw. That’s a shame. They seemed so enthusiastic about it in the video the other day.
Oh well, I wasn’t going to play it anyway.
18/11/2011 at 19:25 Wulf says:
Hrmn. This looks bad. Shame. Though I wonder what John’s opinion of it all is? Since he’s the local adventure-game aficionado. Considering that we both like hidden object games (Snark Busters was pretty good, just to drop that randomly somewhere), we may have more patience for this sort of thing. It may just be bad, though. Hrmn.
18/11/2011 at 19:31 pilouuuu says:
I have no time to waste with this. I have to play another game that has dinosaurs. Winged dinosaurs. They’re called dragons and the game is called Skyrim.
It’s a shame this is so bad as I like Telltale, but the more they deviate from real adventure games the worse their games will become.
19/11/2011 at 12:03 Navagon says:
RIP W key. I’d like to say your sacrifice wasn’t in vain, but…
19/11/2011 at 18:20 archimandrite says:
“Insultingly Terrible.” – Rock Paper Shotgun