Chew on this
By John Walker on April 25th, 2012.
Telltale’s first episode of their adaptation of The Walking Dead has a lot of work to do. After the terrible Jurassic Park provided an exclamation point at the end of a series of increasingly disappointing releases, reputations need rescuing here. So can the zombie thriller adventure redeem the adventure veterans? I’ve decided Wot I Think.
By Alec Meer on March 20th, 2012.
I have significant unease about 1) the Walking Dead TV show b) the Walking Dead comics and c) many of Telltale’s episodic adventure games, which makes me spectacularly ill-qualified to be posting about Telltale’s Walking Dead game. All that said, I do really like the art approach they’ve chosen for it. It’s a new adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s impressively dark but unevenly-flowing, occasionally exploitative comics rather than being based on the recent, glacially-paced (or at least it was at the point I stopped watching it) TV show, so Telltale have elected to depict it in a striking comics-come-to-life style.
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By Adam Smith on February 16th, 2012.
Telltale have begun the process of explaining their take on The Walking Dead, which you may know as a brilliant but at times excessively brutal comic, or a tellybox show that I find strangely unappealing. There are three screenshots, all of which can be embiggened below, and a developer diary that the game will not be an episodic escort mission. Sorry, I’m mistaken, it’s not a developer diary at all. It’s the first episode of “an online talk show…hosted by AJ LoCascio (the voice of Marty McFly in Telltale’s Back to the Future: The Game series)”. The talk show guests (developers) don’t go on to say that the game won’t make Alec weep in frustration, as Jurassic Park did, but let’s hope not.
By Alec Meer on November 18th, 2011.
Frankly I find posting about – and thus somewhat contributing to the sensationalism – this almost as unsavoury as the news story itself, but I suppose it’s the sort of thing I guess we should all be aware of, if only to shake our heads, tut loudly and make doomy prophecies about the world going to hell in a handbasket.
There didn’t appear to be anything in the way of pre-release reviews for Telltale’s Jurassic Park game (I should note that they kindly set across code for RPS today, however), but somehow there were a couple of very, very positive user reviews on Metacritic. Stuff like “a mix between Heavy Rain and LA Noire”, “lovingly-crafted” and “if Steven Spielberg decided to direct Heavy Rain” and other eyebrowing-raisingly effusive endorsements in this vein. Which rather suggests they played a different game entirely to the one I did. Doing a little digging, Gamespot identified that the posters of these gushy comments did, in fact, work for Telltale.
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As-new-as-it-gets games journalism
By Alec Meer on November 18th, 2011.
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.
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By Adam Smith on October 28th, 2011.
Jurassic Park: The Game is a change of pace from Telltale, previously known for its take on the slow time events familiar in point and click games through the centuries. With the addition of raging dinosaurs comes the addition of somewhat quicker events, such as running away, climbing a fence and being tossed through the air, reduced to nothing more than a bag of broken bones and ruptured organs.
This new video goes behind the scenes, demonstrating that there will still be puzzles and narrative alongside the screaming and devouring. I’m not sure how “picture in picture scene navigation” will work but I’m quietly intrigued. Oh, and there’s a short montage of dinosaurs murdering people starting at 2.05.
By Jim Rossignol on August 31st, 2011.
If Alec’s preview of the upcoming dinosaur adventure from Telltale intrigued you, then it’s possible you’ll want to look at the trailer below, which features a number of the exciting dino-based moments from the game. Yeah, and there’s quite a lot of that T-Rex roar. Cheer up, T-Rex, it’s not like everyone makes jokes about your tiny arms.
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Dino's Lair
By Alec Meer on August 30th, 2011.
Trespasser it ain’t, but despite being a far easier sell Jurassic Park: The Game: Episode One: The Intruder is likely to be the title which confounds the argument that Telltale make formula adventure games, simply variations upon a structure and style they hit upon with the first series of their Sam & Max episodes. This is something a little different, the moment when Telltale prove their design ethos isn’t frozen in amber after all. While seasoned adventure nuts will perhaps bounce right off this officially-sanctioned side-story to the first film due to its very casual approach puzzling and danger-dodging, it clearly aims to draw a crowd far beyond nostalgic Lucasartisans. Specifically, a crowd who want to see people om-nom-nommed by bloody great dinosaurs.
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By John Walker on July 21st, 2011.
Telltale have been keeping pretty tight-lipped about one of their 893 current development projects, Fables. At E3 all they were showing was a cryptic poster of a wolf, and queries about it were met with grins and silence. And all that’s been said is that it’s based on the DC comic that re-imagines fairytales in grim and gruesome ways. So it’s interesting to learn that the creator of the source comic, Bill Willingham, may be working on the game. (Willingham has had brief previous games experience when offering a mission to City Of Heroes.) The news comes from comics site, Bleeding Cool, who very confidently report that this will be officially announced on Saturday during ComicCon. They say that the deal is still being signed, but that Willingham has told friends that he’s happy with the studio, and that “they get it”. We expect more details will be revealed over the weekend.
Extremely puzzling
By John Walker on July 1st, 2011.
Telltale’s Puzzle Agent 2 came out yesterday for ten bucks. The original did not please our puzzling eye, so how does its sequel fare? I’ve finished it, so you can find out wot I think.
More games than you can look at (which is three)
By John Walker on June 9th, 2011.
Will there be a #2? I’ve no idea. But for now here’s a collection of some games I saw at E3 2011 and the accompanying thoughts. Below you can find The Old Republic, Telltale’s latest crop, and Codies’ F1 2011.
