Dead At The Gates Redux: The Walking Dead: Season 2

Imagine, if you will, that you're trapped in a dungeon somewhere.  Sand covers the floor, strange liquid drips from various areas, and you're never able to get a decent night's sleep.  Every now and again a figure shows up with bread crusts for food.  He drops them on the ground and waits for you to crawl forward to cram them into your mouth, but the moment your fingers get close, he brings his boot heel down and crushes them into the sand, breaking them apart into mere dust.  And if you try to be aggressive when you grab the bread, you just wind up with broken fingers.

Then, each time, the figure kneels down and lifts your chin up.  He looks you over, observes the bloodshot eyes, the sunken cheeks, and the cracked lips you have.  He smiles kindly for a moment, and asks, "I'm sorry...have I upset you?  Here, let me go get you some bread."

The cycle continues.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the experience playing The Walking Dead: Season 2.

The only thing more emotionally draining than that experience is the fact that behind you in the cell is an open door that leads to freedom.  All you have to do is take it.  But you won't.  Because, somehow, you've convinced yourself that it's not as bleak as it appears, and that if you can just last a bit longer, that one piece of bread you get will be worth it in the end.

Phantom of Inferno

Years ago, I was in a Suncoast Motion Picture Company store (remember those?) and I stumbled upon a DVD.  I was neck deep in my fixation with animation from Japan, and I saw mention of a game company that made, essentially, "visual novels" where you could make decisions in a game, and then see where the story went.

I knew that such games existed, and for the most part, they were all pretty terrible.  There were a few great ones, though.  But considering I knew that Japan was pretty crazy for interactive stories (even if most of them were little more than "choose your own porn adventure") but this looked different.  For one thing, it had people holding guns on the cover.

Plus, it was in the clearance bin.  I pretty much threw some money at the register and took this new prize home.

Scribblenauts Unmasked

The nice thing about the Scribblenauts series is you can go into it fully knowing what to expect if you've played any of the games before.  You play a child blessed with a magic notebook that lets him summon anything he can write down, and you use it (typically) to gather stars from maps and beat challenges.

However, when you incorporate the DC Universe into it, things get a bit crazy.

The Room (not that one)

The Room might possibly be the most infamous terrible movie of all time.  The story, acting, and even the sets seem completely absurd to the point you're surprised that even the guy who painted the walls of the set didn't turn around at one point and say "look, guys, this is *&@# stupid."

This, however, is not about that.

This is about a remarkably atmospheric little puzzle game by the same name that, when you get down to it, might be one of the better video games I'll play this year.

Review: Bioshock Infinite

The original Bioshock was (and still is) one of my favorite video games of all time (I was going to include it in a series called "Erik's Favorite Things" that's coming up, but I guess that's shot now).  I loved the setting, I loved the story, I loved the surprise twist, I loved everything about it...while I was playing it.  Looking back now, I know it wasn't a perfect game.  I mean, it had a few issues.

Like the fact I could get punched by a Big Daddy when it was on the other side of a wall (which is fine, but I expect the wall to fall down afterward).  The first Big Daddy you meet in the game, I found a room you have to crawl into to be safe, and I'd just wait for him to partially phase through the wall trying to get me and shoot him then, just out of reach.

Or there was the fact I'd get shot by a machine gun turret, but all of the bad guys between me and it were somehow able to phase through the bullets.  Or there was the fact that I'd get stuck while running away from things because I didn't realize there was a single, lone half-brick on the ground in front of me, and I had to step backwards because I couldn't go to the side once I hit it, either.

But it was a great game.  Bioshock 2...I enjoyed, but not as much.  So when another new Bioshock game was announced, I got excited, but I tried to maintain a logical sense of "just because you want it to be good doesn't mean it will be good."

Then I saw the first trailer and I was lost.  I was counting down days.  I tried to play it cool, but inside I was picking apart details from every screenshot, every trailer, and every interview.  So, was it good?  Let's find out.

Review: Tomb Raider

I've always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with Lara Croft.  Actually, considering I was sixteen when the first game came out, it was a bit more of a lust/hate relationship.  One the one hand, I wasn't a big fan of the gameplay or the visual style of the first game.  I had difficulty with blind jumps from platform to platform, I wasn't able to shoot a T-Rex if it sat on me, and my then-unfamiliarity with 3D level design had me standing directly under platforms I had to jump to wondering where I was supposed to go.  I wasn't even that interested in the character and her freaky polygon chest.

On the other hand, in 1997 the first Tomb Raider comic book came out from Top Cow publications, featuring a crossover with another character I had little to no interest in, Witchblade.  Two characters I cared nothing about in a comic? What could possibly grab my attention?

Erik Reviews My Little Pony: The Mobile Game

I am extremely different from a lot of other people in how I view media.  However, I wasn't always.

There was a time, when I was younger, that the smallest change to a television series, movie franchise, or even a book storyline would infuriate me.  I took it extremely hard the first time Hulk Hogan lost to the Undertaker.  It wasn't that I was a big fan of wrestling (I watched sometimes with my father, and knew the characters) so much as I simply knew that Hulk Hogan was, at the time, the "ultimate good guy" and that the good guys were supposed to win.

I stopped watching Gargoyles when it became The Goliath Chronicles because, as far as I was concerned, the series was over and the major plots were wrapped up.  I stopped watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers for a while when they replaced three of the cast members (I peeked back now and again, but the magic was gone).  It took me a while to get over the fact when Daphne Maxwell Reid replaced Janet Hubert-Whitten as Will Smith's mother in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

And don't get me started on the Spider-Clone, Batman's back, or Superman and Doomsday.

...and Bendis.  Don't get me started on Bendis.

Where was I?  Oh, right.  Nerdrage.

In recent years, I've realized that it simply isn't worth getting worked up over changes to things I enjoy.  It doesn't devalue the stories I already read or the episodes I already watched.  I don't own the franchise or product, and if I'm unhappy with it, I simply won't spend money on it.  While I might be disappointed in the direction something goes (or retroactive changes, *cough*thankyouGeorgeLucas*cough*), nothing really makes me go "well screw THAT, then."  I've simply learned to be more wary and leery before getting too excited about new things.

Now, when I read that there was a My Little Pony game for Android and Apple products, and it was free to play, I thought "hey, that would make an interesting blog post."  And then I looked at the reviews, and I saw a lot of the same things over and over again.

"This has nothing to do with the series!"

"This doesn't follow the storyline at all!"

"I'm so disappointed that this wasn't the game I expected it to be!"

...people, let me talk to you about the 80s and the 90s.

In those decades, video game manufacturers didn't care if what they were designing was faithful to the original content as long as they could make a dollar.  Now, I'll admit the storyline of the My Little Pony game does seem to be radically different from the show, but let's look at what's different.

In the series, the villainous character Nightmare Moon is defeated, gives up her evil ways, and becomes a kind, caring character trying to adapt to life again after being trapped in the moon for a thousand years.

In the game, Twilight Sparkle returns to Ponyville to find it gone, Nightmare Moon is back, and Twilight has to not only rebuild Ponyville, but also bring back its inhabitants while slowly reclaiming the land from eternal night.

...okay, yeah, pretty big difference.

But you know what?  It's still better than what I had to deal with.  At least in the My Little Pony game, every character is still a pony.  There was the 1987 Star Wars game where you fought Darth Vader at the end of every level (or sometimes a bone pterodactyl or a giant shark).  Except it wasn't Darth Vader.  It was Scorpion Vader.  And he turned into a giant scorpion.

I can't make that up.

Hey, how about a video game based off a comedy movie?  I mean, surely you could tell an interesting game based on, say, The Blues Brothers.

Yeah, remember that time in the movie when the Blues Brothers had to fight guys in warehouses with bottomless pits?  Or collect records to earn points?  Or were being attacked by birds while standing on trees at cloud level?

But maybe they learned their lesson and wouldn't do something like that to another musical-based comedy surrounding getting a giant show together, right?

Yeah, they would.  Enjoy fighting sentient evil musical instruments, folks.

 Seriously.  Evil sentient bagpipes.  Remember that from the movie?

So instead of complaining about what My Little Pony isn't, let's look at what it is.

Y'know, the characters at least look accurate.  That's a plus in my book.

 Having never played any of the Farmville-style games, I can't comment to how much this game might or might not rip off their styles.  What I can explain is that you start out with Twilight Sparkle and Spike and an empty grassy map.  You have to spend money to rebuild Ponyville, then assign tasks to the ponies who come back to earn more money, complete "missions", and earn special points to get rid of parasprites that occasionally infest an area.

Now, this isn't an overly complex game.  The most kind of "game play" it involves is either flicking your finger on the screen to toss a ball to a pony who bounces it back or making a pony run from one side of the screen to the other to catch falling apples.

Characters do "level up" which lets you assign them to bigger tasks, which brings in more money.  All in all, it's pretty basic, right?

Man, somebody's got a ton of ball-bouncing to do.

There's also a "minigame" where you can earn special items or even exclusive characters by spending crystals, and I'm rather proud to say I managed to earn "Dr. Whooves" (yes, Dr. Who fans, there is a time lord pony, it appears, but I'll discuss him later) as part of my crew.  I'm still holding out hope for Trixie, though.  However, it would likely take a lot of time to get the crystals you need to play the game enough to earn all those characters, but hey, you can always buy more!

And that's the other major complaint I read in the reviews:

"How dare they make me spend money to get past a certain point in the game without it taking a long time!"

People, the game is free.  If they don't earn some kind of profit, how do you expect them to make more games?  Do I think microtransactions are a slippery slope if you have difficulty with self control?  Of course.  But nobody's holding a gun to your head making you play this game.  And if you enjoy it, what's wrong with spending ten dollars as a "thank you" for providing something that gives you enjoyment?  The Angry Birds trilogy came out for major systems, and that was $40.  If you can't be willing to spend half that on a game that seems to be pretty open ended so far, then I think you might have a real destructive sense of self-entitlement.


Now, it's no Mass Effect or anything, I'll concede, and the graphics can be a little weird when a pony turns its head sideways, but I figure that's a graphics engine limitation.  Based on the videos I've seen, it appears they got the original voice cast for the main characters to reprise their roles for the game, and that's more than most modern game companies will do (fun fact: For the video game adaptation of Disney's Dinosaur, they couldn't get Della Reese to reprise her role, so they hired Billy West to do it.  You know him as Fry on Futurama.)

The game also has a few bugs.  After browsing through a few reviews (and one brief and slightly terrifying sojourn into the /mlp/ board on 4chan) I was able to connect to a small network of people to send gifts back and forth.  However, if I try to do more than one, the program tends to crash.  I expect people are working on that, and it appears to be a new issue, so it's not rage-inducing yet.

So, overall, the game is pretty enjoyable.  I feel a bit ashamed that it took me four days to figure out how to get big points in the ball-tossing game, and my lack of a big social network who might also play this game forced me to skip a few missions that involve having "friends" to trade things with (for those who are interested, I'm SkyScavenger in Gameloft Live).  I'll probably keep it on my own mobile device as a way to kill time when I'm bored.