Are there any standout titles when it comes to Zombies?

If you are like me you might have noticed that over the last five or more years there has been an increase in the amount of content across all forms of media when it comes to Zombies. This is fine with me even though I am not a massive fan of the genre but there has been one stand out piece that everyone has been talking about for the last three years and that is The Walking Dead.

Today I will be looking at the point and click adventure of The Walking Dead the video game that was released last year by Telltale Games but before we get into the game itself let me mention that The Walking Dead started off as a graphic novel that was created by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard back in 2003. Then in 2010 AMC then released a television adoption of the comic book which from what I have read and hear has been met with very high praises.

With all this praise it was only going to be a matter of time before someone decided to make a video game out of it and nine times out of ten that video game is going to be nothing like the show that it was created from but lucky for us Telltale Games decided that they would make a game based on The Walking Dead but as a point and click adventure.

Now I have never seen or read anything to do with The Walking Dead but from all the praise that the show and the game have received I knew that I would have to have a look at it at some point, lucky for me all five chapters went on sale back in March so I decide then that I would pick it up but have only just finished playing the game.

I should point out that from this point onwards there could be a chance of spoilers, so you have been warned.

Now as I said moments ago I went into the game completely blind and I had no knowledge of what I was getting myself into but that didn’t really matter because the game starts just as the Zombie outbreak happens. This to me was a good way to start the story because it allows for those that are new to the series to understand what is going on and enables you to experience what the characters are experiences as they learn something new about their surroundings.

Now without giving too much away for those that haven’t played the game yet, this is a story about a group of characters trying to survive the aftermath of the Zombie apocalypse, at the same time you will be playing as Lee Everett and making choice that will effect the group and Clementine who you find at the start of the game and have taken it upon yourself to protect.

As I have just mentioned this game allows you to make choice that can be carried over from one episode of the game to the next. Now if you have read any of my Mass Effect blogs that I released back in March you will know that I enjoy playing games and watching Television shows that show you the consequences of your actions. In this game these choice you make may not appear till later in the game which is good because you will never know on your first play through when these choice will come back to haunt you.

The way in which the game plays also is very good for a game that is based on a point and click adventure, what I mean by this is the fact the game makes you feel like you are in the games world looks for items that will enable you to survive.

The last part of the game that I enjoy was the way in which the characters develop throughout the game, as the game goes fewer on it throws in events were you have to make hard decision and because of these decision you as a character and those around you change as the story goes on.

So with a game that has been praised so much what were the problems that I had with this game, well one of biggest problems that I encountered was with the conversation options. The reason for the problem was the fact that it would give you up to four options when you are having a conversation with someone along with a time limit in which to give one of the four responses to them. Now I will admit that I am not one of the fastest readers and because of this I sometimes didn’t get the time to read all the options that where present to me and because of this sometimes I didn’t chose anything which just left my character saying nothing.

The next two problems I had with the game was to do with the story itself, I am not saying that the story was bad because to me it was very good but there were parts were I knew what was going to happen before it happened and that wasn’t because I had read up what was going to happen. Examples of this would be when you leave the motel in episode 3 and arrive at the train that is blocking the road, another one for me was also at the end of the fourth episode where you see Clementine’s hat next to a dumpster.

This also leads me into the final problem with the story, you are given the choice to go it alone to save Clementine which was what I decided but before I could go I had to have a chat with everyone were they would tell me if they are coming with me or not and even then when the final chapter gets started you end up coming back to the group that you left in chapter four to find Clementine.

Apart from very long conversation sections of the game and the small grips with the story the game as a whole was brilliant and because of that I now have an interested in The Walking Dead. If you are a fan of the show and haven’t played the game yet I would recommend you do so and if you are a gamer that likes a good story or a good game in general then I would recommend that you go and play this game right now.

Until Next Time.

Can’t believe it has changed so much

For those that have been following or reading my blog’s on a weekly basic I would like to apologise for the lack of blog’s that I created last month, I original had five blog’s planed for the month but in the end I was only able to create three of which one of them was crap in my opinion. So to start this week’s blog I am going to give you a bit of a history lesson which will lead up to my views on how this May’s London Comic Con went for me.

I have been going to the London Comic Con since all the way back in 2004 when I first discovered this exhibition with a friend of mine, back then exhibition was completely different to how it is today due to the fact that back then it mainly stuck to film, television and comic book and because of this the show didn’t really get any bigger. If anything the number of people that where attending the show was starting to decreasing up until 2005 when the show began to include parts of Japanese culture like Anime and Manga and each year since this inclusion the show has gotten bigger and better.

With the show getting bigger and better the number of people that were attending the show was also going up and by the last time that I went which was back in 2010 you could see that this show was something that people wanted to go to.

Now after being away from the exhibition for over three years I was surprised to see how much the exhibition had increased in size, a good example of this would be back in 2010 there was at least a handful of illustrators but this year there was some were in the region of about forty, which just goes to show how much bigger the exhibition has become over the past three years.

There were two things that caught me off guard while I was at this year’s exhibition and one of those was just how busy the show had gotten, a good example of this would be the fact that there were places in the show room on the Saturday were we were packed in like sardines. I am not saying this is a bad think at all it because if anything it just showed how many more people were interested in the show than the last time I was here.

The other part that caught me off guard was now much the Anime and Manga scene had changed over the last three years. When I look back at 2010 we had not long lost ADV films but we still had Beez Entertainment along with Revelations films and the two biggest Anime distributors in the UK, Manga entertainment and MVM. It wasn’t until I got the exhibition and had spend the best part of Saturday trying to find where Beez Entrainment and Revelations films had gone. When I couldn’t find them and after I had gone home that night I began to do a bit of research to find out what had happened to them. It wasn’t long until I discovered that both companies had ever gone under or had handed their licensers over to another company.

If this weekend had taught me anything, it was the fact how much a hobby like this can change so much when you haven’t been following it for some time.

If there was one question that needed to be answered after this year’s May’s MCM London Comic Con it would be did I enjoy myself at the exhibition? The answer to that question is yes I did and I look forward to what October’s Comic Con has in store for me along with what this year’s London Film and Comic Con is going to be like July.

Until Next Time.

If it was only possible

This week marks the conclusion of my Mass Effect March and yes I know that it is April but I had five topics planned for the five Fridays of March but I only started releasing content from 8^th of March, so you could say that the month ends on the 8^th April but enough of my babbling on, let’s get on with this week’s topic.

For those that have been following the Mass Effect series you would have know that at the beginning of last month Bioware released the last pieces of Downloadable Content (DLC) for the series which also means that the series has now come to some kind of an end for the time being. At the same time you might have also noticed that within my blogs I have pointed out that I haven’t yet played any of the new Mass Effect 3 DLC that has been released since the first pack (From Ashes DLC). The reasoning behind this is because I like to play the game as a whole and if I know that there was still going to be DLC released later down the line then I would wait until it has all been released before playing it all.

The way in which this will work is that I will go thought each one on of the DLC packs in the order that they were released and give them a brief overview of what the pack is about while trying not to spoil it too much (So there could be spoilers for those that haven’t played the DLC yet). After that I will then tell you what I thought about the pack and then move on to the question that always comes up with any DLC, should the pack be DLC or if it should have been on the disk when it was released.

First up we have the Leviathan DLC which puts us on a mission to find out as much as we can about the history of the Reapers. This DLC is related to the main story of Mass Effect 3 and has been pulled of very well due to the fact that it answers a lot of the questions that you may have had at the end of Mass Effect 3. The only drawback I had with this DLC pack was the fact that a lot of what I believed to be correct was correct but at the same time it took away some of what I believed to be true too as well but at the end of the day we now know all most all of the answers to the end now. For if this should have been DLC or on the disk to begin with I would have to say this should have been on the disk when the game was released due to the fact that this piece of DLC is part of the main story of Mass Effect and because of that this should have been included on the disk and not sold as DLC.

Next up on the chopping board is the Omega DLC, this piece of DLC covers what happens to Omega between Mass Effect 2 and 3 and was something that was set up and played out within the novels and graphic novels of the series. The main focus of this DLC Pack is to help Aria T’Loak get back her station that was taken from her by Cerberus, did I enjoy this DLC pack the answer to that question is a mixture of both yes and no. The reason for my answer is when you play Mass Effect 3 before the DLC came out there was a mission in which you needed to get all three factions on Aria’s side so if you did that you knew that you would have to take back Omega but after completing that mission nothing else happened, so you kind of knew this was coming. The reason that I liked this DLC is because it was nice to return to some of the areas that you spend a large amount of your time in, in the second game and plus it also good to see how far both sides were willing to go to keep or get back the  station. When it comes to the question if this should have been DLC or on the disk when the game was first released my answer would be that this should have been DLC from the beginning and that includes the faction mission that was in the main game. The reason for this is because this story was set up in novels and graphic novels and because of this it should have been treated as an add-on to begin with.

The final and last piece of DLC that has been released is called the Citadel, in short this DLC is made up of two parts, the first parts has you  trying to stop a terrorist organisation from trying to kill and the second part is a massive get together with everyone. When it comes to saying how good this DLC pack is I just can’t create a sentence that would give it any justice so I will break it down into just words. It is changeling, comical, Interesting, referential, emotional and a love letter from the creators that I enjoyed playing every minute of. Should this have been DLC or been released on the disk, my answer would have to be DLC and that is because it doesn’t add anything to the story and second it is a laugh that stays within character that was needed for a game that spends a lot of time being serious and emotional.

To bring this Mass Effect March to a close my final thoughts are more along the lines of a thank you, a recommendation and a request. First of all I would like to thank those that have taken the time to read everything that I written down in the last five weeks along with thanking everyone at Bioware for creating sure a great piece of art that I and so many others have been able to enjoy. I would also like to recommend to anyone that hasn’t played or read any form of the series to go and do so and the last thing that I would like to ask even though I know that it may be impossible to do and that is to create a novelisation of all three games. I know that a lot of people would disagree with this at first but to have a story as good as this and not in a novelisation would be a crime, plus if it was you would then be able to find out what the correct story path would be and you could take it away from the television if you wanted to carry on the story. As I said this would be impossible but you never know it could happen in about ten years or so but who knows.

Thank you again and until next time.

Why a month of content?

If you have been following me on Twitter then you might have seen a tweet from me talking about Mass Effect March, you might also be asking yourselves what am I on about and if you do then you might be asking yourself why am, I making a whole month of content for just one game series. Well the reasons why I wanted to spend the whole month talking about this series is one, that I want others to know how I got into the series and why I like the series along with everything that has happened over the last year, I thought that I would at least try and shrine a positive light back on the series.

When the series was first released I was still at that point in my life where I wouldn’t play games, read books or listen to music that were popular and a good example of this would be when my brother (who had moved away to go university) came down for the weekend, we as a family went out for the day and he decided that he wanted to visit our local GAME store. While we were in the store I remember him talking about how much he wanted to play Mass Effect and because of his statement and the way I was back then I decided to stay well away from the series.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2009 when I was out shopping with one of my ex-girlfriend that we both decided to stumble into a GAME store and while looking around the box art for Mass Effect jumped out at me and to make things even better it was also on offer. (At this point in my life I had grown out of the phase that I was in back when I first heard about Mass Effect). At that moment in time I remembered what my brother had said a few years back about it, so I decided to pick it up but that didn’t mean that I could played it right away. Oh-no because not long after picking up the game, me and my ex-girlfriend broke up and in the process I had to move back to my parents house and because of all this I completely forgot about the game until April 2010.

When April of 2010 arrived I had the unforeseen problem of my Laptop dying on me and because of this I knew that I need to go out and buy a new one. While out shopping for my new laptop I discovered that the shop that I was buying my laptop from was also selling Mass Effect 2 on the cheap so without knowing what the first game was like I decided that I would pick the it up. I will admit that I did have a feeling that if there was a second game in the series out on the market then it could only mean that the first one was a success.

May 2010 and throughout the summer of 2010 was a bad time for me but I also took that moment in time to at least give Mass Effect a try in a hopes that I could at least loss myself in a story, setting or place that wasn’t my own at the time. Normally if I wanted to do this I would go and play a Tales of Series game (another RPG) or watch a television programmer but I just wasn’t in the mood for either of them. Within just a few hours of booting up the game I was completely lost in the game and its story and because of this I felt like I was the main character within the series and that I was the one making the choices throughout the game.

Once I had completed the first game and because I knew that I had the second one I decided to get started and right away everything that had drawn me in from the first game was there in the second one but this time on a big and more powerful setting.

All I could do after completing the two games was to go back and play them again but it wasn’t until I was with my current girlfriend that she informed me that there were other stories set within the series in books and graphic novels. With this new information I was really pumped and since that day I have done everything that I can to get my hands on any and all things Mass Effect.

Now after this little bit of story time you might be asking yourself why am I telling you my life story about how I got into the series, well the answer to that is very simple, I wanted to make sure that everyone knew that I was late to the party and to also give you an understand that at the time I was also using the story as a way to get away from what was a dark time in my life.

Now the one thing that I will talk about quickly is that at the time I was looking for something that was set within a science fiction background and while going through the series I noticed that this series also closely resembles television show that I was drew too when I was younger and that was Babylon 5. The reason that I make this connection is because after playing the game once you can see that some of the idea that are in Babylon 5 are also within the Mass Effect series, examples that I would use are the character development and that you as a person have the ability to change the events that are happening right now. I will also be honest and say that Babylon 5 does do it on a much better scale than Mass Effect, but this isn’t the reason we are here.

As I said moments ago some of the reason that I really enjoyed the series as a whole is that you get to see some of your choices play out throughout the series along with the relationships that you have created. What I am mean here is that like with all RPG you are given choices so that you can change the story but at the same time the story will still follow the path that was laid out for it but those character around you will react to your choices differently while at the same time seeing parts of yourself within each character and this is what makes good characters. Good characters are those that you can in some form relate to them while at the same time care for them and worry what could happen to them.

One thing that does sometimes get over looked when playing a game or watching other types of mediums is the music, music is also a very important part within these mediums and if you are unable to get the music tone right for the scene then it could completely change or destroy what is going to happen next and Mass Effect series does make good us of its own music.

The last thing I will look at before concluding this blog is the story for the whole series which includes all the novels, graphic novels, games and DLC (this does not include any DLC after the From Ashes DLC) that I have been able to experiences over the years. What I mean here is that the series has been so well written that it does give you the ability to go back and revisit it again and again, just like some of your favourite films or television shows.

I would also like to take this moment to thank everyone that help create such a great series that we can all go back to again and again and that I do hope to see more of these kind of series in the future.

Until Next Time.