Adventure Gamers - Forums

Don’t get it wrong, the games are good, but they have severe flaws or questionable or controversial points.

1. The biggest this website should respect: They are extremely easy. You can literally play everything one handed and drunk to the boot. There is absolutely no challenge, especially intellectual challenge.

2. The last episode (that got 5) is very controversial on whether it had a good story or at least ending to begin with. Yes, realism is ok and needing happy endings is sometimes excessive but in this case it went too far to the point of being brutally depressing. At the end of the day you play a game to have fun. It didn’t even add that much to the story informationally since if they wanted to kill them all they could have done it earlier since we didn’t learn that much about them aditionally in the last episode anyway.
I think they were influenced by the shallow format of comic books. Since it doesn’t have the good graphics, interactivity, audio and voice overs of a game, it may work better there to be brutally depressing. In this format though it was just sad.

3. Several aspects that are not perfect. They are often technical or minor but when one gives a 100% rating, they have better to be good. e.g. controls are very limited, making a large part of the story completely scripted and linear, even if there are some relatively minor choices. The graphics are good but not perfect, etc.

i havnt played through yet (so not reading most of this post), but dont forget L.A. noire got a 5/5 here too, also a hybrid-ish game with very low difficulty (and a game i enjoyed very much).

Here’s a revelation: people like easy games Some people, anyway - that’s one thing I’ve learned since coming to this place. I personally like a good challenge, but I don’t think that personal preference should stop someone else giving a game a 5/5. It’s the end experience that matters.

And it’s not like I can’t disagree with it. I disagree with a lot of AG’s reviews. I haven’t read the Walking Dead review yet but if you like challenging puzzles, you only have to read a few paragraphs to know it’s not for you (assuming it mentions the quick-time events - and it would be rather negligent not to).

To your points:

1. The Walking Dead isn’t really an adventure game, so expecting it to have challenging puzzles is maybe the wrong way of looking at it. The puzzles are obviously secondary to character development and player choice. Whether you like that mix or not will obviously differ from person to person, but I thought they hit the nail on the head.

2. A “happier” ending, one with more closure, would have been a cop-out. It was always clear that you were preparing Clem for life without Lee. Maybe it was Christa and Omid in the background, maybe it wasn’t—the ambiguity represents the uncertainty of Clem’s future.

3. A 5/5 doesn’t mean the game’s absolutely perfect.

I pointed out similar problems in TWD thread, but as Oscar said, people like
guided experiences. LAnoire had more challenge and gameplay than Heavyrain and TWD
combined just that game never punishes you and you can skip the action sequences. But investigation parts and interrogations were nailed with finesse, with some heavy clue hunting and exploration. Where in TWD you are playing cutscene by QTE or watching it
most of the time. Heck even puzzles are guided, “Hey i need to open this” , camera pans to location where you will find the only object lol. Also the invisible walls and fixed camera just makes it easier to go from one location to other and click everything on that path to solve any problem. Its not accurate to compare it with game like LAnoire which offers big locations with rotatable camera to explore not to mention chases, gunfights etc.

TWD plays itself.

Two points, to your points.

1. I also dislike extremely hard games. e.g. I prefer the difficulty of new Sam and Max from the difficulty of old Sam and Max [edit: even if new Sam and Max went slightly beyond what I’d prefer in simplicity, it didn’t go that far]. Besides, most of the time it wasn’t exactly difficulty back in those days, but rather complexity. Yes, if a room has 653 objects and you can’t even scan for them easily, you can make it “hard” even if you’re looking for 1+1=2.

But that was way beyond that, it was practically a playback with some alternatives, largely.

2. Even if we assume that a majority of non adventure gamers want extremely easy games (i.e. almost playbacks), this is supposed to be adventuregamers.com.

And no, just because someone liked a Playback of an interactive Walking Dead episode doesn’t make him a regular of adventure gaming.

I was around in the nineties and those movie games never became the zeitgeist of adventure gaming. They were briefly popular but never defined even briefly the genre in whole.

Besides, the late 90s and 00s were never that big in adventure gaming. There were some rare sparks of brilliance but those were never mere interactive movies.

What remained were the Longest Journey, The Syberias, the late Gabriel Knights and others that were never mere interactive movies.

Nobody remembers the movie-games as much, in the adventure games at least. I suspect future gamers of the genre will appreciate this series even less than I do right now. And I did enjoy it. But the more I think about it, the less I think it defines the genre and the less I think it has quality if one sees them from the perspective of adventure gaming or maybe even gaming in whole.

diego - 06 December 2012 05:28 AM

There’re adventure games, and there’re interactive movies, which’re like an offspring to adventure games, or a subgenre. If you haven’t been around in the the 90s, there’re games like Star Trek: Borg and Klingon, Fox Hunt and Tender Loving Care. Then, game producers realized you don’t need real actors for the job, and made Fahreinheit.

The Walking Dead is an interactive movie. It’s a prime example of what an interactive movie is. Telltale played on the edge for years, but with TWD (and Jurassic Park, previously) they made a full-fledged interactive movie.

So, my guess is that 5/5 is for the job The Walking Dead does in the interactive movie area.

We’ve got “sub-columns” for things that aren’t quite adventure games - the casual games column, Puzzling (mis)adventures, monthly freeware features.

Maybe interactive movies should be given the same thing instead of fully-fledged reviews with ratings. I agree there’s a gap between adventures and interactive movies, and it’s not a small one. That’s if we’re talking about pure interactive movies like Star Trek: Borg. I haven’t played enough of TWD to know if it’s one of those. Jurassic Park definitely was.

I do feel there should be some challenge to call it an adventure game, and that challenge shouldn’t be simply mashing buttons when you’re told to.

We judge games based on the effectiveness of what they’re trying to accomplish, not on some one-size-fits-all idealist view of what every adventure game should be.

The Walking Dead is more than an “interactive movie”, but yes, it’s an extremely easy adventure game. So what? The question is not “would more adventure gamers like it if it had harder puzzles?” but “would harder puzzles actually benefit the game’s character- and story-driven focus?”  Would jamming a whole bunch of interactive dialogue and major plot developments into the Myst games make them better? No, because that’s not the type of experience those games offer.  Same with TWD (though in reverse, of course).

Would we want all adventure games to be this easy, this streamlined? Of course not. But all games won’t be, so that’s irrelevant. We celebrate the genre’s diversity, not insist that the games all end up feeling exactly the same with different puzzles and stories. 

As for the 5/5, obviously you have a much different opinion on the quality of the story, so you’ll never be satisfied with the explanation, but to the reviewer it was a deeply emotional and very personal experience - these games most definitely do NOT “play themselves”, as that would defeat the entire point of making it a player-driven journey. The fact that it left a lasting impression that far exceeds just about any other (if not every other) adventure game ever made makes it far more deserving of top marks than randomly making the puzzles harder.

For the record, I personally wouldn’t have scored it that high myself either, but I have no problem seeing where Reece was coming from.

That will sound rude but it’s basic math that 5/5 = 100% = perfection.

If you have difficulty seeing that then I suggest to use a 10 out 10 system or something similar because at least to me, that I have some experience in science, 5 out 5 means total perfection when I see it.

Hence, to me, hearing “5/5 doesn’t mean perfect” is quite bizzare.

Call it 4.5/5 or 9.5/10 or 99%/100% if you don’t want to call it non-perfect. When you call it 100% you call it perfect end of story.

thinker - 06 December 2012 02:26 PM

That will sound rude but it’s basic math that 5/5 = 100% = perfection.

If you have difficulty seeing that then I suggest to use a 10 out 10 system or something similar because at least to me, that I have some experience in science, 5 out 5 means total perfection when I see it.

Hence, to me, hearing “5/5 doesn’t mean perfect” is quite bizzare.

Call it 4.5/5 or 9.5/10 or 99%/100% if you don’t want to call it non-perfect. When you call it 100% you call it perfect end of story.

There are no perfect games. So I take 5/5 to mean “as close to perfect as we can reasonably get to”.

Also, how fine should a grading scheme be? Say we go for a percentage scale as you suggest. How do you grade something that is objectively, say, better than 99% but worse than 100%? It’s not perfect according to your standards but no reasonable person can expect to have an infinitely divisible scale… (“This game got a score of one quarter of pi out of a maximum of one.”)

P.S. It did sound rude actually (even if it wasn’t addressed at me).

thinker - 06 December 2012 02:26 PM

That will sound rude and pompous not to mention idiotic but it’s basic math that 5/5 = 100% = perfection.

Fixed.