The Walking Dead

I am undeniably a year or two late to the party on this one. I'm rather ashamed to say, that when the Walking Dead game first came about, I viewed it as a meagre attempt to cash in on the success of the television adaptation. Adding further to my disinterest, was the fact that the characters are not those followed in the television version, but instead entirely new ones. I was convinced that I didn't have any room in my heart for these new characters. Well, they sure as hell forced me to make some room.

My partner and I have a date night once a week. The purpose of which being that we spend some time together in the same room, usually playing a game. Of course we are usually in the same room together anyway, but each doing our own stuff. The Walking Dead is not a two player game, but I got some say in the decisions that were made for Lee.

We played the game on my partner's PC, but with a plugged in PlayStation 3 controller. Although the controller was recognised, the buttons on the screen displayed as XBOX buttons, which led to a lot of panic and confusion when we had to hit the non-existent "A" rapidly to avoid death.
Sometimes the controller decided that an entirely different action was taken to the one that was wanted, but it usually didn't work out too badly.

The Walking Dead is affected by the choices you make as a player. The things you decide to do, and the things you decide to say, affect the options you are left with from that point on, and how people will treat you. Specifically, whether people will be keen to side with you or take you with them if the current arrangement goes to shit.

Personally, we always tried to go for the more amicable and diplomatic-sounding of the dialogue choices, perhaps due to my fear of offending even fictional people. Sometimes, being neutral can still rub characters the wrong way.
You have to strike a difficult balance of being nice to everyone, awful as they may be, in order to secure your survival. But coming first, of course, is Clementine.

Your character, Lee, is being taken to prison in a police car after being convicted of murder. Doesn't sound much like a guy you'll warm to, but nonetheless. The car winds up crashing, because zombies are everywhere. He finds his way to a nearby house where he meets Clementine, a little girl all on her own, who he of course has to take with him. And so the adventure begins.

The Walking Dead is full of a lot of death and risk and panic. You may wind up somewhere horrible, but having made a different decision earlier may have put you in a situation just as bad. The game has a way of making you second guess yourself, and wonder if so-and-so's death would have been prevented if you didn't screw-up somehow. But it's brilliant.

It's a fairly riveting game that I couldn't wait to have another session of. It took my partner and I roughly two or three sessions to get through an episode, and there are five of them in season one in total. Of course, season two is now out, but he isn't keen to start that for a while after all the stress of the first.

[Spoiler alert]

Ōkami HD

I reviewed Ōkami a couple of years ago. My partner downloaded the HD release time ago, but shamefully, I have only just gotten to playing it.

The "HD" in the title implies that the graphics are vastly improved from those of the original game. The imagery in the pre-menu intro is negligibly improved as it is probably the same video rehashed, but there are some differences in the introduction once you've started a game, with improvements in the text and images, and of the transitions between them.

Originally, the non-language-specific narration voice had a wondrous quality to it. This time around, it's rather annoying. This is perhaps because the opening scene has been notably extended. The story portrayed has been padded out, to the point of ridiculousness. It may genuinely have taken me fifteen minutes to get to a part where I was in control of Amaterasu.
There are some parts of the gameplay that allow you to make screen text come up faster by tapping the X button; unfortunately this is not the case for the introduction, and regardless of how fast you can read, you just have to sit there and wait.

My dog Freya becomes enamoured with the screen.