JohnnyBGamer

The Walking Dead: Episodes 1 and 2 Impressions

Last night my wife left me. Well she left me to go to a bachelorette party, I should say. Soon after my son went to bed, I loaded up Telltale Games The Walking Dead: Episode 1 on the PS3. Thinking my wife would be gone for a few hours, I thought that I could at least finish up Episode One – A New Day (I had played for at least an hour a week ago). Little did I know that I would spend the next three hours deeply engrossed in a zombie-filled horror.

I want to say something upfront about this series. Unlike most M-rated games, The Walking Dead earns its rating almost immediately. Beyond the bloody and sometimes lingering gore-filled camera shots, the explicit language used in the game is intense. I don’t think I’ve ever played a video game that uses the f-word with such frequency as The Walking Dead does. This is about as far from the Mario universe as you can possibly get. Just a word of warning.

Living in the chaos of a decimating virus outbreak is not dream of mine. Personal survival quickly becomes the rule of the day; personal survival at the cost of others lives. The Walking Dead: Episode 1 opens with a man named Lee being transported in the back of a police cruiser. Whether he is guilty of whatever it is he has done, the game leaves that up to your imagination. All you know is that something is going horribly wrong in the City of Atlanta. A zombie, standing in the middle of the highway, leads to the police cruiser crashing. The story of Lee’s survival has just begun.

What makes The Walking Dead so compelling is its storyline. The game makes you actually care about different characters. Soon after the car accident, Lee meets up with a little girl named Clementine. This is where the game sucked me in. Lee suddenly has someone that is watching his every move, an innocent. Knowing Clementine is watching me, Lee, makes me make decisions differently. I want to shield her from the carnage. After playing Episode 2 – Starved For Help, I’ve learned that shielding her is often impossible. There is evil in this world, evil that knows no bounds.

I haven’t been this captivated by a game in a long time. The characters, voice acting, and storyline all come together to create a group of people I care about. Deaths come about as shocking. Choices I’ve made I’ve later regretted and have reaped the consequences of. The Walking Dead represents interactive drama at its best. I just wish they’d tone down the language.

Compass

I rolled out of bed this morning and hit the floor. Time to stretch. As I groggily willed my body to move this way and that, I scrolled through my twitter feed. It was then that I noticed that there had been another shooting in Colorado.

The details of this mass theater shooting have been slowly trickling in all day. The shooter was an educated man, studying for a P.h.D. in neuroscience. The very image that simple fact conjures is not of someone hellbent on destruction but of someone with intelligence; someone who would know better.

No matter our title or station in life, we are all capable of carrying out terrible acts of violence against our fellow man. To think we are somehow above what suspect James Holmes did is to deny what we are, human.

As a Christian, I know that Christ calls me above the fray, to fight against this inner darkness. Christ is my compass.

I am not sure of what to make of today’s shooting other than to chalk it up to living in an imperfect world. Dr. Mohler wrote a post that discusses the need for answers in a time like this. I highly suggest checking it out.

Enter the Slime

Went out and bought Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime last night. A total bargain at $5 via Gamestop. In the 40-something minutes I’ve spent with the game, I have:

witnessed the destruction of a nation by Perry the Platypus look-alikes
recruited many, many slimes (with many, many more still to go)
enjoyed the Dragon Quest-lite atmosphere and gameplay

I‘m looking forward to playing more soon.

Have you played Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime? What did you think of it?

A Quick Update – 7/17/12

Lately I’ve been dabbling in smaller handheld games such as DragonVale (iOS), Pocket Planes (iOS), and the Nintendogs demo on the 3DS (my son loves it!). I haven’t walked away from bigger games completely per se, I’ve just noticed that I tend to get sucked in/ consumed by them. 30 hours later I find myself waking up to realize that my family has been neglected for a month. This is not the type of husband or father I am aspiring to be. After much thought, some prayer, and time, I’ve decided to make some changes in an effort to control my gaming appetite. So far, so good.

Verses of the Day: 2 Timothy 3:1-7

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.

6 They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, 7 always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.

– 2 Timothy 3:1-7 (NIV)