The Walking Dead: Review and Discussion

Zombies have been popular culture's undead of choice for a while now. They've spawned hit TV shows, popular movies, more video games than we know what to do with, and even a handful of board games whose main selling points seem to be "hey, this game is about zombies!" I never climbed aboard the zombie bandwagon, but when Alex recommended The Walking Dead (a video game inspired by the same comic books that launched the TV series), I decided to give it a shot. Besides, I'd wanted to play a good point-and-click style exploration game in the vein of Broken Sword or Monkey Island for a while.

The Walking Dead fit the bill pretty well, even though it became clear in the first few minutes that this game is not King's Quest: Survival Horror Edition. Point-and-click games have a set of tropes and conventions that players expect. You need to thoroughly comb old areas after you've explored a new one; you're supposed to try every single item in combination with every other item, and then use the new thing you made on every possible character. The Walking Dead dispenses of those conventions in favor of making the narrative move faster, and while that change in emphasis makes sense given the style and themes of the game, it also emphasizes just how much it pushes the boundaries of being a "game".

If the purest definition of "game" is a thing of decision-making and optimization, then most of the "game play" in The Walking Dead occurs in the narrative instead of in the mechanics. The bulk of the decisions you make are not ones about how best to defeat a certain monster or approach a tactical objective, but ones about which direction you want the story to go. As the game reminds you every time you start a new chapter (and they're called chapters, to emphasize just how much focus is on the narrative), the story is decided by the way you play the game. Ironically, it's really easy to criticize an "open narrative" game like this for not being open enough. As soon as you realize you've been given the freedom to decide which character lives and which one dies, you want the entire story to be malleable, and it's occasionally disappointing to realize the game would have played out basically the same way no matter which one you picked. (That's no knock on the game, because it would be impossible to program a game that was infinitely nonlinear.)

The "everything that rises must converge" realization was most true at the end, during the climactic conversation with the kidnapping stranger, which went more or less like this:
Stranger: Hey, I don't like this one thing you did.
Me: Well, I had a good reason for it, so chill out.
Stranger: Oh yeah? I don't like this other thing you did either.
Me: That was literally the only thing I could have done, and you know it. Get over yourself.
and so on, until Clementine showed up to whack the dude on the head with a lamp. Probably, the stranger still would have found some way to criticize all my decisions even if I'd done things completely differently, and Clementine still would have whacked him on the head with a lamp after he had berated me sufficiently.

Overall, Lee in my game was the compassionate, nonviolent, and honest sort. It would be fascinating to play through again making the exact opposite decisions, playing Lee as a conniving liar and kicking people out of the group as soon as they wronged me or proved themselves a liability. The biggest problem with that approach is that the game is so engaging and the dialog writing so realistic that it would actually be difficult to do, ethically and morally. And that's the one of many things that The Walking Dead does very well, drawing you into its universe and intriguing you to see how it might play out otherwise. Plenty of "moral choice" games sell themselves on the possibility of playing through again on the "other side," but realistically, most games are far too long to make subsequent playthroughs palatable. At between 10 and 15 hours, The Walking Dead is the perfect length to revisit: it's short enough that experiencing it again wouldn't seem like a terrible burden, but not so short that you've memorized the entire game after playing it once or twice.

A second strength of The Walking Dead's "moral choice" system is that there is never a "right" choice. In contrast to other games that display morality as a black-and-white spectrum (or blue-and-orange, if you're Mass Effect), decisions in The Walking Dead are more like your mom telling six-year-old you to choose between your Legos and your toy cars. You want them both, and it doesn't seem fair that you're being forced to make that choice, but there's no way around the decision.

Some of the smaller decisions that The Walking Dead forces you to make were a touch more subtle but still well-designed. There's one in Chapter 4, where you're in the sewers, and a zombie grabs you. The default option is to shoot it, which attracts the rest of the zombies and essentially gives you a countdown timer to figure out what to do next, but if you have the presence of mind to switch weapons and bash it with a wrench instead, you can explore the next section at your own leisure. But with the screen turning red, you need to make that choice very quickly, and it pays to keep a cool head and not freak out. Scenes like this one show how good the game is at creating a sense of urgency and rewarding not panicking.

Outside of the narrative, one of the best things the game does is portray Clementine as an actual character, something that games (and TV, etc.) are pretty reluctant to do with kids. There's so much legitimate development to her personality! Contrast her with Aaron from Lost, who, although much younger, was always a human plot device rather than a real character. And it's impressive that the quick-time events added to the game--they usually just annoy, but here they served the purpose of reminding you that in this world, you need to be ready to react and fight for your life at any minute.

Frankly, it's tough to call The Walking Dead a great game for a couple of reasons. The first is that there's not much "game" there. There is no real difficulty. You can't "win" or "lose". You can die, but only during certain scenes--and even if you do die, you restart and have an immediate chance to try again. The second and more important reason is that calling The Walking Dead a game is doing it a bit of an injustice. It's an immersive experience, and a surprisingly poignant one at times, whose strength is in the narrative and the setting rather than the mechanics or the challenge--and that's exactly what it is trying to be.

SimCity: Discussion and Review

As a kid, SimCity 2000 was the first "real" (i.e., just too old for Oregon Trail) computer game I remember getting into, so it was with great enthusiasm that I pre-ordered the new SimCity (in a very iPad move, just called "SimCity"). I didn't have the chance to play it until more than a week after its release. That might have been the most serendipitous delay in the history of my video gaming career.

Much has been made of SimCity's failings in its first week, and since I never experienced them, I'm not going to beat that particular dead horse any more. The other head of the Ettin of internet rage over SimCity is its "always online" feature. I concur in part, but for a different reason. In contrast to how everyone else on the internet apparently feels, I'm intrigued by the interactivity, and I totally accept the "no city exists in a vacuum" premise of the game. (I don't at all buy the argument about using DRM to control player behavior.)

Where the "always online" feature can run into trouble is when the connection falters. Even in 2013, internet coverage is not perfect. Whether EA is having problems on their end, or Comcast decides to deliver me a hiccup in service, I can't always log in to Origin to play the game. It's a little frustrating that when an outage like that happens, I'm barred from playing the game. Worse is when the outage happens mid-game, which leads to your game instantly closing and losing whatever progress you made since you lost your connection. More sensibly, the game could make a local backup and upload it to the global game when the connection was restored, but this functionality doesn't seem to exist.

Once you're actually in the game, SimCity plays similarly to most of its predecessors, with a bigger emphasis this time around on the "region" or group of cities than just one city. Cities in the same region can cooperate by specializing: one might become a mining and drilling town, another might focus on culture and tourism, and a third might specialize in education and high-tech manufacturing. SimCity is all about identifying the optimal course to grow your town, so in many ways, it's a purer "game" than many video games like RPGs or shooters. It's filled with optimization decisions: immediate profit versus investment for the future, balancing the needs of your residential versus industrial interests, how much you can get away with taxing your businesses before they all get out of town.

Those decisions are not easy to make. Here's a representative story that well encapsulates my SimCity experience so far. I noticed that my approval among my medium-income residents was dropping like a rock, and the chief complaint had to do with how germy my town was. My favorite of the complaints was "get rid of the source of these germs NOW!" Of course, nobody bothered to tell me what the source of the germs actually was.

I eventually tracked it to a single garbage incinerator I'd installed on one of my dumps (to make my residents stop complaining that garbage was piling up). The air pollution was making my Sims sick, a reasonably predictable consequence. So I built up health coverage, but that didn't entirely solve the problem. Meanwhile, my Sims were getting less and less happy, which made them less willing to put up with the exorbitant taxes I'd forced them to pay, and it turned quite a few of them to crime, so I opened a handful of new police stations. Between the costs of health care and police and reduced taxes, my city started running at a massive loss, and I ended up abandoning the town.

In that case, I learned from my mistakes, and I'll be able to play less terribly next time. A few mistakes I haven't learned how to fix. In particular, it seems impossible to apportion the zones in your city correctly; I cover block after block of my town with residential zoning, and I still have a permanent worker shortage in my factories. And it's actually impossible to prepare for natural disasters. I'm not sure what kind of coastal city has two tornadoes run through its downtown in its first two years of incorporation, but I can't blame my Sims for not wanting to live there.

That's to say nothing of the zombie outbreak, which is the single most frustrating and debilitating disaster in the game. Though it was apparently modeled after a flu outbreak, no flu outbreak has ever destroyed 137 buildings in a single night and bankrupted a town the next day. Disasters do help to add some tension to the game, but they happen far too too frequently, and there's too little that can be done about them in advance.

Mostly, though, the challenges in SimCity seem like ones that can be overcome and that can be learned after playing enough. Despite the increased emphasis on continuous, interconnected operation of cities, SimCity might turn into a game I play more like a strategy board game, where I "play a game of SimCity" and see if I do better than I did last time, rather than "play SimCity" and continue the story I started telling before.

Though it appears at first that SimCity has little replay value, there is significant "end game" content in the very expensive "great works" buildings that can be built in cooperation with other cities in the region, and multiplayer with your friends could end up being a lot of fun as you discover new ways to specialize and synergize. SimCity had its issues, but it's worked through nearly all of them; it has its flaws, but most of its mechanics are solid enough--and there's just enough nostalgia there--that the game is worth playing.