The Walking Dead Game

I'll say it right off the bat. Zombies in pop culture is getting stale. Actually, no, it's past that. It's getting tired and old. The horse passed away a while back, came back as zombie horse, died again and now they're giving it a pretty thorough beating. If I hear one more person say "OH MAN I HOPE A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE REALLY HAPPENS DUDE I CAN TOTALLY SURVIVE I'M GONNA DO THIS AND THIS AND THIS AND BE THE ULTIMATE BADASS BLAH BLAH BLAH" I'm going to go crazy. Everyone thinks they'd survive a zombie apocalypse, and realistically it wouldn't be an apocalypse if everyone survived it so shut up and accept the fact that you'll be part of the 99.9% of the population that dies  shortly after the event begins (which it won't). It just pisses me off that zombies are a sure-fire way to make money, and that fact is being exploited in every corner of the entertainment industry that is capable of capitalizing on it. The games are getting repetitive, the movies are derivative, and it's just getting boring, to be honest. It's not that I hate zombies, the original Night of the Living Dead film still scares the hell out of me. I thoroughly enjoyed games like Dead Rising 2, Red Dead Redemption Undead Nightmare, and Dead Nation. There's just a point where they need to either cool it or stop, and that point has passed.

So why do I love The Walking Dead game so much then? 

Some people think Telltale Games is clinging to a sinking ship. I mean, creating point-and-click games on PC and consoles in the technologically developed gaming climate of today? It's definitely old school, a genre that is pretty much dead in commercial gaming. There's more of an emphasis on high action setpieces, realistic graphics and fast paced gameplay these days, and The Walking Dead isn't particularly huge on any of those things. If you're not familiar with the gameplay style, I'll elaborate a bit. Basically you walk around, examine your environment, solve puzzles and most importantly, engage in dialogue with the other characters. You play a convicted murderer named Lee who gets caught up in the middle of a zombie outbreak and encounters an innocent little girl named Clementine who he protects along his journey, with the ultimate goal of bringing her to her parents. These are the two main characters, and the rest are fairly interchangeable. Why? Because Telltale sees fit to kill several characters off in every episode and bring in new ones. Normally in horror movies I'm fairly good at predicting who is going to die and who will live. But in The Walking Dead, not so much. In the last episode alone I can think of 4 moments where my jaw literally dropped and I was saying "Dude. no way, like seriously?". The best part of this game is by far the story, and the level of unpredictability that is there. Lee and Clementine and their various companions are on an incredible journey and by the end of each episode you really feel like you've made some progress, whether you've fixed up a broken train, escaped from a farm inhabited by horrible cannibalistic rednecks, or decided who to save when the building you're in is being overrun. The Walking Dead thrives on immersion, dragging the player with it on its insane, unpredictable journey. And I gotta say, it's been amazing so far. I also like the way they decided to release it, as an episodic continuing game. This is season 1, hopefully  implying that there will be more seasons to come, and there are 5 episodes that go for $4.99 each. I bought the season pass when episode 1 was released for $20, so if you bought early you even save money. Every episode takes 3-4 hours to complete which is a pretty nice value for 5 bucks, especially considering the quality of the content. Every single episode has improved upon the last, and best of all, the episodes are extremely replayable.

Free choice is something that a lot of games advertise, but not many actually do right. It's one thing to give the player a bunch of black and white choices and then give them 1 or 2 endings depending on what they pick like Infamous or Bioshock, and something else entirely to let the person playing make hundreds of small choices throughout the game in the form of dialogue and scripted actions. Every episode of The Walking Dead contains a lot of conversation, and every single thing you say to anyone impacts the story, the way they think about you and how they're going to treat you in future episodes. I have one guy in my group right now that doesn't trust me and won't help me anymore because I didn't take his side in a particular argument like 3 episodes ago. The characters in The Walking Dead remember everything you do and say, even the order you complete objectives in will affect your interactions. Most of these choices aren't just choosing sides either, a lot of them have multiple options and you have to think very carefully about the possible repercussions of what you might do. I remember in one episode I had 4 pieces of food and I had to decide who in the group to give them to. It was a really hard decision, and I could have approached it multiple ways. Even the characters in your game are determined by your choices. I can think of several people that have died along my journey that I could have saved by making a different choice, and several people in the group now that are only there because I chose to keep them alive. The sheer amount of choice in this game makes it well worth the price, after I finish episode 5 I plan to replay the entire thing again making different choices in every episode. But even after 2 full playthroughs there will be a lot I still have to experience to say I have seen everything. 

The graphics in The Walking Dead are not amazing (on the PS3 version I've been playing at least), but they stay true to the franchise's graphic novel roots. The zombies look great, and the character expressions are very well done, which is good because how a person feels about you is usually indicated by their expression when you're talking to them. The scenery changes a lot throughout the story, which is more than I can say for the TV show. The characters in this game have goals greater than just staying alive, and while some of them are inevitably unlikable, you put up with them anyway because sometimes you get to tell them off or even decide whether they live or die later on. The Walking Dead is really what you make it, and if you go with your personal morals when making decisions you can become incredibly emotionally invested in it. I feel really involved in the lives of the characters in the game, and if Clementine dies in episode 5 I'm going to cry like a baby.

Play it. 

Review: The Cabin In The Woods (2011)

Horror is a pretty overpopulated genre these days, which is kind of a double edged sword. On one hand, if you're a huge fan of the genre then there's no lack of material for you to feed your addiction with. On the other, however, it means that although there may be a lot of good horror movies, there are a lot that also suck really hard. And if you're not a die-hard horror fan such as myself, that means that it can be fairly rare that a really good horror film crosses your path. So in a genre inhabited by a huge excess of remakes, sequels, reboots, zombie movies, "found footage" films and torture porn gorefests, The Cabin in the Woods is an original movie that I found surprisingly impressive.

Spoilers ahead.

The basic premise of Cabin in the Woods is nothing too original. A group of young adults go to a cabin in the woods for a weekend of partying and relaxation. You've got all the typical horror movie character archetypes: the promiscuous party girl, her athletic jock boyfriend, the relaxed stoner, the average, nice, normal girl and the smart guy. I suppose it's missing the token black dude that gets killed off first but I'll just assume they decided to forgo that cliche to save time and create unpredictability. Anyways, these five kids head off to the jock's cousin's (allegedly, he doesn't appear in the movie at all) cabin for a few days. On the way they encounter that age old foreshadowing device of a creepy old man that plays no real role in the film other than to give the characters directions and vaguely predict their demise. Of course, they assume he's just been alone out in the middle of nowhere too long and continue to their destination. Once there, they find a few spooky things in the place but generally just chalk it up to an old house built by someone strange. Big mistake. This is where the other subplot comes into play. The kids are being watched the whole time, and their entire experience is being controlled by people underground who are drugging them and controlling them to complete a mysterious ritual. While playing truth or dare that night the cellar door suddenly bursts open. Just like the classic stupid horror movie characters they are, the victims enter. They find a strange diary and read some incantations out of it, causing zombies to rise from the ground. While the jock and his dumb blonde girlfriend are outside making love, encouraged by pheromones that the technicians controlling them released, the zombies appear and kill the blonde. This is when things start to go downhill. The zombies bust into the house, killing the stoner shortly after he finds a camera in his lamp and believes he's on a reality TV show, and the jock, the smart guy and the other girl escape in the RV they came in, only to have a tunnel collapse in front of them, detonated by the technicians trying to kill them. After this, the jock tries to jump across a nearby ravine on a dirt bike to get help, but hits an invisible wall and falls to his death. After this, smart guy and normal girl go back the way they came, only to realize that one of the zombies is in the RV. He kills smart guy, and almost gets average girl too but in a startling change of events, the stoner had previously survived and saves her. They go back to the cabin and discover an elevator under the floor. This takes them down into the secret base where all the people are that are controlling them and trying to kill them. Here they see hundreds of monsters that have been used in previous rituals, and it is revealed that the monster that each group of people get is determined by what object they select when they go into the cellar full of weird old stuff. This group got the zombies because they read the diary of the family that the zombies used to be. Once the technicians discover the kids got into their secret lair, they send troops after them. Thinking on his feet. the stoner opens the containment cells and the monsters all come out and massacre everyone. The two survivors eventually make it into a secret vault where Sigourney Weaver mysteriously appears and tells them that it was all a ritual to appease ancient gods that will destroy the world if they don't get very specific sacrifices that correspond to each victim's personality: The Whore, The Athlete, The Scholar, The Fool, and The Virgin. All of them have to die but the Virgin can survive, her life is left up to fate. So basically, Sigourney Weaver dies and the two survivors chill out smokin' a J while a giant god awakens and presumably destroys the earth because they failed to complete the ritual. (This is a very rough summary, watch the film to get the finer points.)

One of the things I liked about Cabin in the Woods the most was fairly formulaic for its genre, but it had a reason to be. It's one thing to write in characters that are stereotypical of horror films (stoner, jock, slut etc) just because that's become standard, and another thing completely to use those archetypes for a purpose that helps drive the storyline. Those students were picked and chosen to go to that cabin by the people orchestrating the ritual because they fit the descriptions of the people they needed to sacrifice to appease the ancient gods that are really insecure and require validation in the form of human sacrifice to feel good about themselves. It's sort of a horror film inside a horror film. The victims dying is freaky enough in itself, but the story takes itself to another level in the form of questions involving reality and freewill. Am I really sitting here typing this right now? or is some guy watching me waiting for me to get up and leave the room so a werewolf can jump out of the shadows and devour me? I'm pretty sure that the next generic slasher film I watch I'm going to be thinking the whole time about those technicians underground, controlling the environment and the people in it, betting on how and when they are going to die but at the same time making sure things to according to plan so their ritual goes off without a hitch and they appease the ancient gods.

Cabin in the Woods can be seen as a critique of the meta that slasher films generally tend to follow, and some would say that some of the more contrived plot points suggest that the main goal of the movie is to satirize its own genre and reveal how stupid slasher movies really are. I think it's partially that, but it's also something more. It's a new lens for people to view the horror movie genre in, giving purpose and reason to why the current formula is the way it is. It expands outside of itself to create a whole other dimension of horror, and in that aspect is succeeds. The concept of being controlled by mind altering drugs and forced into situations that all but guarantee your own demise is pretty scary in itself, not even counting the hundreds of horrific creatures that the technicians have in store for anyone who is part of the ritual. When the stoner let all the creatures out and they started killing everyone in the underground bunker, a clown came out. I'm freaked out by clowns. Just the prospect of people being able to drug me up and send a killer clown after me is pretty horrifying. There was also one scene where the kids were playing truth or dare and the Whore is dared to make out with a wolf's head that is mounted on the wall. Watching that happen, I was completely sure it was going to come to life and eat her head right there, but it didn't. Cabin in the Woods understands the value of restraint as well as excess, and how necessary it is to create tension and suspense as well as using violence and gore to scare an audience. And in that  aspect as well as several others, it succeeds.

Casino Royale: A Feminist's Nightmare

So in preparation for Skyfall's North America release next week, I watched Casino Royale again. I'm no Bond expert (not really much of a fan, either), but for what it's worth I would definitely say that this is probably the strongest 007 film I've seen. Also, Pierce Brosnan is horrible. Needed to be said. Anyways, Daniel Craig's debut performance as the famous James Bond is really quite impressive, and a taut, well written story along with Eva Green's smoking-hot-ness really brings this film together into something special.

But the quality of the movie isn't really what I want to talk about, what I really want to touch on is how masculine, borderline sexist and misogynistic (sort of, depending on who you ask) Casino Royale is. Bond has always been a masculine, strong manly man with a thing for the ladies, but damn Daniel, you could have toned it down a bit in this one. In the first hour alone he crashes the car of a rich dude who pissed him off by mistaking him for a valet (partially to create a distraction, but still, dick move), takes huge amount of money away from a dude in poker including his absolutely gorgeous Aston Martin, before proceeding to (almost) bang his wife and then later looking straight into his eyes as he pushes a knife into his gut in the middle of a crowded museum. Now that's how you kick a guy while he's down. Bond seems to be a very primal person in this movie, eager to assert his dominance over every foe he encounters, and even more eager to get with every woman that crosses his path.

Our hero 007 has been a ladies man in pretty much all of his movies, but this movie is the first I've seen where they actually have some exposition as to why. Bond says himself that he is pretty much only into married women, so he obviously enjoys the thrill of the hunt, going after women who are unavailable or hard to get, and especially ones who won't get attached to him because that's the last thing he wants. Women are disposable to Bond, and when one he was getting romantic with is killed because of her involvement with him he doesn't care. Why? Because he's JAMES BOND, that's why! He can just find another one and start over. And he does, the one he's working with to bring down the bad guy. Or does he? the very woman who abhorred him at first sight for his objectification of women and his massive, uncontrollable ego falls for him, only to stab him in the back and end up dying because of it. When asked how he felt about it Bond replied with his signature sentimentality, he said "It's over. The bitch is dead." They were apparently in love, but he got over that one pretty quick, probably because he's mad because he thought women were just stupid objects and he got outsmarted by one.

In summary, James Bond probably had mommy issues

Probably going to post a Skyfall review after I see it, stay tuned.