My hand is improving considerably today, but I used up my writing allowance on The Walking Dead Game post for GeekBeat, which hopefully will be up tomorrow. The swelling is mostly gone, just a bit of pain left, so I’m going to rest it again tonight, so no update again. Sorry!
The Walking Dead Game, geekbeat, injury | in General Managed to hurt my hand in a fall today. Rather than do a whole lot of typing, I’m resting it so no big updates. It’s not bad, so hopefully tomorrow will work better.
It’s no secret that I love zombies. One look at my story The Fast and the Dead is enough to convince anyone of that. It should come as no surprise then that I love The Walking Dead in every form it’s available in; as a comic/graphic novel, as a TV series, and now as an adventure game from Telltale Games.
I’ll have a full review of The Walking Dead Game up on GeekBeat.TV soon, but I wanted to go into how episode 1 handles the storytelling, as that’s really the part of the game that impressed me the most.
It’s common these days to call any good, impressive game ‘epic,’ but The Walking Dead Game Episode 1 - A New Day is the opposite of epic. It’s small, it’s personal, it’s isolating, stressful, fearful and very satisfying.
The game puts huge emphasis on the importance of the choices you, playing as Lee Everett, make throughout the story. Conversation and investigation make up the bulk of the game play; make no mistake, while this is a zombie game, it is NOT a shooter, nor is it a survival horror game. It is pure adventure.
Lee EverettAt key points throughout the game, you’ll say things in conversations, and you’ll be given a brief flash of information about the impact that your choice had on things. If you stick up for a friend in an argument, they’ll remember it. If you mouth off and call someone a nasty name, they’ll remember that too. In a twist that’s very Bioware in nature, these decisions can have consequences far beyond episode 1, impacting your journey into the next four episodes as well.
The examples I gave above were relatively trivial (at least they seem that way at first glance.) But there are much weightier choices to be made as well; there are a number of points at which you’ll literally be choosing who lives and who dies, and make no mistake, people WILL die.
The story’s far from over; we’ve been given a single episode of 8 chapters, with four more episodes to come. I’m really looking forward to seeing how deep the connections run between episodes. I’m loving Telltale’s Back to the Future series, but haven’t finished yet in part because each episode is so very self-contained; there’s not as much driving me to finish all five quickly. If The Walking Dead Game lives up to the early promise it shows, I won’t have that problem with it.
J. K. Rowling’s Pottermore site recently opened their shop to allow the sale of Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free eBooks of Harry Potter’s adventures, and now she’s being joined in the DRM-free world by Macmillan’s TOR and Forge imprints.
This signals a big change in the eBook industry, and it’s one we’ve seen before. The music industry went through a similar change when iTunes signaled the end of audio DRM in the iTunes store.
While this move does run the risk of increasing piracy, if that is indeed an actual risk, it also means that paying customers don’t get penalized for being honest as they do right now. I have an extensive collection of Amazon Kinde eBooks for instance, and so I’m effectively locked into Amazon’s ecosystem. If I buy an eReader from a different manufacturer, I can’t bring my Amazon library over to it; they won’t work because of the DRM. When all my TOR titles go DRM-free, that restriction vanishes; I’ll be able to freely convert those TOR books into any other eBook format I want and read them on any device I want, now or in the future.
This is a huge win for many consumers, and has already gained Macmillan an awful lot of attention and praise just today. I can’t wait to see which imprints and which publishers are going to be the next to wade into these more open waters?
(via John Scalzi)
DRM, ebooks, publishing | in News Generally I find that I do my best writing (or what I find to be my best writing, at any rate) when I’m either sick or very tired. Maybe it shuts off my filter for me. Tonight I feel a bit of both, but the words just aren’t flowing the way I’d hope they are. I’ve been staring at a blank page for hours now.
Sometimes the key can be knowing when it’s time to constructively procrastinate, and I think that time for me is right now. Back tomorrow.
