Horror

Rusted Sour

HIGH The soundtrack.

LOW Almost everything else.

WTF Ditto.

It feels like forever since last update, but that's the way life goes sometimes. I caught a sore throat right as the week started and I've been trying to sleep it off when I haven't been grinding away at the day job, so that ate up a lot of my regular time. Toss in a wife and kids to fill up the rest, and there you go.

I Am Alive clearly wants to be a serious, adult take on post-apocalyptic survival, and in some respects it is. Unfortunately, the game's treatment of women, among other things, seems to devolve back to the attitudes of a teenaged boy. In I Am Alive, women are helpless objects to be fought over and protected by men.

Three Slices Through the Same Exquisite Corpse

HIGH Tense and significant story-based choices.

LOW Not knowing whether I was stuck or just waiting for the plot to progress.

WTF The way to break a window "silently." Also, batteries.

Who Can Stop the Rain?

HIGH The Hansel and Gretel play sequence—it's a cool setpiece that pays off in an even cooler way.

LOW Too close to call—clunky combat or the occasional crashes.

WTF Why are there so few enemy types in this game?

In this episode we feature a full blown discussion of The Walking Dead, Episode 1, and Richard drinks the most Richard-like thing that he could possibly drink. Not enough, you say? We also look at the good, the bad and the ugly of open world games. Stop what you're doing right now...unless it is downloading this PODCAST! With Chi Kong Lui, Brad Gallaway, Mike Bracken, Richard "I'm not wasting a bullet" Naik and Dylan Collins.

• The Walking Dead, Toy Soldiers DLC and Escape Goat Shirts!
  
• The Walking Dead: Episode One—A New Day Review

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If you read this blog with any regularity, you probably remember that I was a huge fan of Dead Island last year. So huge, in fact, that I was one of the critics who chose it as our overall game of 2011. We got more than a few funny looks from other critics when we made the announcement, but I still feel good about the choice in comparison to what the competition was, and I definitely think it was the right direction to go.

Mixed Mess Age

HIGH Making it to a safe ledge with just a sliver of stamina remaining.

LOW Staggering around for half an hour with a sliver of life with an irritating "heartbeat" rumble and an ugly red-screen effect ruining the look.

WTF It ends in the middle of th

Being a 3DS and Kinect owner as well as a fan of Japanese robots/mechs, two neighboring games on the main exhibition hall of PAX East immediately caught my attention: Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor for the Xbox 360 and Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir for the 3DS. Both games are updates to game franchises that were once considered innovative back when they were first released.

Brutal, Unflinching and... Important

HIGH Finding a safehouse where colors still exist.

LOW Taking a beating and limping along for two areas on a sliver of life.

WTF Why aren't critics talking about this game? Oh, right. Mass Effect 3.