The End

HIGH The walkie-talkie resolution wasn't a total disaster.

LOW The conflict in the final scene felt too staged.

WTF Where's the obvious dialogue option in the alley?

Bad Girls

HIGH "Time to find allies... The story of my life."

LOW Coming back to Mass Effect 3 for pre-ending DLC felt more than strange.

WTF Where the hell was Aria's couch?

World War Z and The Walking Dead take a similar conceptual approach to the zombie apocalypse, but have fundamentally different views on human society. The basically optimistic World War Z suggests that social problems are a surface malady that the zombie apocalypse would strip away, letting the moral strength of mankind ultimately show through triumphantly. The Walking Dead, on the other hand, sees social order and altruism as artifice, a contortion of natural human behavior that falls apart once the zombies consume the social mass that held it in place.

It's a special 1/5 British edition of the Gamecritics.com podcast. This week we tackle Wreck-It Ralph, Thanksgiving shout outs, and what we've been playing during our long hibernation. Featuring Chi Kong Lui, Brad Gallaway, Mike Bracken, Richard Naik, and special guest host Sinan "Redcoat" Kubba.

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Like many people who played Telltale's episodic game, The Walking Dead, I had read and enjoyed many of the comics beforehand. I appreciated that they took the subject seriously. I don't mean that in the sense of a John Romero film, where the zombies themselves are rather silly but serve to illustrate serious social questions. Rather, like World War Z, The Walking Dead decides on a set of rules about zombies and a premise about people, and unflinchingly follows those principles into the abyss.

When my rather scathing opinion piece about the PlayStation 3 was posted, some rather hyper-defensive comments resulted. I'm going to address these people en masse, directly and firmly.

A Year in the Life of Horny, Magical Teenagers

HIGH The Mystery Gang mocking their own corny "Persona!" cries while plastered.

LOW Cut-and-paste dungeons.

WTF Marie's "poetry."

The guys at Extra Credits run down some underappreciated 16-Bit games on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis video game consoles. Those games include Starflight, E.V.O.: Search for Eden, Warsong, Shadowrun, Terranigma, Uncharted Waters: New Horizons, Inindo and U.N. Squadron. Feel free to leave a comment if you agree or disagree with this list or maybe add a list of your own.

How to Lose with a Straight Flush

HIGH The gameplay is solid for a portable FPS.

LOW Finishing the single-player modes in less than an hour.

WTF This could have been good, had everything not gone horribly wrong

Adult Swim takes the innocent act of a child trying to make his NES cart work and makes it dirty... and funny.

Caution: Crude content