PC

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.

Battling Epically Slowly

HIGH Taking out an enemy's crystal in a single turn.

LOW Waiting for an opponent to submit their turn.

WTF Still waiting… two months later.

Paint by Numbers

HIGH Nailing the perfect sequence of scythe combos and dodges during a fight.

LOW Having my reaper form cancelled out by a boss cut-scene.

WTF This game literally put me to sleep in the early hours.

Recently, European courts ruled that digital property is the same as physical property. Extra Credits does a brief breakdown of what that could mean for games should such a ruling be held up on appeal and duplicated here in the United States.

Vampires are traditionally lithe, powerful, and disquieting entities. I recently had the opportunity to play a new action game featuring said creatures, and sadly, it only managed to convince me that it was the last of those things.

Home is Where the Hearth is… Right?

HIGH Hiring a steward to handle the busywork.

LOW Needing a steward to handle the busywork.

WTF The steward I hired refusing to stay on the estate!

Consider the Leviathan

HIGH Ghosting Dunwall Tower in under fifteen minutes.

LOW The interminable 7th level.

WTF Sending a woman off to a life of imprisonment and rape is the positive, "low chaos" option?