When TV Shows and Video Games Collide: The Walking Dead

As the dudely dudes of Egotastic! surely know, those damn zombies are continuing their marauding invasion of popular culture. Their appearances in every damn media in the cosmos have made them an integral part of 2013 society (remember that guy a few months ago who ate somebody's face? Without his pants on?), alongside such asspains as spam emails offering viagra and/or affordable dick-enlargement surgery and Justin effin' Bieber.

But we'll forgive these festering bastards and their increasingly tedious and clichéd nature, because they also brought us the wonderment of compelling, blood-leaking-all-over-the-kitchen-linoleum TV drama The Walking Dead.

Now, the term ‘TV drama' may evoke horrifying images of tightly-trussed elderly women in corsets in the English countryside lamenting their husbands' inability to get it up, or Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks getting mail or some other flowery horseshit like that. That's not what we have right here. The Walking Dead, primarily set in Georgia, depicts the antics of a small rabble of zombie apocalypse survivors. There's cannibalism, unforeseen bastard plot twists seventeen times per episode and rather large firearms brandished at portions of undead squelchy body which could probably, upon reflection, have done without having high-velocity bullets pumped into them.

In summation, everybody loves it. Even if they don't. What's remarkable about the series, though, is that the video game adaption wasn't the kind of appalling abomination that makes your balls shrink back up into your body in disgust at the developer's ineptitude (as is oftentimes the case with ‘game-of-the-movie' releases and other such terrible).

The Walking Dead: The Game debuted for every goddamn format (without ‘Nintendo' emblazoned across it) in July of last year, a point-and-click adventure of yore unleashed in an episodic fashion. Its major divergence from the usual zombies in video games fare is in its comparatively sedate pace. This is no balls-out guntacular shooter with many guns on, liberally doused in bullet sauce with a large side order of guns. Nuts to that. Instead, character development and relationships between them is paramount. Nostalgic RPG style dialog options are common, and your choices will have a great bearing on how fellow survivors will interact with you.

It's quite a novel approach, in lieu of the usual Arnold Schwarzenegger approach to an undead apocalypse. In this manner, it evokes the spirit of the TV show (which is itself based upon an acclaimed series of comic books) rather than being the piss-poor, limp-scroted kinda-relevant-to-the-source-material mess that's often churned out by the Licensed-tie-in-shit-o-meter. In each medium, The Walking Dead has been very well received, demonstrating conclusively that zombies -when done right- haven't quite outstayed their welcome just yet.

As you'll see from this old trailer-ing business right here:

Source of images: mwgames-hunting