Comments on: Thoughts: Tales From The Borderlands

By: The Videogame Corner: Tales from the Borderlands | Cubic Creativity

The Videogame Corner: Tales from the Borderlands | Cubic Creativity — Sat, 26 Jun 2021 07:04:11 +0000

[…] in the comments to the review of “Tales from the Borderlands” on scientificgamer.com (the link to the artícle can be found here), in which the commenter “Ninja Foodstuff” has the following to say: “As with all […]

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Fri, 06 Nov 2015 17:51:54 +0000

Back to the Future was bad. They also tried making Jurassic Park and that’s where they’ve tried making Heavy Rain first. It was awful. You had QTE galleries giving you gold medals for your performance.

I think Sam & Max were good games, especially latter ones. Monkey Island was meh but still fun. All of those were classic adventure titles and suffered for it – cause most puzzles were applying squid to shovel for progression.

By: Ninja Foodstuff

Ninja Foodstuff — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 23:15:45 +0000

Yeahhh don’t do it. Back to the Future was tolerable mainly because no-one had ever tried it and there was a cameo by Michael J Fox but.. Come to think of it, Jim wrote about them perfectly on his 2012 blog.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 01 Nov 2015 22:12:31 +0000

I’m willing to give Telltale something of a pass on the tech side because that’s clearly not their focus (and in Borderlands’ case the writing is good enough that it’s easy to overlook), but while I’ll happily tolerate it looking somewhat basic I’m absolutely baffled as to why the engine still slows down with juddering framerates at certain points in the game when I’m throwing a much beefier PC at it. They’re going to have to replace it soon.

Fortunately I have not played their attempts at Monkey Island or Sam and Max. I know it would only have made me angry.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 01 Nov 2015 22:08:48 +0000

Yeah pretty much. Borderlands at least made that very, very easy for me to do – I’m far less likely to pick holes in it that I am GoT or The Walking Dead.

P.S. Watch seasons 2 and 3 of Archer, and then jump ship. That way you’ll only remember the best of it.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 01 Nov 2015 22:07:31 +0000

I have to admit my objection to Wolf Among Us stems largely from the source material. Fables was an excellent comic up until, oh, about issue 30-ish, and then went *completely* off the deep end. I just can’t take anything based on it seriously after that. I’d probably have had the same problem with the Walking Dead or GoT if I actually watched the shows. At least Borderlands offered them something of a blank canvas.

(I’m definitely playing a season 2 of this if they even do one, though.)

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 01 Nov 2015 22:03:16 +0000

The first episode is definitely the slowest one; it does pick up later. Although if you weren’t hooked by the demolition derby finale then it might not be for you regardless.

As with most creative enterprises Archer exhausted most of its good jokes comparatively early on (up to the end of season 3, so it’s not like it wasn’t absolutely killing it for a while) and while I respect its recognition of that fact and attempt to change things up during season 5 it wasn’t going to maintain that level of quality without something else to fall back on. And as you say, ongoing plotlines isn’t it.

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Sat, 31 Oct 2015 16:33:25 +0000

I honestly can’t understand how Telltale can sell those “interactive stories” with an engine like this. Ok, they’ve missed Crysis 1 that came out in 2007 and introduced SSAO, advanced shaders and all of this fancy stuff. But the animation. Oh god the animation. Walking Dead tried to squeeze emotions out of me but it horrified me with animation worse than, say, Final Fantasy 8 from freaking 1998. It worked fine with their earlier games like Sam & Max and Monkey Island – the ones with an actual gameplay so you could do something, not just watch.

Also it’s obvious that choice & consequence is directly in conflict with the very idea of episodic game. It’s kinda like watching the second episode of Star Trek and seeing Pickard in a dangerous situation. Sometimes they give you good decisions that do not matter and are still very interesting – mostly moral ones or dialogs like Game of Thrones ep 1 ending. Seriously, 1st episode of Telltale’s Game of Thrones is the only thing they’ve produced worthy of title “interactive story”, cause it really felt interactive and had a good story in it.

Anyway, thanks, I’ll try Borderlands. Don’t care about original games but if your description is right it’s the only way Telltale can go with their tech. They can’t produce anything except cartoonish models moving in a cartoonish way so they should go for comedy – even if their jokes became boring and predictably ironic in a spoiled style of Josh Wedon after couple of seasons of Sam & Max.

By: Ninja Foodstuff

Ninja Foodstuff — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 20:41:40 +0000

I haven’t made it to season 2 of Archer yet, but I thought Tales from the Borderlands was pretty special. As with all Telltale Games, it seems you have to switch off that part of your brain that analyses and pulls back the curtains on the game in order to get the most enjoyment out of it.

By: Darren

Darren — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 20:21:04 +0000

I played the first episode and didn’t find it especially funny, so I still haven’t gone back. I also haven’t played more than the first episode of Game of Thrones. I’m not sure I like Telltale’s games that much, though I did like Until Dawn, which is the same thing, so I don’t know what the deal is.

Good call on Archer, but I’d say the bigger issue is that, in spite of the out-of-control self-referential writing is the fact that the show has also abandoned much pretense at ongoing plotlines. Remember how the identity of Archer’s father used to be an important subplot?