Can't untaste. All-nighter delirium kind of made the flavor even more indescribably awful, on top of making me rambly and not entirely there. If you're wondering about the logo and the background Halo-age, I did this as a (poorly-chosen) victory celebration after finishing Halo 4 on my livestream.



Never again.

He says until the next Dtoid-related food challenge.

(This original archive is a bit better quality than the Youtube video, if you really want to see how nasty the post-soak morass is.)

Telltale Games has been killing it, more and more so, with their point-and-click adventures over the years. Their takes on the Sam & Max and Monkey Island franchises have managed to stay true to the source material laid down in their original iterations, and their takes on licensed material such as Back To The Future and Jurassic Park have done some interesting things, some better than others. It's Telltale's latest darling, however, The Walking Dead, that seems to be turning more heads their way than ever.

The Walking Dead, as an episodic series, has been praised for a great many things, from its realistic and admirable portrayal of children, to its implementation of player choice in the story's progress, and should, arguably, be held as a benchmark for characterization in many respects. At the same time, there are some drawbacks, like unexplained bits of character background and occasionally disjointed jumps from character studies into heavily action-focused sequences, that can nag as one works their way through the game. Most of these, I've personally written off as simple drawbacks of the time constraints and central plot goals of such an episodic format. In the wake of my recent analysis of Home, however, I'm beginning to wonder if some things weren't omitted for the sake of letting the players' mind fill in the blanks.



One character in particular lends herself to a fair deal of speculation, particularly later on: the hard-nosed, hard-assed, no-nonsense Air Force pencil-pusher, Lilly Caul. Introduced as a pushy bitch, and doing little along the way to improve that image unless the player, via main character Lee, finds reasons to buddy up with her, there's a continuous thread through the series that hints that Lilly may prove troublesome down the line.

And here's where we get into more specific spoiler territory, kids, so please, don't read on if you're particular about some pretty big surprises.

Before I continue, I'd like to give a bit of context based on my own playthrough, just so those experienced with the game know where things stand in regards to how I proceeded. In general, I turned off the hints that told you who remembered what or reacted to what, to keep things organic. As for choices, I saved Duck early on at the Greene farm, tended to side with Kenny since he was my first, A-number-one bro after Clementine, saved Carley because I can't abide socks in sandals, and from there on out, leaned toward taking care of the kids first, and a bit of partiality toward Carley afterward since I'd inadvertantly meant the death of her not-quite-boyfriend. Which, I might add, was one of the things I meant about narrative gaps that bugged me; I would've preferred at least a little more exposition on their budding relationship beyond "he saved me" (in no explained fashion) and "he's kind of cute, I guess." But anyway. Oh, and after his bursts of nothing but abuse towards Lee, I adopted a pretty firm position of "Larry can suck a fat one."

Through the first couple of episodes, I kept toeing the line when it came to conflicts between Kenny and Lilly, in part because they often had valid points on both sides, and in part because I just wanted both of them to shut the hell up. This worked well enough, up until the crescendo of events at the St. John Dairy; having had that delightful time with Ben's now-one-legged teacher after bringing him back to the camp following the hunting trip at the beginning of the episode, I was not about to risk having to wrestle with a walker that likely had the strength of Kenny and I combined. That, and to hell with Larry anyway. Any chances I had with being even remotely on Lilly's good side were dashed, along with Larry's brains, across the floor of that refrigeration unit, and I was officially in the Anti-Caul camp, whether I liked it or not. Lilly's refusal to pop a cap in Andy St. John when he was about to crispy-fry my face on the electric fence didn't really win her any points with me, either.

Then came the big shift. At the opening of episode three, there'd been something of a time jump between the discovery of a car full of supplies (the looting of which I abstained from, because morals or something) and the exhaustion of said supplies. Apparently, it'd taken about three months to blow through what had been found, and Lilly, while possibly still effected by mourning over the loss of her father, had gone from a simple bitch to, as Eric Cartman might have put it, a Kamehameha Biatch. Between her constant cheap shots at Kenny and Lee over having smashed in a face neither really would have had they not thought it a matter of life and undeath, and her obstinate, short-sighted desire to live in self-imposed siege in a town pretty much wiped of supplies, Lilly was beginning to become a hazard to the group's survival, whether she wanted to admit it or not.

Additionally, it seemed the passage of time had been pushing Lee and Carley into roles a little closer than mere co-survivors. While, as a player, I'd been more on her side over the fate to which I'd left Doug, her willingness to keep my little secret quiet from the get-go, and because she was arguably the most competent adult in our entourage besides myself, between her firearm handling and cool-headedness, I wasn't against a little love in a hopeless place. Hell, maybe this thread would continue far enough to give Clementine a replacement mother figure before the season wrapped, seeing as how her real mother, given that she'd been at the side of her gravely injured (if the phone message in the first episode was any good indicator) husband and more than likely suffered an unsavory end.

So, of course, everything had to get flushed down the toilet, with a bandit incursion over a missing supply drop (which had been illicitly gathered from our own stash and hidden outside in the first place) forcing everyone to pile into the now-running RV (thanks, Kenny!) and peace out from the motor inn. The trip itself would prove to be less than smooth, with Lilly at everyone's throats as to who may've been stealing the supplies that caused the mess in the first place, and, not long after our flight, a meeting of RV undercarriage and walker that left our party temporarily immobile. Parked by the roadside whilst Kenny cleared the remains of our unwelcome hitchhiker, the metaphorical Shit decided it was the perfect time to take a swan dive into the equally noncorporeal Fan.



Demanding answers as to the supply theft and the chalk signal left on the side of our former home to indicate said supplies were waiting for the bandits (and the walkers following them) that'd forced us out, Lilly's crosshairs settled immediately on Ben and Carley. Now, the omission of Kenny, I could understand, as despite their differences, he'd been focused enough on his family not to put the group at that sort of risk. This also put Katjaa on the okay list, since she and Kenny pretty much operated on the same wavelength. Ms. Caul had trusted me enough, despite still being incredibly bitter about Lee's part in Larry's death, to investigate the broken flashlight and its ties to the supply counts being off that I could see why I was in the clear. Ben was obviously suspect, seeing as how he'd been with the group the shortest of all of us and had done a great job of proving a goddamn idiot kid the entire time he'd stayed around, but Carley? Something didn't add up.

Sure, Carley had stood up to Lilly once or twice, but for the most part, the former had barely even interacted with the latter enough to justify claims that Lilly had distruted Carley for any length of time, or any feuds that might lead to such wild accusations. Carley had been under Lilly's auspices even before I rolled in with Kenny, Katjaa, Duck, and clem, long enough for the pharmacy they'd holed up in to be down to a whopping two energy bars on the shelves, so there wasn't room for much bad blood there, and Carley'd been absent from the St. John debacle, so that was out, too. What could possibly have driven Lilly to include Carley in her sweeping accusations, and subsequently, her kill count?

In trying to puzzle this out and give it more credit than a possibly accidental lack of address on the part of the writers, I looked at our ragtag bunch. You had the kids, Clem and Duck. You had Kenny and Katjaa, as happily married as could be given the circumstances. We'd lost Doug to my own forced hand, Glenn to his quest to find his other friends, and Mark to the St. John family's predations (and, honestly, his Red Shirt Syndrome in having been introduced out of nowhere and mostly anonymously). Ben, the sniveling, useless turd. And Carley, who was probably the closest thing Lilly had to a peer, as they were both women, seemingly not too separate in age, and-



Wait a second. As Lee, I was the only available man in this picture, and Carley was, less than subtly, starting to move in on me. Mere loyalty to my side shouldn't have put Carley in harm's way, as again, Lilly'd commissioned me to do the inital investigation that led to this mess, so chances are guilt by association wasn't the problem. Out of curiosity, I went ahead and spoiled myself as to what happened if Doug survived the fall of the pharmacy rather than Carley, and it turns out he take Lilly's bullet shoving Ben out of the way rather than being the target himself. Carley was clearly meant to die by Lilly's hand, judging by the (impressive) headshot Lilly delivered, and the only reasoning I could find behind such determination was that this was a crime of passion.

Not that I'm trying to misogynize against Lilly, by implying she needs a man. Far from it, actually; she's quite capable herself, and doesn't seem to be letting her emotions cloud her judgment at any point while her father is still alive. Sure, she's bullheaded and bitchy, but it would appear to be more out of believing she's right and a product of how her situational analysis works rather than anything having to do with her heart. The death of Larry (who, as early as Episode 1's end, had protectively warned me to stay away from his daughter in the first place), however, clearly threw her for a loop regardless of whether you try to help save him or end him, and with the walls of reason down, perhaps Lilly's biological urges and any pupal-stage feelings she may've had for Lee, essentially the last man on Earth, with a side of fondness for Clementine (later revealed by Clem's admission regarding the source of her hair ties), ending up being Carley's undoing.

Not that any of this Psych 101 gobbledegook mattered to me when things went down. Before Carley's body even had a chance to cool, I was more than happy to leave Lilly to whatever fate the walkers or roving bandits had in store for her. Hell, given the chance, I would've liked to shoot her in the foot, punch her in the face, or something, anything before abandoning her to rot, regardless of whether Clementine's feelings for me would've taken a hit. Not just for Lee's sake, seeing as he'd been denied what was may have proved his last chance at romantic love given the world ending, but because Lilly denied me, the player, something as well.

Romantic ties in games, and in fiction on the whole, are frequently a complete load of crap. Relationships blossom based solely on love at first sight (which I give some credence to, but not with the frequency it's presented), or, more often, on nothing at all rather than the fact a work might draw in more of an audience if it were implied (or explicitly demonstrated) two of the characters want to (or do) swap bodily fluids. It's a rare case when romance, or even more platonic interactions, spring from shared circumstances, chemistry, and time spent together between two characters rather than being shoehorned into a plot and, because of that, feeling forced and disappointing.



Lee and Carley had been through a lot together, and whether or not I'd intended to initially, I'd given Carley reasons to be fond of me, and she'd had my back just as much the entire time. For whatever reasons, be they the ones I've inferred personally or something else off the books, Lilly saw fit to destroy that when it'd barely had a chance to even bud, and because of that, I was more than eager to destroy her. Not that I begrudge Telltale for any of it, mind you. Rather, I applaud their choices' ability to get such a rise out of me, and their writers' success in both developing a such a relationship that felt reasonable within the context they'd provided and their willingness to abort it for the sake of storytelling, rather than floating, even for a little while, the possibility that such a bleak future could even hope to have a Happily Ever After.

I would've liked to have had a little more time to see Carley and Lee grow together, though doing so could easily have made her demise even more poignant at best, or a cheap, obvious go-to dramatic trope at worst, but The Walking Dead handled this pretty well. The morals of the story, I'd say, are that all bets are off regardless of how close or not close you are with your associates in a zombie apocalypse, and anyone named Ben should be thrown off a bridge as soon as possible.

Benjamin Rivers' Home is a game that didn't see the most timely release. Rolling out, originally, at the beginning of June, Home's 2-D, low-res, sprite-based horror risked some overshadowing by the long-awaited Lone Survivor, which finally appeared a couple of months beforehand. With Halloween upon us, Home has been seeing a bit more scrutiny, being featured in both Indie Royale's Halloween bundle, and thereby has had a chance to prove itself vastly different from Jasper Byrne's long-awaited opus.

Whereas Home is not the prettiest game out there, its retro feel is consistent throughout, which lends itself to the open-ended storytelling and how much the game leaves to the player's imagination, both in interpreting immediate circumstances and filling in the blanks in regards to the overall plot. As I proceed, be warned that there may be some mild spoilers ahead, though again, the game's events lend themselves to a great deal of interpretation, and would seem to differ based on the many choices you're given over the game's course. Any reveals will hopefully be kept to unavoidable, non-surprise incidents, though let it be known that I played through saying "Yes" to pretty much every choice, for fear of missing something I needed to progress later on. As for my interpretation of the game's events, worry not; I'm keeping that for someplace else, which I'll get to later. Moving on.



Home starts by waking you up in a strange room in a stranger's house on a dark and stormy night, as many a horrific tale tends to. Turns out that stranger is a bit on the dead side, there's reasonably fresh blood in several areas of the house, and you don't recall how or why you're there in the first place. How convenient. Your investigation takes you through the rest of said house, some dubious underground tunnels that eventually link up to the sewer system, the factory where you used to work, a forested park, your old buddy Norm's shop and apartment, and finally to your own neighborhood and titular home itself, all the while collecting (or electing not to collect) clues that may help clarify what's going on. Of particular import are the discoveries of various murder victims and the weapons that likely murdered them, though it's mostly left up to the player to figure out who did the murdering. The game doesn't actually telegraph that very well, so there are bits where it seems like you're just doing busywork to proceed, and when the game's ending is wrapped more in the main character's reflection on events (and your input into his thought process) rather than any solid answers, it may seem like a disappointed when a lot of questions are left unanswered.

That is, until a post-credits screen pops up, inviting you to head to a special, "What Happened?" section of the main Home site, where you can share your thoughts as to what occurred in the game. That's when it clicks. That's when you realize that Home is the story you make it, and you weren't having your hand held through a thin, trope-ridden plot the entire time; rather, the gameplay was simplistic at times to let your imagination do the walking, to assemble the puzzle however you choose given whatever pieces you decide to pick up or leave, or even explore enough to find in the first place. Therein lies the brilliance of Home.



If you'd like to take a trip Home yourself, it's in the Indie Royale Halloween Bundle with a bunch of other great games until November 2nd, or you can get it on its own for a whopping $2.99 on Steam, either by looking it up yourself or via a link at the game's website. Or feel free to watch my playthrough above, if you'd rather not get your hands dirty. Either way, definitely check out the What Happened page linked earlier if you do finish Home in some fashion, as even if you'd rather not share your own interpretation, there's an interesting spectrum of views to weigh against one's own.

Though I recently ran through some of the Halloween offerings on the free-to-play scene, some wallet-friendly haunts had yet to unveil their spookier side. Now that October 31st is nearly upon us, the few stragglers out there seem to have come out in full, spooky force. Here's a list of who's joined the party, and what they brought with them.



As anticipated, Team Fortress 2 has gone all out for Halloween again this year with Scream Fortress. A spooky spread of new goodies have dropped in the store, Soldier's former roommate and currently ghostly wizard, Merasmus, is haunting a new King of the Hill map, and there's a new Mann vs Machine throwdown against hordes of zombies rather than robots. Players have until November 8th to check out all of the above, as well as snag a couple of new, event-specific achievements in the process.

Building on their earlier costume selection, Elsword has added Halloween masks, a Halloween-themed dungeon, and Grim Reaper appearances across almost all of their maps, which can be sought in quests for special holiday items. Even the Reaper's scythe is being handed out in various forms solely for logging in for at least ten minutes on certain days, so if you're strapped for time, you can at least get a few souvenirs before time's up.



Super Monday Night Combat unveiled some new Los Muertos uniforms for all available Pros, as well as a Los Muertos Stare flair. None of them are quite as magnificent as the Mr. Destructoid set for Karl that was available around the game's initial release, but that's to be expected.



Coinciding handily with their move from closed to open beta, RaiderZ has chucked pumpkins wherever they can across their servers. Not all of them are decorative, however; lootable pumpkins are spawning all over the place, and their contents, as well as candy collected from fallen foes, can be traded in for Halloween outfits, toys, and even a witch's broomstick mount. The outfits are, unfortunately, temporary, but permanent versions can be purchased in the game's cash shop. Unlike most of the other seasonal events going on, RaiderZ's Halloween celebration is running all the way to November 20th, so you've got plenty of time to hoard more treats.

While Firefall's open beta is still code-reliant, those who've managed to get in already or manage to sneak in during the next couple of weeks can celebrate the Night Of The Melding. Luau Larry kiosks in the game are selling a slew of Halloween goods, including decorations like spiderwebs and tombstones, and anyone can buy one of several masks from the New You stations, in styles such as a skull, hockey mask, or pumpkin, among other things.

Additionally, most of the other free-to-play All Hallow's action is still underway, so get out there and get your freebie on, even if you're too old to be taken seriously trick-or-treating.

There's no doubt Christmas has come early for gamers, with a slew of excellent titles rolling out a few months ahead of the traditionally hectic holiday sales season. From solid indie outings, like the long-awaited Retro City Rampage, to triple-A titles such as Dishonored and Borderlands, gamer's wallets are taking a pounding even before that oh so sweet, November 1st candy clearance sale that makes Halloween that much mroe worthwhile. If that wasn't enough punishment for your bank account, there seems to be a veritable onslaught of downloadable content on top of all the fresh gaming goodness.



Tropico 4 and Borderlands 2 seem to share a mind when it comes to their newest content packs, as both have DLC featuring pirates out this month. In the former's Pirate Heaven pack, aspiring dictators now have access to a Sailor trait, and the ability to sneak goods through embargo enforcement thanks to the new Smuggler's Hut building. BLT, on the other hand, serves up an entirely new campaign expansion, Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty, wherein the titular character sends you roaming the sand seas surrounding the town of Oasis for more loot and a fistfull of new, nautically-themed nemeses to take down. On top of this new chapter in Pandora's history, Gearbox also released the bonus Mechromancer class, with new skill trees and abilities to explore, and a week earlier than expected at that.



Halloween seems to be a popular focal point for DLC as well lately, be it in thematics or just release timing. Recently announced for Sleeping Dogs, we'll be seeing the unavoidable undead in Nightmare On North Point, as Big Scar Wu defies his Prince Albert-y fate and unleashes some less-than-living hordes for payback's sake. While possibly not as directly Halloween-tied, Death's romp through Darksiders II sees a revisit on Devil's Night this year as horseman the second sets off to thrash and loot his way through the Shadow Lands. And, since it's as good a time as any to play dress-up, the already demon-ridden Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit just got an infusion of Sega-inspired masks and skins, and there's also a new mission pack out for those who've had their fill of the main game's offerings.



For those who've given the latest On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness a thorough going-over, a fresh and free content pack is dropping with new missions for those with maxed-out job levels, as well as zombie skins for the characters to keep things festive. Not to be left out, the latest iteration in Team17's flagship series, [i]Worms Revolution[i], just added a new pack of puzzles and weapons in their Funfair Pack; sure, it doesn't seem Halloween-related at all in its carnival trappings, until you realize it features a Clown Nose accessory, and clowns are easily the scariest thing to be haunted by.



All this (and more, as I've likely missed plenty given how much has been going on, game-wise) is nice, and it's great to see games getting such continued support, but at the same time, it's a bit worrying. A lot of these games getting content are really, really fresh off the disc presses. Borderlands 2 is barely a month old and already getting all that extra content; even without the Pirate's Booty expansion, a new character alone can warrant an entirely new game playthrough just to explore the Mechromancer's skill tree. Hell Yeah! has another month on top of that, age-wise, so it might be about time for some fresh stages, but Worms Revolution? It's been out two weeks, which is arguably too soon for additional content. One has to wonder what all the rush is about, especially given most of these titles invite a decent time investment to finish in the first place.

Is it a push to gain some market value by having extra goodies already out there before the big guns (pun perhaps marginally intended) like Call of Duty: Black Ops II[i] and [i]Halo 4 land next month? An attempt to keep players invested in their games in spite of the inevitable holiday rush? Whatever's going on, it's starting to feel a bit harrowing, as it feels more and more necessary to plow through games rather than savoring them in the interest of keeping abreast of the bleeding edge, and that doesn't seem like the soundest strategy to make a game memorable to those who play it.

So please, please, publishers, slow down a bit. There's already a lot to play this year as it is, and I'm sure those who've bitten the bullet and invested in your titles aren't going to abandon you just because Santa CoD and Kwanzaa Chief are coming to town, just in time for Wii-Ukkah. Deep breaths. Let us play.






...someone's got to get that Prince Albert joke. Need a hint? Prince Albert in a can? Anyone? C'mon.

(Some spoilers for the story of Tokyo Jungle follow. You know, if you're actually playing for the story. Mild spoilers for other games, too, that you may actually have heard of. Just sayin'.)



There have been quite the number of deranged, heinously-motivated villains over the course of video game history, be they blatantly so, or more subtly indsidious. As much as I love when a badguy proves to be more sympathetic in their drives, such as Handsome Jack's internal schism between personal ties and personal power in Borderlands 2, or Hans Tiedemann's best intentions for Titan Station, both before and after things went terribly wrong, in Dead Space 2, there's something about an irrepentantly twisted bastard that makes them that much easier to hate, and therefore that much more memorable.

Kefka Palazzo's underhanded tactics and genocidal bent toward the Espers made wiping the floor with all four screens' worth of him at the end of Final Fantasy VI that much more satisfying. Mortal Kombat's Shang Tsung oversaw and manipulated the series' titular tournament for ages, solely to feed his own need for warriors' souls. The Prophets' blind adherence to rhetoric and wielding of religious authority nearly got humanity, their own crew the Covenant, and anything else remotely sentient running about wiped from the face of the galaxy in the Halo games. The list goes on and on, to be sure, but there's one nemesis that outshines many, if not all of its counterparts, when it comes to bastardry, and you don't even get to meet or fight for the entire game it in which it features.

The new king of villainy is humankind itself, for its actions leading up to the events of Tokyo Jungle.



Even those familiar with the game may be unaware of just what people have done that makes them so reprehensible, seeing as how there isn't a single person to be found in the game save for a lone salaryman*, and he's optional DLC for survival mode only. The animals themselves featuring in the game occasionally wonder, in story mode, just what happened to everyone, but it's mostly a puzzle left to the player to piece together, in the form of data logs that unlock further chapters and eventually reveal the horrible truth.

In order to survive a global catastrophe, the remaining people of A.D. 2215 decide to transport themselves back in time to A.D. 2027. However, in order to do so, due to some quirk of the time travel technology, the human population of the past must take the place of those being transported in from the future. In short, humanity has decided to short-sell its ancestry wholesale just to live a few more years. Not only that, but to put the technology in place to perform such a swap, the scientists of the future find a way to get in touch with their predecessors, anonymously feeding them information and manipulating the development of the past in order to get their way.



As if that weren't dastardly enough, consider that, according to the logs that outline the game's story, said future population has been cut to ten thousand people due to some disaster, and they're trapped planetside by space debris. Considering the fact that 2027's world population, barring any disasters of its own, is likely to be somewhere a bit over seven billion, you're looking at a trade-off of 700,000 people for every person saved by this crazy scheme. Every single survivor, complacent or not, would be individually accountable for the combined kill counts of the Belzec and Jasenovac (upper estimate) concentration camps of the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. Think about that.

While the game's events, in a way, make those who set these events in motion accountable for their crimes against their forebears, albeit in a somewhat bittersweet fashion, it doesn't make the mere thought that people could actually resort to such a tactic any less reprehensible. With Tokyo Jungle, Sony and Crispy's have done wonders to remind us that, sometimes, we can be our own worst enemy, and have a responsibility to not let our personal greed lead to oblivion for our species en masse. In all fairness, they probably got what they deserved once Tokyo's future was handed over to the rest of the animal kingdom.




* - The lastest DLC pack, which features said salaryman, also bears a Homo erectus character, but it's doubtful he was part of the populace originally hanging around in 2027.