Telltale pisses me off again (or "Jurassic Park the Game")

Platform:  Xbox360, also available on PC, Mac, and PS3
From: Telltale Games
Downloads available: PS marketplace $19.99, Xbox Live Marketplace $19.99

Overall: 6/10
Good enough to hold your attention; bad enough to piss you off at the production staff.  Besides, there are super cool dinos in every episode that make playing the game worth it.

Play: 4/10
It was lazy play design that allowed me to push the buttons too late and have them count or right on time and have them not.

Plot: 6/10
Visual suspense and well-timed sensation jumps (vibration or shock noises) saved this game -- not the writing.

Characterization:  2/10
I could have been happier if they all died at the end.

Customization: 3/10
With a game that relies on timed responses, like every Telltale game out there, why is there not a calibration option?

Telltale Games has a knack for frustrating me with their "almost there" games.  Their concepts are great (who wouldn't want to meet Emmett Brown as a young adult or protect Clementine from the pain of a world filled with zombies?); but their characters are flat and unrealistic, their gameplay is regularly flawed, and their conflict is situationally driven. There are some things Telltale got right with this game:  like licensing the Jurassic Park story to begin with and keeping Nima, our sympathetic "bad guy's," motivation a secret as long as they did.   I also, personally, appreciate that they left aiming out of the equation since Telltalle notoriously leaves out Y-inversion, and I play inverted.  However, that may be all they got right.

The game begins in a well-written tutorial clip where you play an injured Nina as she runs from ... something.  She takes a dramatic spill near a cliff until she eventually falls off and in front of a Jeep.  The Jeep catches her in its headlights and slides sideways as it attempts to stop.  Nina runs to the right, blacking out the screen as she passes, and we are left to wonder whether she was hurt or not.  Those are the bits Telltale is good at: visual suspense.  Unfortunately, the story goes on.

Flat and Contrived watch dinos before the electricity goes out. They never saw it coming, even when they were in the middle of it.

After a slight break for the opening credits, we meet our two protagonists: "Flat" and "Contrived," also known as Gerry and Jessica Harding.  They are a father-daughter duo who are separated by divorce and love dinos, but that's all the characterization they get.  Flat is a vet at the park who loves his daughter and has a tendency to — er, do nothing that sets him apart in any way from any other character ever.  Contrived is a smart, sassy every-teen who must have short-term amnesia.  Throughout the game, she's nearly eaten by dinos in every chapter, giving Flat a chance to save her.  As soon as she's safe again, Contrived will blunder herself ignorantly into another bad situation with the dinos, and the cycle continues.

The third episode is particularly badly written.  After a romp through the jungle as rescue team merc, Billy Yoder, to collect Flat, Contrived, and Mysterious (Nina), they travel to pick up Dr. Laura Sorkin.  Dr. Sorkin is a fan of dinos and protesting but not of logic.  Facepalm after facepalm ensues as Dr. Sorkin makes some of the worst decisions in the history of decision making, and everyone else just goes along with it. Pack your boxes on a helicopter instead of leaving the doomed island?  Sure! Listen to your prattle on about dino rights instead of knocking you out, dragging you onto the helicopter, and getting off the island?  Of course! Pour chemicals into the island's water supply that would allow dinos to live without InGen on the island?  Why, that sounds swell!  How could anything go wrong? Somehow, Telltale expects us to be surprised and held in suspense by these developments, and honestly, I was.  Never before have I encountered such insipid, dim-witted characters who couldn't be less interested in their own safety or survival.  There was no way I could tell what they were going to do next because it's all so contrary to normal survival instincts.

But, folks, that's as far as I'll go.  I don't want to give you too many spoilers if you plan on playing the game.  The best dinos are saved for the final plot point.

Avatar Legends: Low Budget, Great Writing

Platform:  Xbox360
From Barkers Crest Studio
Xbox Live Marketplace, 240c

Overall: 6/10
A great choice for classic gamers (think NES, SNES, Atari, Commodore 64 type gamers) who like a little snark in their throwbacks.

Play: 6/10
It is what it is, and it's nothing fancy, but it is easy to navigate for any level of gamer.  Difficulty can be changed to suit gaming experience.

Plot: 4/10
There is a typical, three-act structure hero's journey plot with multiple areas and levels to navigate through.  While the plot isn't captivating, the play on older games should keep classic gamers interested for a while.

Characterization:  7/10
We are the "hero" of the typical hero's journey, so there isn't a lot of characterization for our hero.  Many of the NPCs, however, have cool little stories that require charisma unlocks for some dialogue choices.

Customization: 5/10
In such a simple game, the only customizations are what our avatar looks like and what weapons and magic we use.  It's adequate for this kind of game.

Released on May 26, 2011, Avatar Legends has been out for a while as far as console games go, but I still found it imperative that I write some kind of review on it.  It's got the button mashing game style of old, mixed with a meta-game viewpoint writing style, and the added coolness of getting to play an RPG with your XBox360 dashboard avatar.

You start out in 'Tutorial Area' where you learn that the game is so low tech that you can't open doors and so linear that your first chest is directly in front of you. . . on the road.  After chatting with another avatar who thinks you're The One because you opened a magical chest, we step into the hero's special world as we pass out of Tutorial Area and into Hub Town.

Sure, it tickles me that they're using traditional, Joseph Campbell myth structure in their writing, but the great meta one liners put it over the top for me.  Instead of caving into this fantasy world around them, the avatars treat the world as a gamer would normally treat an RPG.

One of my favorite one liners comes from an NPC near Hub Town and completely sold me on the game the first time I played.  In this quest, your avatar has to locate a shipment of weapons for the guy at the weapons store.  He said that the shipment was supposed to be here already and he thinks that his friend got lost.  After a few snarky comments to the weapons guy, you're off on a short quest for Weapons Dealer Friend, which is actually his avatar's name.  When we find him, he's not too far outside of Hub Town.  His gear has been stolen and he needs you to fight trolls to get it back.

If you choose to whine about being sent on another quest, which I did of course, your character will say:  "Why can't things ever be easy?"

In response, Weapon Dealer Friend will say, "Because then you'd get less loot."

Understandably, my explanation probably won't elicit as many chuckles as actually playing through the game, but that interaction is a good example of the semi-meta POV you're getting here.  It runs throughout, or at least as far as I've been able to play.

Battles are third person, from above and there's none of that camera staying over the shoulder stuff.  Choose your difficulty based on how well you play from that point of view.  I didn't and I was slaughtered the first time I played this.

This game has a large world.  After Hub Town, you go to another map area with three distinct sections, each with their own quests.  You have to complete at least two of those worlds in order to enter the main quest town and once you get through that town you go to another area with three distinct sections, etc.  I made it to the third world and had gotten through two of my sections before I lost my save the same week the Xbox cloud saves came out.  It was an unfortunate coincidence.

But that is beside the point.  Keep in mind that simple play plus large world makes for a lot of fetch quests that involve a lot of walking and button mashing and none of the entertaining gore that we have all become accustomed to.  If you're the type of person that takes the Bloody Mess perk in Fallout because even those head shots aren't entertaining enough for you, this is not your kind of game.

However, if you're an RPG fan, like myself, who can put up with some button mashing, you should at least try it out to experience the wonderful dialogue and see your dashboard avatar in action.  Classic gamers may appreciate this too.  It's fairly straightforward as far as quests and gameplay go and the 3rd person battle style is very similar to those old NES role playing games.

Avatar Legends is a great little geek guilty pleasure game and it totally worth the mere 240 credits needed to purchase it.  Get it on the Xbox Live Marketplace or download the trial for free!  (And then let me know so we can try out that multiplayer!)