I wonder if Telltale are worrying about Difficult Second Album Syndrome, despite Fables: The Wolf Among Us actually being about their dozenth adventure game series. The rapture their Walking Dead series was met with puts them, if not actually on the A-list then at least on the waiting list for the A-list. By which I mean they’re on the list of developers who I’d say are on the list to be on the list. Maybe I should do a list of all of them., but to be honest I feel a bit too listless to bother.

The Wolf Among Us, then. It’s an episodic adventure game based on the modern-day fairy tales, Big Bad (were)Wolf-starring DC comic series Fables. (more…)

Edit: Telltale have sent a correction to Game Informer. “The current estimated release window for Season Two of The Walking Dead is for fall of this year (2013), and not next year (2014) as has been reported after a recent interview.”

TV is evil. No, no, not because it drains our brains, turns all children into devil-worshiping miscreants, and won’t let Gordon Ramsay host everything, but because it taught me to expect that the very TV-like Walking Dead season two would arrive only a year after its pioneering predecessor. But alas, tearing out the reigning Emotion King’s decaying guts and replacing them with state-of-the-art new ones takes time. So then, when do you think Walking Dead season two is kicking off? 30 years from now? Tomorrow? Half-Life? Nope. Try late next year. Besides, everyone knows Half-Life 3′s been out for years. Valve’s just doing a timed exclusive with the actual Combine dimension to ensure this one’s safety. I mean, obviously.

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Telltale’s pretty much synonymous with The Walking Dead these days, but it has plans. Big plans. Maybe it’ll build a rocketship to Mars. Or perhaps it’ll make the world’s tallest ice cream sandwich. Also to Mars. Or I guess it could be making some more videogames, but that’s kinda reaching a bit. Regardless, I asked Telltale CEO Dan Connors what lies beyond his studio’s tear-blurred vision of the apocalypse, and he laid out quite the roadmap. Click past the break for updates on Fables, King’s Quest (sorta), potential plans for an entirely original multimedia universe, and a discussion of why JJ Abrams and Valve are hardly the only ones building bridges between entertainment’s many scattered islands.>

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You probably haven’t heard, but Telltale’s The Walking Dead is kind of a big deal. It maybe won some awards or something and also made its players weep so much that their ducts now cough out specks of sand and the occasional cactus. There is, in other words, something to be said for using games to spin crushingly compelling yarns, and Telltale knows it has something very special on its hands. Season one, however, was just the beginning. The only envelope’s had its shoulder bumped. Now it’s time to give it a good, hard push. I sat down with Telltale CEO Dan Connors to discuss how he plans to go about doing that, what he’s taking away from reactions to the first season, and how his company plans to squash some of Walking Dead’s more glaring flaws – for instance, those awful game-wrecking save bugs. >

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Inexplicably finding themselves in conversation with an energy drink manufacturer, Telltale mentioned that they were working on season two of The Walking Dead. We already knew that but what we didn’t know is that the sequel to last year’s most efficient jerker of tears will most likely carry over saves from the ending of the original episodes. That surprises me, considering that the season ended with the zombie virus cured by a broth containing Basset Hound saliva and pixie tears. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to go back to the dark days of the decaying dead and follow a separate group of survivors rather than continuing with the Little House on the Prairie set-up suggested by that ending? Actual> spoilers below.

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There’s a still a certain resistance in myself I have to battle when mentioning The Walking Dead games. I’d allowed myself to become so prejudiced against Telltale’s games after their patchy resurrections of franchises that meant a great deal to me as a child, and it doesn’t help that the Walking Dead comics have often demonstrated attitudes I find to be highly unsavoury. But TT’s Walking Dead games are deftly done slices of tension and humanity, reimaginging adventure games’ abstract puzzles as gut-punch moral dilemmas. Tada! My prejudice is defeated.

I imagine a second series of these episodes is all but guaranteed at this point, but the final episode of the current one approaches fast. Will it resolve Lee and Clementine’s tale once and for all, or pull a Homeland and delay much-needed denouements and resolutions until a second series? All we can do for now is watch the finale trailer and comb it for clues. (more…)

Here’s an interesting notion: Telltale have put out a “stats” trailer for The Walking Dead: Episode Four, which details the choices folks made, making for a sort of post-mortem breakdown of people’s morality within the game. While I won’t explode any details here, it’s interesting that The Walking Dead players are by and large good guys. If you’ve played the game already, I think you will want to take a look to compare with your own choices.

It should go without saying that there are SERIOUS SPOILERS down there. Episode Five should shamble into the crosshairs of our morality math in a few weeks. (more…)

I’ll put most of this after the jump so that people who aren’t up to date don’t get spoilers in their afternoon tea. The Walking Dead: Episode Four sees the survivors entering “the worst kind” of place. Anyone following the series will know that all the places so far have been far from “the best kind” of places. The trailer below contains piles of zombies and malicious use of a walkie talkie.

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Three episodes into its run and more than half way to the presumably bitter end, the first series of The Walking Dead from Telltale has touched a lot of people with its rotten old hands. Tears have been shed, shocks have been administered and the weighty grimness is becoming unbearably tragic. I’ve tried to be light on specific spoilers but I do talk about how ‘orrible it all is, and also why I have my doubts about the walk and the talk.>

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Well, relative to right now, anyway. Originally, Telltale was dead set on a “mid-August” date for its next helping of zombie-driven drama, but time – the fickle, obstinate beast – had other ideas. Time ideas. But now, in the darkest, most hopeless reaches of late> August, there is hope. You may have had to wait an extra between-five-and-fifteen days, but here it is: The Walking Dead Episode 3 – Long Road Ahead will be out later today. But why wait until midweek of late August when you can watch a (slightly spoilery) trailer in Q1 of early now>?

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