I'll admit, after watching the E3 2012 press conferences at home on my couch while drinking Heineken and using a spray bottle on my 8-week-old kittens every time they used my scalp as a scratching post, I didn't have high hopes for the show floor. No Fable 4? No God of War 4? No Dreamcast 2? Pffh. Yawn.

I arrived at E3 about two hours late with an attitude that basically said, "Okay, giant flashy expo. Impress me." Needless to say, I have been impressed. But maybe not necessarily by what was supposed to impress me.

Assassin's Creed 3 will be a Star-Spangled good time, Epic Mickey 2 looks stunning after finally escaping the evil clutches of the low-def Wii, and Watch-Underscore-Dogs appears to be incredibly innovative but will probably never live up to the expectations we now have for it. But bitchy high-school comments aside, everyone made a great showing—congrats! May the dick-measuring contest that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo never stop swelling.

Without further to-do, I would like to present some E3 awards of my own – but not for "best game" or "best shooter" or nonsense like that. No. These are much more important.

Look, all of the video footage we've seen from the new Tomb Raider game is not giving me confidence that she is going to be anything short of a total incompetent whiner. We get it, Square Enix—you don't want Lara Croft to be an unrealistic ass-kicking Barbie doll with a pair of pistols and double-D's anymore because it apparently turns off women. So, I guess you're going in the opposite direction: The new Lara Croft really, and I mean really, gets her ass kicked in every video we've seen, while letting out some of the most annoying girly squeals and screams I've ever heard.

But after everything that takes this girl out—explosions, enemies with arrows, falling from heights, barrels, sharp rocks—I could not have laughed more when a tree branch puts her on her face. A tree branch. Sticking out of the ground. Really, Lara? You're trying to survive in a dangerous, wild environment and you can't even pick up your feet four inches? You're a mean one, tree branch. Thank you.

With expo parking ranging from $15 a day to a whopping $40, it pays to be an armored vehicle with a mounted gun. You can drive that thing anywhere—who's going to stop you? No parking attendant is going to give a ticket to something that can run over their house.

The Twitterverse "went wild" as soon as Just Dance 4 came on the scene at the Ubisoft press conference, where a bunch of cute girls started dancing to the 1999 hit song, "Wild, Wild West." God bless you, Ubisoft. I haven't been able to bust out my bow-legged rodeo dance moves until I was forced to perform that same Will Smith song at a dance recital when I was 13.

I love booth babes—more so looking at them than actually conversing with them. This year, we had some really cute costumes that obviously took a lot of effort to put together, and I was wow'd. These include the Lollipop Chainsaw girl, the girls from Wargaming, and the armored-up models over at Dungeons & Dragons: Neverwinter. But, alas, for every great costume there are five terrible ones.

The Crave booth babes were basically in boring blue bikinis, and even worse, the Dead or Alive 5 girls were in black t-shirts, black shorts, and sparkly rhinestone belts worthy of a Glen Campbell song. With all of the females in the Dead or Alive games, you couldn't even give us some boobalicious cosplay? Highly disappointed. I at least hoped to see volleyballs in this new DOA fighting game.

Okay, fine, it wasn't human flesh. It was turkey flesh. My buddy Alan Johnson from Telltale Games invited me into the Walking Dead demo area while promptly handing me a giant turkey leg attached to a prosthetic human hand. He whispered that they also had bath salts in the back, but I passed.

The six looks like a giraffe getting a BJ. I'm sorry you can't unsee it, but it had to be said.

It's safe to say I've been looking forward to the next game announcement from my pals over at Twisted Pixel more than anyone, so when that shiny, beautiful bike sex'd up my computer screen during the Microsoft press conference, I drooled a little.

Something about Kung-Fu motorcycles? Give us more, Twisted Pixel, you tease!

Team Ico is still keeping The Last Guardian all to themselves, making me wonder if it really exists or is just some giant hoax, like that time Paul McCartney died. The game was a no-show at E3 due to "technical difficulties." What, did the dog-bird eat the kid or something? No one cares about God of War: Play This Until God of War 4 Comes Out. We want The Last Guardian!

And finally…

Turns out my brand new kittens, Maddox and Milo LOVE lanyards.

However, they rejected the Sony lanyard and only play with the Nintendo lanyard, because clearly they're too young to know better. Thanks for the free cat toys, Nintendo!

I had a few more awards, one having to do with my experience nearly running headfirst into Snoop Dogg with his bodyguard pulling me away saying "Git out da way!" but these were the ones I really wanted to share with you. I had a fantastic time at E3 this year and hope my sore feet recover before next year. Special thanks to NOS Energy Drinks for keeping me awake all three days and simultaneously eating away my stomach lining.

Until next year, I'm Lisa Foiles, and I never want to eat at an LA food truck again.

Telltale's Walking Dead video game has been great so far; better and truer to the source material than the less-than-great TV show.

But when I first started it up, I couldn't help but wonder why it was in color. The game is cell-shaded and looks for all the world like a moving comic book, but Kirkman, Moore and Adlard's books are in stark black and white.

I visited with Telltale during E3 to check out the game's second episode, and took the opportunity to ask writer and designer Mark Darin whether we'd ever get a black and white option for the game.

"It was one of the first things we thought of," Darin said, "but they just figured out that you can have a still image and have it be black and white and look absolutely beautiful and pristine, but when you start moving around in a 3D world, it starts to become kinda muddy. They really did want to do it, they wanted to have that option available, but it just didn't make sense so they pulled it."

It's too bad—the comic-book-style color can sometimes make The Walking Dead look too cartoony (despite its wonderfully dark overall tone and vibe). As that image up top shows, if the game could've worked in black and white, it would have been even closer to the books' gritty vibe than it already is.

I'll more more in-depth thoughts on the next episode of The Walking Dead, which releases later this summer, next week.

The first episode in Telltale's game based on The Walking Dead comics has sold more than 1 Million copies across all platforms. Good news, since I really liked it!

When casting about for media to compare gaming to, most minds land on film. Action movies and action games still draw inspiration from each other, and when game budgets and incomes draw comparisons, it's always to Hollywood.

But over at The Atlantic, writer Yannick LeJacq argues that really, video games and television have much to learn from each other—perhaps, even, a shared future. TV, LeJacq explains, has been drawing in more and more interactivity, and games, particularly explicitly episodic experiences like The Walking Dead, have steadily been taking on more of the broadcast structure.

"Paying $60 dollars per package-not to mention the cost of consoles, other hardware, and related services-is an increasingly prohibitive venture for many gamers," LeJacq observes, before touching on the rise of the free-to-play genre as well as shorter, inexpensive, casual and mobile titles like Angry Birds. He points out that taking what could be a massive, "serious" game and breaking it into discrete, affordable chunks that require a low time investment from players may just be what makes the medium tick in the future:

The implication for consumer taste is that you're fine spending 99 cents on a game you'll play on your morning commute. But if you spend more than 50 bucks, you damn well better be getting your money's worth—if "getting your money's worth" means being able to spend countless hours in front of the screen day after day.

This makes for a weird conflation of "time spent in front of the screen" with "quality." ... By serializing "serious games" of this caliber, long-form dramatic experiences can be doled out with more thought given to the lives of the people playing them.

So far, this seems to actually be working.

LeJacq is not the first to applaud the apparent trend for video games to be cribbing style and strucutre from television. Kotaku's own Kirk Hamilton recently likened no less-beloved a game than Mass Effect 2 to a television series, applauding its sense of pace and timing. And, LeJacq concludes, the trends may eventually move both ways, connecting our entertainment:

After all, just like RuPaul's Drag Race, more television is borrowing from the success of American Idol to invite a deeper sense of user engagement. We're probably a long way away from episodes of Breaking Bad asking, "WILL WALTER WHITE SAVE JANE, OR LEAVE HER TO DIE? TONIGHT, YOU DECIDE." And hopefully, we'll never get to that. But what we may see instead is completely novel experience, something where we all sit down together with a game and a screen—the 21st century's true campfire—and learn how to tell each other better stories.

The Future of Video Games Could Look a Lot Like Television [The Atlantic]

I wanted to like the television adaptation of The Walking Dead when it premiered on AMC back in 2010. I like zombies; I like Frank Darabont. I'd heard nothing but good things about the comics the show was based on.

And I liked the pilot; I really did. But immediately after that… they lost me. The show almost immediately became a ploddingly paced snooze-fest broken up by moments of excitement that weren't worth the wait. It was almost entirely populated by underdeveloped characters who frequently behaved like unforgivable imbeciles when they weren't... just... sitting there.

If anything it got worse in its second full season, a farm-shackled slog broken up by just enough action to keep us hopeful that it would get better. And here we are after an action-packed season 2 finale... still hopeful that it might finally get better.

So, I approached Telltale's The Walking Dead video game with some skepticism. I've been reading the books, and their excellence has only served to make me more frustrated with the show. Could a video game adaptation really be better than a TV adaptation?

I've now played through the first episode of the game's planned five-episode run a couple of times. And hey, what do you know? It's very good.

Here are 5 reasons why I like the Walking Dead game better than the TV show.

The Characters Aren't All Tools

The fact that protagonist Rick Grimes is the most interesting character on the TV show says less about what an interesting character he is and more about how uninteresting everyone else is. It's only in a few raw moments (the final scenes of the second season, for example) when we get a look at how he could be actually maybe be a character with some depth.

The game's protagonist Lee Everett, on the other hand, is more of a mystery. He has a criminal past that we don't quite understand, and even though we don't know what he's done, we're forced to make decisions about how clean we want to come to the other survivors. Some of them take him at his word, others are suspicious.

His relationships with his family and his ex-wife are complicated, and we learn about them through casually tossed off bits of conversation and, at some points, grisly discoveries in the game.

The game is primarily concerned with telling Lee's story, but the other characters I met offered just enough in their limited screen time to make me interested in them. And the young girl Clementine (who I'll get to in a minute) is another well-done, real-feeling character. Best of all, the game features Glenn, who is by far the least-toolish character on the TV show. It's a veritable cornucopia of non-toolishness!

I find that I want to know more about Lee, and I'm happy that there will be four more episodes in which I'll get to do so. Rick Grimes, on the other hand, has had two seasons worth of TV show to make me interested in him, and yet despite flashes of depth he's still kinda just this guy, you know? And the less said about those goons he hangs out with, the better.

Turns Out Mopey Conversations Are Better if You're Having Them

In any zombie apocalypse, there's going to be some downtime; moments when you and your fellow survivors sort of just look at one another blankly, think about the horrible things you've seen and done, and sort of… cope.

In all its forms, The Walking Dead works very hard to conjure those moments; the comics spend page after page looking into the darkness of a soul without hope. But in the TV show, that navel-gazing slows to a glacial pace, and characters spend ages staring into the middle distance, blandly mouthing vague statements about being sad and feeling anguished about this or that. Aside from a couple of the main characters, we aren't given enough information about any of them to find it all that engaging.

The Walking Dead the game has had a fraction of the amount of the TV series' run-time to work with, so its characters are even less developed. And yet, I find that I'm invested in the bland conversations and the shell-shocked mumbling, and I'm eager to know what shell-shocked mumbles will happen next. That's mostly because I'm actually doing the mumbling, and making choices.

Watching a character be vague about his sketchy past isn't all that interesting. In this case, playing as a character who is attempting to be vague about his sketchy past is much more so. Let's call it a "win" for interactive media!

The Kid Isn't a Complete Effing Moron

In fact, Clementine is pretty great. She's cute and funny, smarter than she lets on, yet she still acts like a kid. She's one of the most realistically drawn kids I've encountered in a video game in some time.

I spent the entire first chapter having Lee tell her half-truths in just the way that we really do with young kids—I'm not going to spell out for her that her family is most likely dead, and I'm not going to tell her the full story of my checkered criminal past. I could if I wanted to (those are dialogue options), but those just aren't things I would tell a little kid.

I like her and I found that I (and by extension, Lee) wanted to shelter her from what was happening as well as I could. I'm looking forward to seeing how her relationship with Lee changes over the course of the next four chapters. I hope nothing tragic happens. Knowing The Walking Dead, my hopes are most likely in vain.

Compare that to the Walking Dead TV show, where we spent the entirety of the second season anguishing over dumbassed Carl who left the cars like a huge dumbass and wandered out and got shot, in the way that only a real dumbass could. Ugh. Go away, Carl. Go off with your dumbass mom and get turned into a zombie or something. Maybe it would make you smarter.

I Don't Long For Zombie Attacks

The TV version of The Walking Dead tends to be at its best whenever action is either happening or is about to happen. A tense buildup to a bloody confrontation in a bar was my single favorite sequence of the entire series to date. The season 2 finale, which I only recently got around to watching, contained the most engaging extended sequence the show has had in ages. But too much of the series up to then, hampered by uneven writing and budget limitations, has to take place in between zombie attacks. For whatever reason, the show-runners have been unable to turn this weakness into a strength.

Conversely, the action sequences in The Walking Dead game are its least interesting part—and that's by design. It's essentially a point-and-click adventure game, and the Heavy Rain-light controls in combat aren't really designed to be difficult. Despite a couple of harrowing encounters, I never came all that close to dying in all of episode one.

Rather, the game lives in the moments immediately after combat, when you had to make some terrible choice or other and then decide how to rationalize it to everyone else. It's where the central theme comes into play. And hey, speaking of choices and themes...

There's a Clear Central Theme, And It's Interesting

The Walking Dead is a game about choice. We often hear that in branching games like this: "This is a game about choice." Well of course it is! The player's ability to make narrative-altering decisions is one of the game's defining attributes!

But unlike some other choice-based games, The Walking Dead has something real to say about choice. Namely, that in the heat of the moment, difficult choices barely feel like choices at all. Every time Lee looks back at a difficult decision he made while under pressure, he says something that rings true: It didn't feel like a choice because he didn't have time to think.

"Sometimes," he says, "we don't make choices; we just do what we do."

Compared to the TV show, that theme feels focused and surprisingly fresh. The show feels like a bit of a muddle—sure, it plays with thematic material (Some stuff about religion? Maybe a thing about... like... caring about your kid?), but they're kind of lost in a vague stew of sadness and ennui. I've watched hour after hour of it, and I'm still not really sure if the show has anything to say.

"The zombie apocalypse sure is a bummer," I suppose.

The Walking Dead comics will probably always stand above their non-comic-book offspring. They are tight, brutal, fast-moving, and no matter how many various spinoffs we get, they'll always be the source of the series' guts and soul. (Its oozing guts and black, black soul.) But I'm heartened to see that the writers of the Walking Dead game appear to understand the source material, and have been able to execute it more convincingly and interestingly than their TV show-making counterparts, at least so far.

Even if you've never played a Telltale episodic game, this one really is worth checking out. I've been describing it as "All of the parts of a zombie apocalypse that you haven't yet played in a video game." I hope that sounds like the endorsement that I mean it to be.

I enjoyed the hell out of The Walking Dead and find myself very much looking forward to the next episode. That's something I haven't said about the TV show since the pilot aired.