Telltale is one of a handful of developers who has earned my undying loyalty. You tell me they made a game, and I will immediately want to play that game. This is a team that decided it made absolute sense to develop an episodic series based on a relatively obscure web comic. You also have the successful revival of the Monkey Island franchise, three solid seasons of Sam & Max, and a Back to the Future series that is as satisfying a fourth entry as I could hope for. Then sadly we had Jurassic Park The Game, a rare misstep that seems to have generated a lot more ill will towards the company than is deserved.

I never reviewed Jurassic Park properly on this site so I’ll quickly summarize my thoughts here. Not the best. Story was vaguely interesting but the game play was boring and there were so many hiccups in the audio and visuals that I was expecting the game to collapse in on itself at any second. Based on how quietly it was slipped out the door, and the fact that they skipped the monthly releases and jus released them all at once immediately, I wouldn’t be surprised if Telltale just wanted to get this out and be done with it.

I am happy to report that not only is The Walking Dead a return to form for Telltale, but one of their best efforts to date.

For starters, the lovely picture above you has absolutely nothing to do with anything that I'm about to say here. There just wasn't a relevant image to use and looking at Scarlett Johansson is always a good way to spend your time so here we are. 

If there's one word I would use to describe my work here at Totalactionadventure.com, it would be "sporadic". I tend to go in these bursts where I'll update frequently for a few weeks, then maybe once a month for a while, before another burst sets in, usually around the time when we need to pay to renew the domain. Well today I had an epiphany. In a nutshell, it's really fucking dumb to have this outlet and not use it. So get ready because I now want to go full force with this thing. There will still be dry patches as my work is insanely busy (with projects that will soon become very relevant here) but I want updates to be fairly steady. There will definitely be a quality over quantity motto going on though, so don't expect a lot of news stories and filler. 

What can you expect? More movie reviews, the occasional modern video game review, retro gaming reviews, personal updates on my quest to acquire a full NES collection, more podcasts, and possibly a few surprises along the way. 

I think we can all agree that sounds like the greatest thing in the world right? Now it's just a matter of keeping me focused, and christ I just bought the full series of The Real Ghostbusters cartoon on DVD so that is NOT going to be easy.

A film that deals with a mother’s attempt to understand her son’s decision to murder fellow students and teachers at his high school should be disturbing. However, I saw the film about a week ago, and I am still haunted by some of the scenes. What we get is a state of mind, jumping from scenes of bliss from an earlier life, to scenes of frustration, to utter shock. This technique of disrupting any sort of chronology further adds to a sense of discomfort in a tale in which a mother tries to understand whether her son is innately evil, or whether her cold, distant mothering was the cause of his violent outbursts. We get snippets of her life before Kevin along side scenes of Kevin at different stages in his life, starting as an infant who seemingly rejects his mother once out of the womb, to a toddler who mimics her (refusing to talk and intentionally soiling his diapers which he wears until a very late stage in his development). His dark hair and dark eyes and deliberate attempts to anger his mother make him seem like a child spawned from some demon. As an adolescent, his dark eyes, oddly angled smirk, and clothes too small for his body create a look of pure evil. His awkward stance and uncaring attitude seems appropriate for an adolescent; however, his unabashed masturbation in front of his mother, his comfortable stance and accurate aim with a bow and arrow, and the eating of lychees during a conversation about his younger sister having to get a glass eye (the loss of the eye resulting from a cleaning substance that we assume Kevin has poured into her eye) intimate that there is more to this character than just a diffuclt time adjusting to a pubescent stage in his life.

One day late but it still exists so yay! Since I for the life of me can't seem to get Skype working for recording, Marta kindly agreed to step in and record this episode that could be the angriest one yet. Cyclists, racists and laundry all get venom thrown at them this week. And we bring back the happy talk that we had in episode 1! So if you're ready for bad British accents and inconsistent audio levels, this is the episode for you!

Hosts: Shawn, Marta
Download: MP3 Format (17.2 MB - Right Click, Save-Target-As)

Although recorded last week this one is just going up now because...well because I don't know how the hell to edit podcasts and make them sound all nice. Plus there was some oddness going on with the file but all should now be well and you can hear all our Twilight and Jay Leno bashing clear as a bell!

I can't believe it took us until episode 2 to rip apart Twilight but here it is for a good 15 minutes straight so we're definitely making up for lost time. I also forgot to make everyone say their thing that makes that happy so it's just pure unabated rage from start to finish for this go around. 

This also means that hopefully we can maintain a bi-weekly Sunday schedule so hold us to it society! And I'll get all that pesky RSS and iTunes madness sorted out soon.

Hosts: Shawn, Marianne, Dana
Download: MP3 Format (20.1 MB - Right Click, Save-Target-As)

It's the very first episode of our new podcast, You Silly Humans, which may have a cute name but the cursing and venom starts to fly within the first 60 seconds so don't let it fool you! The premise of our little show is simple - we bitch 'bout stuff. It could be something in the news, something on TV, or just an infuriating encounter in a coffee shop check-out line. It's angry, it's cynical, but hey it's also fun!

This first week I am joined by my spouse as we attack moms of all shapes and sizes. We also make some time for a weird spur of the moment charity rant, as well as heaping some praise on the world of literature. And Tom Cruise. 

Hope you enjoy it and it will only get better from here!

Host: Shawn McMahon
Download: MP3 Format (19.3 MB - Right Click, Save-Target-As)

Depending on how you look at it, the Playstation Vita has now been out for just over one week or just over two. It has been a strange launch to say the least. I pre-ordered the First Edition bundle back in January, less so because I wanted the pack-in deals (which for the record include a decent but unimpressive carrying case, a mediocre pack-in game and a 4 GB memory card that likely won’t last me very long) and more because I got caught up in the idea of getting it early. For some reason that strangely appealed to me.

So I’ve had it for over a week now, and I would never ever have the time to give a proper review to each of the games I’ve played (it’s a pretty high number, I tend to go overboard when a new system launches) as well as the system so I thought I would do a general write-up and give a very brief overview of my thoughts up until this point.

I found myself at the cinema twice to see this exceptional film. An adaptation of a stage play that opened in New York, Roman Polanski’s Carnage does justice to the original script, depicting a story that captures the fragility of relationships as they crumble at two couples’ desire to prove that their kid was in the right. Carnage demonstrates how the civilized easily dissolves into the barbaric, unrefined, crude gestures that are so quickly triggered by the declaration, “I am right!”

No lie – Rhythm Heaven Fever was one of my most anticipated games of the year. I was introduced to the series with the DS installment a few years back, which I bought on a blind whim so I would have something new to play on my just purchased DSi. I sat down to try it out and ended up not moving for hours, a pattern that would repeat itself every time I fired it up. I wasn’t sure if we would ever get more Rhythm Heaven in North America and yet here we are, with a budget priced installment for the Wii.

And hey guess what? Turns out Rhythm Heaven is still fantastic.

Last week Double Fine productions launched an initiative on Kickstarter to raise $400,000 to fund an old school adventure game in the vein of Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, and Grim Fandango. Publishers were never going to fund such a project, so why not go to the fans instead? Well the rest is history. They surpassed their goal (of which they expected to take the full 33 days to accomplish) in just 1 day and less than a week later have raised almost 2 million dollars. Yes we are indeed going to get a new adventure game from the mind of Tim Schaefer, something I, and clearly many others, have wanted for a good long while. It’s one of those rare occasions where just about everybody seems to be in agreement that this is a great thing.

Well, almost everybody.