Our Telltale Wishlist

Telltale has made quite a name for themselves since they created their own subgenre of the adventure game with The Walking Dead back in 2012. Since then they have applied that same formula to several notable franchises from Borderlands to Minecraft and most recently Batman. Telltale’s uncanny ability to take an established property and put their own story-driven, quick time event laden brand over it to deliver something new has earned them quite a following. And while I don’t particularly like all of the work they do (looking at you Minecraft) they’re just printing money with these games so there’s clearly a huge market. So with that said, I thought it would be fun to think about some franchises that would adapt to the Telltale formula in an interesting way!

Best Video Game Character Deaths

Obvious Spoilers for the tagged games!

Death is everywhere in video games. The body count of the typical Whitey McStubbly character is in the thousands. IGN estimates that Nathan Drake of the Uncharted games has killed just under 2,000 people in his three hit PS3 games, not even counting Golden Abyss. Death is taken for granted in video games. That’s why when one comes around that has an impact on you it’s special. We’ve all witnessed one. We’ve seen a comrade, a villain or

Mental Health in Video Games

As I discussed in my piece on mental health in popular culture, mental illness is more often than not presented in films, books and games as something to be feared. Characters like the Joker, Hannibal Lecter, Vaas and others all embody the “mentally insane” crutch that writers use to explain a character’s motivations. Rather than create an actual backstory that explains a character’s motivations writers just make the character “mentally insane” and think that’s enough to justify their actions. The association of mental illness with violent behaviour is a falsehood that video games have perpetuated for decades. There are countless games that rely on fear of the mentally ill to motivate players to hide from, beat up and even murder said mentally ill characters. There are some games however that do work to combat the gross misunderstanding of mental illness by the general public. Let’s take a closer look at some games that handled mental illness poorly as well as the games that handled it well.