Telltale and Last Of Us

So I guess I’ll write something about games this time. The eye continues to improve, and focusing on nearby things gets a little bit better each day. (Writing this post has been the easiest so far.) There’s still a slight bit of soreness there which crops up in unexpected ways. Sometimes it hurts when I yawn or squeeze my eye shut, and sometimes it feels like there’s something like a hair stuck in the eye. Usually some Tylenol fixes it. But it doesn’t interfere with my activity at all. Today I mowed and drove to the grocery store and back (I was cleared for driving the next day, actually).

Telltale Games is apparently shutting down. I don’t have any specific reason for thinking this, but I feel like there was writing on the wall for this. I remember hearing some “scuttlebutt” about company mismanagement or something. I’ve only played The Walking Dead games, which are fantastic. I’m not sure what that genre is called. Visual novels? I don’t think that’s right, because most of the games that people call visual novels seem like they have half nekkid Anime characters in them.

Anyway, I feel a bit bad because I hadn’t bought the final Walking Dead game yet, the first episode of which just came out last month. Are they going to finish releasing that? I hope so. On the other hand, it seems like the company’s problems ran a bit deeper than just one game having slow sales. I suspect we would still be hearing the same news if The Walking Dead Final Season sales had been through the roof.

I just noticed that the Steam reviews of The Final Season just got clobbered with negative reviews, which is pretty sad. I assume people think the season won’t be completed. I hope that’s not true. But um, yeah, it seems prudent to wait. It’s not like my money would make it to the developers now anyway.

In other news, I’m enjoying The Last Of Us, though I’ve only played a couple of hours so far. It’s a stealth game, though, which isn’t my favorite kind of game. The gameplay seems pretty dern hard on Normal. One wrong step and you’re reloading from the last checkpoint, to the point where it’s kind of irritating. I’m probably going to bump it back to Easy. The story seems a bit contrived so far, but I can see where it has a lot of potential to be as great as everyone says it is. (I bought it entirely for the story, because I remember basically everyone in the universe raving about how great it was.)

One thing I particularly like which has nothing to do with the game is called Photo Mode. If you enable it, you can press the left stick button and go into a screenshot mode that is the most comprehensive I’ve ever seen in any game, with the possible exception of the GeForce Ansel screenshot capabilities. You can pan and zoom the camera around anywhere in the scene, change the depth of field, colors, lighting, just about anything you can think of. It’s the kind of thing that I wish every single MMORPG I’ve ever played had. Final Fantasy XIV is the only one that comes close, and Black Desert Online of course has the Ansel support.

The hard part of PS4 screenshots is getting those images to a PC. I also experimented with recording videos directly from the PS4 today. Supposedly you can stream directly to Twitch just by pressing a couple of buttons. There’s a little earpiece that plugs into the controller that also has a microphone in it. It doesn’t look like it should work, but it actually does a passable job of recording your voice as you play. I think it only records video at 30 fps though.

Related

• The Walking Dead Game Episode 3