Dead on Arival Island?

How do you get one of the most amazing game trailers (or trailers in general) ever produced to be bad for your product? Just ask Techland with their amazing piece of film that, evidently, doesn't represent their game in anything except in setting.

Like just about every nerd ever I had an amazing nerdgasm over the Dead Island cinematic released a month and a half ago and was really eager to see the Walking Dead of video games. It really looked that instead of being a bland, Left 4 Dead knockoff it would be a drama with the setting being zombie apocalypse. Report after report is telling us that isn't the case at all. Even the producer of the game is likening it to Borderlands in the way it keeps players hooked.

It makes me sad that I really feel that our hearts have been broken already. Maybe my hopes were naive, but I really felt we may be seeing a second fiddle studio really come in to it's own with a tour de force pet project. Then again that's not always a guaranteed success either.

If Techland actually made the game they represented in the trailer I would pre-order 2 copies (because your diety of choice knows I would need it for PC and Xbox). Unfortunately, it is being now represented as a second rate L4D. Dead Island, in my not so humble opinion, has been downgraded to the "must be crap until proven otherwise" catagory.

All I can say is the game better be pretty friggin' awesome.

Oh Telltale, where art thou?

Telltale has been getting a lot of press lately by announcing and releasing classic adventure games based around licensed properties. Just in the last day there have been reports of games based on Jurassic Park, the comic Fables, and AMC hit show and graphic novel The Walking Dead. Are Telltale games really the smartest PC developer in existence?

It doesn't take a marketing or business genius to see what they are doing. License some mid to high level IP, churn out as many games with their existing technology as they can with an episodic model, then sell exclusively digitally on platforms like Steam and their own digital store to make an absolute killing with the only overhead going to writing and production. I suppose you can create a lot of content while recycling the same adventure game mechanics that really haven't changed at all in 24 years.

Their most recent release of Back to the Future episodic games has garnered them moderate critical success, but is it for the IP or the game itself? I have doubt this business model will be very successful, but is it really any better than Facebook and social games? At least there you can find thought and innovation, even if the gameplay is shallow and minimal.