Telltale – Walking Dead bugs are just intended to make it more harrowing

Judder so bad that the people move like zombies and the zombies don't move.

Judder so bad that the people move like zombies and the zombies don’t move.

While Telltale’s adventure game adaptation of the hit TV and comic-book series The Walking Dead was off being a sleeper hit on PC, coming out of nowhere to win a whole host a game of the year awards, those playing the episodic title on Xbox 360 were having a decidedly less fun time of things. As PC users were enjoying the title in its natural state, console gamers were beset with a host of issues, ranging from animation mismatches to outright save-file deletion.

It turns out, however, that this was all a part of Telltale’s plan.

“We’re going to go out and say it right now” said lead designer Jake Rodkin, “the definitive Walking Dead experience is the console one. If you play it on PC, it behaves exactly like a video game should. There are no random crashes, no deletions, no unexpected behaviour. But the console version, that’s what really subverts tropes.

A lot of people spoke last year about how Spec-Ops: The Line shook up the classic FPS model in order to send a message. We decided to go one further, but say something about video games as a whole. When you pay $20 for a game you expect it to have basic functions, but what happens when it doesn’t? What happens when you can’t guarantee that this level will complete because of some shoddy action-scripting?”

The revelation is expected to set off a whole slew of “ironic” games, or games which, through being meta, attempt to tell a story.

Sergey Tirov’s claims that Big Rigs was a commentary on modern capitalism and rushed development cycles have so far been unsubstantiated.

About Cieran Douglass

Cieran built this website in a cave with a bunch of scraps. Actually no that's not right at all, it was with Wordpress and middling Photoshop and design skills. He often plays video games and his favourites are Paper Mario TTYD, GTA San Andreas, Portal 2 and Minecraft. His display picture is not an accurate portrayal. He currently works for a much bigger website at the University of York, but if you'd like him to write something for you he can be contacted at cieran@pixelgrater.com.