StarOcean said:
I'm referring to their interactive movies. I don't have anything on their point and click games though. But I mostly know them for their movie-like games. Which, to be fair, aren't bad as movies. I find their characters interesting. But I would never buy them since I don't believe they work as games.
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Telltale once started with the premise to revive a genre in NA which was invented in the US but was dead like Jazz there 15 years ago (the reason was that LucasArts, Sierra On-Line [King's Quest/Space Quest/Leisure Suit Larry etc.] and Westwood Studios [Kyrandia, Blade Runner] had left the genre of point & click adventure games behind) and only kept alive in Europe from 2000 onwards, with e.g. Pendulo Studios' Runaway from Spain, Microïds' Syberia from France, Deck 13's Ankh and Animation Arts' Secret Files from Germany, Funcom's The Longest Journey from Norway.
Well Telltale definitely helped to bring the classic genre back to the table also in NA with their Sam & Max games, but after the shift from p&c to interactive movies many fans of point & click games hated them. Telltale was also one of the first companies - if not even the very first one - to publish their games in episodes, which made the haters even hate them more. I was one of the haters, but at the same time I realized that Heavy Rain and Telltale's own IMs were just a modern revival of the FMV genre (an adventure game subgenre) which already existed long before and became sort of popular in the 90s with games like the Tex Murphy series, The 7th Guest and Phantasmagoria. The difference is that the modern IMs are not FMV (Full Motion Video) like back then but told in-engine (I think David Cage was the first one to do it this way with Fahrenheit in 2005).
If today the genre of adventure games (one of the oldest gaming genres, it started with text adventures in the 70s afaik) would only consist of interactive movies, I would still hate Telltale as they were THE company to make IMs a worldwide success on all systems from PC to smartphone. But actually we have more developers and publishers of classic point & click adventure today than ever before (e.g. Wadjet Eye, Daedalic, Ron "Monkey Island" Gilbert's upcoming Thimbleweed Park, to name just 3 examples). The genre of adventure games is more alive than ever, so I "made peace" with Telltale and decided to try a few of their IMs.
And what can I say: I really loved The Wolf Among Us (imo their best IM so far thanks to Bill Willingham's fantastic comic book characters) and - much to my surprise - I also liked Tales from Borderlands, a pretty humorous IM (while Wolf is much darker). I'm actually even a bit excited for the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy IM as I love the movie. Are these "real games"? I don't care, I just enjoy some of them once in a while for what they are, interactive movies, or like lewis said: interactive comic books.
I still buy them only with heavy discounts, though. I won't pay 20-25 € for an IM (all episodes), 8 € or less is the sweet spot for me.
