This week, we talk about zombies.

Gary Butterfield of Watch Out For Fireballs joins us for an extra-long episode on the groundbreaking adventure game The Walking Dead by Telltale games. This is a game that we’ve been dying to talk about since we launched the show, and we couldn’t be happier to have Gary on to give his take.

A brief programming note about this week’s episode: We had so much fun recording this episode that we ran very long, so we’re bringing you this episode in two parts. This part begins with about a half hour of general discussion of the game, followed by about an hour of discussing the game’s plot up to about the half way point. Next week we’ll be bringing you the conclusion of this episode, which clocks in at about forty additional minutes.

Links for this episode

Gary and the rest of the Duckfeed.tv crew are doing a 24 hour charity livestream event!

Duckstream 2014 NOVEMBER 21st starting at 6PM PST. 24 hours of charity streaming from your friends at Duckfeed.tv.

All proceeds go to Transactive. Transactive provides a holistic range of services to empower transgender and gender nonconforming children, youth and their families.

Availability

You can get this game for just a few bucks on basically anything that will show pictures on a screen. Rather than try to link to everything, I’m just going to link to Telltale’s purchase page.

We played the game on Steam for Mac & PC as well as on an Xbox 360, but it is also available on PS3, both the PS4 and Xbox One, and on iOS and Android including Android micro consoles like the Ouya.

The Short Game is experimenting with our format this week, and you’re the guinea pig! We’re calling these shortisodes; half-length (or less) episodes in which we break from our regular format of talking in depth about one game per episode and talk instead about… whatever we want! This will allow us to still get something in your feed each week (cough late cough) while we move to our bi-weekly-ish format.

In this, our first shortisode, we discuss some of the points raised in Ben Kuchera’s recent Polygon article, “To hell with longer games, tell me how SHORT your game is.” We couldn’t agree more.

Links for this episode:

You can follow our show on Twitter at @_shortgame

Your hosts this week were:

This week, Laura joins us again to discuss Little Inferno, a game so unique that it defies description. Here, we’ll give it a go: Little Inferno is a game in which you order items from catalogs, burn them in a beautiful interactive fireplace, and somehow this earns you more money to buy more things to burn.

Sound intriguing? We didn’t think so! Yet somehow, developers Tomorrow Corporation (of World of Goo fame) turn this strange, casual game concept into a two-to-four hour experience that we all found deeply emotionally and intellectually satisfying. If you’re into games as art and games as culture, you’ll want to check this one out. A great and utterly unique game, and a great episode of The Short Game.

Availability

Previously offered as a part of Humble Indie Bundle 8.

Links

You can follow our show on Twitter at @_shortgame

Your hosts this week were: