PC GAMES

Fantastic mission, outrageous weapons, and awesome vehicles make the open-world mayhem of saints Row: The Third an absolute blast.

Some games create atmospheric worlds that attempt to draw you in with moving stories about characters seeking a second chance, or cast you as troubled superheroes who push themselves to the limit to fight evil. Saints Row: The Third is not like those games. Rather, it's the kind of game that gives you weapons called apocafists with which you can punch people, instantly making them explode in a bloody mess. The Third won't impress you with knockout visuals, move you with an absorbing story, or engage you with challenging combat. What it does,  better than just about any game before, is embrace the idea of an open world as a place for play, constantly giving you access to awesome new toys and providing you with no shortage of exciting opportunities to use them.

PC GAMES

The Walking Dead

This is not your average Telltale Games adventure. The depelover best known for all-ages affairs like the Back to the future and Tales of Monkey Island franchises has nimbly waded into the gust and gore of the zombie apocalypse with the first episode of its five-part take on The Walking Dead. A New Day is chock-full of all the bursting brains, eaten entrails, and sudden deaths of leading characters that feature prominently in both Robert Krikman's award-winning comicseries  and the freewheeling TV show adaptation. Marty McFly might not approve, but you certainly will if you have even the slightest taste for good zombie stories... and a strong stomach to deal with the many gross-out moments.

What makes A New Day so compelling is its attention to appearance, plot, and character development. To help with clarity, the art sheds the black-and-white style of the comics in favor of vibrant color, though it uses similar  art to that drawn by Charlie Adlard in the current issues. Fans may yearn for an option to go into a black-and-white mode, but the game art builds nicely on its paper inspiration. The PC and console versions of the game look much the same, although the PC edition is best overall with the smoothest animation. The playStation, 3 game stutters regularly, although never fot long enough that this causes any problems. The only issue is the camera, which is often too close to the action to get a good look at your surroundings. You get a good cinematic view of everything, at least, although this doesn't help much when you're scrounging through the drugstore for goodies or checking out nearby zombies.

 The story has been crafted adroitly to weave in and out of the events told in the comics and  on TV, blending the new with the familiar. So while you take on the role of the previously unseen Lee Everett, the adven ture takes  you through parts of rural Georgia also visted by Rick Grimes and the gang. Many of the events here fill out backstories fro the comics. You visit Hershel's farm before the he started that interesting collection in his barn, for instance, and rescue Glenn when he gets trapped during one of his scavenging runs.

 All of the characters are very well written and voiced as individuals (none of the TV actors reprise their roles here, though), which makes you care about whether or not  they get munched on by ravenous corpses. It's difficult to get up from the game, so expect to finish it in a two-or three-hour single sitting. Granted, there are some cliches. Lee is a stereotypical man of mystery, with a sinister past that may involve his killing the US senator messing around with his wife. His kid sidekick, Clementine, while lovable and tough in her own right, is obviously a plot device to help targic Lee find his way again.