FRANCHISE ME: BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE GAME

So glad you included The Game as you're right, it's the closest to Part IV we'll ever get and a much better "spin-off" than the lousy cartoon series.

Thanks for the great write up. Can't wait for Die Hard. 

I just remembered Back to the Future: The Ride which also showed some possibilities they could've explored. I remember as a kid being ecstatic that a T-Rex almost ate the Delorean. 

Yeah, the ride was great. I was originally going to mention it in the Franchise Assessment, but it didn't really fit in with what I was talking about. It felt like it was getting mentioned just to mention it, which seemed pointless.

I'd imagine the game works great on YouTube. As gameplay, even as adventure gameplay which is usually obtuse and slow, it drags on like mad, especially episode 2, and the reasons aren't good enough to motivate at that point. The right elements and story plot points are here, which is good enough to play through it once, and there's stretches of great (most of the Citizen Brown episode, actually), it just doesn't know how to keep the urgency up until they go for broke in Ep 5. Then, EVERYTHING works.

Still, this is definitely where the franchise should be, and I kinda hope there's more sequels too, especially if Telltale throws some of that Walking Dead decision-making magic in here. They can play around with the timeline to infinity this way, with very little caution thrown to the wind, and they do. Unrepentantly so. There's even two trophies for sitting through the long-winded attempts at explaining the new timelines/Deloreans.

Also, not mentioned: How the game gets to that ultimate payoff of Edna, just by Doc Citizen Brown asking the simple question of what happens to her in 1986, and how what started as a joke of a characterization suddenly feels immensely, heartbreakingly sad. I daresay there's nothing even in the films that gets that specific with the human effects of mucking with the timeline.

I don't know if you know this, but Telltale, the guys behind this, also did a Jurassic Park game.

It is, by all but the most Stockholm'd accounts, garbage.

It was essentially the test bed for their Walking Dead game, so I guess we can be grateful they learned from their mistakes, because Walking Dead is phenomenal.

Yeah, watching someone else play through the game I could tell it was barely a game. Just endless conversations and super basic puzzles, then lengthy cutscenes.