Post by Blade Runner 07 on Feb 14, 2014 17:40:57 GMT -5
I wont beat around the bush with a clever anecdote to start this article. I wish more zombie games would focus on the elements present in Romeros original Dead trilogy. I'll explain.
Not what I had in mind.
Weather you are a cop, soldier, or just an ordinary person with no survival training, that isn't so important. What is important is how the characters we identify with react to what is happening. What made the Dead trilogy so good, was that it had us following real people with responsibilities. There was not the added drama of children or elderly to worry about. Just a bunch of "responsible" adults coping with the living dead. It was a hopeless situation, they knew it and it was an effective enough premise. The worse you could face is either getting bitten, or coming into contact with an asshole. It wasn't every five minutes or even every day in the later films that they found themselves bashing a Zeds head in or rittleing a hoard of them with bullets, it was a big deal just encountering a few of these things alone.
The thing is, it was always the bad guys who reveled in these circumstances. They embraced the idea of a broken society where they could "kill" the walking dead indiscriminately and more often than not, today's games have you playing as just that kind of person. Even if it's not touch upon in the story. These games encourage you to build new, creative tools to destroy zombies with a "bring it on" attitude about things. We see most clearly in The Walking Dead series where the constant responsibility of destroying these things that were once people, hardenes and breaks away at the morality of a person and leaves them a shell of there former selves. The lines between good and bad are blurred. It's depressing to say the least.
Like, really depressing.
This brings me to focus on the games, the bigger point of this article. The more popular zombie games these days, never brings reality to the forefront. Like how the Zeds might out number them, how dangerous they actually are, and the survivors seemingly hopeless situation. They never emphasize that it may be better to maintain the humanity they still have and work on living around the disaster rather than taking it head-on in vain. They instead insists upon the up and coming YOLO philosophy of the younger generation where death isn't a permanent consequence, but rather just an inevitability that can't be stopped or deterred, and remedied with a "reload last save" option.
Zombies are more or less fodder like the smaller aliens in Halo. Get a good melee weapon or gun and start laying waste. Most of these games just arnt realistic, if there is such a thing as a realistic zombie game. It's an arcade game hidden behind a facade of production values much higher than it deserves credit for. You either play as a hardened person with little to no character development, or one with a tacked on responsibility like loved ones to care for that supposed to inject humanity into the story but ultimately just feels cheap and cliche. Either way, there is no focus on your characters own survival and ultimately feels shallow.
With my bear hands. You face defeat.
When I play these games I want to feel the way I did when watching Romero's movies. It's fun to out smart the Zeds and sneak around, it's fun to slowly extinguish a finite amount of these things and know that you are dealing with this situation your character doesn't want to be in the best way you know how. It doesn't need to be action based but rather about suspense and the constant threat of permanent death. This was present in early zombie games like Resident Evil where you didn't always have the tools to defeat zombies and many times had to avoid them rather than fight them to survive.
This also reigns true for the characters themselves. In the Romero films the characters were eventually numbed by there experiences but you either took that journey with them or were reminded of there humanity between scenes. There were no sob stories of how they lost a loved one, these were the strong people we wanted to see overcome the odds . It's the people we were in the first few Resident Evil games, the ones we played in few zombie games leading up the craze that started a few years ago.
Odds are 5:1 he's not walking away from this. Guns be damned.
I know I sound like an old man coming down on a younger generation but I can only take so much zombie arcade action before I'm left wondering where the time went when zombies were something to be feared and avoided for survival rather than confronted and destroyed for fun.
Not what I had in mind.
Weather you are a cop, soldier, or just an ordinary person with no survival training, that isn't so important. What is important is how the characters we identify with react to what is happening. What made the Dead trilogy so good, was that it had us following real people with responsibilities. There was not the added drama of children or elderly to worry about. Just a bunch of "responsible" adults coping with the living dead. It was a hopeless situation, they knew it and it was an effective enough premise. The worse you could face is either getting bitten, or coming into contact with an asshole. It wasn't every five minutes or even every day in the later films that they found themselves bashing a Zeds head in or rittleing a hoard of them with bullets, it was a big deal just encountering a few of these things alone.
The thing is, it was always the bad guys who reveled in these circumstances. They embraced the idea of a broken society where they could "kill" the walking dead indiscriminately and more often than not, today's games have you playing as just that kind of person. Even if it's not touch upon in the story. These games encourage you to build new, creative tools to destroy zombies with a "bring it on" attitude about things. We see most clearly in The Walking Dead series where the constant responsibility of destroying these things that were once people, hardenes and breaks away at the morality of a person and leaves them a shell of there former selves. The lines between good and bad are blurred. It's depressing to say the least.
Like, really depressing.
This brings me to focus on the games, the bigger point of this article. The more popular zombie games these days, never brings reality to the forefront. Like how the Zeds might out number them, how dangerous they actually are, and the survivors seemingly hopeless situation. They never emphasize that it may be better to maintain the humanity they still have and work on living around the disaster rather than taking it head-on in vain. They instead insists upon the up and coming YOLO philosophy of the younger generation where death isn't a permanent consequence, but rather just an inevitability that can't be stopped or deterred, and remedied with a "reload last save" option.
Zombies are more or less fodder like the smaller aliens in Halo. Get a good melee weapon or gun and start laying waste. Most of these games just arnt realistic, if there is such a thing as a realistic zombie game. It's an arcade game hidden behind a facade of production values much higher than it deserves credit for. You either play as a hardened person with little to no character development, or one with a tacked on responsibility like loved ones to care for that supposed to inject humanity into the story but ultimately just feels cheap and cliche. Either way, there is no focus on your characters own survival and ultimately feels shallow.
With my bear hands. You face defeat.
When I play these games I want to feel the way I did when watching Romero's movies. It's fun to out smart the Zeds and sneak around, it's fun to slowly extinguish a finite amount of these things and know that you are dealing with this situation your character doesn't want to be in the best way you know how. It doesn't need to be action based but rather about suspense and the constant threat of permanent death. This was present in early zombie games like Resident Evil where you didn't always have the tools to defeat zombies and many times had to avoid them rather than fight them to survive.
This also reigns true for the characters themselves. In the Romero films the characters were eventually numbed by there experiences but you either took that journey with them or were reminded of there humanity between scenes. There were no sob stories of how they lost a loved one, these were the strong people we wanted to see overcome the odds . It's the people we were in the first few Resident Evil games, the ones we played in few zombie games leading up the craze that started a few years ago.
Odds are 5:1 he's not walking away from this. Guns be damned.
I know I sound like an old man coming down on a younger generation but I can only take so much zombie arcade action before I'm left wondering where the time went when zombies were something to be feared and avoided for survival rather than confronted and destroyed for fun.