yeah, it’s enough to make me reconsider leaving my base if I don’t need something after dark.
I figured this was getting 5 stars, no one streams a game for a whole week if they aren’t having F-U-N. ;)
Great write up as always Tom, I’ll be waiting for the inevitable Steam release.
Nice review, this game is great and is pure fun. I hope they improve the coop modes like you said in future updates. we really need a pure coop mode where the players are part of the host group.
Forget Romero and just watch this:
Zombies…whatevs…
Body Snatchers, really? That’s a movie for people who were traumatized by mommy making them eat all their vegetables before leaving the table.
Romero is for DIYers in a mall. “Genre” my ass. Back at you, Sir!
You say that like it’s a bad thing! Dawn showed us that hey, maybe you can survive a zombie apocalypse. Go find a place you can barricade, make sure you have food and water, maybe some buddies to hang out with, and as long as bikers wielding pies don’t show up, you’re golden!
What does Body Snatchers tell us? Nope, give up, you stand no chance against your pea pod overlords. In fact, you’re so boring, people wouldn’t even notice if you were replaced with a vegetable! Not exactly life affirming.
If you want life affirming, watch Bambi.
IoBS evokes, cleanly and with cold terror, the fear and paranoia of the Cold War.
Dawn invokes the terror of mall shopping in Pennsylvania doused in Ketchup blood. It has all the script and atmosphere of a 3M corporate video with the production values of early Jon Waters. It’s a "classic"if two bots and a Joel were involved.
And to you, Sir.
Cold War? Why not just watch Hunt for Red October? If I wanted an allegory I’d read Aesop!
Zombies work because they don’t need to stand for anything. They can, I guess, if you’re one of those people who needs a “message” in your entertainment so it doesn’t feel like a waste of time, but sometimes a zombie is just encroaching doom, that will not stop until it’s chewing through your flesh that it can’t even taste or digest anymore. Zombies don’t make sense and they don’t need to. They’re the boogeyman. They don’t come from space and they don’t stand in for sneaky russkies that want to steal our way of life.
So ketchup blood and rotting chicken meat are more terror inducing than a Doppelganger? Indeed, in your words, Zombies “stand for nothing”. I will leave you to eat your cheese whiz from the can nozzle, sir, and bid you good day!
Now…was this debate nerdier or less nerdy than “Deckard was a replicant”?
Less nerdy. But probably also less dumb.
A flying silver ball that attaches itself to your cranium, and then drills your brains out, is much scarier.
Haven’t read the review yet, but I wonder if this formula wouldn’t transfer very nicely to other conventional videogame settings. The fantasy State of Decay, the SF State of Decay etc etc.
Tom mentioned in his streams last week, SoD2 is by far the better game and SoD1 can be skipped at this point.
Polygon agrees, zombies are better than vegetables.
And Polygon (or Kotaku for that matter) should inform my gaming and pop culture opinions because…?
Because polygons. What are you gonna do, listen to a bunch of sprites? Maybe a voxel or two?
If you had just said “Because agrees with me”, you would have had me right there with you.
If you had said “Because Social Justice”, I would have laughed.
And you would have laughed too!!
@divedivedive this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Hey, but at least you know that’s the big issue! Stamina is life more than hit points are life. Just always be ready with some sort of stamina booster when you’re fighting, be aware of when you’re playing with a character whose stamina hasn’t leveled up, and use the dodge key to get out of a tangle before you’ve run out of stamina instead of when you’ve run out of stamina.
Ugh, you just did.
But are you saying you like Day better than Dawn. Seems to me Romero’s downward slide began in Day. Maybe it’s just because I’m staunchly anti-Bub. Once he starts folding in a “zombies are just misunderstood” subtext, I start checking out.
Tell that to poor Tom Savini torn apart in the mall!
I’m not sure what their deal is with Microsoft, and they’ve been pretty coy about whether they’ll be on Steam, but I’m guessing it’s part of their contract to be coy about being on Steam. I’m hoping maybe a matter of a few months? Is that too optimistic? I hate to see this game languishing in Microsoft’s corner of the game world. :(
Especially when you’ve got power hooked up and your base is nicely lit up with electric light. Who wants to go out there with only a crappy flashlight? I do find nighttime is good for when you have to make long drives.
That could be interesting.
I’d be interested in my base being recreated on someone else’s map and vice versa. I’m not sure what the limitations are with NPC settlements, but it would be cool if I could synchronize my map with @Telefrog’s or @Jason_McMaster’s to build whatever base they’re running as an NPC settlement in my game. Imagine the possibilities! I could negotiate lucrative trade deals with @Telefrog’s base, while taking control of @Jason_McMaster’s base and exiling all his characters.
It does lay some thematic groundwork for zombie lore. But, yeah, terrible substitute. Besides, the 50s version can’t hold a candle to the 70s weirdness of the Philip Kaufman version. So freaky.
-Tom