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
I have his autograph! He’s pretty rad
Sheet. Amateurs! You want body snatching weirdness? Try the 1993 Body Snatchers directed by Abel Ferrera. It’s all about the loss of identity and paranoia of being a military family.
Dated! Oliver Hirschbiegel’s version is about the invasion of Iraq. But it doesn’t get any respect because Gabriel Anwar isn’t nekkid in it.
-Tom
Tom is right. and I thought this game would SUCK. Watching a stream doesn’t do it justice. The graphics are pretty good and the combat is so much better than the original. The base balance keeps you making decisions that matter. You never get to a point where you feel completely set (like in the orginal), I like that going out on a run really matters more in this game than in most of SoD. Also each base has differing strategies, and running a smaller group is sometimes more viable than more than six. There is still ALOT that can be done with this game to make it so great! but its great already! Too bad Microsoft are too cheap of bastards to invest more into it! totally worth it.
Also you should still play Lifeline and the original story. The original SoD had a good story overall and it still is worth playing.
Ferrera’s version is definitely dated. It also feels so much weirder to me because the focus is narrow. It really only resonates with a very specific audience: teens of military families.
The original Dawn is a masterpiece. But before Dawn or even Night there was Invisible Invaders (aka Night of the Living Dads)
I don’t know if Romero ever acknowledged the obvious influence.
Are the 3 maps all part of the same campaign, or do you just choose 1 and complete the “win” conditions there?
Well first of all, yeah I am saying that. Took me a while to figure it out, but I like what Day was doing better than Dawn. I liked that it was deeper into the apocalypse, well past outbreak. And while all the actors were, let’s say swinging for the fences, I appreciated that the result was that nearly every character you meet at this point is pretty much totally insane in some way or another. The military guys have gone completely paranoid, and the scientists have just crawled up their own cerebellum and are lost in their research.
And - oh yeah, their research. Now I like Bub, but I get why folks don’t. He kind of turns into this cuddly goofball of a character, defangs the zombies as a threat. But he does make a kind of sense. I mean, if you’re going to accept that the zombies are reanimated by brain activity, and retain enough of that to have some semblance of motor skills, is it that much of a stretch to consider that they might, in some far off corner, remember who they were? I think it was Land of the Dead where he really went off into “they were just misunderstood” territory, with the survivors kind of making their own separate peace with the zombies. That’s yet another step, and I can understand not following Romero along that path. But he was trying something you didn’t really see in zombie fiction, not really until Z Nation, which is another underrated story.
“The clock running while you weren’t playing was a huge point of contention for some players, and it was often misunderstood, precisely because it was such a bad idea.”
I just started to play the first. I haven’t logged on to State of Decay Year One since Tom was streaming his review copy last week. Is that going to be a problem? Is it like Animal Crossing? A bunch of weeds?
I finally fired this up last night – I was waiting for a patch, but whatever – and comfortably settled in to that special SoD mix of auteur game design and jank. Zombie Labs seems to have their hearts in the right places, but just quite don’t have the technical chops (or budget, or something) to create a smooth open-world experience.
Still, based on what I’ve played through, I’m very happy with SoD 1.9999.
Huh, I ight have to check this out. I really wanted to like the original game but it hid so many of its mechanics that it made Dark Souls jealous, the interface was terrible, and fuuuuuuuck that “keeps running while you’re away from the game” like it was a F2P mobile strategy game.
Inarguable movie opinions!
What madness is making people recommend the 50s Body Snatchers instead of the superior in every possible way 70s remake? What’s next, the 50s The Thing over the John Carpenter version? The 50s The Blob over the 80s remake?
Honestly, I view Romero movies as historical artifacts and not much more, in the same way as Nostferatu and all the other old iconic monster movies. For pure thrills and terror, none of the Dead movies hold a candle to 28 Days Later. The Dawn remake hit every note the original did but better. Fast zombies with instant infection are scarier than slow zombies, and only allegory-obsessed viewers will argue otherwise (“They represent the slow creeping inevitability of death, maaaaaaan!”). Even Romero himself admitted how dumb slow zombies were in the 1990 NotLD remake. The things are zero threat unless you trip and just decide not to get up. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that 90% of deaths in slow zombie movies are from tripping over furniture.
But let’s talk allegories. Dawn is where it all started going wrong. Flush with ego after being praised for his (unintended) commentary on race in NotLD, Romero decided to double down with the unsubtle consumerism metaphor in Dawn. From then on, each of his movies would get heavier and heavier with the metaphor. Day of the Dead would go on to the tired and lazy "man is the real monster) motif. The nadir of this would be Land of the Dead, where the subtext was so heavy that it was indistinguishable from the literal plot (shat-on undesirables kept out of fancy community, only one group is humans and the other zombies).
And that’s why the Dawn remake was such a joy. Fast zombies. No social commentary. No overly stupid characters. In any lesser or lazier zombie movie, an infected survivor hiding their bite would predictably be the group’s downfall. The Dawn remake makes you think it’s going with that cliche, only for an old lady to shoot the infected, her dumb protective husband, and zombie baby in the face! A more disappointing zombie movie would have the group’s alpha asshole start the trouble (Romero was especially guilty of cementing this trope). The Dawn remake makes you think it’s going in this direction, then has the character quickly come to their senses and focus the rest of the movie on the fun of zombie sniping, propane tanks, and chainsaw slits.