The found footage of State of Decay 2

Nothing is going to equal the dissonance of the original Dead Island trailer in relation to that game, but this campaign for State of Decay 2 sure doesn’t match the goofy jank of an open-world sandbox.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/05/16/the-found-footage-of-state-of-decay-2/

I’m not going to watch those because I’m worried about spoilers. But, ooh, I’m glad you brought up that Dead Island trailer. That holds up!

And it just reminds me of something I was talking about on the stream: it sucks that videogames are too squeamish to include child zombies. They’re an important part of the mythology and it’s cowardly to not include them in a game that’s M-rated anyway.

-Tom

No spoilers in either of the State of Decay live action ads from what I saw. Just little vignettes that feel like they come from some other zombie story entirely.

I suspect the concern is it may lead to an AO rating, or in some countries (eg Australia, Germany) an outright ban. In Europe, for instance, the PEGI 18 label (which admittedly isn’t anything like the death sentence an AO rating would be) covers among other things " violence towards defenceless characters". I suppose technically a child zombie isn’t defenceless once it’s zombified, but I suspect the certifiers wouldn’t see it that way. Dying Light was PEGI 18 even having chickened out on the trailer.

Actually, looking at the handbook (from 2008, can’t find an up-to-date version), they explicitly cover this.

Huh. It’s funny that they state outright in their rules that violence is not as bad if it happens to a man, but I guess you can’t expect anything else.

Why is that funny? Women are less physically strong / tall as men and also statistically way less prone to violence than men … therefore violence against women is almost always disproportionate. And violence against children, do I even need to cover this?

It’s funny – not ha ha funny, but hypocritical funny – that zombie games are full of chick zombies, but nary a kid zombies in sight.

For the former, I was just assuming that digital distribution has mitigated concern about ESRB ratings. Do you think Steam would refuse to carry a game with child zombies? I know they have their limits, but I don’t know where they are. And, yeah, it’s a bit foolish to hope a game published by Microsoft wouldn’t toe the line.

As for the bit about bans in other countries, that’s a really good point. I guess markets like Germany and Australia are big enough that it matters.

-Tom

You can’t have killable kids, zombified or otherwise, or you lose all of the EU and Australia. Stupid, but reality.

a) But they’re not kids, they’re zombies!
b) That’s a price I’m willing to pay. Sorry, Europe and Australia. Maybe next time don’t elect such dumb politicians.

-Tom

I really hope that was irony.

What about killable SEXY LADY ZOMBIES?

(for the record I do not find zombies sexy because gross, man)

Welp, I guess your Frank West photos won’t be getting any erotic points.

-Tom

Dying Light had zombie kids that could be killed.

If Crane uses a special action to subdue a screamer, he will cradle the screamer in his arms calm it back down into crying like before startled, before proceeding to snap its neck.

What was Dying Light rated as in Australia and the EU?

I have to apologize to Tom. When I saw this thread title, I thought it was his State of Decay 2 review using a tired metaphor about how the game is like found footage films.

Whew.

R18+, PEGI 18

This is for @wumpus:

-Tom

13 Ghosts had the sexiest zombie (or whatever she was) I’ve seen. It also had Monk, double bonus.

I’d post pictures but she was always naked, so here’s Monk.

I was promised naked Monk.

So 13 Ghosts, that’s the one where a dude was vertically bisected by a pane of glass I think? And then the front half of his body sort of slides away and exposes his back half insides as a weird science class display? That was a cool effect even if it didn’t make a lot of sense.