Five for you.

Like you, I was upset until I realized that nobody was going to buy it.

I'll give props to The Last Of Us - I didn't think I'd care about another zombie game, but that game is intense, despite how overused zombies are now.

No shit, last night I played through that dark subway section with the clickers. Fuck me was that intense.

I think there's a lot of untapped potential. It's just a convention of the genre that everything be shit.

Every fucking zombie movie: Oh, man, wake up! You were in a coma! You missed the two most action-packed, exciting weeks of earth's history. There were tanks and explosions and shit. The secret service was gunning down zombies on the white house lawn. Johnny Cash was there. There was an epic struggle to save the world and now it's over and everybody is going to die if they haven't already.

Do you wanna come with me and a couple of other folks on a boring road trip to nowhere?

I don't know, the trailers for the recent The War Z made it look like you get to see all that you are describing. It also looked like absolute shit.

This game, The Last of Us, is definitely derivative (take a dash of Children of Men, a dash of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a heavy dose of classic zombie tropes and just a squeeze of ethnobotanical dystopia) but it definitely lives up to its sources of inspiration.

It has sentiment without being sentimental. The characters feel like real people and the gameplay, while it doesn't reinvent the wheel, has no dissonance with the story. If you play on hard, you'll just barely make it out of most encounters. I play about 3, maybe 4 videogames a year. For me, this is one of the best in many years. (I haven't finished it yet so it could get really shitty by the end but I doubt it)

I kinda but not really remember that part of DRII, but if you're talking about a Dom DeLuise lookalike chef, you're talking about Paul Prudhomme, who has been off and on confined to a wheelchair since the 90s, and in either state is anecdotally catastrophic to party with.

I guess my points are, who cares about those shitty, game-breaking cinematics sandwiched in the otherwise awesome gameplay of the Dead Rising games, and I forgot my other point, but I'm gonna go butter toast a steak sandwich. Because of the debt to Escoffier.

And just to clarify, I'm talking about the snow you may encounter hanging with Prudhomme's crews being so fluffy white it once stunned this cokehead chef I had worked with who once bugged out and spent a year in Bolivia before he came back to the shit burg where I live.

Are you drunk?

You're in for a treat. It's definitely my favorite version of the game; possibly my favorite entry in the series after RE4. I haven't played it recently so it may not hold up, but I remember the graphics being very impressive.

Best pre-4 Resident Evil title. With 4 being the game everyone in the game industry is still trying to mimic. If 4 never happened and spawned all the modern cliches of action/adventure titles, I am pretty sure we would still be saying Re-Make was the best out of the series.

As for Dead Rising, I mean, the original was trying a bunch of new shit. Some of it worked, some of it didn't. This was back when being surrounded by 100's of zombie models without the game crawling to a halt was a pretty stunning feet.

FUCK EMPATHY

To be fair Dead Rising 2 was the first zombie game I played that even raised the question of treating zombies ethically. A heavy handed metaphor for aids is better than nothing.

I'm pretty sure the zombies in Dead Rising 2 were a metaphor for pollen and other allergens. They were basically a fog that you had to slip through. You clear exactly one room in the whole fucking game. The one time they toyed with the idea of zombies compromising barriers and people being in some kind of dynamic peril they didn't just go to a cutscene - they went to a cutscene that started with a line of dialogue explaining that they had cleared out the zombies or something. So not only don't we get to clear out the zombies that are putting the group in peril ourselves, we don't even get to watch it in a cutscene. What a shitty, shitty, game and frankly a shitty, shitty, genre. Shitting on potential is a fucking convention of the genre.

Dead Rising 2 wasn't really a zombie game, though. It was a sandbox game stuffed full of entertaining things to discover. The zombie swarms were there so you would have something to use all of your entertaining discoveries against. They could easily have been replaced with something else, like robots or lizard people or cavemen, and it still would have been just as fun.

Blue raises an excellent point, the game would have been much more enjoyable if you could clear areas of zombies.

The dead coming back to life to eat the living is some heavy reality based shit, man!

kingarthur you seem to mistakenly have replied to my comment, since your post is completely non-sequitur

Me too. They were one of my favorite game companies back when I played Ducktails and Megaman 2. But, everything they've done in the last 20 or so years has tried to make me forget about the good times I've had.

Right there with you. I remember loving SF@2 and @3, Darkstalkers, classic Megaman, Megaman X, and Megaman Legends. I feel sad when I go back to play those and realize Capcom will never make something as good as that.

The good news for the upcoming Ducktales remake is that it's being handled by WayForward; those guys understand what makes a fun 2D platformer or brawler.

Ducktales remake?!

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!!!

@Caminante I was being serious. A remake (thankfully a 2D platformer) will be released soon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6d1A2row6I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckTales_%28video_game%29

Zombies have become a tool, just like any other flavor of mook. Video game (and movie) makers just want a handy group you can mow down without any ethical qualms because they're not human or are automatically evil.

See also: Robots, Nazis, Hipsters, etc.