3 Zombie Games and their Annoying-Kid-In-Movie Counterparts

With the premiere of Walking Dead on AMC, mainstream audiences are learning what film buffs and gamers have known all along; zombie outbreaks are not just a trashy, lowbrow plot device, but are an entirely legitimate foundation for extremely compelling narratives of very diverse types. The George Romero films use them for social commentary, Shawn of the Dead for comedy, 28 Days Later for suspense and now Walking Dead for post-apocalyptic survivor drama. It's a watershed moment for the genre and will hopefully inspire even more talented people to follow the example set by Frank Darabont and Danny Boyle to try their hand at the zombie premise.

Because zombies have had wider acceptance in gaming for longer, however, there have been many more opportunities to get it completely wrong. I am one of those gamers who doesn't get liquid fanboy all over my sweatpants just because something has zombies in it, I don't care how gory it is. If it's not as good or as fun as Resident Evil 4 or Undead Nightmare, I'd really just rather play those again.

Just the other day I was organizing my game collection when I stumbled on Mark of Kri, a game for the PS2 that is extremely original and fun until the very last level when it becomes about hordes of zombies. Then, seemingly as a revelation by the Nerd Gods, Enemy Mine came on TV. While it is kind of silly, it actually is a surprisingly watchable movie until the last 30 minutes, when it becomes about rescuing a stupid kid from a refinery or something. Both Mark of Kri and Enemy Mine were fine and enjoyable entertainment which choked at the last minute.

Who'da thunk, kids and zombies have a lot in common! Most of my gamer friends don't watch as many movies as I do and my film-buff friends aren't gamers. So to make everybody happy, here's my list of 3 Zombie Games and their Annoying-Kid-In-Movie Counterparts.


1) Mark of Kri - Enemy Mine

Third Act Fuckups

Mark of Kri is about stealth and occasional combat when you screw up. The controls are solid, the stealth mechanics went unmatched until the Assassin's Creed series, and the Polynesian-inspired world of fortresses and mercenaries is completely unique in all of gaming. Naturally, a game that emphasizes stealth and strategy is going to be somewhat weak in its combat mechanics, which is actually one of the game's strengths for the most part - the player is forced to think these actions through to weigh the risks of stealth versus open combat. That intrigue collapses very quickly in the last level. Suddenly, instead of creeping around corners and crossbow-sniping guards, you begin fighting hordes of zombies, which is nothing but combat. It's not even engaging swordplay like elsewhere in the game, it's tedious axe-swinging and taking cheap, unblockable hits while hoping you don't die stupidly before the next save point. Game ruiner, I cannot recommend the game based on this alone.

Enemy Mine is about aliens, but really it's about racism. Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. play a human and an alien during a war between the two races who get stuck on a planet and have to overcome prejudice to survive. Nothing revolutionary, but fair enough. But with about 30 minutes left to go, we find out that Gossett reproduces asexually, so he has a kid and eventually dies. The kid is then promptly abducted by an inexplicably hateful Vincent Schiavelli and the whole end of the movie turns from innocent-if-clichéd parable to a bland chase through what seems to be a barrel factory for a kid nobody really gives a shit about. Dead in the water.


2) Crackdown 2 - Aliens

If It Ain't Broke, Why Not Break It?

Both Crackdown 2 and Aliens are sequels that were made by people who had nothing to do with the originals, yet who were still talented in their own rights. And while parts of both sequels are competent, at times even great, each felt the need to include extraneous elements that not only ruined their spots in the story, but over time begin to infect the fun parts as well.

Crackdown was guaranteed to sell because it included the much-hyped Halo 3 beta, but nobody expected the game to be really good. Nobody saw it coming, which is what made playing it more exciting since it's getting increasingly difficult to play a good game that hasn't already been hyped for years. On the surface it appeared to be a plotless, gleefully violent sandbox shooter, but its attention to detail and shockingly sophisticated story kept gamers occupied for months. Naturally, everybody was excited for a sequel that would up the carnage, up the abilities and assume its rightful place as king of sandboxes. What nobody saw coming was a standard plot, a broken targeting system and - you guessed it - zombies. Not only did Crackdown 2 make the first one seem worse by not fixing elements that nobody noticed were flawed until they had to play them again, it added a whole new side of things that made gamers wonder if the new developers had even enjoyed playing the original. And zombies? Taking on a city full of gangsters using an arsenal of automatic weapons and superpowers is fun. Fighting zombies using the same mechanic is NOT FUN. Despite its other flaws, Crackdown 2 would actually be an okay game if the zombie designers had just gone on vacation during development.

Alien is another phenomenon that nobody saw coming. It was little more to the studio that financed it than a Star Wars cash-in with a half-written script, but what nobody expected was one of the greatest monster movies of all time. Claustrophobia, sexual overtones and unparalleled creature design by HR Giger produced a sci fi horror piece that still endures over 30 years after its debut. Naturally, a sequel was not far behind (Aliens, with an -s), and on board was the usually reliable sci fi guy James Cameron. Replacing the horror with explosions and bullets, it is more of an action movie but a fine one...until Newt shows up. The first time I saw Aliens I was about Newt's age, 10 or so, but I hated her from the moment she opened her mouth. Always getting into trouble that inexplicably draws attention away from the, y'know, aliens, all she does is whine and get everybody into more trouble. Apparently deleted scenes elaborate on a story about Ripley having a motherhood complex that compels her to unreasonable lengths to protect Newt, but if that was cut it makes one wonder why the whole kid wasn't just cut as well. The movie had a solid plot with solid acting, it had reason to exist and is otherwise very competently made, but to this day I can't watch it all the way through because of that damn kid.


3) Resident Evil 5 - Attack of the Clones/Revenge of the Sith

You're Not Supposed to Want the Good Guys to Die

The Resident Evil series is to survival horror what the Star Wars saga is to space opera - neither were the first of their kind, but both were groundbreaking and forever changed the tropes of their respective genres. They also began to get stale the more the franchises were milked, and attempts at reinvigoration came off as middling and patronizing.

RE5 attempts to capitalize on the breakthroughs of RE4, again putting the camera over the shoulder with dynamic cutscenes and similar targeting mechanics. The controls are designed to feel familiar if you played RE4, and for awhile they seem intuitive until you slowly realize that nothing you try to do seems to work. This is tolerable at first, with enough interesting baddies and tense context-sensitive moments to keep things moving, but the worst of the game's sins is in the partner AI character Sheva. Bad AI in games is often forgivable though annoying, but it's not supposed to be so bad and unhelpful that you really want your partner to die. I swear, when the Majini took her out the first time, I had to take a moment to decide whether I wanted to save her or not.

The highlight of a movie shouldn't be the mass slaughtering of innocent children, but it's much easier to stomach when it's not children we're dealing with, it's foils. You may remember a scene in Attack of the Clones where Obi Wan can't seem to understand why a planet isn't in the database, even though it should be there and gravitational readings show evidence of something in its place. Instead of figuring out what the audience already knows immediately, Obi Wan visits Yoda as he trains a group of classically precocious, Lucasian young Jedi prospects. Obi Wan explains the problem, then Yoda repeats it as a question then they need a kid to tell them what the entire audience WAS ALREADY SCREAMING AT THEM - that somebody with security clearance had erased the planet. The only reason this scene is in the movie is so that Yoda could then say the most nauseating line of the franchise, "Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is." The whole movie could be 5 minutes shorter and a whole lot less pedantic if that scene were completely cut out.

Then Dark Side Anakin kills them all in Revenge of the Sith. Normally I'd feel bad, but these children had "Kill Me" written on their foreheads the moment Lucas decided to make them husks, filling them with platitudes instead of souls. I was not meant to enjoy this scene, but it did guarantee that they'd never open their stupid yet preternaturally prescient pieholes.

Fable III Review

Fable III

Playing a Peter Molyneux game is a little like listening to your friend's band's demo; good or bad, it's not easy to enjoy objectively when they won't stop overselling it. This often makes these games difficult to review because it is unclear how much of the review should have to do with the hype.

Molyneux himself aside, there are many promises made by Fable II that go unrealized in Fable III. Fable II was an exceptional game that was sure to keep players occupied for well over a month in its epic quest and enormous number of sidequests. The main story was huge and incredibly satisfying to finish with many twists and turns along the way, but some of the most interesting missions were only available after the story ended. The moral choices made for compelling storytelling and had dire consequences. All in all, a full RPG experience.

As a successor to Fable II, Fable III - while still rather good - is disappointing. The biggest disappointment of all is the length. Whereas its predecessor took this reviewer over a month to finish to 100%, Fable III took about a week and a half, including sidequests. Even more disappointing is the amount of loose ends that result from some of these sidequests, particularly the escort missions.

Just Can't Wait To Be King...but you could draw it out a bit longer...

Fable III's story puts the player in the role of one of the two children of the Hero King/Queen of the previous game. King Logan is your older brother who rules Albion with an iron fist, cracking down on the slightest disobedience and thinks nothing of killing innocents who are not even in his way. This prompts a rebellion among many of his generals and officers with the player assuming the lead. You must gain allies by proving your worth and promising to make changes once you assume the throne. Once you do, it's up to you whether to honor them.

The inherent danger in making a game with two separate parts is that neither is fully realized. Spore was a fantastic game, but many felt overwhelmed by the sudden space component, while Brutal Legend appeared to be an amusing hack-and-slash but suddenly threw RTS at the player with no warning. The two sections of Fable III - the lead-up to the revolution and the rebuilding - are each far too short on their own, and when added together barely amount to 15 hours. When my character became King, I thought "Wow, that was shorter than I expected, but now the real game is gonna begin! That's what Peter Molyneux said!"

Two hours later, I beat the game.

The Pros and Cons of Streamlining

Fable III does apply some very clever improvements to the series. The leveling-up of individual weapons works wonderfully and is extremely involving, holding hands makes unavoidably tedious escort missions slightly less so, and the creative take on the Start menu (pressing Start whisks you away to "The Sanctuary") is probably the most clever innovation in an RPG since Mass Effect's dialogue system. It is also much easier to be a landlord with the new overhead map that allows the player to buy, sell and manage all owned property from the Sanctuary map, eliminating needless running back and forth for hours.

However, Lionhead makes a misstep in streamlining the leveling-up system. As the game progresses, new sections of what is called the Road to Rule open up and allow the player to open chests containing new abilities, new expressions and new features such as Entrepreneur Mode. Initially this is more fun than Fable II's system of learning everything from books, but increasing weapon and magical abilities by opening chests as the story progresses ends up feeling rather cheap and easy, requiring almost no reward for diversified gameplay as Fable II does. Whereas the aforementioned changes give the player more control over certain aspects of the game, this system takes control away from what makes RPGs so engaging.

Final Thoughts

Fable III is a good sequel to an excellent game. It seems like more attention was paid to the improvements in gameplay than to the actual story, which makes the whole thing feel like a wash. The reason people endured the flaws of Fable II was that the core of the game was the story and epic nature of the thing, and while Fable III fixes some of the technical flaws, it forgets to preserve the core of what made it interesting in the first place.

B- (though DLC may be submitted for extra credit)

Kris and Adam Discuss AFI’s Top 100: Chinatown

Adam Daroff is an old friend of mine who currently works and lives in LA as an editor of film and TV. We are both finishing off the American Film Institute's Top 100 and writing joint reviews and thoughts as we go. You can read his response at his blog, I Am A Blog

Chinatown

Note: Roman Polanski gets no love from me. Any praise for the movie and his direction should not be taken as praise for him personally.

The Context

Almost every movie on the AFI Top 100 from the 1970s is made by members of what has been dubbed New Hollywood – Francis Ford Coppolla, Mike Nichols, Martin Scorcese, Roman Polanski, Michael Cimino. Some of these names are legendary, some are infamous, some continue to make notable movies but are not household names, and some are largely forgotten, but their impact is still felt. Their films are approaching 40 years old, but even today many of them still evoke feelings of discovery and inspiration not unlike the first time I read Nietzsche at age 15 (admit it, we all went through a Nietzsche phase, and if you've ever said “Fuck you, mom,” it was probably while under his spell). Filmmakers were experimenting with new ideas, new freedoms and ever-expanding budgets. It was something of a renaissance, I've always wished I could have been there as it happened.

Everybody was trying new things during these years, but Chinatown stands out as a new take on something old. The same way Apocalypse Now demonstrates Joseph Conrad's continued relevance by putting his story Heart of Darkness in a modern setting, Chinatown reinvigorates the entire genre of film noir by keeping its 1930s setting and tone but by being more honest about how such a story would have played out than films had previously been allowed. The sex is sexier, the twists are twistier, the violence is more violent and the nihilistic protagonist is even more nihilistic – that is, until he realizes what's actually at stake in this case.

However, Polanski never allows his newfound freedom descend into licentiousness, and the most luscious part of Chinatown remains the atmosphere. Most revisionist noir I've seen get carried away in following tropes and stereotypes, filmmaking by numbers. If you've seen an episode of Boardwalk Empire you know what I mean - “Hey, people were more racist!” “Hey, people said 'dame' and 'broad' a lot!” “Hey, everyone spoke in either elaborate metaphors or pedantic truisms!” It is very easy to get carried away with making a period film, rather than creating a world for that period film. That's where Chinatown excels – every character is a real person in a real environment, not a stock character to lend it period-specific credentials.

The Film

Part of what's so great about Chinatown is how it slowly reveals what it's about, so a plot summary would do it disservice. Suffice to say Jake Gittes has an amoral swagger that has served him well as a PI, and Evelyn Mulwary wants what's nicest even if it's not what's best. Both have rather large fish to fry. Intrigue ensues.

Probably the most gripping part, and the thing that makes Chinatown truly worth watching, is its ending. I won't say anything specific, but at the moment where Jake realizes exactly what has just happened and that this is how the story really ends, you feel the impact it has on him. Here's a guy who's never been phased by anything in his life, but he honestly never saw this coming, and even if he did he never expected to let it impact him like it does. This one scene is some of the best acting Jack Nicholson has ever done and the best directing Roman Polanski has ever done. Watch it for this one scene.

Now, my biggest pet peeve in film is anything that takes you out of the moment. Polanski has a very self-serving cameo as a gangster guarding the waterworks. Here's what that scene did for my enjoyment of the film: “Oh man, what's going to happen? Hey, that's a young Roman Polanski! Wait, why does an LA gangster have a Polish accent? And why does he keep calling Jack Nicholson 'kitty'? Crap, he just cut him, something important just happened but I was too distracted to understand why!” A minor complaint, but probably emblematic of the invincibility Polanski was feeling at the time.

Comments: Roman Polanski is a contemptible human being and if I ran a studio I would outright refuse to fund or distribute any of his films. But movies like this remind you why he was, and continues to be, such a big deal.

Deserves to be on Top 100: Yes.

Inspired: Early Coen Brothers, no doubt. I got the same feeling watching this film that I got from Blood Simple and Barton Fink.

Kris and Adam Discuss AFI’s Top 100: Casablanca

Adam Daroff is an old friend of mine who currently works and lives in LA as an editor of film and TV. We are both finishing off the American Film Institute's Top 100 and writing joint reviews and thoughts as we go. You can read his response at his blog, I Am A Blog

Casablanca

How good is Casablanca? It's so good that it's almost become cliche to talk about how good it is. This one lives up to the hype, and very few movies, even good ones, are able to live up to any hype at all. The whole thing lives and breathes, the plot and characters are completely believable, the nightclub actually feels alive, every actor fills the part brilliantly, and all of the subplots contribute to the movie instead of dragging it down. Best of all, there are no cheap sentimental tricks, just pure honesty and genuine inner turmoil.

Because I don't have much to say about its greatness that someone else hasn't already said more eloquently, I'm just going to make two observations then wrap this up:

-This movie seems to have the reputation of being a great love story. I think it's exactly the opposite. The great love story happened years before in Paris, and that part of Rick and Ilsa's life is over. This movie is about contextualizing your emotions and seeing your place in the world and the events around you. That's the whole point of the "hill of beans" speech - the world keeps turning no matter how heartbroken you are, and self-pity should never stop you from doing the right thing.

-Because it was made in 1942, during the war itself but not in an actual war zone, this is the only film I can think of where Nazis are portrayed as a fact of life. Too many movies fall into the trap of making the bad guys bloodthirsty dicks while the good guys are handsome boys who love their families (I'm looking at you, Pan's Labyrinth). That is lazy character development and Casablanca doesn't do any of that. Don't get me wrong, this is clearly an anti-Nazi movie - the bad guys are Nazis and the good guys are resistance fighters, and there is a lot of anti-Nazi rhetoric in the dialogue - but there is a noticeable difference in the way the individual Nazis and collaborators are portrayed. They are bad guys because they've sided with the enemy, not because they're alcoholics who don't like children and kick puppies.

Comments: As good as you've heard, possibly better.

Deserves to be on Top 100: Oh God, yes.

Inspired: Chasing Amy. That may be a stretch, but I had the same emotional reaction to both movies. The hero is a generally likable guy who loses sight of his moral compass...he genuinely loves the girl but can never get her back because reality pushes them apart, and in the end the only right thing to do is let her go for both of their sakes.***

***The key difference is why she left - in Casablanca it's because of the difficult reality of the war, in Chasing Amy it's because he still has hangups about her past but won't admit it.

Kris and Adam Discuss AFI’s Top 100: The Third Man

Adam Daroff is an old friend of mine who currently works and lives in LA as an editor of film and TV. We are both finishing off the American Film Institute's Top 100 and writing joint reviews and thoughts as we go. You can read his response at his blog, I Am A Blog

The Third Man

When watching old movies, I find myself thinking one of two things. It's either “Wow, why don't they make them like that anymore?” or it's “Wow, I'm sure glad they don't make them like that anymore.” I felt both over the course of watching The Third Man, a 1949 thriller where the plot is constantly restated in the dialogue for the first 45 minutes as if they were expecting the audience to show up a half hour late, then suddenly shifts gears and turns into some of the most compelling, gripping filmmaking I've ever seen for the second half.

What Happens

The movie begins with pulp novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) arriving in post-war Vienna which, because of the partitioning between the four Allies, is halfway between police state and total anarchy. Martins was told by his friend Harry Lime that he could get some work, but upon arriving Martins finds that Lime has just died after getting hit by a car. Suspiciously, nobody can quite agree on the details of the accident, and everybody involved seems to be some sort of swindler or smuggler who has some vested interest in hiding the truth.

Martins juggles the all of these accounts, none of which hold any water and all of which foreshadow so strongly that the characters may as well end every line of dialogue with “Dot dot dot, Mr. Martins...” He also encounters all the old standbys one would expect in a film such this; he falls for Lime's vampy mistress and is hassled by the British investigator handling Lime's case. Suddenly, Lime (Orson Welles, as it is turns out) is back on the scene alive and well, and here is where the movie takes a sharp turn for the exciting. Martins has mixed feelings about Lime after finding out about his crimes (he'd been selling second-rate penicillin and is responsible for the deaths of many sick children), but Lime turns out to have a cynical yet oddly compelling worldview behind his actions.

I'll stop summarizing here. I don't mind spoiling the first half, but the second half really needs to be seen to be appreciated.

What's Really Going On

The first half seemed to be setting us up for a competent yet boring romp through old-time Hollywood-style filmmaking – a sarcastic yet cocksure American shows up in Europe and plows his way through an investigation by brutish smooth talking, hard drinking and lady-charming. His investigative technique isn't particularly delicate or clever, he just runs up to a person and asks what they know in the rudest way possible, his only apparent motivation being his cynicism. He ignores everyone's well-meaning advice to leave the matter be. He feels like he deserves something from everyone even though he has nothing to offer them. He thinks he can seduce the girl. He thinks that he's smarter than the police. And nobody truly confronts him or attempts to prove him wrong for 45 minutes.

Once Lime shows up, Martins is no longer the star of the show and has to finally think about all of the advice he'd ignored, even though everyone had been freely offering it to him since the moment he arrived. He no longer has all the answers, he's caught up in forces he doesn't understand, and Lime actually is the free thinking and enterprising spirit Martins only pretends to be. He betrays his friend and doesn't get the girl, nobody has a happy ending, and things end up worse than if he'd just left it be like everyone told him. The very character traits he'd flaunted at the beginning of the film were a facade to mask his equivocating nature, and his inability to live up to his ideals only causes more misery for everyone.

All in all, this is a wonderful movie if you're willing to endure conventions from 1949 that later became cliché.

Comments: First half uninteresting, but sets up amazing second half

Deserves to be on Top 100: Yes

Inspired: Seven; person being hunted portrayed by star whose presence in the movie was planned as a surprise; movie takes unexpected change in pacing and tone; we learn that character's true motives in one big conversation in a confined space.

Statement of purpose

There are many, many, many blogs out there, most of which don't need to exist. Most of those that don't need to exist already cover the very topics I plan on covering here in this one. So why even bother?

The idea to start my own blog came while trying to explain the proceedings at this year's E3 Convention*** to my roommates, who are somewhat nerdy in their own ways. There were some genuinely exciting announcements about Portal 2 and the use of Steam on the PS3, about Kinect (though it's probably getting a bit overblown), and even Shigeru Miyamoto's demo of the new Zelda game's use of Wii MotionPlus was fun if glitchy, so I thought it was worth bringing up.

As I tried to explain all this, I realized they weren't exactly engaged. They were being polite as I yammered on about video game stuff, but they didn't exactly have the same casual point of reference that I did (try explaining Steam in a hurry).

Meanwhile, I've started watching as many of the AFI Top 100 films as I can before the end of the summer, I'm catching up on the latest Alan Moore comics while keeping tabs on the AL stats. All this while writing my thesis and making it to band practice twice a week.

So it occurred to me...instead of boring my friends with my nerdy thoughts on things they don't care about, I'll get it all out of my system by blogging about it...which is quite possibly even nerdier. But at least it'll organize my thoughts while giving my friends a break.

What I'm not is a "buff" on any of these topics. I'm a fan, but I claim no special authority or insight into a specific medium. What I am is someone who feels that the best video game can be just as meaningful and effective as the best film, that illustrations in a graphic novel are every bit as effective as the written word, and that fans of sports and fans of Sci-Fi have more in common than they may think. There is no contradiction in loving Star Trek: The Next Generation and planning your entire week around catching the NBA playoffs; in having both Miles Davis and Lady Gaga on the same playlist; or in reading Dante's Inferno while playing Dante's Inferno.

Let's see how this goes.



***(The E3 Convention, for those who don't know, is sort of the Iowa Caucuses of the gaming world - nothing that happens there really matters, there are no games actually released, and the whole thing is just one big bellows ready to blow smoke up the consumer's ass. It doesn't actually matter all that much to the consumers, just the industry and the media, much like the Caucuses. The average gamer doesn't much care how much money is spent on Sony's presentation, nor does the average voter care about any aspect of the Caucuses.)