#skelegun rambles

[skelegun]

The “zombie” genre is kinda dead right now, and for good reason. But I’ve been nostalgiaing pretty hard for old school Reaident Evil, so I’ve had zombies on the brain lately.

I guess you could sort of break down Zombie stories into sort of 3 general types, which not-so-coincidentally tie into the 3 Romero classics. There is the “Night” type stories which deal with initial outbreak, the “Dawn” type which is sort of mid outbreak and rule of law has broken down but there is still a chance to rebuild, and the “Day” type which is throughly post-apocalyptic and is about the struggles and turmoils of the last few humans remaining in an utterly hopeless world.

I say it’s a good thing the zombie apocalypse genre died, because it became oversaturated with garbage, most of which falls into the “Dawn” category, which is my least favorite of the three types. The problem is the Dawn type stories are incredibly easy to write, and produce because you can just have people run around the woods with crossbows and shit, and make it some dumb wish fulfillment thing where you get to shoot Mad Max bad guys and not have to pay for stuff at stores. It’s dull as fuck.

My favorite of the three types is the “Night” type, which is while not terribly uncommon, has never been explored correctly enough for my liking. See, one of my favorite parts in the old resident evil games was the visual story telling combined with the journals and documents detailing how the situation got the way it did.

Like in RE1, the T-Virus leak didn’t just turn everyone immediately into zombies like in the bad movie version. Instead the leak infected some people whose brains slowly rotted. The others knew about the leak and quarantined the infected. The security personel tried their best to maintain order, but things began to snowball since people began to abandon their posts or committ suicide. The zombie dogs were actually a successful experiment and were trained and would follow orders like normal dogs, but without their handlers to “feed” them they eventually became feral and broke out of their pens and made the situation infinitely worse.

In Resident Evil 2 and 3 you find documents all through out the police station detailing the heroism of the RPD as they tried to defend civilians inside, but because of intentional mismanagement and sabotague at the top, their castle could not hold, and you see signs of battle all through out the station. In the original version of 3, towards the end you come across a battlefield littered with the corpses of a squad of Delta Force as well as several dead Tyrants.

It’s that kind of stuff I find most interesting. I would love for their to be a game where you play as a policeman trying to defend a police station full of civilians from monsters. Where you have to make difficult decisions, like a how to handle a civilian who is panicking, do you disobey your superior officers, etc. that kind of stuff is infinitely more interesting to me then stories about dudes run around the woods looking for cans of beans.

#long post #skelegun rambles