iZombie on the CW. It’s the cop+ zombie show. Pretty funny and I enjoy it.
3 Likes
I don’t know about zomby based procedural cop shows, we could do with getting zomby based animated sitcoms back on the air though:
8 Likes
But didn’t they explore that with Lore first?
2 Likes
If the fanboys didn’t like green then why are there so many mods adding it in? 
blame the devs.
THAT… sucks. It’s depressing that hollywood/TV production still seems to want to default to white, male protagonists, because of the perception that white Americans won’t go see it otherwise. I think if you put it out there, it’s got a good story that people will relate too, then people will watch it, even if the actors don’t look like them, exactly.
3 Likes
Wade Davis’ book on the topic is interesting. The movie was meh, though. But at least it stuck to the key findings Davis made, even if it tried to glamorize it a bit…
2 Likes
Um… the main character is a zombie. So is one of the main antagonists. And lots of other characters on the show. It’s just not what we now think of as classic zombies, George Romero Zombies, the literal walking dead with no soul or consciousness. But what is a zombie has been played with and changes through out the course of popular culture history. From the traditional Haitian zombie that @shuck mentioned above, to Night of the Living dead, to iZombie.
2 Likes
lt is the color of super mutants and glowing ones. Can you blame them?
Ok, I get ‘barren brown’ is kind of a visual trademark of the series, but it is kind of weird to barely have any vegetation anywhere centuries after the nukes.
Then again, spiritual antecessor Wasteland was about Desert Rangers in Nevada or wherever, and Mad Max has done a lot to associate post-apocalyptic with dry’n’sandy in popular culture.
Oh, and with all those desperate scavengers and raiders and factions running around everything is perfectly untouched for exploring and looting convenience. Lucky no one though of that before! And the computers are always working and turned on. Nuclear batteries, am I right?
I complain because I love.
2 Likes
-
Someone stole all the zombies!
-
These zombies entered the U.S. illegally (they’re criminals and rapists and some, I assume, are good zombies).
-
Zombie gangs are battling for territory in the inner city to control the drug trade.
-
Zombies are being held captive by people cashing their Social Security checks.
-
Zombie CEO of a zombie startup forges documents to delay paying zombie workers. (Startup is a zombie matching platform called ZmbRiot.)
5 Likes
All this talk of supernatural crime stories, and not one mention of Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased?
6 Likes
It seems to me, Fred Allen once observed that dealing with network executives was like being nibbled to death my a flock of ducks. Or words to that effect.
1 Like
I think it comes down to lack of imagination or laziness on Bethesda’s part. The original 2 games took place in desert localities a lot closer to the nuclear war in question. Between one and two there was a noticeable advancement in the level of environmental and social recovery. A lot more building and settlement in two. But they were both desert bound, deserts tend to preserve things. Whether that’s skeletons or things like wooden structures and cloth. And they tend to lack for vegetation. Bethesda just sort of transplanted the established aesthetic to a time frame and region where that didn’t make sense. And Obsidian who were basically making an extensive mod using Bethesda’s tools and assets were sort of penned in by that. It makes sense that 100’s of years later a large, directly hit city like DC would still be a mess of intractable ruined. It makes less sense that in an area that was originally a temperate swamp that vegetation wouldn’t have encroached in some way over the intervening hundreds years. Even if radiation slowed things down a bit. It doesn’t make sense that structurally unsound, damaged houses made from wood would remain free standing for 400 years.
Some of this could be made to make sense. Those houses. We already build with pressure treated wood, to obviate the fact that wood rots. So maybe they used super radioactive pressure treatment rocket space spray to take that even further. And some of it is actually kind of a clever joke. The pre-war food everyone makes fun of? Basically a play off the old saw about Twinkies surviving a nuclear war. You don’t find perfectly fresh bottles of pre-war milk, right from the cow. Or perfectly normal un-rotted apples just sitting there. You find packaged processed foods. Including many (like the boxed Dandy Boy Apples) touting their incredible RADIOACTIVE PRESERVATION!!! Clearly its a gag on mid-century (and current) shelf stable processed food. In the Fallout universe they apparently found ways to make junk food perfectly, eadibly shelf stable for hundreds of years.
But they don’t point this out. Or do anything with it. Its just sort of there, for you to notice if you care to think it through. And that’s the thing with those more recent games. Bethesda hasn’t done the leg work. They just sort of coast on “this is the fallout aesthetic, dusty brown is the important part”. Even when they do put something clever in they really don’t do much to it. And it often doesn’t fit or make sense with the cobbled together leftovers that stand in for world building.
Its frustrating and silly. And while it was fine, kind of fun, and excusable down to technology and state of the industry at the time they brought the series back. Its sort of un-justifiable right now. A lot of other developers are doing a hell of a lot more, with a hell of a lot less. Many of them succeed as well as they do in part because of the careful attention payed to just these little details and issues of setting. And Bethesda keeps plopping out what are essentially slightly more complex versions of games from a decade ago.
2 Likes
I admit that my immediate desire, upon reading the headline and BEFORE reading the article, was to come here and make some comment about “Oh, so they want a post-apocalyptic TV show without zombies - sort of like Jericho?” and then I read the actual article.
No - they want zombies - just one or two a week, though. And Cagney and Lacey/Simon and Simon/Jessica Fletcher/whoTF ever to run around and crack the case.
I stare blinkingly at my screen, dumbfounded.
5 Likes
12 Likes
Not this at all, but what if…?
Maybe it’s not a shark, but it’s a squid? Or a pebble. Or a policeman…
4 Likes
I agree, but it isn’t me complaining. I remember reading the complaints that Oasis had green trees in F3, and similar complaints about Jacobstown having green trees and snow in FNV.
Having said that, a lot of those people are the same people who complain that Fallout isn’t a turn based game anymore.
2 Likes
Yeah, it’s interesting, research subsequent to Wade’s has raised questions about how (or if) it could all work… so some intriguing mysteries remain.
For fun I’ve been putting together a sort of phylogenic tree of zombie movies. Although Romero created the modern cinematic zombie, it was actually Return of the Living Dead that popularized the qualities that are part of the modern pop-culture zombie, i.e. brain-eating, transmissibility (via Lenzi’s Incubo sulla città contaminata), but it also had intelligent, conscious zombies. So iZombie fits perfectly within that modern zombie film tradition - especially since all the smart zombies are shown to be precursors to mindless shamblers, if they don’t get regular brains.
The original game explicitly was a mash-up of two aesthetic sources - the Mad Max series, as mentioned, and 1950s American “atomic monster” and post-apocalyptic movies, all of which were filmed in deserts. So desert (filled with giant insects) is key to the look, and this is why you also have a weird combo of 1950s style and retro-futurism and 1980s post-punk bondage leathers. The first game was set in Southern California as both justification for the desert setting and homage to the '50s films. The subsequent games slavishly maintained the aesthetics because, well, it’s not Fallout without them, even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense with their new locations. (The dead grass is what gets to me. Is it alive but brown and dried-looking, or has it managed to survive intact, but dead and withered, for hundreds of years?)
7 Likes
Right and that’s sort of the thing. There’s insufficient context provided for little details like that. Its all sort of superficial, and the sort of depth that would justify it, or lead to details that make some sense hasn’t been introduced because Bethesda’s effort is focused elsewhere. They opted to move the location to DC, somewhat in line with the series tradition. The West Coast desert location was selected less because it justified the Mad Max look and more because Interplay, and subsequently Black Isle, were founded in Southern California and the creators were intimately familiar with the area depicted. Bethesda is based outside DC and they’re intimately familiar with that region. But they failed to follow through on fleshing that idea out. Rather than keeping the western desert local, or figuring out what a lowlands East Coast waste land would look like they kept the barren and dusty approach slapped onto the new location. They chose to depict an era several hundred years removed from the original games. But failed to consider, or do the foot work on, changes that might have happened in half a damn millennia after the bombs fell.
If the barren, dust bowl setting is absolutely integral to Fallout game. You either don’t set it in a place where that’s incongruous. Or do the work to justify and utilize its presence. If the Junk-town, still just beginning to rebuild aesthetic is absolutely essential, don’t move the time frame forward that makes that unlikely to be the only level civilization has attained. If you do, flesh it out, add to it. The lack of all that seems to have accelerated in number 4, as it has in most of Bethesda’s recent games. All of it is curiously superficial and dead feeling.
4 Likes
3 Likes
