I didn’t care for that story arc either. (“What if we had the Borg, only with emotion and individuality instead of a single, dispassionate hive mind bent on assimilation of all intelligent life?”) At least Lore only made one ship full of Borg seem less scary and alien though. Revealing that they answer to a queen kind of ruined the whole Borg collective for me.
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The Walking Dead is shitty television and its earnest fans are engaged in an abusive relationship with their entertainment.
There have been some, Sky did a couple. They were OK, but I always thought Mackenzie Crook would have made a better Rincewind than David Jason, though he made a pretty decent fist of it.
I even liked the Vic & Bob remake.
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No shit. They basically ruined the Borg with that. Without the queen the Borg are horrifying. With the queen they are just a robot army.
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No. It’s iZombie! Which, I might add, is really enjoyable.
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I didn’t watch much of the 00s series. IMO it dumbed the concept of the original 70s series to nearly TWD levels of pointless drama. What both TWD and 00s Survivors fail to grasp is that there is for more real drama and interest which can be mined from actual survival problems than trying to make it up with hackneyed inter-personal dynamics and bickering.
Television producers seem to always push an agenda that “it is all about the personalities” - while simultaneously making those same personalities predictably foolish. I already live in a world of predictable bickering people, so I would prefer series to be far more plot heavy, to actually be about something.
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Braindead is still kinda fun and gets props for the Jonathan Coulton recap songs. It’s a little like The Brink in it’s attempts to mix comedy and political satire.
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You’re correct, no matter what the environment, the focus is on the social crap. Was there anyone who wasn’t desperately waiting for Lori to die?
It’s amazing The Martian got greenlit, it’s all man vs nature & technology.
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I think those '50s and '80s movies (there were a bunch of post-apocalyptic Mad Max clones, too, made in other deserts) really set firm the style, “nuclear post-apocalypse = Mad Max desert,” that was a core part of the aesthetic/setting of the first game. The second game introduced foliage that was alive but brown and sickly, keeping with the idea that “everything is struggling to live.” Bethesda’s move to a 3D FPS meant they needed ground cover, but it was also paramount to maintain the style of the first game, so they ignored the issues it raised to be adding dead plants. (It’s not like anything in Fallout really made sense in the first place, after all.) It all looks stranger given the dated idea of a post-apocalyptic environment, especially with more realistic, lush apocalypses in film, games and television since. But they can’t drop either the dead landscape (level layout issues force the addition of dead plants) nor can they drop the Mad Max “salvaged cities” look, either, without losing that core Fallout identity. Which makes me feel that Fallout, as a franchise, is kind of done - what it must be to be “Fallout” is too limiting.
Yeah, it totally ripped the heart out of how the Borg were supposed to work (and what made them scary). It’s exactly the same problem the recent “Terminator” movies have had - someone’s need for a James Bondian monologuing villain meant they lost the idea of the Borg/Skynet being this implacable, single-minded enemy so alien that you couldn’t meaningfully communicate with it, much less negotiate.
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I don’t necessarily agree. But like I said if that’s the case why change the setting to a place and time where that no longer works? And that’s sort of what I’ve getting at. Superficially that pretty specific art direction is “Fallout” but in the original games it had a context and purpose that made sense. They took that art direction and slapped it on a context and purpose where it didn’t. If you’re going to shift something that integral you have to think it through. Say to yourself “ok so how would this work”, just as the original Interplay team did.
I sort of agree that Fallout could very well be done, if Bethesda keeps going about thing the way they do. Its gonna take a fairly significant change in how they make games overall for anything really interesting to come out of there. They’re making these increasingly janky, complicated, grind machines. Focusing almost entirely on mechanical concerns, and letting all the setting, character, and story telling aspects atrophy. The thing about Fallout 4 that most turned me off is that it really feels, in a lot of ways, half finished. There’s that huge focus on building/crafting, but you actually can’t do all that much with it. And it doesn’t work particularly well. And half the DLC seems to be just additions to that system. The whole thing is very odd. Game felt like knock off post apocalyptic Legos.
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If zombie means beautiful millenial with white hair, well ok then. Meanwhile, the classical Haitian zombie had no will of its own, remaining under the control of the bokor at all times.
iZombie is a police procedural with a superficial gloss. She’s a zombie rather in the sense that Rachel Dolezal is black. You just call yourself that, and you are! Language is magic!
Do you think that other zombie media such as The Walking Dead are appropriating Haitian and/or Vodou culture? I could see some people taking either position - maybe they lack the cultural context to make proper Vodou zombies, or maybe it would be more respectful to make the effort.
Identity seems a bit more involved that what “you just call yourself”. TWD notably never refers to its undead as being zombies. Would it be better to refer to them as revenant or ghouls, if this seems more accurate? Or should we use the word “zombie” even if we already have words which are more accurate?
We need a vehicle for Charles Dance as well.
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To the Dance-mobile!
(sorry)
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Well let’s make it a threesome with Jerome and Jonathan. How about a remake of Charlie’s angels with 3 old white dudes? No bikini scenes, please.
Or “Grumpiest Old Men”. More like ‘Gran Torino’ than Lemmon and Matthau. Jerome is the young cutup of the group.
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I too disagree. I didn’t play the first two Fallouts (well, I started the first but got frustrated at the movement and UI pretty quickly), but I’ve played the other three, and I think there’s still plenty of room to create in that post-civilization world. F3 had a distinct look that seemed to put a demolished Washington DC into a blasted desert, and even though the lighting and color palette kinda hurts my eyes, I embraced the look and vibe. New Vegas looked better, I thought. But there was still some variety to be found in both games: the lushness of the Oasis in F3 where Harold and Bob lived, the unspoilt wilderness of Zion in NV’s DLC Honest Hearts, the weird SF moonbase vibe of Old World Blues, the wintry Anchorage Reclamation simulation, even the spaceship in Mothership Zeta. To be sure, there was a lot of sameness when it came to storage spaces, restrooms, file cabinets, desks, etc., but I don’t think the games clung too rigidly to a Mad Max aesthetic. I think they’re more limited by the Fallout-specific 1950s-version-of-the-21st-century-that-gets-wrecked-and-irradiated-for-200-years aesthetic.
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Well charles dance is definitely up for that.
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She’s a zombie, because she died and came back to live and has to eat brains in order to not be a mindless danger to those around here. It’s not in the Romero sense, but she is indeed a zombie… There is pretty wide latitude of the definition outside of the traditional definition (because it’s been like that since NOTLD, right?). Given the sheer number of zombie films produced in the last 100 years, I don’t see why this is controversial:
I don’t think that a self-aware zombie is a new gloss on the genre. Both Warm Bodies and Life After Beth as having more self-aware zombies comes to mind…
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Just throw him in the mix as the grumpy upstairs neighbor or something… We can make it a modern day odd couple.
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