Swarms of aggressively conformist violent chuds that want to kill anyone that doesn't fit their narrow definition of "normal" also fantasize about defending themselves against zombies, as always. :what-the-hell:

  • Circra [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I've said it before but we really need to go back to the Romero zombies. Have them as a critique of consumerist culture and have the 'heroes' as regular chumps and not all stoic, grim borderline superheroes.

    • CthulhusIntern [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The original Night of the Living Dead was presented more as a natural disaster, and how people react to that. Also, as soon as the military showed up, the zombies were done (since really, there's no way for zombies to last against a military). Hence, it's only a night.

      • luther7718 [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        And then come Dawn the government's managed to do absolutely nothing about a horrible infectious disease, while the media bickers amongst themselves and willingly airs false information for views

    • luther7718 [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I've said this before too, Zack Snyder's 2004 Dawn reboot was the reactionary Christian right coopting what was originally quite a progressive genre of fiction

    • Kanna [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      He really had the right idea and few people have been able to get it right since. His first few zombie movies in particular still hold up very well

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      The only story that most Epic G*mers seem to identify as nonpolitical is when grizzled white men kill zombiesque brown/black-coded masses to avenge their fridged wives and/or rescue their sexually objectified teenage daughters from said brown/black coded masses.

  • djphdk [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I'm sorry but this looks like politics in a video game and I am very much against that sort of thing. :very-smart:

  • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Woah there Kotaku, let's not imply that being edgy and embarrassing are mutually exclusive when they are very much not.

  • ScotPilgrimVsTheLibs [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    If we made an Alec McKinney theme'd video game where the enemies were morbidly obese blond guys in American flag t-shirts, neckbeards in Pepe t-shirts, klansmen, neo-nazis, the game wouldn't last an hour on steam before being released and the creator being :vote:d.

    • FirstToServe [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      If you really wanted to retaliate in the medium, a Ruby Ridge simulator would piss them off pretty good.

    • culpritus [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      a Willem Van Spronsen game as a rogue-like version of Smash TV could be pretty interesting

      • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Turning his life&death into a game puts an awful taste in my mouth

        Prison liberation as a broader concept could be cool, maybe in the vein of Tonight We Riot where "the collective effort" is the main character

  • Wheaties [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    And yes, you’re right. I said “zombies.” Because, if nothing else, Acquitted is a cowardly piece of dross. Some zombies carry Communist and Antifa flags, and the girl ones have pink and blue hair (satire!!!), but their blood is green, their skin grey, and their heads split open. In another act of astonishing parody, the game calls them “Brainless,” which would be quite the zing if you couldn’t literally see their brains.

    “Self-defense VS the Braindead” reads its title screen. This reminds me of when vehicular slaughter-sim Carmageddon was released in Germany in 1997, when the country had laws that forbade video games to depict blood. Developers Stainless Games patched it for that market, making the people into zombies, the red blood into green goo. But there was no governmental authority looming over Nordic Empire, no external pressure to censor its own game. It just chickened out.

    emphasis is mine

    they can't even do a half-assed cashgrab - they're rocking a quarter-ass

    • half_giraffe [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      the game calls them “Brainless,” which would be quite the zing if you couldn’t literally see their brains

      This really got me lmao :michael-laugh:

  • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
    ·
    2 years ago

    zombies are the horror aesthetic of liberatory violence from the perspective of the rich & white.

    this is one of those hilarious times when the unthinking rightwinger stumbles into being correct by identifying themes a lot of people miss simply by being so gonzo in their ideological commitment theyr immune to seeing the criticism in the work

    "When did zombie movies get all SJW and political???"

    "1968"

    • Wheaties [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Huh. Funny, then, that this game uses zombies-as-antagonists when the hot trend is zombie-as-player.

      Look at Dark Souls. Being undead is advantageous - you get to fail and try again. Re-spawning has been elevated from mere mechanic to narrative mechanic. If an obstacle is too unmanageable, you can even build a 'hoard' and summon in an extra pair of hands to cut the workload in half.

      • Ideology [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        It's closer, but imo it's more the logical evolution of the soulless lone chud protagonist in shooter games. DS even pokes fun at you for it: "Good job dipshit, you killed hundreds of beings and took the pointless throne. Did it get you anywhere? No. You're king of nothing."

        I'd argue Ep 1 of Midnight Gospel is the closest thing to what Plastic Pills is suggesting.

        • Wheaties [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          “Good job dipshit, you killed hundreds of beings and took the pointless throne. Did it get you anywhere? No. You’re king of nothing.”

          Ha! Too true! I love how thematically rich Souls is and I hate that you have to be a masochistic gamer to access it.

        • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          “Good job dipshit, you killed hundreds of beings and took the pointless throne. Did it get you anywhere? No. You’re king of nothing.”

          Kind of tangential, but I really love how

          No Man's Sky spoilers

          No Man's Sky takes a contradictory angle to the same position.

          You rush across the galaxy to discover the secret of the ATLAS protocol and when you finally get to the center of the galaxy you discover that No Man's Sky is a computer simulation of a computer simulation ( :shocked-pikachu: ) and that the simulation-within-simulation is breaking down and eating itself. The countdown timer only reads "17" and you have no way of knowing if that's 17 minutes, 17 hours, 17 days, or if "time" in the simulation has any relation to whatever "time" the ATLAS protocol is running off of outside the simulation.

          So, you find out in the end that the point of the story was that the story was pointless; but that's a good thing because now you can spend the rest of "existence" freed from that weight around your neck.

          This is doubly interesting because you can almost read it as an in-universe reckoning with the finite nature of these online games. You don't really know when it will happen, but at a certain point the switch is flipped and the "universe" is gone forever; and your "job" so-to-speak is to enjoy the ride while it lasts.

  • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Has this game even sold that much? I feel like it's one of those games where the notoriety outweighs its actual popularity.

  • ComRed2 [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Ah yes, had to make them into "zombies" so it ends up being a "zombie shooting game", when in reality it's a call to violence.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      It isn't murder if the murder victims are dehumanized. :hitlerthinkaboutit: