Black Summer: How not to do a Zombie show

 

Since becoming a father I have spent a great deal of time doing laps of my living room while rocking the baby for naps and the like.  During that time, since I can't play games quite as much as I'd like, I've been catching up with my watch list on Netflix and Amazon and I've seen some good shit.  Better Call Saul, Peaky Blinders (except season 6 that shit was anus), Everything Everywhere All At Once, Juni Ito: Maniac, all in all it's been a pretty good time.  But then I decided to fire up a zombie series called Black Summer and holy moly, this isn't just the worst thing I've watched while on baby duty, it's maybe one of the worst things I've seen just in general.

First broadcast via Netflix in 2019 and apparently some kind of spinoff of some other crap sounding show called Z Nation, Black Summer follows a bunch of characters as they try to survive their way through a zombie apocolypse in order to get to some kind of sports stadium where apparently it's safe.  I'm currently half way through the first season of the show and it's pissing me off to such a degree that I can't help but come here to complain about it.

The premise is you're average zombie survival affair.  Survivors and zombies and assholes for your standard issue "are you humans the real monsters after all?!" nonsense that comes with most zombie media but that's fine, I was pretty much expecting it to be that way going in.  What I wasn't expecting is for the writing of the show to be THIS fucking horrendous on all fronts.  You could legitimately use this show in a course for aspiring film students on what not to do when making a horror show.

Each episode consists of your standard zombie fare where characters go to a place, get fucked somehow and then try to survive but the problem with Black Summer is that the characters seem to be sometimes just willfully fucking themselves or just opting to be immensely fucking stupid at all times.  For example there's one part where they end up in a school which has been overrun by murderous teenagers.  That setup in itself is kind of stupid but there is a scene where a standoff happens, one guy has a gun train on a group of kids, they have a gun pointed back at them and a hostage.  The hostage in question is deaf so there's a bit of an exchange and they agree to let him go in exchange for their gun.  The leader of the teens passes his gun to a small boy and says "shoot him if he moves" while they make the change but the hostage in question is deaf, so he starts to walk where the small boy just blasts him in the back, killing him.  At this point the boys start to flee and they just let them fucking go.  The characters were going on in the previous episode about how they needed weapons and these kids clearly have weapons and just killed your friend and instead of gunning them down and taking their shit they just let them go.  This is then proceeded by the dumbest zombie chase of all time where characters just opt to leave doors wide open for the rage zombie to chase them through and make the shittest attempts I have ever seen in this type of media to block his path.  These are fast rage zombies by the way and their ability to tank bullets seems to be based on how  "tense" the scene needs to be rather than having any sort of consistent rules. 

Speaking of inconsistent rules, in the same episode there is another character who is running away from a zombie, again in the dumbest way imaginable who has a very clearly fucked up right hand.  It's covered in blood and after escaping the zombie he tries to start a car and has to clumsily reach over to the ignition with his left hand because his right is unusable.  These scene ends with him finding a mostly untouched supermarket after escaping the zombie where it then shows a title card and then he's walking around the store completely fucking healed.  I would have been willing to accept that he found some medical supplies either in a back room or in the asiles of the store and patched himself up off camera but there's no bandage or any evidence of that kind of thing at all.  It's like the entire sequence of him getting injured was written way after the fact OR, and given how stupid the show is I'm assuming this to be the case, they fucking forgot.  The lack of attention to any kind of detail or consistency just makes the entire production feel lazy. 

What's worse is that zombie features are such a well trodden road that the rules are basically written for you and barely any effort has to be put in for this kind of thing.  Hell, even games like Resident Evil were getting this shit right in 1996.  In RE1 the characters split up because they don't know what they are getting into and they are trained soldiers, in RE2 they get split up by unfortunate circumstance and in Black Summer they split up as if that idiot gas from Cabin in the Woods is just part of the air in that region of America.  When you're show can be compared to original Resident Evil and RE comes out on top as being the more intelligently put together piece of media, you have a BIG problem.

It's the exact issue I had with that stupid fucking movie called A Quiet Place.  Where all the "tension" of the show is generated by characters being stupid rather than any kind of clever scenario writing.  Despite pissing me off greatly I'm going to finish both seasons and if it magically gets better I'll come back and write a big apology to it but I imagine that it's only going to get worse from here.  It got cancelled after 2 seasons anyway so the chance of it getting any better is 0%

Days Gone

 

Does anyone actually give a fuck about zombies any more?  The zombie genre, for both games and movies is so played out that whenever I see something that features zombies in it I now reflexively groan and roll my eyes.

Now the big mother-fucker of zombie fiction is The Walking Dead.  While it's not so popular now, just a few years ago people were going fucking CRAZY for that show.  One of the most popular characters in that show was Daryl, a rough and tumble biker type with a lone-wolf type attitude and the kind of guy to not take no shit from nobody, no sir.  So one day a bunch of stupid wankers had the brilliant idea of making a zombie survival game where all the characters were Daryl and everyone behaved like they had fallen off their motorcycles and landed on their heads one too many times.

I'm going to skip a real description of the story to this game because it's very long and very stupid but I'll do my best to give you a cliff notes version.  You play as Deacon St John, the most Daryl-like of all the people in the land, and while riding around the zombie infested mountains you get jumped by a bunch of cultists and your friend, Bald-Daryl, gets his arm messed up by a blow torch.  You then gotta help him out, help out a bunch of camps, kill the cultists, join the army, find your wife and then murder the army before they start an outright holy war on all the people of the land.  The game ends with the army dead and nothing solved as you ride off into the sunset.

But who really gives a shit about the story when its such an obvious "the real monsters are us humans" kind of tale so what we are really here for is the game play.  Well sadly, the game play is simple, generic over the shoulder 3rd person action bullshit like you've played a million times.  The enemies are daft, the zombies are stupid and easy to kill and every mission is basically go somewhere and shoot shit or go somewhere and chase shit on your bike.  The survival elements are non existent because the getting camp money is easy as fuck and even if for some reason your run your supplies down, almost every car, building and bush is bursting at the seams with supplies for you to craft stuff.  

 The games big draw, the one thing that anyone remembers from the E3 demo that they showcased that one year, is the zombie hordes.  Dotted around the map are HUGE numbers of zombies that will all aggro you at once if you alert them.  The problem with the hordes is that throughout my entire play through I couldn't find a reason to give a shit about them.  There's a few missions throughout the campaign where you HAVE to fight a horde but outside of that you just very easily avoid them as you do all your other shit.  The horde fights aren't even interesting either, you just let them chase you around and when they bunch up around something explosive you shoot it.  Throw molotovs or napalm while your being chased and once the numbers thin out finish the job with your gun.  It's a test of patience rather than a test of skill or preparation.  A lot of hype for a non-feature.

But the absolute worst aspect of this game is the bugs, there are, SO MANY bugs in Days Gone that it's actually embarrassing.  I didn't bother to update the game upon first putting the disc in and before the 28gb patch I was getting hard frame rate drops, textures not working, AI bugging out, missions not working, the whole shabang.  There was one mission in particular where I had to rescue a guy from a camp.  Upon arrival one guy took the guy into a back room and I had to gun my way through the other guys.   What was supposed to happen is that when I killed the guys outside, I would jimmy open the door, kill the leader and rescue the dude inside.  What actually happened is that the game bugged out and it would not recognize the henchmen as being dead so I would go to the door and it would just throw up a message saying "clear the area of enemies to rescue to hostage".  The problem is that this was a main story mission and despite many attempts at restarting the game, reloading save files, resetting the mission the thing WOULD NOT PROGRESS at all.  

 That's when I caved and installed the 28gb patch that it was pestering me for on my Playstation menu and that fixed that mission bug but the game still suffered from constant broken textures, crap AI, crashes and there was one mission near the end of the game where collision with the floor just crapped out and I couldn't progress for a while AGAIN because I kept falling into the abyss under the world.  

This game really is the whole package of long, tedious, broken and predictable.  If you saw the E3 trailer all those years ago and were thinking about picking it up, just don't.  Save your money and use it to buy something better than this such as Dying Light. 

I just want ONE AR zombie survival game

So a little while ago a friend of mine brought to my attention a game called mobile called The Walking Dead: Our World.  The game looked, at first glace, like a sort of Pokemon Go-esque thing where you go around killing zombies and it looked pretty cool.  However when I got home I found out that going around killing zombies with your phone camera seems to be the ONLY thing you do.  Granted I haven't played it yet and I'm such a sucker for TWD I'll at least give it a try but my disappointment is pretty high.

Ever since the success of Pokemon Go I've had this fantasy about an AR zombie survival game that would involve running around your local area to find supplies and fight for survival.  At the start of the game you'd register a location as your "base", it could be your home or place of work or wherever the hell you like.  You'd build up a base and gather survivors and every so often on the map little caches of supplies would pop up around the area your in.  You'd be tasked with going off and gathering supplies and keeping your camp alive but when you went out you'd be chased about by zombies (or whatever else) and if they caught you, you'd game over.  Maybe if you had a survivor in your camp it could act as an extra life or there could be some perma death system, I don't know, but I just want that kind of game to exist.

I got the same pangs of disappointment when I played Zombies Run, a sort of fitness app for mobile.  I thought it would be just that where I'd have to jog about collecting supplies but from the little I experienced of it, it's basically just a podcast you listen to while you go for a jog and the "fun" comes from the fact it asks you to run a bit faster every so often.  Not a bad app by any stretch but just not the zombie mobile survival game of my dreams.

So if you're a game developer and you stumble on this post, please go and make that above idea a reality.  I'm not a game dev so tweak it and make it actually good but at least give me a credit as "Blog Prick" or something like that.  I know zombies are an over saturated genre but I seriously feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in the world of zombie AR, someone needs to get on it.

The Walking Dead

Once again I've gone through a bit of a dry period with the blog.  Usually when this happens it's because I get incredibly busy and then by the time I have any free time I'm too exhausted/lazy to write stuff.  This time however, the reason is a lot less legitimate, I've just had all my post-work time gobbled up by The Walking Dead.  I was given a series 1-6 box set and it's basically consumed my life up to now.

It's a series I've ignored for a long time mainly because, and this is a bad habit of mine, the fan base being made up of a herd of wankers.  It's one of those shows that everyone was absolutely creaming their pants over to which I just rolled my eyes and was like "It's a fucking zombie show, it can't be THAT good...".  But, I have to throw my hands up on this one, I was wrong, it IS that good.  What's funny is that I feel like it's all going full circle because people have been saying that it's been slowly getting worse but I'm enjoying it more and more with every season I watch.

Story wise it's a pretty typical zombie affair.  There's an outbreak and then a group of survivors have to get together to help each other not die.  They look for a place to stay and then some other group will come along and fuck things up because of course the big twist is that the real enemies are not the zombies but other people. We've all seen it in things like Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days, Dead Rising and basically any zombie thing ever.  But what makes The Walking Dead so compelling is the drama between the characters and the characters themselves.  Despite the cast being so large the show does a good job about making you care about most of them and when one of them does get chomped on or takes a bullet to the head it is genuinely gut wrenching.  Also when the bad guys do get their just deserts it's always some kind of awesome sequence of events that fills you with that warm sense of satisfaction that a real asshole died that day.

Of course, I have some complaints about things the group does or the insane logics that certain characters decide to follow sometimes.  There's also mad inconstancy with general zombie strength and ability.  Like one moment the zombies will be clawing at a dude for minutes and said dude will take no damage and other moments a zombie will rip open some guys stomach like it's a fucking bag of potato chips.  Also it's a good job the characters are as good as they are because the premise for each couple of seasons is more formulaic than fucking One Piece.  My other final big complaint is that some fucking GENIUS decided to make a box set that ends at season 6.  Season 6 is the absolute DUMBEST place to end anything because the final episode ends with the entire squad getting caught, a new villain turning up, murdering a major character POV so we don't know who it is and then just cutting to credits.  Also Season 2 is dogshit, but there's plenty of videos on YouTube about that.

There's also a bunch of games based on this series that I'm now interested to try.  Well I say "games" but really there's only the Telltale (RIP) one that seems like it's worth a shit.  There's some other FPS one that I don't remember the name of that I remember everyone said was garbage and there's another called Overkills' The Walking Dead but that just looks like a really boring version of Left4Dead so I won't be buying that in a hurry.

If you've not seen it, go watch it, it's REALLY fucking good.  If the posts stop coming again it's because I caved and signed up for Netflix to see seasons 7+, so sorry in advance if that happens.  Also don't worry about spoilers, I had everything spoiled and it only seemed to make it more interesting, jump in!



 

Paying To Save With Metal Gear Survive

This is a game I've mostly ignored.  I saw some of the initial stuff that was put out and I was so disgusted that I just ignored it from then on out.  It's a fucking disgrace that a series like Metal Gear Solid has been reduced to an online zombie survival game.  I mean the groundwork is there to make some kind of legit survival type game within the Metal Gear universe that you could play online but instead they just copped out and used fucking zombies.  But whatever, I'm sure fans of the series know how shit it is and even newcomers probably aren't going to be swayed when there's so many other fucking zombie games on the market.

What I'm mad about with this post is the news I caught wind of about how you save the game.  When you start the game you are given one save slot, if you want to have another save slot you have to pay 1000 "SV Coins" which is the games premium currency and this basically translates to $10.  Now people have been complaining about loot boxes recently but this just takes the fucking cake.

A loot box, by itself, isn't THAT bad of a thing.  The only game I'm currently involved in playing that has them is Overwatch and in that game the boxes contain nothing but cosmetic shit to make your character look different.  Someone who is level 50 and has opened a ton of boxes has no inherent advantage over the player at level 1 who has opened 0 but the level 50 guy probably looks a bit cooler.  This got shaken up a bit with Battlefront when the loot boxes started containing game changing shit like weapons and gear which meant that players who paid money had an advantage over those who didn't in a game that was already like $60 just to play in the first place.

But that's nothing, NOTHING compared to the bullshit that is being forced to pay money to save your game.  I guess it's another character slot or something like that but even then that's bullshit.  Imagine if you are the kind of person with lets say, 2 siblings who all love Metal Gear SO MUCH that all of you are willing to give Survive a chance.  So you log on Steam, you drop 35 fucking Pounds for the game itself and you make a dude and you have a grand old time.  Then your brother wants to play so now you have to pay an EXTRA £10 just to let him play his own guy because you don't want him fucking up your shit.  Then your sister comes along and decides SHE wants to play so that's ANOTHER £10 just so she can make her character and play.  That's £55 for the game and enough slots just to let people who live with you play.  Don't tell me "just share the one slot" either because if this was me and my wife, I wouldn't want here anywhere NEAR my save files, fuck that.

The only game I remember doing this other than this is FFXI and at least in the game you can KIND of justify having the one character because each job in that game levels up individually.  So if you wanted to play a thief and your brother wanted to be a black mage then those two jobs level up independently so while still bullshit at least you and someone else could, in theory, play your own shit.  Also my time with FFXI was extremely limited back in high school so there's even a chance I'm wrong about that one.

What's even worse is that not only is paying to save complete dogshit but the launch itself has been SO BAD that there's been an apology issued in the form of 100 SV coins.  So for your unplayable mess of a shitty Metal Gear game you get 1/10th of a save slot.  I get the feeling that this Metal Gear won't be Surviving for very long.

I'll see myself out.

Less Zombies Please

I'm so sick of fucking Zombies, why are there so many god damn Zombie games?!

Zombies have been a pretty important part of gaming, a lot of great games have zombies in them.  From Resident Evil on PS1 to Dead Rising 3 for our next gen systems, Zombies have been a big part of our gaming lives for a long long time.  However, it's starting to get to the point where I'm sick of seeing the fucking things.  I DARE you to go on Steam and count the number of cheap indie games that are about zombies, the number is fucking staggering.

I refuse to believe that there is a single developer around right now who could do something new or interesting with zombies.  I'm not saying that developers aren't talented enough or anything like that, but there's only so much you can do with a zombie.  Make em slow, make em fast, make 'em transform in the night time etc etc.  it's all been done multiple times.

There's so many fucking zombie games that if I wanted to do a special blog segment on games with zombies in it, I could take about a different title every day for over a year EASILY.  There are A LOT of fucking goddamn zombie games and it's now gotten to the point where whenever I see one I just roll my eyes.

I think the games industry needs some kind of new fixation to make games about.  There are plenty of other things that one could make a game about that are way more interesting than zombies.  There are so many countries that have really cool and interesting folk tales about various monsters and things that go bump in the night that would make for a really cool game idea. 

Like check this bastard out, it's called a Baku and it's some kind of Japanese spirit thingy that eats dreams.  I mean you could make a game along the lines of some guy who's stuck inside his own dream world as it gets devoured by a Baku and he has to find a way to beat it or die.  I'd play the shit out of a game like that and I'm sure someone who's better at making games than I am could come up with a better idea.

So drop the zombies and use your imagination a bit will ya?

Dying Light

There are so many zombie games now that the whole concept has become sort of meaningless but somehow the guys over at Techland have managed to get me excited for their upcoming zombie game Dying Light.

At first I sort of rolled my eyes and thought "oh great, another zombie game" and the fact that it was made by the same guys who gave us Dead Island didn't really make me any more excited but then I found a 12 minute game play video.

Granted it's still a work in progress but right now it's actually looking pretty promising.  No silly levelling systems or some other feature to make zombie killing easier.  Right now it just looks like the player is given a bunch of objectives and they have to survive while they fulfil those objectives, simple and fun.  There seems to be some extra side missions to which will have some kind of effect on the story but it doesn't look like you'll be running around doing "quests" for people.  Also the free running mechanic looks like it'll make traversing the areas of the game quite fun and give you quite a few options on how to deal with an upcoming horde.

The thing I quite like about the game play trailer is that during the day it's sort of a bog standard first person zombie game, but things get interesting once night falls because the zombies stop being zombies and they become strange creatures that can perform all sorts of acrobatic feats to come and chew your brains out.

Still, with it being a zombie game I'm not jumping out of my seat in excitement but I'm most definitely looking forward to more news to see how this one turns out.  I'm down for some free running, zombie killing action so sign me up and give me a pair of running shoes and a shotgun.