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PA Comic: Friday, March 2nd - Pro-Antagonism
Sterica
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ESPECIALLY regarding Lori.
Dear god.
Fuck that bitch goose.
The show has definitely gotten better again after the mid-season break but it's definitely still got issues. They really need to work on the people / zombie ratio.
Can we have zombies in Mad Men? Or perhaps a few zombies in Walking Dead could show up wearing suits.
But if the survivors shouted advertising pitches as they killed zombies...it could be the best cross-over ever.
There's a missing word in the first panel!
Okay I'm done. And I've never watched the show. However, when it comes to how many zombie themed thing there are for the last ten years, I'm comfortable with letting the zombies win now.
Edit - Awesome.
Full disclosure, I stopped reading it after the 4th hardcover (end of the Governor arc).
kingworkscreative.com
kingworkscreative.blogspot.com
There were also two errors in the newspost, so maybe this is just Tychpo Friday.
ep 1: this is kinda cool
ep 2: this is ok
ep 3: bored now
never bothered watching beyond that.
Felt like the early story could've made a better movie than series.
Same. I enjoyed the comic, and I enjoy the show.
I liked the comic for the most part, and I've seen a few episodes from season 1. The show succeeds in some things (the zombies consistently look great, for one thing), but based on my small sampling there were some problems with creating meaningful characters.
random season 1
Also in the season finale, when the woman stays behind with the CDC doctor to die in the explosion, I didn't care. There didn't seem to be a reason to care that she died, and none of the characters seemed to care much either, despite the fact that it was apparently supposed to be this dramatic decision. It got even more undercut by the blonde woman also deciding to stay, and the old guy making a stand and eventually persuading her not to.
Star Chamber... it's been dead to me for a while.
Especially after they finally released the Mac client for it, got bought by SOE, and then discontinued it a few months later.
It was cool that one of their employees was keeping it up to date in his spare time, but I think I figured if the company itself wasn't going to support it, why should I put any more money into it?
Fuck SOE. They basically killed that company.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
On a random note, the hoodie with the SWTOR Dark side icon which Gabe was wearing in the comic "Side Effects May Include" is being turned into an official shirt by J!NX:
http://www.swtor.com/news/news-article/20120302
The reason zombies aren't "done to death" is that no one is actually "doing zombies", they remove the whole "survival" part of the zombie genre and instead use the physical zombies as a vehicle to deliver whatever they want. It's no more a "Zombie" product than Frankenberry cereal is a "Science Fiction Horror" cereal.
Dawn of the Dead (the 2000s remake) was not a zombie movie. It was an anti-consumerist movie that happens to have zombies.
Resident Evil (any of the movies or the games) aren't zombie media. It's an action/survival game with zombies in it.
Walking Dead isn't a zombie TV show. It's a drama that happens to have zombies.
If, at any point, you can replace the monster with a Sharktopus it's not a zombie movie. It's a monster movie that wants to use zombies as the gimmick.
I think the only movies to get the genre right recently are, ironically, the ones that mock the genre. Zombieland was about survival, dealing with survival, and used the survivalist mentality to allow characters to have growth that was only possible once normal society collapsed. It hinged around survival and the characteristics of zombies.
I give Shaun of the Dead a pass because even though it used zombies as a vehicle to show the zombifying effect of everyday life, it still hinged around the characteristics of zombies to give us the definition of "zombifying", and used to them to a T. Wholly because of the fact that it relied on our knowledge of what zombies are to compare them to modern life, but the reliance on zombies (specifically and only zombies) as the antagonist makes it qualify just as well.
Alright, the Walking Dead.
It needed to start with Rick getting shot. Then cut to the initial outbreak of zombies showing Shane and Rick's family, going through their initial interactions of the outbreak in the first episode. Then on to escaping the zombies with Rick's family and surviving the initial panic in the next three episodes. Then showing the dwindling aftermath of the panics with people meeting up and moving together in the last episodes of the season. The last few minutes of the last episode of the first season should have been a cut to Rick's hospital bed, his fingers twitching and then his eyes slowly opening. The benefits of this are that you get to start out the first episode zombie heavy with lots of introduction, but also lots of drama. Everyone is immediately faced with the zombified loved ones and acquaintances in their life. There's dramatic tension solely based around the essence of what a zombie is, and it allows the build up, growth and introduction of the main characters. You get to see how everyone's relationships evolve and why Shane is banging Rick's wife. This way, when Rick wakes up, it's not a case of Shane's a douche and Rick's a nice, but slow, leader guy. It's a case of actual dramatic tension between Shane's relationship with Lori and Rick's relationship with Lori, and both relationships are completely legitimate.
Starting with Rick waking up makes us feel nothing for Shane, and even less for his relationships. In the regular show, he's just a goose with no redeeming qualities, and the only reason that's the case is because the writers/directors/producers completely failed drama 101. In that, we feel nothing for something with no build up. Yeah, we had maybe an episode to build up "oooh, someone's been cheating", but we feel nothing for either Rick's relationship with his family or for Shane's relationship with Rick's family. It's just a void and It's just bad writing.
Cosmic Rift and Infantry have been on virtually non-existent service & support since the former's inception and the latter's bringing onto SOE. So this never was an issue.
For the most part, back when SOE tried to turn them Pay 2 Play they both died. Cosmic Rift did to a much larger extent than Infantry.
After they turned them back to F2P several years later, Infantry gained some players back.
By the time of this shutdown, the 'server' (it's more like a tiny process sitting somewhere on a giant EQ server, barely bothering anyone) is a ghost town.
Infantry still had a few players, but not more than a couple hundred at best, I imagine.
The saddest part of it all is that had SOE opened the modding tools to the community much earlier than it did (in the last few years, at the game's death throbs), as the community kept asking for since the very beginning, it would've likely been a very lively game as it had a deep untapped potential (some of it manifested in the off-shoot 'illegal' short-lived FreeInfantry shards).
Back when it had many active, talented, players who were more than willing to contribute content and improve the game.
Their older 'sister', SubSpace, is still existing, ironically, after much turbulence throughout the decades (a '95 game) and many power struggles within its community and losing many server hosts.
By contrast to SOE's operated games, it's continued survival is mainly due to being player-ran, since the server/map editor was distributed freely with the game at retail (and post VIE/Interplay's abandonment of the game due to their bankruptcy, kept being operated by players).
The, seemingly, only current surviving host is one provided by Priit Kasesalu (Kazaa/Skype), who also programmed the currently used client for the game (dubbed "continuum").
It has been a fun ride.
Is the comic a liar with pants on fire?
Will I enjoy the first season, at least, and then at some point in the series, completely understand the complaint that is being illustrated?
The comic the show is based on is a lot more entertaining
I had some GREAT memories of infantry back in its prime
it really was an awesome game.
I still watched the whole first season, it's not actively offensively bad, and I did enjoy the dressing-up-as-a-zombie bits and the rooftop scenes. But it left me with no desire to watch any more or read the comics etc.
Actually, has there ever been a zombie movie where the zombies just don't distinguish between zombies and humans, and are happy to fight each other? That would mean that after a few days, only the real badass zombies would be left. Former martial arts experts and Marines, that kind of thing. So you'd have fewer zombies around but you'd know that each one was really dangerous.
That. Is. All.
I still feel something for all the characters at this point though. First season, not so much. You're right, I completely forgot about that woman who stayed behind in the exploding CDCC. At the time I was like "oh wow that sucks", but looking back I really don't care.
I mean all these realistic gripes on characters and their actions are fundamentally flawed at the start...It's not reality, it's TV. Yelling at the TV trying to communicate that going into that door alone is not only stupid but would never happen, is entertaining and half the fun of the show.
The special effects are fucking awesome for a TV show. I really like them, and I have no problems with zombie movement, hordes, or the amount left in the world.
If you're wondering why I like the show, it's probably cause I haven't read the comics.
Big gripes from last night's episode:
I'm enjoying the show a lot so far, but I can understand why people don't like it.
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I think I was most upset about the shutdown of the Shadowbane servers.
I followed that game since fruition, and although I was inactive in the ending days; I would occasionally step back in and drink deep from the politically charged map doused with player cities.
The way the world was an open sandbox laid out for a PvP centered player community was done well. Erecting(heh) your city for your guild and protecting it on a late night 3 AM Bane from a group of foreign(literally) conquerors was the height of my journeys in that game...
Even when the emulated server starts up sometime this summer, I don't think I will be able to relive those days, at least not in that specific game.