Apocalypse How - The Strain - I Am Legend's Descendant

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Back to another one of these huh, well, it's no bad at all, at least i enjoy them.

Anyways, today i'm talking about The Strain, a vampire apocalypse that seems to be one of I Am Legend's closest descendants. It's a really great series honestly, and the show so far has stayed relatively close to it's source material.

The Vampires:
Unlike my last review, there's only really two types of this monster.
First, we have the original 7, they are pretty much the hive minds of these armies. They can see through the eyes of the vampires they create and they are very intelligent, being in charge of millions of vampires, well, not all of them in charge of so, mainly just one, the only one who quite literally calls them self "The Master." They also don't die quickly in sunlight unlike their underlings, but they can still die because of it. They can also use other vampire and human bodies as they're new body is their old body gets too damaged.

Now, their underlings, which are the most common of them all, being the only other kind. Start off fairly slow and not to bright, but within a month them are back to full mobility and can actually think for themselves, making them much more formidable than zombies. But their main weakness is sunlight/UV lights, they also can killed normally with simple bullets or getting beheaded, heck, you can even ripe their "stinger" out, but silver burns them and is thus more effective.

The Anatomy:
 Vampires in this series have no hair (they lose it when they turn), no genitalia (it shrivel up and falls off), has a 6 foot "stinger" coiled up in their throat that shoots out at an incredible speed and latch onto something, cutting into an artery and draining the blood while passing on the parasite. Their skin is pale, for obvious reasons, and they are the same height as humans.

The Parasite:
In this series, it's not a virus, but instead something a little more feasible, a parasite. In this case it's a type of worms that enters into the victims bloodstream and quickly replicates. By the time you get one out, there is already several more flowing through you. They cause the metamorphosis itself and turn the blood into a white substance and changes the internal organs that process blood, along with the changes mentioned above.

Now, i said this was closely related to I Am Legend, and in truth it is. The vampires have attributes of zombies and vampires, they also become smarter as time goes on, and in both series the characters work for a cure.

Tune in next Friday when I review Season 1 of the show.

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What Makes Zombies Scary

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1. The Ones You Loved
The undead are stupid, slow and rather easy to get around, thus the only factor likely to stop you from killing them is the fact that, well, they were once human. There will always be that doubt that maybe they are still human, that they are simply trapped, and that doubt will always stop you. But there will always be those few zombies that are worse than the rest, they're not stronger, they are not faster, no: they were once the ones you loved. 

2. Alone With A Monster
In the beginning of an apocalypse, most TV shows, movies, and literature will show the beginning of the apocalypse as a horde, when in reality, the first time you will probably see a zombie is in your own house, or office, or gas station, some place closed in, some place where it's easy to get trapped. Stuck in a place where something wants to eat you and, assuming the apocalypse has just begun, you probably don't know how to kill it. Worse yet, when you're left in the dark, or searching a building, you don't know where it is, where it's "hiding," now a zombie's slowness no longer matters, they can jump out at you, and even worse, bite you, endgame. 

3. Surrounded By Monsters
While one zombie alone in the open isn't that scary nor dangerous, a wall of undead shambling toward you however, that will stop you in your tracks. Often times in the open, zombies will be found in hordes, they congregate around noises, or scent depending on the source material. When the next trigger is set off, the zombies that were simply wandering will now all be moving in a horde towards it. The thing about hordes is that simply, you're best bet is running. Attempt to shoot down a horde, you risk getting flanked by more dead shambling toward you, attempt to blow it up, they will still keep coming, you try to set it on fire, well, check out my blog post Fire!, for that particular crash course. There is no stopping it, and watching a wall of dead mow down the living at the beginning of the apocalypse will teach you to avoid these swarms.

4. Eaten Alive

They're are many horrible ways to die, and honestly, in the apocalypse, you'll be lucky if you die from a bite. Zombies have an incredibly gruesome way of getting rid of people, eating you alive, well until you pass out and die, or just die, that's when the pain ends. Drowning is awful, burning is dreadful, but being ripped apart piece by piece as several hands dig into and several mouths rip off you're flesh, that's a whole different hell. Here you are being devoured by the very thing you've been trying to run away from, the very thing that's killed the one's you loved, and now it's about to claim you too, and your death won't be kick, and it definitely won't be painless.

5. No End In Sight
If any realizations going to crush what hope you have left, it'll be the though that in the end, there might be no end, the zombies may rot into the dirt but the humans that survive, the higher the chance of another large scale outbreak begins. It's the horror that lingers, a force that could exist as long as humanity still lives. The military might be able to save you, although if you believe most zombie fiction, the military rarely survives, but is it enough? No, not without a cure, and if society falls, a cure will not be possible. If humanity survives, the undead will always haunt us.

6. The Pain You Know
This one i'll admit is probably not as obvious as the previous reasons, but there will always be a slightly chilling feeling to seeing a zombie with a knife buried in it's chest or it's arm hacked off, or it's jaw missing. We can relate to that, much more than we can relate to seeing the same thing on a vampire or werewolf, because we know what that mean on our own terms, and that's the subtle horror of it.

7. The Uncanny Valley
For those of you who don't know about the uncanny valley i recommend this video by Extra Credits here: Extra Credits - The Uncanny Valley. Zombie fall perfectly into this valley, they look human, but not enough that instead, they would naturally freak you out. When they first turn, they'd look close enough to human, but instead they now lurch at you, try to eat others, and are making raspy growl. They look human but clearly aren't anymore, that makes a huge difference.Sometimes the scariest things are not the twisted monstrosities, but instead, a dark reflection of yourself, a glimpse of your future, a look at what will happen to you too when you lose you're humanity.

I was going to do a little bit more, explaining the human side of the horror, how a world gone mad making humanity just as bad as, if not worse than, zombies, but i'll save that for another week. Come back next Friday when I talk about "The Strain" two words, vampire apocalypse...

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Apocalypse How - Attack On Titan

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So i'm not here to explain why Attack On The Titan is good, other have people have done that, and done that better than i ever could. But to say the least, i highly recommend it. It's does a lot of things well, and i highly recommend it.

Anyways, i'm here to talk about the apocalypse behind it, because one, it's interesting, and two it's a rather unused concept. This apocalypse is about giant humanoid creatures appearing on earth and trying to destroy humanity. They cannot be starved (considering most of them haven't had a meal in 100 years at the show's opening), they can not be hacked to bits except for one weak spot, the nape of their neck, in which a chuck of flesh must be cut out, they regenerate everywhere else, (it only takes a minute or two for their head to grow back), and they are surprisingly fast and rather light for their size.

These titans also range from 3 - 60 meters tall (If you watch the show a 3m tall titan is mentioned, the chart just doesn't show it) Here's a comparison chart from the show itself:

Now mind you though, that 60m titan is one of a kind and rarely shows up, but it possesses a certain amount of intelligence that makes it incredibly dangerous, not to mention it can appear and disappear in an instant.

There are also variant titans which are faster than the rest. They can outrun a horse which might not sound impressive, but when cars are long gone in most accounts, that's pretty fast, you can't out run that, well let alone a regular titan. There's also another kind of titan i won't talk about mainly because it would a huge spoiler in the series, and that type is also not very well known.

In this series, to fight the titans, humanity has Three Dimensional Maneuver Gear, a gas canister propelled system with 2 grapples to stab into object and buildings, 8 hard-steel blade that attach to the 2 handles that are also the firing mechanism for the grapples, the suit also consists of a system of belts and straps that are used to maneuver while mid-air.

Although it's kind of up for debate as to whether or not such a system is realistic. But that's not exactly what matters, what are the odds of our world surviving this apocalypse? Not very good, slim, almost non-existent, nah, impossible. Unless we do what this series does (not the 3d gear) and build a giant wall out of stone or metal or whatever, we might have a chance, or if we decide to live on the ocean, or in the air or on one of the poles, but even so, it's a matter of getting there and hoping the titans can't swim. Actually sea living might just be it, that or blotting out the sky.  The Titans do have another weakness besides cutting off their nape, lack of sunlight. Without sunlight some titans will become sluggish and start to starve, something 100 years without eating didn't do.

But one possible weakness might also be cold temperature, Titans have an insanely high body temperature and thus are always steaming and emit a lot of heat especially when they die, so maybe, just maybe, ocean water could kill the things. I say the ocean because it's large enough to keep a relatively consistent and cold temperature, so any Titans chasing humanity into the water might die of hypothermia, assuming that their body temperature isn't so high or just simply defies the laws of nature like the way their weight does. The series creator himself Hajime Isayama even said the titans mainly attack from the south, but none from the north because it's a frozen wasteland. 

So that's your lot, either find some way the zip around quickly to chop up the titans, build a giant wall, set sail, or blot out the sun, maybe with nukes? I mean it sounds stupid but that's what most people i know would resort to, but yeah anyways, come back next Friday, my next post is on what makes zombies scary (and how most people are doing it wrong.)  

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5 Zombie Game Tropes That Get On My Nerves

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1. The Protagonist Is Immune
I'm sorry, well not really, but i consider this a HUGE cop out. I get that if a player had to reload a save every single time someone bites them then the game might be considered to difficult. But hang on, that's not quite right, zombie games are supposed to difficult, and besides, Dying Light did something like this, you're character gets bit and you have to take some kind of medicine to hold off the virus. But it could be done better, Dying Light never made it into a ticking clock element, it ended only effecting you specifically in story, and no where else... Anyways, moving on...

2. Crafting Systems
I can't help but feel like some zombie games are taking this too far. Not Dead Rising though, Dead Rising is meant to be insane with that kind of stuff, but when you can duct tape a battery to a weapon and give it Lightning Powers!!!,  then you might not be on the right side of realism. I know, i know, a game filled with zombies, do you really expect realism when it's talking about raising the dead? Well, if you're a game with the tone of Dead Island or Dying Light, then you probably don't want to have weapons like this...

But hey, all i'm saying is if you're going to have a depressing or serious tone to your game, do not allow wolverine claws, i mean serious, you wouldn't have an episode of SpongeBob in Human Centipede, well okay, bad example, Human Centipede might just be over the top and campy enough to get away with that kind of thing.

3. Escort Quests
Escort quests can be bad enough in regular games, but in zombie ones, especially in ones like Dead Rising and Dead Island where zombies start to show up all over the place, it gets tiring if controller breaking frustrating. Or mouse breaking, sorry, think i just gave away the fact that i'm mainly a console gamer. Now, this problem can be avoided and often is if the A.I. isn't...

But sadly when the A.I. is faulty, escort quests become hell, or hell on earth. One way to fix this is a simple command to just get them to hide someplace or actually get in the car. Yeah, this ones hardly to deal with, and i think a better title for this section might be Poorly Handled Escort Quests.

4. Zombie Variety
I get zombies might be a bit over used, but the variations of zombies have become a little cliche, and honestly, i don't care to much about seeing the new zombie types. I'm waiting for someone to do zombies well first. Zombies are supposed to be slow moving, can only die when the head is destroyed, transmit the virus through bites, and are only truly a threat in tight spaces or in large numbers. But i rarely see that, instead zombies have to mutate nowadays, and you know what, that would've made more sense when zombies were caused by radiation (as in Night Of The Living Dead) not when they are created by a virus. Viruses mutate, sure, but they usually only mutate to a form people wont be immune to, not a form that changes their hosts shape.  And some of the zombie types are even hackneyed at this point, that's how over used zombies are, now even their mutations are getting old. There always seems to be the spitter, the exploder, the sprinter, the tough mother****er, and the psycho du jour. Although, Dead I sland, explain this to me, how is it that a small island have so many psychos in straight jackets running around? I get you could have a mental ward or something, but even so, i'm pretty a straight jacket doesn't make you muscle bound, if anything it does the opposite, it's just weird, and if your trying to have a dark and somber tone it just doesn't make sense.

5. How To Ramp Up Difficulty
This ties in to almost every one of my previous points really. Everything for weapon crafting, to zombie variety, to protagonist immunity boils down to one thing, game difficulty, and if this is how developers are doing it, then they're doing it all wrong. It's simple really, okay, probably not the coding, but at least the design and rule set. You want to make your game difficult? Make zombies only truly go down if they're burnt alive or take a bullet (or other object) to the head. To make it fair, bullets are one hit kills if it hits them in the head, and only certain weapons that would naturally be weaker than an axe or a sledgehammer might potentially take maybe 2 or 3 whacks to kill a zombie with. To make sure there's no confusion, give weaker weapons a "light weapon" category and one hit kill weapons "heavy weapons" for melee based weapons that is. Another idea is to not make the character immune, Dying Light avoided that, but also don't do what Dying Light did get rid of xp because we acted too fast to remember that the zombies in red jackets explode. Instead maybe give us an option to reload the save or instead revive ourselves with some of our xp, or just force us to reload. Another option is to avoid certain weapon crafting and make it take some actual time and effort to make a weapon with lightning powers, or just make it only electrify enemies, but make it realistic if that's the tone of the rest of it, but if you're like Dead Rising, then go nuts. Heck, here's a rather unexplored concept, want to ramp up difficulty, don't make variations of zombified humans, maybe instead do zombified animals, i mean those could be scary as hell, especially when they first turn.
Well, i could go on longer, but at that point i'd be better off making a whole new post for. Anyways, i have no idea what i'm doing next week, but until then...

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