Zombies take MANHATTAN

I’ve been thinking about computer games a lot recently. I’ve also been giving some thought to the subject of the living dead. Specifically the trailer for I am Legend. It got me thinking about my old idea for a MMORPG based on a Zombie Apocalypse. Now I know I’ve mentioned this before but bear with me. I’ve been mulling the whole thing over in my mind a bit and have made some more progress on the idea.

Firstly it would be based around the tech of a first person shooter. It has to be a first person shooter or you’re never going to get to the fun of shooting zombies in the face. If the game was a button clicking grind fest like World of Warcraft or its ilk it would get old very fast. Ditto if it were to be programmed as a half-in-half like Hellgate London with its’ mix of RPG stats and faux first person shooting. I’d probably add in a dash of physics based zombie bashing action from the upcoming zombie filled Dead Island. Then I’d liberally sprinkle with some MMORPG staples such as crafting.

Setting

Hellgate London has given me some inspiration for the setting though, along with the film Land of the Dead by George Romero. I’m thinking of something along the lines of the game being set within the ruins of downtown Manhattan. The East and Hudson Rivers form natural barriers on either side. To further fortify the area the survivors have built barricades and demolished buildings north of Madison Square gardens. The rest of the city is swarming with the living dead who constantly assail the survivors.

The reason for the dead rising will be kept a mystery to the players. They’re supposed to be concerned with day to day survival. I would leave the origins of the zombie hordes a mystery till I was sure the game would survive more than a few months.

I’m guessing the main zombies would be just reanimated, shambling humans like in the movies. Their main threat would be from their unnatural resilience and overwhelming numbers.

Players

They players control a single character from the first person perspective just like a regular first person shooter. The player would only control a single character with regenerating health similar to Call of Duty 2 rather than some Hit Points based thing.

The combat would all be based on twitch skills so a good fighter in say Quake would be a winner in the combat. There would be an extra layer of non-combat bonuses, perks and skills built on top of this for the other MMORPG stuff which levelled up through some kind of XP system based on their use.

Scavenging

Scavenging would be integral to the game’s economy. The players would have to hunt down items and resources outside of the “safe” areas. The areas closer to the barriers will have been picked clean of the high level materials forcing players further and further out into the zombie infested city. The safer areas closer to the fortified areas will hold lots of lower the quality materials.

Examples of scavenged items could include canned foods, paper, plastics, ammunition and electronics.

Crafting

Crafting would play a big part in the game and would be responsible for the manufacture of everything from clothing to rocket launchers. These would be purely player produced. If everyone is out popping caps in the heads of zombies they’ll very quickly get reduced to waving melee weapons about. Then all of a sudden their melee weapons break and they have a problem…

Sea of Words

I’m not a particularly happy guy today. I’ve got the feeling that my work may well have killed off any attempt at doing some writing until at least Christmas. The powers that be have got me writing a guide all about how a certain group within the office should be doing their job. Worse they’ve decided that it needs to be written IMMEDIATELY! In response I have found myself developing a kind of writers block as my brain protests having to do anything. Those tiny little neurons are only being kept off the picket lines with regular injections of unhealthy levels of sugar via Mars Bars and In Bru.

My team think I’m crazy for agreeing to write the thing in the first place. They point out that it’s not as if these people don’t know they’re making a complete arse of their work. They just don’t seem to give a damn about it either way. I know they’re right, but I also know that someone has to write the guide. That someone might as well be me. The guide surely can’t make anything worse and if it makes things better then I might just get my name in lights. Either way it will make life much easier for my guys.

I shall persevere however.

Have you seen this? Boy?

I have to admit it. I obtained a copy of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and I quite enjoyed it. I’ve already detailed my misgivings in my previous post so I’ll stick to appraising the materials. If you don’t want any spoilers look away now.

It’s not a perfect show by any means. I’m worried that like a great many good ideas the Hollywood Committee Machine will roll through The Sarah Connor Chronicles like a road roller with Animal from the Muppets at the wheel. I fully expect any creative writers to be sacked after the first series and replaced by the writers from Mork and Mindy…

MORK

(ad lib, mug at camera)

MINDY

Oh Mork, you whacky alien, have my babies!

The story blazed along at a quick pace alternating between moments of extreme terminator induced peril and the requisite character building sections. Summer Glau in the role of Cameron the “Good” Terminator was suitable unnerving at points like a human entry into the uncanny valley. She did a remarkable job of balancing the cold machine intelligence of a robot with the empathy of a human being. In the long run I think that might lead to her character developing some kind of schizoid-emotional disorder but I’m willing to wait and see what happens.

I still have trouble accepting the arrival of a teenage-girl “terminatoress.” The original terminator was an iconic role made all the more threatening by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s amazing method acting. Ok so he basically spent the entire movie as a mute and for the main part played himself. The point is Arnie was born to play the Terminator. Robert Patrick had a fair stab at it in T2 but lets be frank I’m fairly sure he’s a cut price military robot anyway. Kristanna Loken was the infamous TX in T3 which lets be frank was a cheap excuse to get some T&A into the series. She had a fair old stab at the terminator vibe but she strikes me as being some kind of android a lot of the time anyway.

Cromartie the “bad” terminator was well handled by. He was far from perfect however. The schoolroom scene where he impersonates a supply teacher to gain access to John Connor’s classroom was interesting. The terminator actually took the time to read the register while secretly ripping open its’ thigh and pulling out a pistol. This rung a bit false after the lengths previous terminators went to when confronted with such a situation. Arnie stormed a police station full of cops in the first movie. In the second move he took on the entire LAPD with a minigun while Robert Patrick horsed into the fight in a stolen helicopter. In the third one Kristinna took over an entire military base and turned the prototype robots against their creators.

Cromartie however tries to be smart ass. Somehow he manages to hide a gun in his thigh (which must have been there before the skin was laid on). He took the time to bluff his way into the school where John Connor had just enrolled. He even decided to read out the register while tearing open his thigh to remove the concealed gun. He then managed to somehow totally cock up the relatively simple act of shooting a seated teenage boy at point blank range. This seems to be something of a problem for a machine designed as an unstoppable assassin. Maybe Skynet needs to stop using beta drivers for its robot soldiers.

The time travel element was also a source of some concern for me. The new “termapoppit” glibly explained away the presence of a temporal distortion device and some sort of homemade plasma cannon in a bank vault as the work of time travelling human engineers. What wasn’t so well explained was why the hell they had to jump from 1999 to 2007 in the first place? Why couldn’t they just have set the whole show in 2007? The canon answer is that they are leaping forward to the critical point before Skynet destroys the world. Still if I was going to avert a worldwide nuclear holocaust I think I’d prefer to have eight years to get some kind of plan together rather than one.

Secondly what happened to the Cromartie Terminator? It was last seen taking a direct hit from the home made plasma gun just as Sarah, John and Cameron disappeared into the future. If it was destroyed or disabled presumably the remains have fallen into the hands of military or civilian researchers. In turn this means that these guys have now got an eight year head start on bringing about the apocalypse. If he somehow escaped then where is he all these years? I’m not sure how an escape would be possible even for a terminator after a plasma blast to the face. Especially since he was taken down by the aforementioned point blank range blast in a bank surrounded by armed cops.

In closing, no it’s not perfect, it’s got plenty of plot holes but the pilot was fast paced with decent dialogue, quite unlike a few other shows I could name. I suggest you see it before it gets steamrollered by the magic of Hollywood.

I am BEOWULF!

The Kat and I took a trip last night to view the newly released Beowulf film after spotting a trailer a while back. I had a few trepidations about the whole thing even though we went at my suggestion. The greatest of these was the similarity in style between Beowulf and the giant turkey that is Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within. The animation in both movies is very similar at first glance. Beowulf teeters on the verge of entering the Uncanny Valley but manages to remain just on the right side of cartoon-like to prevent mass vomiting amongst the audience.

Ray Winston has undergone a substantial makeover for his part as Beowulf, gaining a few inches in height and losing his substantial middle aged spread. To The Kat’s eternal annoyance I’ve repeatedly been referring to him as Ray Park.In my defence I really though that was his name! While looking around I’ve actually found an actor called Ray Park, and he’s a Scotsman no less. Unfortunately he played the heavily made-up Darth Maul in Star Wars: the Phantom Menace. He doesn’t look anything like Ray Winston however so I can’t use that as an excuse.

Angelina Jolie hasn’t changed at all, even retaining her trademark Steve Tyler-esque lips. She seems to spend the vast majority of the movie emerging from various pools of water and gazing seductively at the male characters. In fact, in spite of all the publicity buzzing around Angelina I would go as far as to say that her character was really just a supporting role. Frankly all she did was screw various members of the cast and make them kings for a while. Â Then once they were all secure on their thrones she gave birth to deadly twisted children with supernatural powers. These kids then went rampaging through the kingdom smashing the place up till a hero arrived to defeat them. Surely even in the dark ages there’s better ways to go about getting your hole?

The acting was credible given the fact that somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that the actors had all been dressed in skin tight blue suits for the duration of filming. The film was heavy on action and short on philosophical prostelysing with credible characterisation given to all of the major players. Beowulf was blunt, self-aggrandising and arrogant with his trademarked phrase “I am Beowulf” reverberating out every five minutes.

Grendal himself was a subtle mix of a pathetic malformed child and a monstrous killing machine. His lines were spoken in Old English which at times made him difficult to understand but oddly it did make him a more rounded seeming character. His fight scene with h Beowulf was excellently choreographed and really showcased both characters personalities: Grendal as the petulant child taking revenge on the king and his warriors and Beowulf the arrogant warrior out to prove himself.

I was presently surprised by the motion captured versions of all the actors. They were superbly expressive compared to other similar computer aided efforts. I would go as far to say that some modern human actors could learn a thing or two from their digital counterparts.

The movie plays merry hell with the plot of the original poem as is the usual procedure with making any modern movie from an older work. Events are combined, omitted and rewritten to fit a modern audience. The film doesn’t suffer from this fact as much as other remake movies have (e.g. anything with Ben Stiller or Sean William Scott). That said I don’t think the author is in any state to complain anyhow.

I’m somewhat surprised that the movie has been rated as a 12. In the first ten minutes we see Grendal impale, rend and disembowel a dozen heavily armed men in a lively but very gory battle in the royal mead hall. We also see an amorous Geat warrior ogling a pair of pendulous digitally enhanced breasts and discussing blowjobs. It was about this time that a family with several small kids and a buggy wheeled past Kat and I on the way to their seats. Naturally in the spirit of public

Gremlins

It seems that some form of small mystical creature has boaked in the machine that powers this website. Normal service shall resume as soon as I finish extracting the bits of carrot from the gearbox.

Codliver Oil…

The rambling, gambling Kat has introduced me to the musical styling of a man by the name of Hamish Imlach. Information about Hamish appears to be as brief on Wikipedia as it is in real life. He seems to be one of those artists that sadly were more often heard than seen. Contrast that with a lot of modern artists that should neither be seen or heard.

Though I’ve only listened to one of those scurrilous and often misnamed “Greatest Hits” albums I have to say I’ve been fair impressed with his stuff in the main. He swings back and forth between a humorous musical jester to serious blues guitar work with seeming impunity. His renditions of well known folk songs makes you feel like you’ve travelled back in time. If you close your eyes you can imagine yourself in an era before every pub had a plasma TV with MTV blasting out 24/7. It was a simpler time though, when a musician could entertain you with a guitar, a pint and a tune you could sing along to. Hamish does all that with a quintessentially Scottish accent to match them. He has just the right mix between teary eyed sentimentalism, self deprecating humour and cutting satire that I expect from a man schooled in this great land.

Hamish Imlach I salute you sir, wherever your’ spirit may roam.

On Flanders Fields

In case you missed it, yesterday was Remembrance Sunday, the day when we remember those who died in the two world wars. I caught a glimpse of the local boy’s brigade on their way to the war memorial and an odd sequence of thoughts struck me. The first was of all the history, emotion and memory bound up in the solemn ceremony that takes place every November 11th on the anniversary of the end of the Great War in 1918. The sight of everyone standing on a cold November morning around war memorial was certainly evocative and the sight of red poppies got me thinking about my Gran. You see my Gran gave a lot of time, effort and dedication throughout her life to the Earl Haig Fund. I remember every November she would produce a poppy pin for each and every member of the family. She didn’t do this for reward or recognition. She did it because like so many of her generation the war was a real and grim reality for much of her young adult life. Many men she knew would have went away to fight and never returned. It’s not a unique story by any means but it’s a deeply personal story of how far we’ve come.

My Gran is gone now, sadly like so many others of her generation that saw and lived through so much. Now as I grow older and more world-weary, I read the books and study the causes, the impact and the legacy those two monumental conflicts I’ve grown to appreciate what two entire generations suffered to protect.

Today however I was reminded that the memory of the sacrifice of two generations is slowly fading. The reminder came like a hammer blow to the cranium, delivered with a nasal high-pitched whine that only a pubescent bam could muster: “Here, so whit’s thur poppy thing aw about anyhow?” It terrifies me that the meaning of such an important symbol could be mystery to anyone, even a simpleton ned born and raised in Sighthill.

So buy a poppy from the seller every year and remember whatever diatribe we may lay on the inequity and foolishness of the modern world that we have the freedom to enjoy it because of the brave generations that wentbefore us.

Let Glasgow Flourish, for a while

It seems that Glasgow somehow managed to succeed in it’s bid to hold the 2014 Commonwealth Games. I guess we can now look forward to six solid years of unstoppable, inescapable advertising drivel and PR on the subject. I fully expect reams of reports, miles of column inches, flag waving and band playing. This will of course be accompanied by countless special initiatives to divert the local bams, junkies and jakes from harrassing the visitors. Naturally these will be cunningly disguised as helping them escape the poverty and degredation they live in.

It will undoubtedly end in some kind of scandal like everything this scale does. Millennium Dome I’m looking at you here.

Glasgow hardly seems the ideal place to have any kind of athletics competition. Hell the only sports that Glasgow seems famous for lately are the hundred metres running from the police dash and freestyle stabbing. To me it seems like a colossal waste of money. Glasgow city and her right honourable council seem to be intent on living up to that old Roman adage of Give them Bread and Circuses. There doesn’t seem to be a day goes by that they aren’t in the Evening Times for some reason or another. Usually it’s a row of smiling middle aged, middle management in pinstriped faces shaking hands with the great unwashed. These hard working council chiefs are out there doing their bit to help out the underprivileged in some manner. Sure it’s all PR and column inches bullshit but you want to believe that Glasgow City Council has the resident’s best interests at heart. You really want to think admire them for spending the outrageous council tax bills on something worthwhile. Glasgow city council have a strange set of priorities when it comes to things. Half the roads in Glasgow haven’t been resurfaced in fifteen years, they’re falling apart. The council however decide that it’s far more important to spend millions of taxpayers’ money on their beatification of the city centre. The city is riddled with areas of poverty, unemployment and deprivation but hey, it’s alright we’ll splash out a few hundred million on an athletics competition, that’ll cheer those misery guts up.

It’s about then you read on the BBC News that the Commonwealth Games are going to cost the city £288 Million to stage. That they plan to throw up a purpose built athletes village in Dalmarnock and there’s even talk of a velodrome and indoor games centre at Parkhead. These are things these areas have desperately needed for a long time but as usual it takes something B.I.G. to get it in motion.

I reserve judgement on what good the games will do Glasgow as a whole. I can’t help but cast a cynical eye over the grand plans and schemes and wonder who’s really wining in all this. The property developers are going to win for sure. They’ll be rolling in multi-million pound contracts to build all this, not to mention the infrastructure to support it. The canny merchants, investors and landlords of Glasgow will certainly benefit as they crash into the East End buying up every square metre of land they can lay their sweaty fat fingers on. I can’t wait for the day I see a grubby ex-council flat in the Red Row flats on the market for half a million quid because you can just about see the Athletes village in the distance.

The world media will certainly benefit. If not from showing the games themselves then certainly for the tragic stories of athletes who wandered into Bridgeton Cross on a Friday night wearing the wrong colours.

Naturally Glasgow’s thriving underworld of thieves, beggars, hustlers, buskers and general scum will benefit as they descend on mass. I can’t blame them they’re just providing everything the other vultures want. As far as I’m concerned, if it gets the bastards out of the city centre so I can walk down the street in peace, all the better.

The PR tornado is already sweeping in towards the city as I type. If you believe the PR the people of Parkhead, Dalmarnock and Tollcross are packing their bags ready to meet it. They can’t wait to be swept up and set down on the yellow brick road to a healthier, richer and safer community. I don’t think it’ll happen and I don’t think most of them think it will either. They just don’t want to be seen to exercise that most West of Scotland right, the right to be cynical. They know this stuff will boost the local economy for a few months but it’ll go away just as fast leaving them back at square one. They know it’ll bring jobs into the area but they also know most of them will go to Polish immigrants and middle-class middle management types to order them around. They know that their communities will be safer as police officers are poured into the areas to keep the local bams in check. They also know that the place will return to its’ normal war torn state as soon as the police stop coming.

So people of Glasgow I salute you, and for the next six years I shall watch with pride as you let them pull the wool over your collective eyes. I shall be waiting right here when the games are over and the tumbleweed comes rolling in again.

Sarah Connor?

The Sci-Fi oracle that is TEH KAT has got me thinking about television spin-off series today. It all started with a discussion of the upcoming Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles. The original Terminator was a masterpiece of a low budget action movie. Hardly Oscar winning material but it set the gold standard for every movie about cyborgs and time-travelling assassins that followed it. I won’t say too much about Arnold Schwarzenegger (wow that’s in the spell check dictionary…?) Â Quite simply he was born to play the role of a murderous indestructible cyborg from the future.

The first thing that hits me is the guy behind it Josh Friedman was responsible for the infamous Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds. Having sat through that particular masterpiece for two hours in a cinema after paying good money I’m in no mood to be charitable. Rock solid shit! Not to mention how much worse it was listening to an hour and a half of Dakota Fanning screaming like someone had poured molten lead in her ear. I must admit I’m approaching this new series with some degree of trepidation.

Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles however looks to be yet another Sci-Fi spin off that’s been through the Hollywood committee mill. Sure it seems to tick all the right Terminator boxes but something’s not quite right in there. It’s got a young teenage John Connor played ably by Thomas Dekker (19 in real life) who Wikipedia informs me is best known for playing buddy with the ambiguous sexuality on Heroes and some other whiny kid in the Honey I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show (WTF?). It’s got a hot teenage girl terminator played by Summer Glau (26 in real life) who played the role of River Tam in the short lived series Firefly. She’s been sent back in time to protect John Connor presumably by using her jailbait cock-teasing powers on him and his friends. Naturally I assume this means there will be teen angst and related arseholery to appeal to the teenage emo-kid demographic. It’s got some dark haired English actress playing the originally blonde and American Sarah Connor. The bad guy terminator rather surprisingly is not played by Michael Ironsides as I first suspected. I guess they were paying less than ten bucks an hour for the villain slot. Instead the role has gone to some random character I’ve never heard of before. Still how difficult can it be to play a remorseless killing machine from the future, Robert Patrick and Arnold Schwarzenegger managed it.

I weep acid.

Tegenaria Domestica

My house has been invaded by legions of Jakey Spiders. I don’t know if they were taking shelter from the high winds and rain last night or maybe there was some kind of belated Halloween party going in spider town. The cause is irrelevant the simple fact of the matter is the wee eight legged swine were all over the place. I had two on the living room wall about the size of a twenty pence and another smaller pair scuttling about in the bedroom and bathroom.

I have no real fear of spiders other than the eternal nagging urban legend that you swallow at least one spider a year while sleeping. So now I have that coupled with the sudden concern that I can’t find hide-nor-hair of the things. Suddenly my spaghetti doesn’t look so appealing.

I have included an artist’s mock-up of the culprits in the hope that it will lead to their apprehension: