Last of Us [PS4]

Oh, boy! We need new consoles! IQ is so bad! There is no more juice left in those consoles...poor devs, need to cut down their visions to fit into old tec.

Still, I like the style and art of this game very much. When AA works, the graphics are nice. The atmosphere in the trailers shown so far is very dense...I am looking forward to exprrience NDs new world.

 

Whats wrong with having Zombies in LOU? Zombies are cool! They just need to make sure thre are a limited number and not spawning out of walls.

 

I agree that from everything I've seen of the game, zombies are the silliest part. Sure zombies are cool, but they are also a pretty childish and unrealistic element to a story that seems to be pretty well developed and well written. It spoils the suspension of disbelief a little, and makes it a little harder to take the game as seriously as it could be without them. The game seems to have plenty of good non-zombie related gameplay, and characters so maybe they could have simply done away without them. Find another reason for an apocalipse, and focus on real human interaction. Zombies are fun, but are a very immature and gamey character, they could simply have a faction of psycopathinc super agressive kamikaze people instead.

 

There are no zombies in this game! You have people infected with fungus that disfigures them and drive them crazy. They haven't died and then reanimated, they're just driven to consume to feed their parasitic growth.

 

TLOU enemies aren't zombies though in the traditional sense. I agree that traditional zombies are silly and childish (reanimated dead people that feed off the living ), but TLOU's enemies are more like people infected with a rabies-like fungal infection that burst forth from their bodies in huge hideous growths and compels them through behavioural modification to attack other humans, thus spreading the infection further. Its based on the real-life fungus called cordyceps which is a very real fungus that attacks insects, takes over their mental faculties and controls them to make them reach a high place where their bodies can be burst open and fungal spores released.

The entire premise for the game is a "what if" scenario based around the real life cordyceps fungus. I think it's much more thoughtful than the average flesh eating zombie viral infection, actually very appealing, and a different more grounded-in-reality twist to the zombie horror survival game genre.

In fact I think the premise is actually pretty terrifying. First time i heard of cordyceps i thought "WTF!!! Nature is pretty screwed up to create something like that!" and "imagine if the cordyceps someday evolved to infect humans". The following day TLOU was announced to my joyous delight

 

I agree, it doesn't take any imaginative stretch to see how the spore could be targeted to humans, be it either by nature itself or as a biological weapon.

Just watch this clip from BBC's Planet Earth narrated by Sir David Attenborough.


Also much more realistic than zombies. The spore is only out to propagate itself through the targeted host.

The game trailer certainly seems to be very immersive to say the least and it looks great.

 

Certainly this is less stupid then the living dead kind of zombies, yet not so much. They are still mindless monsters that were someday people and now have became ferocious brain eating infection spreading creatures that are less taboo to shoot at and see their limbs fly away and onveniently make for a very good enemy type on a game. I'd say its less silly, but in no way is that any close to realistic.

Sure, but to imagine the human version of the fungus would tranform people into wild killing machines is pretty fantastic to say the least.

 

But the evolutionary pressure on an a human version would be vastly different. For a start the cordyceps we have seen attacks only insects, simpler behaviours etc. In a much more dynamically complex system as a human brain the effect could be far more extreme. There would be little point in a human climbing up a tree to explode spores as the rate of infection would be low.

Using the physiology available in a human body would suggest that using speed to spread the infection would make more sense. The fact that the resulting infected are violent could just be an emergent side affect, the real reason for an up close attack is to infect a new host with spores as the infection is not spread through bites.

 

Rather than spoil it, suspension of disbelief is exactly what's required for any fantastic narrative. Suspension of disbelief is spoiled when the internal consistency of any narrative is so lacking that you can't even enjoy it on its own terms. A great example of this is Star Wars where you're supposed to accept that the Jedi perceive the near future, thus giving them superhuman reflexes, yet somehow it's also possible to catch one unawares and shoot them in the back. Good luck spinning that contradiction, Disney.

I dunno, personally I find zombies boring as hell, even symbolically, but I don't consider them a bridge too far when it comes to taking a narrative seriously. At least this makes a lot more sense than J.J. Abrams' Revolution, where somehow electromagnetism ceases to hold as a law of nature.

 

If a that fungus got to humans, and invaded their nervous system, the most likely results would be headaches, seizures, blindness/deafness, death or maybe it would turn the person into a vegetable without killing it. The craziest side effect you could come up with within the realm of biological possibility would be for the thing to give people hallucinations, panic attacks and maybe make them more agressive.
Now the game is talking about a thing that puts a human being completely and permanently out his faculties, while still keeping him alive, and agressive, and highly agile, and intelligent enough to hear and smell other people, and atack them, and eat their flesh, and get up on their feet again to start the process again, yet stupid enough lose their memory, consciousness and to be completely mindless for everything else, with the added bonus of some very hollywoodesche mutations to their face so that you don't feel bad about blowing their brains up. Oh, and it evolved enough to do all that within a couple of years -given the present day setting.
If that was at all feasible, any other disease would have done it first. Like a killer flu that turns people into mindless snot monsters, trying to catch people with their sneeze atack. The closest thing we have to that is Rabies, and it's results are far less dramatic and gameplay inspiring then any stupid fictional zombie disease, and I don't see it causing an zombiepocalipse any time soon. If it would ever evolve into something close to what is depicted in Naughty's game, it would take centuries, and humanity would have plenty of time to find better treatment, a cure, a vaccine or at least organize itself so that it doesn't turn society to hell within a single generation.
Its like the mutants in X-man, sure mutations exist in reality and theoretically a person can have one that turns them into a super-human. But what mutations usually do to humans most of the time is make them be born with down syndrome. Yes, there are some cases of super humans with special abilities thanks to genetic mutations, yet those are far less flashy then what you see in any comic book.

 

What you are describing is actually more realistic and probable than what occurs in probably 95 % of all stories told. It is certainly more probable than what happens in most CSI stories.

 

So I guess they are smart zombies? Just let the things be zombies and let them act like NORMAL regular zombies. I don't want SUPER ZOMBIES SHOOTING SNIPER RIFLES! Or zombies operating cranes, raising dogs or zombie slave ships. Too many of these "new zombie breeds" have abilities that have you thinking WTF? Zombies flying helicopters and operating heavy machinary. No zombie commanders having zombie meetings around a fire. They don't want to make a game where you kill people trying to defend themselves. Zombies are zombies. No matter what the contrived definition you want to come up with.

 

If you are referring to Resident Evil, then the series hasn't had actual zombies since RE3.

 

The name's Zombie, James Zombie....


Zombie Skyfall
To Zombies with Love
The Zombie Daylights
Live and Let Die....Again
.....

 

I believe 6 fused together the parasite infected with the reanimated. You actually get parasite infected zombies that use guns, objects and drive stuff

Anyhow, zombies are actually people who are not conscious of their actions, dont appear to have connection with reality, are in constant drowsiness and are controlled by someone. In Haiti the voodoo practitioners use some neurotoxin from some kind of fish which they prepare along with other ingredients. They use this on a "target" individual who falls into a dead-like state but he is actually alive. So naturally his relatives will bury the poor guy alive.
Because he doesnt get enough oxygen his brain suffers from some damage. The voodoo practitioner digs him out and he uses him as a slave. He avoids feeding him with any kind of food that contains anything that stimulates the brain such as sult so he wouldnt get back to his senses again.

 

That's half the work force! We Zombies have rights too!

 

Half?

 

Just another pointless game.

 

As i said they haven't had zombies since RE3.
Parasites in RE4 were simply a foreign body that still let the host think and control themselves however they wished, the ones in RE5 were similar but grew faster. And there are in RE6 it keeps mutating the body of the host to a worse state everytime they get hurt, and the others are again the standard parasites.

In all these cases the host is still alive and conscious unlike the RE1-RE3 zombies which were already dead.