|
 |
Le_Forgeron <jgr### [at] free fr> wrote:
> Because zombies lack a movie-expression. Short of "Thriller", zombies
> are not expected to be expressive. They do not plot, they are dumb. At
> best, they contaminate. You cannot be the lead character with a role of
> zombie. Not bankable for a movie.
> Good for a game: re-use the sprites everywhere!
I think it's more than that.
A movie about zombies can be superb, as demonstrated by George Romero, but
is a very hard genre to pull off in such a masterful way (as demonstrated
by the fact that Romero's movies are almost the only zombie movies that
are actually good, with very few exceptions.)
A relatively good movie about vampires is much easier to make. As you say,
Lugosi's Dracula set a precedent for the "suave" vampire stereotype which
is quite easy to write scripts about.
In video games, however, zombies fill a perfect niche: The desire for gamers
to kill. Killing people, especially in gruesome ways, is always morally
questionable and raises the alarms of moral guardians. You can make it
about an alien invasion, but that's a genre of its own. Zombies are a
perfect genre for this because you can have tons and tons of them, and you
can allow the player to kill them en masse using the most gruesome ways one
can imagine, without moral guardians starting a crusade. After all, if they
are already dead, you are not really killing them, are you?
Additionally, the zombie slasher game genre is relatively versatile: It can
be a survival horror, a mindless first-person shooter, black comedy, and
even a pseudophilosophical comment on the human condition.
A video game about vampires is much more difficult to pull off. A video game
is not (only) a movie; there has to be gameplay also. Killing tons and tons
of vampires isn't just the same thing, nor is vampires really the kind of
genre for that. Like the movies, the game would have to be a lot more
story-oriented, and that's difficult to balance with good gameplay.
--
- Warp
Post a reply to this message
|
|
