Really? The Differently Animated community doesn’t have enough trouble without two jokers from Bloody-Disgusting.com hosting a little online cage match to determine the best stereotype of Zombies?

Welcome one and all to a brand new series here on Dead Pixels, home of all things geeky and videogame-y. TJ and I have been slaving over our hot computers to bring you what we affectionately refer to as the Duel to the Death. In this new series we’ll take popular characters, monsters, bosses and everything in-between and pit them against each other so we can watch the giblets fly. All you have to do is watch the fight, root for who you want to win, and if your side loses you can vent your rage in the comments. Easy, right?

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In this issue it’s all about the zombies. But we’re not just talking about the classic, shambling undead made popular in Resident Evil – we’re expanding this duel to a few more contenders as well. Also in this match are the agile, “rage” zombies like what’s found in Left 4 Dead, the sort-of-but-not-really zombies from the last two Resident Evils, and the possessed townsfolk from Alan Wake and Deadly Premonition. Now, this isn’t a “who would win if we put one of each in an arena and watch them fight?” sort of scenario, this is more about which poses the biggest threat to humanity. So who wins? Let’s find out.

This is incredibly disgustingly disreputable and insulting. Zombies are people too, not cardboard cut-outs for you to rate on how much they terrify your adolescent, empathy deficient minds!

That being said, the list of Zombies they assemble is baffling on a number of levels. Even assuming that they’re sticking to videogame Zombies (which would leave out the ‘fast Zombies’ from Return of the Living Dead), why did they leave out the victims from ‘Dead Rising’? Seems like kind of a major oversight.

The factual errors and questionable assertions (like that Resident Evil Zombies are equivalent to Romero Zombies in terms of biological function; RE Zombies for example are not technically Undead, they’re genetically altered by the T-Virus, and viruses don’t actually infect dead tissue) pile up, but what’s most interesting for me is a passage about the lives of the ‘Non-Zombie’ victim characters from Resident Evil 4:

Adam: And don’t forget their ability to sustain themselves even when they’re not tearing up innocent people and eating them Jeffrey Dahmer style. In the village in Resident Evil 4 I’m pretty sure I came across a bunch tables set with rotting meals. I like picturing the townsfolk sitting at the table, saying grace before chowing down and talking about their day and how little Johnny got an A on his report card. Then suddenly, Leon comes into town and starts killing everyone. Somehow, Little Johnny is the only survivor, but he doesn’t know how to live without his mom’s cooking and he doesn’t want to go to bed until his dad reads him a few pages from that storybook he loves so much. So Johnny decides his only option is to take the chainsaw from his slain uncle who wore a bag over his head to cover the burns on his face that he got from saving two puppies from a burning building a few years back, then Johnny turns on the chainsaw and lies on top of it, sobbing until he breathes his final breath.

TJ: Holy shit, you’ve got me LOL’zing over here. I think I just read the official pitch for Resident Evil 4-2.

Laughing? For a split second there this ‘Adam’ character broke through the programming and indoctrinated hate and saw, well, what we see here at the ZRC, every single day.

A brief glimmer of hope, a tiny amount of light breaking through the clouds… alas. Transitory.

So what enemies from a Zombie videogame does the ZRC find most menacing? That’s easy: we’re terrified of the S.T.A.R.S. ‘police officers’ from the Resident Evil series.

Think about it. These highly trained, extremely heavily armed quasi-cops, seemingly accountable to no one, travel all over the city (later the world), busting down doors and shooting people in the face just for the way they look. Warrants? They don’t need no stinking warrants!

Where on earth do these jokers get their budget, anyway? It gets worse. As the games go on it appears that the S.T.A.R.S. become some sort of black-ops enforcer/terrorists with carte blanche to ignore international law and conduct raids deep into sovereign territory, where they then massacre, well, entire villages as they see fit (and described hauntingly above).

If you don’t find accountability-free, lawless, heavily armed, wealthy, secretive international assassins scarier than the mere existence of the Differently Animated then.. I don’t even know what’s wrong with you, really.

Tags: Journamalism, Mainstream Media, Social Justice, Videogames

This entry was posted by John Sears on Friday, August 12th, 2011 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.