“Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City”, “Yakuza: Dead Souls” and the Art of Missing the Point
Two new, obviously vicious Anti-Zombie games are out this spring and the reviews are mixed, and unfortunately, miss the Zombie Rights angle entirely. Example:
Play enough games and you learn some universal rules. An enemy’s weak spot is marked in red; purple items are poison; and zombies make any scenario better.
It’s fact. The undead are like the bacon of gaming. Toss them in an open-world game, and zombies add a refreshing twist. Make them the villains of a twin-stick shooter and that tired formula becomes compelling again. The idea has produced hits like clockwork, but two new releases test the limits of this notion and show that perhaps you can have too much of a good thing.…
Although that experience challenged my zombie-bacon premise, “Yakuza: Dead Souls” restored my faith in the concept. The series has always tried to capture the hard-boiled seriousness of the Japanese Underworld. Usually set in modern times, “Yakuza” games are realistic and expansive, focusing on detailed neighborhoods and combat.
Those same ideas are carried over in “Yakuza: Dead Souls,” but this title has more humor as players take on the role of four characters who must survive a zombie outbreak and rescue friends and underlings.
I understand that a review of a videogame should probably include details of its gameplay system and the enjoyability of participating in said system, but at what point do we see a little social responsibility come into play? Zombies are people too! They’re not just ‘bacon’, seasoning to make your idle hours of virtual carnage a bit more enjoyable.
And it might be worth asking yourself why targeting a particular, sadly oppressed class of people makes virtual carnage more enjoyable.
I think it says something about you, Gieson Cacho. I think it says something about you.
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