Posted by Gremlin [24.8.14.102 - c-24-8-14-102.client.comcast.net] on 13 January 2004 at 17.21.48 ZuluTime:

Since it's far easier to add updates through the board when I haven't got my computer....
     There's an update on that whole mess. After a couple more hours of trying to get the thing to respond, I pretty well concluded that it had nothing to do with software after all. Unless someone out there finally wrote a decent worm virus including a BIOSkiller. I was able to get far enough into the system to take the drive offline altogether, and start from CD; even still, nothing ever happened. Or, really, nothing good.
     Instead, the drive, which, last I knew, was offline, started up and made this upsetting, bansheeesque shrieking noise. So I'm calling this a physical disease.
     So I took it back to BestBuy. In exchange for my information that I was in the middle of writing a novel, on deadline, I got dumb stares from the TechGeeks and a sort of conditional assurance that they'd send the thing back to HewlettPackard by Second Day Air [meaning that HP might be getting it today] and have it back to me within a week. Of course, the conditional aspect relied on that being at all true. So, it could be years.
     Meanwhile, I've now got scads of time here. So far, I've used up a percentage of those scads playing through Code: Veronica again [I bought the GameCube version a few weeks ago, and promptly lost the damned thing; so I went back to the PS2 version for this]. Having now played roughly every available version of Resident Evil [with the justifiable exceptions of Raiden and Survivor (although I've watched people suffer through the latter)], I've pretty well decided that, while ResZero and DeadAim are technologically superior, Veronica is probably the most interesting game to date. Which may change soonish, if ResFour is half as good as CapCom are currently making it out to be. Also, regarding Deadache, Veronica is the easiest game to emulate in LightWave--largely because it's actually three-dimensional, unlike most of the others are. Also, Veronica was the milestone in which Wesker stopped worrying about his hair and started sounding strangely English. One of these days, I'm going to figure out what that's all about.
     Also, I picked up and played through BloodRayne a few days ago. I put that one off for a while, simply because something about vampiric secret agents hunting nazis in the 1930s sounded oddly, um...retarded. Having now played the game...I wasn't precisely wrong to assume that. It's not a terrible game, all things considered--insofar as all things considered include Yar's Revenge; it's just not something I'm in any hurry to go back through again. Let's just say that it didn't kill me to spend twenty bucks on it; spending fifty on it when it came out would have upset me a bit.
     In other news, Dawn of the Dead is being remade. I call that news because, for some reason, I just found out. Based on the trailer, it might be worth seeing, too. Partly because...I guess there's a list.
     1) it doesn't appear to go anywhere near Monroevill Mall this time, suggesting that it might no go anywhere near that annoying fucking music, either.
     2) If there are any rogue paramilitary bikers in the remake, they might not be armed with banana creme pies.
     3) The zombies are actually fast. Which is probably necessary in the twenty-first century, since Resident Evil and Twenty-eight Days Later have upgraded them to sprinters. Although it does beg the question, yet again, of how and why the ?virus in the Romeroverse actually works; my ERV in Pandemic, as it happens, necessarily limits the speed and reaction time of the zombies; if a zombie can run and jump, then it's not infected by the sort of thing I'm developing here.
     4) I've been a bit disappointed in Stephen King for about ten years now.
     4.1) In Nightmares and Dreamscapes [if memory serves], there was a short story entited Home Delivery, which was a sort of singular monologue from a chick who, in a world overrun by Romero's zombies, was pregnant. Despite the state of civilsation, she was optimistic about everything, because the kid would turn out all right. Spielbergian bullshit. If it were me, I'd have added an epilogue, in which the kid turned out to be a stillborn. Which I may have mentioned here at gremlin.net in the past.
     4.2) If so, then the guys making this remake may have caught that idea. Or, someone else was as upset as I was. Based on the trailer, it looks like someone finally introduced the concept of stillborn zombies into a damned film. Which I'd probably be far happier to finally see, if I hadn't already slated the same thing to happen in Pandemic.
     Oh well. I could be wrong about it. The whole trailer was a bit too fast and blurry to make a lot of sense out of. Although:
     5) Someone actually attached a camera to the back of a car to stabilise it--not unlike the StomachCam in Pi. It's really weird to see, since the car turns corners without losing the camera at all. I haven't decided whether I'm in favour of it yet; but it's definitely the first time I've seen that outside of a videogame. So that's kinda neat.
     Strangely, outside of playing videogames and watching films on the general subject, I haven't been able to do a lot with Pandemic lately, since I haven't got my own computer. I did track down and steal the original $7million script for Day of the Dead last night. I haven't finished reading it yet, but, based on rumours that Return of the Living Dead Three was based more on Romero's original idea than Day wound up being, I'm kinda interested now. RotLD3 basically sucked, after all; if Romero had got the budget required to make a film about the military training legions of zombies as soldiers...who knows. As it is, the ?final film in Romero's ?trilogy impresses me as the most intellectual, to date. So I have to wonder how things would have turned out with more than $3.5million to film it.
     Incidentally, I found the filmscript at HomepageoftheDead.com, which surprised me a bit. The WhoIs suggests that the site was registered in 1998. So I'm wondering, now, whether someone else had SiteoftheLivingDead.com at the time; I can't really be the first guy to have thought of registering that. Something to look up sometime, maybe.
     Anyway: that's about all the news I've got at the moment. My laptop is somewhere on the planet, I don't really know what's wrong with it, and I don't know whether they're actually going to try to fix it before giving up and replacing it; Remake of the Dead should be out in a matter of weeks, and should be worth seeing; Pandemic is officially on hold until I get a computer with an intelligently-placed Control Key, although I'm still plotting out little bits of it and making a few notes to consider using once I'm able to type effectively again.
     Oh yeah. Note to Self: secure the reprint rights for this:

Back to back; belly to belly
Well I don't give a damn cos it doesn't matter really
Back to back; belly to belly
At the Zombie Jamboree

You're all alone, you know.
     --The Kingston Trio