Sunday 4th April 2004
Speaking of zombies....
In case this has to be mentioned, it's not done yet. Aesthetically, I'm planning to rotoscope various zombies from various stills from various films and assemble them into a more seamless collage for the upper banner. Functionally...the searchbox works already, but it's in JavaScript [mostly so I can test it out without uploading everything to the server every few minutes], so it's a slowish CSI; I may swap it for a slowish SSI .cgi eventually. A fastish .php would probably work too; but the server hasn't got PHP installed. Also, I've never actually used PHP before; although it looks far better than ASP, from what I've seen. I'll stick with JavaScript for now, and see whether it ever gets too big to use.
I managed to go do some shopping the other day, buying, for the most part, various zombiesque stuff. Including, for example, the new DiviMax Superbit version of Dawn of the Dead--partly because I loaned out my older one with that weird Warhol cover [evidently approaching pricelessness on ebay.com since it's been out of print since before DVplayers were actually invented], and partly because it's reportedly got pixeldoubling and Dolby5.1 and commentary from everyone from Romero to people just driving around Philidelphia in 1978 and, maybe just maybe, colourcorrection on that orange blood; I'd have to rip the disc and get a screenshot to pull into Photoshop to eyedrop to get the hexadecimal value to ascertain that, which is more work than I wanted to put into anything right away. So far, I haven't even watched the film yet. I'll get to it. Soonish.
Also, primarily on demand, I picked up a copy of I Am Legend. The novel. I've never read it. But, a huge percentage of people who hear about Pandemic have ordered me to read it, even though it's more about vampires than zombies. Apparently, though, it's thought to have been the basic storyline Romero borrowed for Night of the Living Dead, so it might come in handy. At the very least, it's gotta be better than The Zombie Survival Mess everyone's obssessing over these days. I honestly can't figure out why every zombiegeek I encounter on the 'net values this book over canned food and shotguns 'in the event of an actual zombie plague', except that the same morons are assuring everyone that Resident Evil, Twenty-eight Days Later, and Remake of the Dead all fail to be canon zombiefilms, for whatever indefensible reasons. The first thing I noticed in this silly survival manual was its assertion that every film made to date was entirely wrong about zombies, for various reasons. Not that it's a useless book, to me; I can always have various characters in Pandemic give various techniques a try, just before they die for being functionally retarded. Which, of course, is the leading cause of death in any zombie scenario.
Which then brings me to the next purchase. Resident Evil: Outbreak. Lemee qualify something real quick.
To date, I've played and beat Resident Evil, RE: DualShock, RE: Director's Cut, RE2, RE3: Nemesis, RE: Code Veronica, RE: Code Veronica X, RE1: GameCube, REZero, and RE: DeadAim. I've seen someone play and beat RE: Survivor, and I have it on good authority that RE: Gaiden is even sillier than its name. It could be argued that I know as much about these games as anyone ever will.
I've spent more time playing Outbreak, now, than it took me to beat DeadAim; the best I've done so far was leaping across the ledge atop the pub, and figuring out too late that hitting the X button ten thousand times a second might be a good way to stay alive for another minute. It's easily the most difficult game I've ever encountered. With the arguable exception of Knight Orc, which I actually took apart to figure out how in hell to beat it, which still didn't actually help me finish the damned game.
Of course, so far, I've only played Outbreak as a standalone. I've been entertaining the idea of buying a PS2 modem and a PS2 drive, but haven't bothered yet. Thanks to Outbreak, I'll probably have to buy both, simply because the disc only comes with five of the reported twenty-five different 'levels' written to date, the other twenty of which will theoretically be available, eventually, for download across a PS2 modem into a PS2 drive. Not that I'm in a huge hurry, since the Outbreak servers are getting slammed to hell and back this week. But, eventually, I'll probably go grab some of this stuff, just so I can confuse everyone else running from these zombies with random chats of 'TK! WTF!' >:)
Here, in case you haven't got near this game yet, is why it's so damned hard.
First of all, you're starting off in a pub. Why? Because it's the only way to defend the fact that you've got a BloodAlcohol level of point three percent. Which might actually be intentional. That, or it just seems like it now that they've completely changed the controller setup to work more like Vise City than a Resident Evil game. I'm not thrilled about this fact.
Also, someone at Capcom must have run across Twenty-eight Days Later, because these zombies have become dangerously fast. Someone also seems to have noticed that, not only can the 300MHz 128Bit PS2 handle some graphics, it can also support three hundred zombies onscreen at once.
This is no longer a clever way to pause the game....More good news: running out of bullets is no longer a simple way of reloading; now, you get to go into the inventory and reload one...bullet...at...a...time. Which is bad, since the inventory screen has become a HUD through which you get to watch Certain Death shuffling toward you. Same for the map HUD. And everything but the Lemme Outta Here screen hidden beyond the Select Button.
There are, however, a few cool updates. Like the ability to hide in lockers and under beds--although that only seems to work in rooms into which the zombies never get round to shuffling in the first place. I assume this ability will come in handy later in the game, in case I ever manage to get to the next building alive.
Another neat trick I hadn't seen before is the ability to kick zombies to death. Not in the old headstomping manoeuvre, but in an actual sort of roundhouse available to a couple of the playable characters. That tends to come in handy when you're out of bullets. Unfortunately, once a zombie gets hold of you, the game automatically makes you shoot it, which counts against the bullets you're trying to conserve. Kinda like the daggers in the GameCube's Res1. I haven't yet discovered how, or if, you get out of that once you're out of bullets.
And, the best part. The whole game is effectively the minigame from the end of Res3. Somehow, you start off with the ?TVirus [I assume we're still blaming everything on that] already present in your system. The longer you live, the more you bleed, the more you run, and so on, the greater the percentage of your blood has been infected; once the percentage reaches 100.00%, you die. The end. You don't get to vote on it at all.
Meanwhile, the typewriters--never really the most brilliant system anyway--are effectively extinct. They exist, but they only save your progress once. Which is to say that, once you save the game, all you can do is start against from that point; the next thing you do is either win the level, die, or save again to return to the title screen to restart. So, again, once you die, that's basically it until you start over from the beginning.
I haven't seen anything resembling an Item Box yet. I assume they're still missing since they disappeared in ResZero and DeadAim.
So. Outbreak is probably the most realistic Res yet; sadly, it's also the least possible. And that's before you hop online with seven [I think] other people, all rushing to steal your bullets and first aid spray before you can grab them.
I'm not too sure about the online aspect yet. Various sites are calling it Capcom's last ditch effort to get anyone to care about Resident Evil. Which sounds like a begged question, to me--especially given the rush to buy these games after the film was released, and after the move was completed to the GameCube. Of course, given the indefensible popularity of the Microsuck Spaceheater [marketed under the name XBox], there might be a problem getting the losers worshipping this massive, bloated iMac of a system to buy both a videogame and a useful system, just to shoot at zombies, when they're perfectly content playing virtual volleyball across a phoneline. I don't wanna sound like a grownup here, but, while you have to go pretty far to gun down zombies IRL, you can thump a ball over a net just by walking the hell outside. And that goes doubly for The Sims Online: I like The Sims; I've got every version of The Sims; I playtested The Sims Online for Maxis/EA/Microsuck before it was released; if I wanna go meet people, I've got a damned car. And, in this town, I can even meet people IRL pretending to be myriad things they're not--including various species of magicuser. Although I suppose thats 'a viable engineer in the field of maegickque', isn't it....
People disturb me.
One thing I haven't worked out yet is whether Outbreak is actually 3D. DeadAim obviously was; but the perspectives in Outbreak are forced, so the backgrounds could be imagemaps again. Eventually, I'll make a point of figuring that out; so far, I've been too busy making some effort to avoid death to look around much at the scenery. I'm pretty sure that the characters are 3D though. And they move pretty convincingly for a videogame. Which is to say that they move pretty realistically. Which is to say that they don't stay alive for long. Which is to say that this game is not easy to beat.
So far, with the exception of CheatCC.com's attempt to defraud you into buying a membership, no one seems to know anything about GameShark or ActionReplay codes for this thing. Obviously, there are going to be hexadecimal codes controlling numbers somewhere in there--bullets, health, percentage of bloodcells infected, et cetera; I'm wondering, though, whether those codes will ever actually be made public, since they're likely to affect the numbers in an online game as well. It's possible that the servers will disallow any sharked numbers from getting in, which is also the case with CounterStrike and other cheatable games which connect to servers. I wouldn't mind seeing a few codes for invincibility and infinity and level hacks, if only because it would let me get a closer look at the scenery without getting a closer look at the YOU DIED screen. Which reminds me....
I'm not certain precisely how ActionReplay actually works. I get that you type in [or waste hours using a controller] the codes, which get saved to a memory card, which confuse the game, which let you do some neat stuff. I also get that, in the event that you mistype a code, the software knows enough to warn you that your code is invalid. What I don't get is why, given that the software knows the difference between viable codes and not, it can't just give you a list of viable codes, even if it isn't sure what they do, and let you turn them on and off to figure out their functions. I can't blame that on CodeJunkies hoping to sell you update discs, since the codes are availble from CodeJunkies.com at approximately the instant they're discovered. My only other guess is that a given code might have some chance in hell of damaging the PS2 itself, by extension dmaging CodeJunkies when some 'tard tries to sue them for making it possible for his own idiocy to lead to a broken machine. Which leaves me wondering what prevents me from suing CodeJunkies for preventing me from breaking my machine getting something accomplished. The world may never know.
Thinking about it, there's probably some neat scriptkiddie software out there on the 'net designed to crack PS2 games for hexcodes already. I'll have to watch for something like that.
Okay. Let's move on.
I'm working, slowly but surely, on Site of the Living Dead. And that's a simple matter of finishing up three specific things: graphics, function, and content. I had the content largely worked out, when the laptop containing it all went all JestBuy on me. So that's no longer part of our universe. This time, I'm concentrating first on the look and functionality of the site, kinda like this prototype:
Then, beneath the upper table, there's that neat frontier where I haven't even begun to figure out the design. According to the Mead version with the UniBall plugin, I'll probably have some sort of blogue format to it, adding updates as they become available, and using teaser paragraphs with Read More links leading to WhicheverFilm.html.
Beyond that, there'll probably be various neat links, like Buy the Film at Amazon.com, Buy a Shirt from Wastedinc.com, and Submit a Report options. The submission option would be a way to write an entry regarding a given LivingDead tale and EMail it or post it to some variation of a messageboard or whatever. Once I have more of the format figured out, I'll make that option available.
Having given it some thought, and having argued with people about it, I've decided that the LivingDead are not necessarily zombies. And, for that matter, that zombies are not necessarily the LivingDead. But: the LivingDead would or could include everything from zombies to vampires to Frankenstein's monster to--as an extreme--the 'velociraptors' in Jurassic Park. By some reasoning, the primary villains of everything from Freddy v Jason and The Passion of the Christ would count as the LivingDead. Even if we're not quite sure what allows them to cheat death like that. So, SotLD won't be exclusively a zombiefilm site, so much as a horrorfilm site. A sort of IMDb.com without various 'serious' films, maybe. Although a few 'serious' films will necessarily sneak in there, I suppose. And novels. And videogames. And whatever. Which all becomes a databasic nightmare, which is part of the reason the site still isn't finished. Yet.
Still: I hope to have a functional version online pretty soon. Possibly this month, presuming I don't spend the next four solid weeks trying to beat Outbreak.
Yikes. On those words, one of the zombies in the cyclic Outbreak demo over on the television just teleported across the screen. Literally. I'm hoping it was just the disc catching on something. Which is possible. My PS2 is getting pretty old. And I think it's got about half a cat in it. I'll have to trade it in one of these days; EBGames have some promotion running in which you can trade in even a broken PS2 along with fifty bucks for a new one.
Of course, I've bought enough stuff there, and know the manager well enough at this point, that they tend to sneak me various free things these days. I got a copy of that spongy Necronomicon version of The Evil Dead for free >:)
Okay. I'll go back to doing something else now. SotLD maybe. Or, maybe, dying a lot atop J's Bar. Whee.
More later....
--Gremlin