Yeah, I'm alive.
So I have mostly managed to conquer the dreaded Acid Reflux, and I got to go to Phoenix and visit my best friend. I was there six days, counting travel time. So sorry this is a bit late.
While I was out there, we went to Dave and Busters, and I did what I always do at arcades... blew all my money on whatever version of House of The Dead they have there. This one had 3 and 4, and I mainly played 3, it being cheaper and me being better able to handle the pump-action light gun than the machine gun.
I suck at these games. I suck royally. But I love them. I noticed that the voice acting in them's gotten better, which is damning with faint praise, I know. Given that 1 and 2 made Resident Evil 1 look well-acted, they had a LONG way up.
But I got to thinking, there are some interesting differences between HotD and RE, despite the huge similarities, and the big one is the zombies. If you don't want some minor game spoilers, stop reading now.
Everybody with me? Good.
RE's zombies are actually fairly well thought-out and explained. Sure, lots of handwavium on how the T-Virus really works, but at least it's mostly internally consistent. The big thing here is that RE Zombies are ALIVE. Okay yes, in Code: Veronica, the spill apparently resurrects corpses, but that seems to be a one-off. It certainly never happens in any of the other games that use it. So far, anyway.
HoTD's zombies seem to require dying first. Sophie, *In some endings* Goldman... we don't see too many conversions, but the ones we do see, the character is pretty much confirmed dead before rising. Except Daniel in 3's "bad ending," but he's a special case, being Patient 0 for his father's experiments.
Actually, we don't know if HotD's zombies are even infectious. G gets wounded in game 2, and shrugs it off. He's alive and well nineteen years later, in game 3. Game 1 has zombie researchers, but they could have been contaminated by a spill, rather than a carrier. And certainly Sophie looked just fine before she died. Goldman very likely could have injected himself, and it's an open question HOW the rest of the zombies got turned.
The only in-game explanation we get is the occasional vague line about "Genome theory." Which could mean damn near anything.
Geek that I am, my explanation is that what we've got is a retrovirus. It's capable of breeding to some extent in human tissue, but it only works if there's clinical death. If you survive long enough after being infected, your immune system clears it out, and you don't become a zombie. Hence G surviving game 2. Do enough tissue damage that oxygen deprivation starts setting in, and the virus kicks into gear, resurrects the dead tissue, and boom, zombie. Which can then create various mutations ala the bosses, if they weren't actually engineered by the psychos making things.
... God, I'm a geek...
While I was out there, we went to Dave and Busters, and I did what I always do at arcades... blew all my money on whatever version of House of The Dead they have there. This one had 3 and 4, and I mainly played 3, it being cheaper and me being better able to handle the pump-action light gun than the machine gun.
I suck at these games. I suck royally. But I love them. I noticed that the voice acting in them's gotten better, which is damning with faint praise, I know. Given that 1 and 2 made Resident Evil 1 look well-acted, they had a LONG way up.
But I got to thinking, there are some interesting differences between HotD and RE, despite the huge similarities, and the big one is the zombies. If you don't want some minor game spoilers, stop reading now.
Everybody with me? Good.
RE's zombies are actually fairly well thought-out and explained. Sure, lots of handwavium on how the T-Virus really works, but at least it's mostly internally consistent. The big thing here is that RE Zombies are ALIVE. Okay yes, in Code: Veronica, the spill apparently resurrects corpses, but that seems to be a one-off. It certainly never happens in any of the other games that use it. So far, anyway.
HoTD's zombies seem to require dying first. Sophie, *In some endings* Goldman... we don't see too many conversions, but the ones we do see, the character is pretty much confirmed dead before rising. Except Daniel in 3's "bad ending," but he's a special case, being Patient 0 for his father's experiments.
Actually, we don't know if HotD's zombies are even infectious. G gets wounded in game 2, and shrugs it off. He's alive and well nineteen years later, in game 3. Game 1 has zombie researchers, but they could have been contaminated by a spill, rather than a carrier. And certainly Sophie looked just fine before she died. Goldman very likely could have injected himself, and it's an open question HOW the rest of the zombies got turned.
The only in-game explanation we get is the occasional vague line about "Genome theory." Which could mean damn near anything.
Geek that I am, my explanation is that what we've got is a retrovirus. It's capable of breeding to some extent in human tissue, but it only works if there's clinical death. If you survive long enough after being infected, your immune system clears it out, and you don't become a zombie. Hence G surviving game 2. Do enough tissue damage that oxygen deprivation starts setting in, and the virus kicks into gear, resurrects the dead tissue, and boom, zombie. Which can then create various mutations ala the bosses, if they weren't actually engineered by the psychos making things.
... God, I'm a geek...