Unfinished Epics

Those who know me or read my intro, will know that I'm a bit of a gamer.

I have a lot of games I really like, some of the more recent being Uncharted, Infamous, Resident Evil 4, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Little Big Planet and Borderlands.

I really love these games and would highly recommend them, not to mention a whole myriad of others. But if I was forced to narrow down my favourites to a more select few, to state which games -really- dug into my brain, really got me hooked and wet to play, I guess I'd have to say it would be Final Fantasy VII, and more recently, Dragon Age.

However, as a gamer, I feel the need to come clean. To confess a dirty little secret. To bear my soul and beg your merciful forgiveness.

.... I've never actually finished playing either of these games.


So how is it, that games that rank at the top of my list of all time favourite games that I love and obsess about, are one's I've never even completed?

I suppose with FF7, it was a matter of spoilers. I actually didn't play the game until I saw there was this movie called Advent Children coming out that looked really shiny. I was a sucker for anime and CGI at the time, and with a little digging, I discovered FF7... and pretty much spoiled the entire story for myself. In great detail.

You WISH you could be as bad a** as Cid Highwind.

So I guess when it came time to play, I could just sit back and enjoy playing. I didn't feel the -need- to have to rush through and get to the end, because I knew what would happen. I wanted to do aaaalllllllll the side quests, wanted to get all the materia and characters, wanted to level up like a mother effer. And then something happened and I couldn't play the game for a while, and I just never really got back around to playing it again. (Well, there was that brief stint on my PSP, but I haven't played that in forever either, so...)

And I guess there was a similar case with Dragon Age.

Alistair, the most broski bro ever to bro a bro.

When I first started playing it last year, I was hooked. I quickly racked something like 70+ hours playing it within a month or so, and having only got about half way through (in case you haven't figured it out yet, I like taking my time with games.). Then I got stuck in an area that I really didn't like, and went on vacation. When I returned, I really wasn't all that enthused to return to the drudgery of the environment I'd left behind. Finally, after weeks and months of procrastination, and with a bit of playing time here and there, I completed the dreadful stage, and that's about where I'm at as it stands. True, I've been rather busy with a lot of real life stuff these last few months, and I do intend on going back to it, soon I hope, but I haven't felt that -need- that I simply -have- to play more. I'm sure I will, once I load it up again, perhaps that's why I'm dawdling, since I'm worried I might not have the time to invest in such an epic RPG right now.

Or maybe I'm just subconsciously avoiding finishing these games, because then they'll be... well, finished. And it's hard to let go the things you really love.

Or maybe I'm just lazy. Yeah, that's probably it.


What are your unfinished epics?

All things zombies (well, kinda)

So I should probably put it right out there, that I'm a bit of a zombie fan.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't live, eat and breathe zombies, I don't have zombie bed sheets or spend all my free time plotting my escape plan in the event of a zombie apocolypse (although I would be lying if I said I hadn't thought about it once or twice). I'm no means a zombie expert, but I do like the idea of them, in the same way I like the ideas behind most things fantasy and sci-fi. And over the last couple years especially, thanks to a general increase of zombie popularity, I've been playing a lot of games and watching a lot of movies and recently I've started reading some books about zombies, and so it should be said that probably quite a bit of what I'll review here will contain zombies.

I should also mention that when I use the word 'zombie', I do so generally in  a very loose sense of the word. Zombie fanatics will probably tell you that these zombies in that move aren't REAL zombies because blah blah blah. I guess in a nutshell, the way it seems to be is, a traditional zombie is someone that has died, and has been reanimated, and is therefore usually slower and well, dead. An 'infected' new-age zombie person, is a person that has not offically died, but has been overtaken by some kind of virus or mutation or other outside factor, which has turned the person into a mindless raging violent creature, usually a lot faster, and possibly intelligent. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of other nuances on the matter, but I'm not here to argue semantics right now. The undead, the living dead, the infected, the zombie, if they're after my flesh, then it doesn't make a whole lot of difference to me really. In fact the new infected zombie seems far more interesting to me, as they tend to pose the biggest risk, and seem to be the most plausible type of plague that might actually occur (scroll to the last story). (Or maybe not, supposing they're dumb, and dead, that is). But whatever the zombie type, they can all be portrayed well, or horribly, in media, and I'd like to discuss some of those cases in later posts.

So now that that's out of the way, a bit about what I've played/watched. I guess the big two zombie games I got into first were Resident Evil 4, and Left 4 Dead 2. The Dead Rising series, for all its horrible flaws, was also really, really fun. I recently also got Plants vs Zombies, which is far more addicting and fun then it really ought to be. Also, Crazy Dave is a boss. And CRAAAAAZZYY :)

Look out! He's CRAAZY!

Fido would have to be one of my all time favourite zombie movies. I've heard mixed reviews, but personally, it hits all the right places for me, and I thought it was brilliant (then again, I watched it without knowing anything about it, not even that it was a zombie movie, and I find that films I'm in a black-out about tend to impress me more, but nevertheless, this movie is great). I'm struggling so hard not to start talking about it right now; perhaps I'll have to watch it again this weekend and write up a review on it so I can gush all about it. I also remember 28 Days leaving a big impression on me, but it's been a while since I saw it, so I can't say too much on it just now. In fact, a lot of zombie movies I watched were many years ago, when I was quite a bit younger. I'll have to go back and rewatch them all with older eyes and see how they compare, and what I think about them now that I appreiate the 'zombie' more.

Yeah, Bro, I don't trust the girl in pink either. There's something fishy about her... unlike the zombie standing right behind you...

For Christmas, my boyfriend bought me three zombie books I'm really keen to get into. A Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, The Zombie Combat Manual by Roger Ma, and another by Brooks, World War Z: an Oral History of the Zombie War. I've started in on the Zombie Survival Guide, but haven't got very far yet. It's been a while since I've read books, and I've fallen out of the habit; but I'm enjoying it a lot so far, while simultaneously freaking myself out at how ill prepared I am when should a zombie outbreak occur, provided all the hypothesis in the book are plausible (and some don't seem terribly so, but I suppose it's not really written to be accurate, but humourous).

Anyway, that about wraps up my overview on zombies. Like I said, a lot of games and movies I'll talk about wont have anything at all to do with zombies on this blog, but some will, and hopefully you'll look forward to reading those as much as I look forward to writing them.

Cheers for now.