{"id":26720,"date":"2015-05-13T04:30:28","date_gmt":"2015-05-13T09:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=26720"},"modified":"2015-05-17T09:54:47","modified_gmt":"2015-05-17T14:54:47","slug":"dead-island-ep-1-oar-and-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=26720","title":{"rendered":"Dead Island Ep 1: Oar and Peace"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Zombie month continues with Dead Island, a game that isn&#8217;t just disappointing, it&#8217;s <strong>famously<\/strong> disappointing. For a late entry into the zombie craze, that makes this game something extra-special.<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/LhQmy6BM9eY\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LhQmy6BM9eY'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Here is the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ialZcLaI17Y\">Dead Island trailer<\/a> we were discussing at the start of the show. I know the whole discussion of the trailer vs. the game is really familiar territory to anyone who followed Dead Island at release, but it&#8217;s pretty hard to discuss this game without the topic coming up. And in case some of my points sound a little familiar, here is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=13210\" title=\"Dead Island: Stream-of-Gameplay Review\">the half-assed review I did of the game<\/a> when it was new.<\/p>\n<p>At the nine minute mark: How can carboard boxes possibly block a fire door and prevent you from using the stairs to exit the building? Since this floor of the hotel is clear of zombies and the outside isn&#8217;t, what idiot barricaded us in? What is it about the zombie apocalypse that caused the elevator cables to snap? How did you survive such a huge drop? If the cables did indeed snap, then what brought the elevator to a stop one floor short of the bottom of the shaft and hold it there for a second? What videocamera is our mystrious helper using to see us? How is the videocamera still working when both the power and the elevator have failed? How is it that the still-glowing light fixtures in the elevator aren&#8217;t giving off any light?<\/p>\n<p>Around the twelve minute mark: I was complaining about how the game doesn&#8217;t explain why you&#8217;re immune to zombie-itis, when I should have been complaining about the nonsensical relocation. You lock yourself in a room, get ambushed by a single zombie, and pass out. Then you wake up in a bungalow far from the hotel.<\/p>\n<p>How did a single zombie knock you out in one punch? Why did that zombie not subsequently eat you? How did the other survivors reach you? How did they transport you? Why did they bother? Why did they bring you into their safehouse and lay you out on the bed when you&#8217;re obviously covered in bite marks? <\/p>\n<p>(Yes, there&#8217;s a tiny bit of a fig leaf on some of this later when it makes it clear that Mr. Radio Guy somehow knew you were immune and asked Sinomoi to come get you, but that raises more questions than it answers. More on that in a minute.)<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->This one moment is such a snarl of strange contrivances, and <strong>none of this was needed<\/strong>. All the writer needs to do here is introduce the world and get you to meet Sinomoi and the other survivors. That&#8217;s not difficult to accomplish. This is possibly the laziest, goofiest, and most awkward way to accomplish that. It&#8217;s the classic AAA blunder: Why does this story feel like it was written by a child? And if the story doesn&#8217;t matter, then why was so much money spent scripting, writing, animating, and voice-acting these cutscenes? <\/p>\n<p>At the fourteen minute mark: The dialog here is atrocious, even by cheesy videogame standards. Let&#8217;s take one line from Simonoi:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I have many sick and injured here, mate. They&#8217;re crazy with fear. Tell me where you are&#8230; Where are you?&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Let&#8217;s take it apart:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>&#8220;I have many sick and injured here, mate.&#8221; No you don&#8217;t. You&#8217;ve got a bungalow full of healthy adults in the prime of their lives. Every single one of them has a beach-ready physique.\n<li>&#8220;They&#8217;re crazy with fear.&#8221; Which only highlights the question of how they saved the main character[s]. If these people are too sick and scared to escape by sea (which ought to be pretty damn effortless, given that they&#8217;re sitting on the beach) then how did they ever manage to storm the hotel, fight through the undead, and drag our protagonists &#8211; potentially all 4 of them &#8211; all the way back to the bungalow?\n<li>&#8220;Tell me where you are&#8230; Where are you?&#8221; Seriously? This went through writer, director, and voice actor and nobody noticed how this is completely redundant? This is super-basic stuff. Trim your dialog. It makes the scene cheaper to produce, more interesting for the audience, and it wastes less of their time.\n<li>&#8220;Where are you?&#8221; Hang on. Sinomoi doesn&#8217;t know where this guy is? You would naturally expect this guy to be at the hotel, since he had access to the hotel security feed. I don&#8217;t actually expect that to be the case, but I would expect Sinomoi to expect that to be the case. It&#8217;s just&#8230; how did this question not come up earlier?\n<\/ol>\n<p>The <em>whole game<\/em> is like this. Whenever people are talking, they&#8217;re usually telling us what we already know, contradicting stuff the game has shown us, or highlighting plot holes and contrivances. It&#8217;s really hard to critique this thing because every line feels wrong or off and by the time I&#8217;ve untangled one nonsense line of dialog, four more have come and gone. <\/p>\n<p>I like at the end when a single bungalow contained every videogame cliche from the turn of the century: An audiolog, a radio narrating exposition, and a keycard to open a door. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.homestarrunner.com\/sbemail187.html\">Here is the Homestar cartoonman show what Rutskarn made mention of<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Zombie month continues with Dead Island, a game that isn&#8217;t just disappointing, it&#8217;s famously disappointing. For a late entry into the zombie craze, that makes this game something extra-special. Link (YouTube) Here is the Dead Island trailer we were discussing at the start of the show. I know the whole discussion of the trailer vs. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[421],"class_list":["post-26720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-dead-island"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26720\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}