drivel said:
There is one Zombie game franchise where the humans are more of a threat than zombies: Dead Rising. The psychopaths in the game represent a far more difficult challenge than most of the zombies you come across. That's most certainly on purpose, and I appreciate the message of that design decision:
Even in our most dire hour, when all seems lost, and we're under attack from brain-hungry monsters, people will still be heartless, self-centered megalomaniacs hell-bent on twisting the circumstances to benefit themselves.
Right, but that does play into my conclusion: that a zombie game that recognizes that normal humans are more of a threat, regardless of genre, makes that game more like other examples of the same genre that don't feature zombies. By that token, Dead Rising would be less a "zombie game" (assuming there is such a thing, really) and more of a "game with zombies in it".
A true "zombie game" would be a game that relied heavily on the unique nature of zombies: mindless, numerous, inexorable, implacable, unnatural. In a zombie movie, those things just create a context in which you have a traditional conflict: man vs man, man vs nature, man vs himself. In a zombie game that's actually about zombies, the conflict is player vs zombies. It's sort of weird to imagine a zombie game in which the boss characters aren't zombies, but some other sort of thing.
