Hi, I am Ian Gonzales and I have opinions. I’ve been writing for Unwinnable since the summer of 2010. I mostly write about comic books and movies (hence the title, Panels & Frames) and I curate our annual Best Comics list. This is a place where I will ruminate on whatever catches my fancy or my ire in this all encompassing box we call culture. So, here we are. Today, I am here to write about zombies.
Scale is the freshest take on first-person perspective games I’ve seen since the original Portal. It is being developed by Steve Swink, who describes himself as a game designer first and foremost, but who also teaches game and level design, including master classes at NYU, and has published a book titled Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation.
Knowing something is one thing. Grasping it can be something entirely different. I have long known that parents are hard-pressed for time. There’s a lot that goes into keeping a small child alive. You must feed them, change their diapers, stop them from crying and keep them from accidentally killing themselves in a world pretty much designed to harm small, incompetent creatures. These mandatory tasks don’t leave room for things the childless might take for granted, such as an afternoon spent playing a videogame or an unhurried bowel movement.
There it was, shattered as if by a falling tree branch, except there were no trees nearby to do the shattering. Someone had pulled into my driveway to turn around and hit the corner post of my fence. They hit it so hard that they dislodged the concrete mooring and the force shattered the top crossbar, splaying the pickets out like pick-up sticks. Then they drove off. It was the middle of the afternoon.
I have a confession to make. I voted for George W. Bush. But not in 2004 – when the tragic, unnecessary debacle of the war in Iraq was still ratcheting up in scope and bloodshed. This was 2000, the year I turned 18. It’s not that I look back on that decision with regret. I really just didn’t know any better. Having been raised in a Christian household, my understanding of presidential politics boiled down to one all-important moral issue. Either you cast your ballot for the God-fearing Republican or you condoned the killing of babies. It was really that
The following is the latest in a series of journal entries chronicling the author’s descent into next-gen gaming degeneracy and assorted geekery – from getting his first television in years to trying to figure out why the @$@$&@@ you need two goddamn directional pads just to walk down an effing hallway.
In last week’s episode of The Walking Dead, a zombie ripped someone’s throat out and then that guy got up and ripped someone’s stomach open and before you know it a bunch of zombies were attacking a bunch of people until the humans came in and busted the zombies’ heads open with pipes and knives and I thought “Meh, that doesn’t seem that bad.”
I don’t scare easily. I can get as startled as the next guy, and the typical realms of death and gore usually manage to shake me, but getting a good honest scare out of me through a movie is tough. It may be because I didn’t really grow up with any of the classics – I saw The Blair Witch Project as a youngster and was frightened for a whole week afterwards, but I didn’t see Halloween, The Exorcist, Nightmare on Elm Street or any of the other classics until high school, when I started looking at them with a
