Zombies: Undead or Infected?

Sarcasmo

A Taste Of Honey Fluff Boy
Mar 28, 2005
34,396
464
648
46
Austin
Marklar
₥663
I'm torn on this one. On the one hand the undead angle is easy to approach. It makes for a good story, certainly, and an almost perfect adversary. Something that is very difficult to kill, and nearly impossible to stop en masse. On the other hand it's impossible to justify. We all know that dead things cannot reanimate or come back to life (lol Jesus), so the entire time we're digesting the horror we're logically let down and thus our immersion is broken. Is the undeath an inexplicable plot device or is it passed by a virus, and if that's the case how does that make sense?

Infected, living masses of people are easily believable, and super rabies appears to be the current drug of choice. What if 100 million people suffered from encephalitis and began attacking and cannibalizing anyone who came near? That would be pretty scary. However the infected are still alive and thus killing them is easy. Thermobaric bombs would devastate entire neighborhoods of them, and of course gunshots or even simple knives would be extremely effective too, assuming you're immune to the zombie disease and they don't also have AIDS.

I prefer strictly infected in order to overcome the plausibility obstacle. You can invent virtually any virus you want, with any number of horrifying symptoms and methods of transmission. And the infected can behave in any number of ways. Plus zombie sex couldn't be considered necrophilia and therefore weird. In fact I think I've had infected zombie sex before.

I also don't buy the current trend of zombies sprinting and climbing, which of course the insane, diseased living are perfectly capable of.

Undead: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead,
Infected: 28 Days Later, Quarantine, Left 4 Dead (video game)
Hybrid (infection somehow causing undeath): World War Z (book)

Which do you prefer?
 
Last edited:
Hybrid more like in the book I Am Legend. There was dead people reanimated by a vampire like virus and they was alive people also infected. Both seemed to be similar at first but there was slight differences such as the still alive ones were able of some thought while the dead ones just did the brains thingy.
 
The issues you get with the straight undead version is does anyone that dies after the original resurrection come back to life too or are they just dead? Of course if a zombie kills them via bite etc. they come back but what if they get into a car accident escaping zombies or die through any non-zombie related means.
 
Why would you become a straight zombie after a bite though? That implies a biological cause, though the results are obviously not biological at all.
 
Why would you become a straight zombie after a bite though? That implies a biological cause, though the results are obviously not biological at all.


They could be biological. A virus or some form a parasite transmitted through a bite, or some ingestion of infected materials, that attacks the brain and causes death, then reanimates the host for its own purposes, whatever they may be.
 
They could be biological. A virus or some form a parasite transmitted through a bite, or some ingestion of infected materials, that attacks the brain and causes death, then reanimates the host for its own purposes, whatever they may be.

That sounds like the warning for a bad Mexican restaurant.
 
Tried the demo
Looks REALLY good, but some of the play mechanics aggravated me.
Like the inability to move while aiming, and the AI "partner" always jumping right in front of me.
Its still a maybe for me.

So no kiting then? That's the secret to world domination.