Remember Rule #2: Double Tap

Resident Evil has always had an important place in Kris and my friendship. It’s a video game series that Kris has always enjoyed playing and I’ve always enjoyed watching, mainly because I could never play it. I don’t know why, but I could never ever get a handle on the “original” RE control scheme used in all the games in the series up until Resident Evil 4. The third person “up is always the way you’re facing” scheme was too confusing to me to be able to control quick enough to run away from the zombies and not get massacred. If it was anything faster than the regular shambling Zeds, like a Licker or - the worse - one of the zombie dogs, I was definitely a goner.

Kris, on the other hand, has always enjoyed playing the games, but is frequently too uncomfortable[^1] going it alone. Of all the crazy stuff we read about in comics or the Sci-Fi books we like, zombie attacks sound the most plausible to him. Who cares about alien invasions, the Second Coming, or the LHC ripping apart the Space-Time Continuum when at any moment Little Sally Summers from down the street could drop dead, only to stand back up and try to eat your face off? Recently, we worked our way through the GameCube re-release of the original Resident Evil with Kris piloting and me keeping track of puzzles and clues while he tried not to get eaten. We had a lot of fun doing it and planned on working through RE2 the same way, but then life got too busy.[^2] Hopefully, we’ll get back to it soon.

[^1]: The best term I can use without destroying his street cred.
[^2]: Primarily because we started working on the comic.

Speaking of zombie hordes ripping out the throats of the unobservant, the trailer for AMC’s The Walking Dead is the first of several guerrilla videos to sneak out of last week’s Comic Con International. While the trailer looked awesome and I’m definitely interested to see how the series turns out, I’m disappointed that these trailers haven’t been officially released. The Gnome is particularly blown away by the stupidity of the studios for not releasing these videos immediately after they are shown at CCI. She doesn’t understand what the studios think they gain by not releasing the trailers and “punishing” those of us who couldn’t afford to nor had the time or opportunity to go out to San Diego, especially when much poorer quality videos are going to leak out online like the Walking Dead trailer did. The Thor trailer also leaked, although it has since been taken down. If you didn’t get a chance to see it when it was up, I must say I was impressed. The movie looks like it will be epic enough to befit the Norse gods.

The live-action test footage of Blue Beetle was officially released by DC and it looks pretty awesome. I know that most people suspect this is part of experimenting with a Blue Beetle series, possibly as a replacement for Smallville after it’s 10th and final series, but they also announced that Blue Beetle will be appearing in Smallville itself, so it could be tied in with that. Either way, it looks pretty awesome.

One other video of interest that got released this week was the trailer for Zack Snyder’s new movie Sucker Punch. Kris saw it earlier this week and got really excited about it, insisting that I watch it. Being really busy at the time, I ignored him and forgot about it, until he shoved a laptop in my face and made me watch it. There is so much awesome in this trailer it’s hard to describe. I had never heard about the production until now, but I definitely will be paying more attention and it could turn into one of those few movies I go and see in the theaters these days. It’s got Samurai, dragons, neon lit brothels, and girls with machine guns and samurai swords. What more does a movie need?