Dead and Loving It

SCARED SHIRT ON Just like being hounded by the bills

ME AND MY SON, we dig the dead. Tired of the rut and Facebook games at home, we sometimes scour for some internet cafes uptown every time we get the chance to go out of the house and let ourselves be lost with this not-so new LAN* game called Left4Dead. We always relish the time spent in some noisy, overcrowded internet joint just to feel the scare of a host of zombies attacking in front of us. And as soon as we hit home before dusk, we were so dazed, our eyes bloated, hungry, and all the more mesmerized over the game. It’s a weird way to pass the time, but we were so hooked up we couldn’t stop talking about it all through into the night.

The game is simple: kill as many zombies as you can until you can escape from them. But along the way, you will have to accomplish a series of missions that aren’t so easy to break through considering that four seemingly helpless assassins against a city populated by a million zombies is quite daunting and impossible to overcome, let alone survive with only a shotgun and a machete as your primary weapon at times. Although the game’s scheme is so simple, survive until the end, but its graphics and gargling gore never misses a beat. Playing Left4Dead is as close as you can be in killing a zombie.

And it did become a preoccupation to me and my son for weeks. We talked about it most of the time, while having dinner or even when we’re preparing for school. We sometimes act out the characters of the game or some scary situations we somehow encountered while playing it. We laugh, we regret, we get angry when our characters get killed. Ellis, my son’s favorite character in the game and the youngest of the foursome that includes Coach, Nick and Rochelle (characters of Left4Dead 2) became a word of mouth in the house. The addiction even went further as he tried to imitate how Ellis looked like, with his ubiquitous bull cap, a T-shirt and a backpack that has a first-aid kit and a hand gun clinging on it. The effect of the game was so extensive that we even looked for a TV show, movie or series on cable that fits the scare and the sensation of killing a zombie with an automatic weapon.

Fearless foursome

But eventually it became a haul. My son, all of a sudden, somehow got tired of obliterating the undead that he quipped, “Dili nako magdula ani, Daddy.” And it was an expected response since I could hear him complain at times that there’s simply too much zombies to waste and that the wasting hurt his eyes he almost felt a strange sympathy when he somehow startled the witch during one of those intense zombie attacks. He went back to his old Scooby Doo ways on TV, which was actually good since the zombie scare was practically encroaching on his itinerary that there was no other activity worth noting except the desire to pound that zombie on the ground. The saturation point came when he couldn’t pass one mission and that Ellis was repeatedly killed by what seemed to be an endless array of zombies hacking on him. My son just had enough.

But while we’re at it, we were so focused we couldn’t wait to hit those cafes again and do our thing. The real-life graphics presented in the game equally made us zombies in front of the computer. My son, for instance, always make it a habit to watch the preview of the game before hitting those keys, that trailer-like preview explaining why only four people were left to survive in a blood-drenched neighborhood of witches and zombies. Whether you’re trapped in a city full of creatures from the netherworld or feeling helpless in a swamp surrounded by gook-vomiting dead people, Left4Dead is a hell of an experience as far as bloodbath goes, where intestinal horror and fright night drama are linked together to form a thriller that would turn your gut upside down.

A hunter

The dark shadow and the impending doom prevalent in every mission in the game is already an enticement, especially among kids, and adults as well, who has a penchant for anything horror. The nasty creatures swarming around these four assassins were quite insidious and menacing as if they were let loose from the fires of hell and couldn’t wait to get a piece of Coach, a baldy, seemingly overweight dude; Nick, a suit-wearing gigolo; Ellis, a young sporty lad; and Rochelle, the only rose among the thorny gang of four. Not to be outdone, however, the places these assassins went through were as haunted as you can get. An abandoned carnival; a quiet, eerie farmhouse; a gloomy, burning hotel; a hollow gothic mansion; a deserted churchyard; foggy cemeteries; crumbling bridges, all throwing up with vile, crawling creatures waiting for your blood.

Nevertheless, no matter how lifelike the creatures were, and gruesome the massacres had been, Left4Dead is still quite detrimental when left unchecked, especially to the kids. Subconsciously, it can affect a whole lot of attention when establishing a sense of right and wrong between killing a zombie and the actual killing itself. It is a potentially brutal game, so effective is its brutality that it is even brushed off as a form of entertainment. Children can play the game for all they care (what with the availability of the game at every internet outlet), but parental consent is still the order of the day. A little explaining to do, no matter how trivial it is, can probably spell the difference. Explaining to the kid, just like I did, about the justifications of killing a zombie in the context of a game is more than enough for him to understand that it’s just all a façade, a fantasy and a fairy tale gone bad.

I’m glad he understood it more than I expected, but he did live out a fantasy teeming with a lot of blood around him at some point, imagining a host of zombies on the verge of mauling him to pieces. He even went to the extent of standing right next to the door of the house like a sentinel, complete with all of his high-powered gadgets, and always on the lookout for some zombies, witches and hunters so that mommy and daddy may be spared of an impending attack. I could still picture out the smile on his face every time a mere mention of Left4Dead came across his ear, the opportunity, according to him, to play like a soldier but with the undead as his major target. He did love the game for quite some time, and expressed his desire to become a soldier when he grows up, instead of the doctor/engineer he initially professed before the Left4Dead thing.

That, however, is a different story altogether.     

*LAN - Local Area Network