An occasional lurker who decided to join up.

[RandomZombieFan]

Well, truth be told, I'm not a fan of most movies. Even though they're rarely more than two hours long, I don't have the patience for them. Most movies drag along, taking the story in directions I don't care about, putting characters I'm not interested in into situations that I don't really want to watch. In other words, movies are usually boring to me. And it's not that I dislike zombie movies, I just dislike most zombie movies, because they don't live up their potential, partially due to the fact that they don't try to.

I can agree on why you like LNOE...however, LNOE is fun to me because it's interactive. You control those characters and, in large part, their fates. Or, even better, you can control the undead, go out on the hunt for brains, explore a bit of that mindless mindset. Also, the characters in LNOE have biographies which, ironically, develop them about as well and sometimes a bit better than many characters in zombie movies, even though those biographies are only about a paragraph long.

You're right, all the characters usually die in a zombie movie. Usually. However, most movies take at least ten minutes to get to the "Holy crap, zombies are attacking!" part of the movie. You have a lot of time for worthy dialogue and development right there. Even after that massacre, there are at least four important survivors to develop, and often they find safehouses or a mall or whatever they need to rest and recuperate for a good while before things get really crazy again. Even when they're on the streets running for their lives and trying to form a plan, characters can be distinguished and made unique by their reactions to situations and interactions with each other. What I'm trying to say is that even in an hour and a half, there's plenty of time to develop the characters so that I'm actually interested to see if they get torn to pieces by the undead.

To illustrate my point, here's the intro to Left 4 Dead 2. Watch the first part, where the characters break into an abandoned building modified to be a saferoom for survivors. Note their unique priorities and mannerisms.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLDl-41BlZA[/youtube]

This sequence is no more than thirty seconds long...so why was I more interested in these characters than in the entire cast of your average zombie movie when first I watched it? I think that this is especially ridiculous when you consider that Left 4 Dead 2 is more about gameplay than it is the survivors and storyline.