Editorials
‘Generation Zero is a Great Sci Fi Survival Concept, But a Frustrating Mess to Play
Generation Zero is like Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, but if Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds removed nearly all the other players, replaced them with giant robots and left the pure and unfettered jank of it all buggily intact.
That’s sort of the conceit of the story, too. You and your friends were returning from a day trip to a nearby island when you crashed your boat. Now, you’ve washed ashore and everyone you know and love has disappeared, replaced with metallic beasties that prowl the striking gray-green wilderness. Oh, and it’s the ‘80s.
There’s a constant sense of tension as you crouch around this mostly empty world, knowing that, at any second, one of those mechanized doggos could chew through half your health with a single springy leap at your torso. But, just as often the tension comes from the game’s technical difficulties. Sometimes you’ll look beneath your feet and the ground will disappear revealing the blue ripple-textured plane of the ocean below. Often, boulders dance a spasmodic jig on the ground in front of you, glitching in and out like a time-lapse gif of a sick kid contracting and recovering from chicken pox. The most nerve-wracking moment I’ve had in Generation Zero so far resulted, not from any Simon Stålenhag-inspired (or not Simon Stalenhag-inspired, depending on who you believe) opponent staring down the barrel of my dilapidated shotgun. Rather, it was waiting to see if the cassette reels that spin in the bottom left corner of the loading screen would keep rolling or come to a halt as I hit yet another infinite load bug.
As I sneak through this world that feels on the brink of falling apart, I can’t help but feel that, like PUBG, Generation Zero could have benefited from some time as an early access title. If you, like me, heard that the Swedish developer was somehow releasing this game between December’s Just Cause 4 and May’s Rage 2 and thought, “Wow, that’s a lot! Wonder how they’re managing it all,” the answer is: Generation Zero feels exactly like the kind of game a AAA studio could reasonably squeeze out in between two other, more expensive games.
That is to say, Generation Zero isn’t bad, but you can almost feel the team members being siphoned off this project in favor of others with bigger potential for return on investment. The houses, barns, and sheds that you’ll search for loot (and take shelter in from the robot horde) all share common structures with only minor aesthetic differences—a different neon poster here, a different saying embroidered in the framed, wall-mounted doily there. Roughly 10 hours in, I haven’t encountered any NPCs; there are no quest givers in what is, ostensibly, an open world game. Instead, you’ll listen to distress calls broadcasting over radios or recorded on answering machines; you’ll find maps or notes that point you in the right direction.
That right direction can still be difficult to find, as the waypoint system needs some serious work. New objectives don’t show up on the map, even if you’re tracking them. Instead, once you get close enough, a floating marker will show up in the air to guide you to your destination. If you do manage to find your destination, there’s a solid chance that a giant robot will knock your health down to zero with a pair of missiles, or that a gang of the aforementioned mecha-hounds will team up to end you. Once your health hits zero, you will sometimes have the option to revive (I don’t know why or how the game decides whether this option is available), but will often get a game over sending you back to the nearest safe house, which is often not very near at all. If you’re attempting to make your way through a particularly crowded area, put a podcast on and expect to make slow, abortive progress. This world is hard to navigate, and early on at least, the effort needed is questionably worth it.
Some of these issues are mitigated when playing cooperatively. Enemies are easier to take down with a friend or three by your side, and if you go down, you’ll likely be rezzed. But, having friends along makes the thinness of the game’s structure all the more apparent. Given that the missions aren’t really missions at all, just hunts for the next map or audiolog, and that your friends may not be attempting to accomplish the same objectives as you anyway, cooperative play requires a make-your-own-fun ethic. The best case scenario is that this leads to you and your friends taking down a giant robot together in a fun dynamic fight. But, in my experience, it mostly involved me and my friend listlessly looking for and trading loot. Again, this felt like PUBG, but as exciting as PUBG would be if the circle never constricted and you could just hang out in an abandoned barn until the end of time.
There are moments, though, where Avalanche’s vision for a mysteriously desolate isle shines through. On Sunday, I spotted a section on my map where a large structure sat on top of a mountain. I couldn’t tell anything else from the flat 2D rendering, so I decided to investigate for myself. I slowly climbed the mountain, aware that a pack of robohounds could be anywhere. When I reached the top—instead of the endlessly repeating palette-swapped houses—I was surprised to find the ruins of a castle. I began to investigate; I had never seen anything remotely like this in the game before. For a moment, it gave me a glimpse of what Generation Zero could have in store for me, out there in the wild. And then a pack of robohounds wrecked me with a little help from one of the big boys with the missile launchers. Once I loaded into the safehouse, I set off again, hoping to explore the castle further. But, the dogs wrecked me again, and I gave up.
Maybe I’ll return later, with a friend by my side, and put those mean good boys down—the buddy I’ve spent the most time playing with really likes this game, for what it’s worth, and will probably continue playing after I move on. But, right now, the sense of mystery that this world occasionally provides is overshadowed by frustration and purposelessness.
Generation Zero code provided for PC by the publisher
Generation Zero is out now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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