Hey guys! Hope you had a Happy Halloween … hope it was extra spooky. ;) I saw Zombieland, which was great – cute, even, which isn’t a word you normally use to describe zombie movies. Definitely one of my two favorite zombie movies (the other being Shaun of the Dead). Yeah, I’m a casual zombie fan.

Speaking of zombies, I recently got to play through the L4D2 demo, and it is sweet. More weapons, more dynamic maps, more special infected — all things we knew were coming, but it’s nice to know that they all meshed pretty well. The new survivors are cool too — tough and brazen. There’s definitely a difference between the games as they’re advertised by their trailers – L4D was a zombie movie, but L4D2 definitely views more as an action movie than anything else. My big complaint about the new game is the sound design. Sound plays a huge role in the first game – it gives you hints as to what special infected is roaming around and so on. The sound in the new one blends into more of a cacophony, and it’s tough to pick out the sounds you need. Maybe it’s just a question of training the ear. Anyway, verdict on the demo is a definite thumbs up … can’t wait for the game to drop.

Finished Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase a few weeks ago, and reading through Rakesh Satyal’s Blue Boy at the recommendation of a longtime friend – it is alternately hilarious, tragic and hilariously tragic.

Comics-wise, I read Yotsuba&! Vol. 6 and … that might be it. I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to read comics lately, which is crazy talk! But Applegeeks ally Jamie Noguchi recently posted about an interview with Naoki Urasawa, and I’ve been watching and rewatching it. The guy is really something … my favorite quote comes when an interviewer asks, “Do the things you draw ever come out exactly as you see them in your head?” Urasawa pauses to think and then says (I’m paraphrasing), “Every once in a while, I can draw exactly what I see in my head. I like to think that for just a moment, the god of manga is resting on my right hand.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 5:44 PM and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.