we all agree of course that this is not a deliberately racist or racially insensitive game.

i uh, i don't think this is true!

I wish instead of making this a stupid action game they actually portrayed a feeling of hopelessness instead of "oh snap zombies lucky I have all these guns to kill em!". I wonder what the new silent hill will be like, probally much better.

ok but

its set in africa, which is pretty much ALL BLACK PEOPLE

and

they're zombies which pretty much ACT LIKE ANIMALS and require their heads blown off to perish


soooooo

edit: i'm not saying its not racist or whatever, I'm just saying its PRETTY FEASIBLE. if the zombie apoc happened, some white guy in africa is probably going to be killing animalistic (because being zombieee) black people by shooting them in the head. and same for everywhere else. i don't think its racism, I think it's just the way it comes off, yet this is kinda how the genre itself is and such.

I completely agree with you here.

no not deliberately but i thought i he meant insensitive at all and not just DELIBERATELY INSENSITIVE which i doubt they were

This game doesn't really sound racist to me (and I'm half black).
I mean it's a zombie game in Africa... what race of people do you think the zombie's are gonna be?
And yeah there are alot of people of other races in Africa but from my understanding this is a remote African village or something so yeah it would be mostly black (but I'm 100% sure this game will have a 2nd half that happens in a way more boring setting like a lab or something which is a good chance to change up the races alittle). And to the people who are saying that he's "massacring african villagers" I'm pretty sure that's not what the game is about at all, it's about killing AFRICAN ZOMBIES the same way RE4 was about killing SPANISH (the race of my other half btw) ZOMBIES. Do you really think that if Chris met a NORMAL AFRICAN in the village who wasn't zombified he'd just say "Damn nigger" and blow his head off? I don't think so. These things aren't human anymore, the color of their skin doesn't change that fact. You know now that I think about it I actually find it racist that so few games happen in Africa just because no one wants to run into problems like this. Africa is a prime setting for a game.

Why is the hero in this some jacked up american army type anyway? That doesn't make for good zombie game.

It needs to be a person who LIVES IN THE PLACE trying to survive when the shit hits the fan, just like any zombie movie. This is why 28 weeks later is worse than 28 days later.

Yeah I pretty much agree with you except for the sentence I took out (lol)
This is probably why I've always liked Silent Hill which usually stars normalish people more than RE which usually stars well um... S.T.A.R.S. military people.
A zombie outbreak from the perspective of an African guy (sorta like that guy in Blood Diamond) would be unique and refreshing (not to mention it probably wouldn't seem as racist to people anymore).
Actually why the hell does this game star Chris anyway? Billy from RE0 actually makes more sense because of his past there.

that's really not the point though. I mean, let's ignore plotline issues, like a government secret agent being sent into Africa while clearly not blending in or of an entire village just full of CRAZY BLACK FOLK or any of that stuff.

the thing is, on first glance, this really LOOKED VERY BAD. I mean, you've got a white dude coming in portrayed as saving a bunch of apelike Africans who want to club him on the head. take out the little subtitles and you've got a scene that just looks deliberately like a race war.

of course that's not intentional, but that's not the point. other movies and mediums don't have this kind of problem because, well, they've reached the basic understanding that releasing a trailer of whitey killing darky is fairly discomfiting. but videogames, being made by some of the least aware people on the planet, haven't quite reached that basic level of understanding!

the game isn't racist, and the chances that it was intended to be racist or racially insensitive are almost zero, but let's face it, there's a very real context to see it in and you don't have to stretch at all to reach it! these kinds of things really shouldn't be an issue and are indicative of a larger problem in gamemaking as a whole though.

Haha yeah I have to agree with you. I remember once I saw this movie (I think it was an old Steven Seagal movie) where the hero was killing almost exclusively black people. Sure they were drug dealers who had turned the city into a dump but man that whole movie just felt akward and i'm pretty sure if anyone had come in the room they would have thought it was a KKK recruitment film or something (especially since it was like 99% shooting black people with the amount of story you'd expect from a Seagal film).

Anyway like I said before this game would probably go over better if it starred an African lead.

This may be of some interest to people (If you haven't seen it) Yahtzee does a quick review of 'a RE5 trailer' back in 15 Aug 2007? wtf?

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1-Heavenly-Sword-and-Other-Stuff
It's after he talks about the heavenly sword demo about 3 minutes in.

Anyway like I said before this game would probably go over better if it starred an African lead.

I would have really liked to have seen this happen, I wonder how Capcom would have handled though?

I would have really liked to have seen this happen, I wonder how Capcom would have handled though?

big lips, dreadlocks

its not enough i want wheelchair zombies