Killing Floor Mac Os X Download
Ignace Yeshwas
I had recently been critically exploring my relationship with food. Rather than going through the motions of eating, I wanted to be in tune with what I ate, where it came from and how it made me feel.
The family owns a one-story beige house and a few acres at the end of a cracking, potholed road off El Camino Real. Their wide-open dirt driveway slopes upwards towards the house and down to some trees and dumpsters. This was the killing floor.
All the while, Mike chatted, identifying each foul-smelling digestive liquid that gurgled out. The original pool of throat blood had congealed into a brilliant red layer over the dust. It shook like Jell-O when I poked it with a piece of hay.
Cows had always looked so lifeless to me, just thousands of nameless speckled bodies on the sides of roads. This one only seemed so full of life once I saw it torn open and all its colors spilled out.
Then the harvesters tore the belly open and the guts and innards fell out in a big heap. There was little that resembled a cow. They snatched the purpled organs, the liver, the spleen, tossing them between their hands like pizza dough.
Howlin' Wolf lead guitarist Hubert Sumlin was the first blues legend I snagged an interview with for my book, The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu. Even though Sumlin (who passed away last December at age 80) was the soul of kindness, with courtly Southern-gentleman manners, I was pretty nervous. To warm up, I pitched him a softball question about the title of Wolf's great Chicago blues standard, "Killing Floor."
I expected Sumlin to simply verify the longstanding notion that "killing floor" refers to a slaughterhouse. To my surprise, Sumlin, who was not only Wolf's guitarist but also his close friend from 1954 until Wolf's death in 1976, politely demurred. Instead, he recounted a detailed (and hilarious!) story about Wolf's inspiration for "Killing Floor" that I'd never read anywhere.
As a (rock) musician myself, this got me thinking -- perhaps we blues fans spend too much time talking to each other, and not enough talking to the artists. I resolved from that moment on to interview as many elder blues artists as I could for my book -- and to talk less and listen more.
It's true that many southern African Americans who flooded north during the Great Migration found work on the blood-slick killing floors of Chicago meat-packing slaughterhouses. So it's understandable why even Wikipedia reports that "Howlin' Wolf recorded 'Killing Floor' in 1964. The song's title refers to the active area of a slaughterhouse. Wolf uses it as a metaphor for his relationship predicament."
One might argue that Wolf picked up the use of killing floor to mean slaughterhouse from "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues," which was recorded by influential Delta bluesman Skip James in 1931. Yet James had never been up north until he was brought to Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1931 to make that recording for Paramount. There's no indication in the lyrics to "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues", either, that he's singing about a slaughterhouse.
When I asked Sumlin if Wolf's title referred to a slaughterhouse, Sumlin replied: "No, what happened was... Wolf had seven wives. One was named Helen. She shot him with a double barrel shotgun with buckshot. Out the second floor window. This woman, oh man, he wrote that song about her! Reason I know it is every song he wrote, they was real."
"Down on the killing floor -- that means a woman has you down," Sumlin explained. "She went out of her way to try to kill you. She at the peak of doing it, and you got away now." He paused, then added, "You know people have wished they was dead -- you been treated so bad that sometimes you just say, 'Oh Lord have mercy.' You'd rather be six feet in the ground."
According to Sumlin, when Wolf arrived home in West Milford, Arkansas, from a lengthy tour, Helen sent him to the corner store, ostensibly to buy groceries so she could cook him a welcome-home feast. While he was gone, she ransacked the tour bus for evidence that her man had been fooling around on the road.
"She sent him to the store to get some food, about a half block up the road," Sumlin recalled. "Some potatoes, tomatoes, and all this stuff. Well, somebody left her underwear in this bus. Some woman. And Helen went out and searched the bus before he gets back. One of the boys in his band messed up, you know. She found these things in the bus and she thought it was Wolf.
"She did shoot him, too, full of buckshot. They picked shots out of him for a whole week. She got him from behind. He looked up in the window and she pulled the trigger. By the time he turned his back, oh boy, he was full of buckshot. Man if he'd been a little closer, she coulda killed him!"
According to Sumlin, it wasn't only woman trouble that could depress the mighty Wolf, who was 6'3" and weighed almost three hundred pounds. Wolf was even more passionate about his music. "He did one album that he didn't like, and he went home and got in the bed and stayed three days before he would come back and finish it," Sumlin recalled. "They finally got him back down there to do his voice and finish it."
Sumlin's stinging guitar licks on "Killing Floor" have a lot to do with its staying power as a blues standard. They are building blocks of electric guitar, earnestly cranked out by guitarists of varying competence at blues jams around the world.
I asked Sumlin how he came up with such memorable lines. "I guess I found myself," Sumlin replied modestly. "I found my voice on account of Wolf fired me so many times, sometimes for two minutes, three minutes, five minutes, twenty minutes. But he hired me right back. Boy, he didn't like it when nobody missed no notes. 'Go on find yourself' he would say, and I guess I did."
Every time I try to open killing floor, it crashes. I paid for this game on Oculus. I have been unable to play it since. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling. This is the crash I get every time.
Killing Floor is a cooperative survival shooter that pits you and up to five other players against wave after wave of genetically modified, humanoid "specimens" that have escaped the laboratory and are rapidly overrunning England. Although they are technically not undead, and the game consistently calls them "specimens," these creatures, which travel around in hoards trying to eat people, certainly won't be offended if you mistake them for zombies. These all-but-zombies come in a variety of breeds, you can kill them with a variety of weapons, and that pretty much sums up the game. Killing Floor is satisfying in its simplicity, though the lackluster graphics are a testament to its humble beginnings as an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod. Even as a full game, it forgoes accoutrements such as story, characters, and competitive multiplayer mode, yet where zombie-killing fun is concerned, it delivers in spades.
Gameplay in Killing Floor is simple. Slaughter a batch of specimens, buy new equipment from the trader, and repeat until you have a boss fight with "The Patriarch," a nasty misanthrope with a rocket launcher, a chain gun, and the ability to go invisible. No verbose exposition, lengthy cutscenes, or half-baked attempts at character and story development are arbitrarily affixed to this pure first-person-shooter experience. From the beginning, you'll love the game's satisfying gunplay. Guns look and feel real thanks to convincing ballistics and iron sights, which make aiming both important and engaging. In addition, "pray and spray" is worthless on higher difficulty levels, and ammo is often sparse, so every shot counts. To survive the intense and often claustrophobic firefights, you must coordinate with your teammates and make good use of the environment, which you can accomplish by welding shut doors to create temporary choke points, forcing the creatures to fight on your terms. Furthermore, you need to try and complete each round near the trader, who moves her shop between waves (unfortunately she won't sell you her personal teleporter) and opens for business for only less than a minute each time.
At the start of each map, you must choose one of six perks that enhance your skills in certain areas and work like classes, minus the restrictions. For instance, field medics are faster at healing themselves and their teammates, whereas commandos do more damage with the assault rifle and are better at spotting invisible enemies. Regardless of which one you're playing at the time, you'll gain experience toward leveling up your perks every time you act appropriately in-game. For example, each headshot, with the right guns, counts toward the sharpshooter perk, and you earn experience for the firebug perk by roasting enemies to a crisp. When selecting a perk, you may want to look at your teammates, because although you can play with a squad full of chainsaw-wielding berserkers, a well-rounded team will increase your chance of survival.
Using an algorithm that factors in player achievements, such as long-distance kills and headshots, Killing Floor will occasionally send everyone into slow motion, aka ZED time. (The ZED stands for the same thing as the S in Harry S. Truman: nothing.) Although it can be helpful at higher difficulties, the slow motion kicks in all too often during uninspiring moments--such as when you're trying to turn around--and can become an annoyance, particularly on beginner difficulty. Another annoying situation can come up when you're trying to find and kill the final enemy in a wave. Though they generally succeed at navigating the map, creatures can occasionally become caught on something, and nothing is more frustrating than spending several minutes trying to find the last creature only to discover that it's invisible and stuck on a log 150 meters away from the trader.
Although Killing Floor technically has both single-player and multiplayer modes, the lack of any computer teammates means that single-player is good only for playing out your Rambo V: Zombie Apocalypse fantasies. Similarly, Cooperative mode is the only gametype (sorry, competitive players), and there are only five maps, which are, to be fair, all large and nonlinear, with plenty of corners to hide in, doors to weld behind you, and settings for heroic last stands. In multiplayer, your survival depends largely on your teammates, and coordinating with them is both fun and highly advantageous. Unfortunately, ample opportunities for griefing are also available. Mischievous, or simply misguided, teammates can weld shut the door to your escape route, forcing you to choose between going out guns blazing and trying to un-weld a door while fiends chew on your innards. Even more infuriating is not being able to visit the trader because some oaf is blocking the doorway, and given that friendly fire doesn't apply, you can't even execute him or her for it.
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