What is it about pandemics? We've had a rash of them recently, and here's another. In this one, though, the pandemic is the zombie apocalypse.
Most games with zombies are horror apocalypse; in this one, you are, by implication, a mad scientist unleashing the zombie apocalypse on the world. It's played in a series of stages, each one set in a "city"; you trigger a zombie infection, then watch as your zombies eat the brains of citizens, sweeping your pointer about to collect coins when they die. Then, you upgrade your zombie capabilities in the "Lab." At higher levels, the humans fight back with mercs, secret agents, Spiderman, Santa Claus and other such things who are harder to infect and who fight your zombies, possibly stopping the infection before you collect lots of coins. Luckily, you get bombs and such to blow them up as an upgrade.
Submitted by JohnEvans on Fri, 11/06/2009 - 23:33.
In honor of Halloween...Urban Dead is a web-based persistent world game; your character is either a "zombie" or a "survivor", two factions eternally trapped in an urban warzone. You gain experience by fighting, you buy skills when you level up, you have "action points" that accumulate over time.
That much is easy to say, but there are surprising depths to Urban Dead. It's worth playing for a while, and it's even more worth seeing how other people play. There are some interesting aspects of the game when you start out, like: Which skill should I buy first? How do I survive as a newbie zombie? But many players have all their skills bought, and that's where you start getting into the really interesting strategies.
If you read about game design at all, you'll eventually come across something about "second order design". The idea is that game designers create experiences indirectly; they create rules, the rules delineate the players' actions, and those actions lead to experiences that are engaging in some way. The designer attempts to create rules that lead to the kind of experience they're trying to engender. A related concept is "emergent behavior", which arises when rules interact to encourage new actions.
The designer of Urban Dead, Kevan Davis, has set down a number of simple rules delineating what someone could do during a zombie apocalypse. The persistent nature of the game implies that there have to be some times when you're logged off, but your character is still around. Zombies roam the city searching for survivors, so if you're a survivor, you want somewhere to hide. Therefore, survivors hole up in buildings and barricade them. If a building is at all barricaded, a zombie cannot enter it; they can attack the barricade, but success is dependent on a die roll and tends to take a lot of AP. Survivors can enter buildings unless they're "heavily barricaded" or above. Therefore, newbie survivors roam about looking for buildings that are barricaded well but not completely.
From the other point of view, a zombie wants to find a likely building, tear down the barricades and feast on the brains of those inside. However, if you're one zombie against a building with 10 survivors, they're likely to blast you with a shotgun and repair the barricades as soon as they log in again. You could get a dozen friends together and coordinate in real time to break into a survivor safehouse; players certainly do that. But there's another, more interesting way...
When a zombie is face to face with one or more survivors (which usually means they've broken into a building), they can use the skill Feeding Groan. Everyone within a radius of several blocks will hear the groan and its position. Zombies that hear this groan know that someone broke through a barricade--that the survivors are, for that moment, vulnerable, and that a fellow zombie is asking for help.
The result is decentralized organization. Like ants or slime molds, the zombies swarm in where there's a vulnerability. Nobody said "Attack this building"; even throwing 10 zombies at a building might not work if it's heavily barricaded, or if there aren't any survivors inside! But Feeding Groans allow the zombie hordes to organize themselves without a central authority. Each zombie is acting on its own initiative, but for the greater good (in a zombiecentric sense).
From a survivor's perspective, one zombie breaks through and starts groaning--and suddenly a huge fucking zombie horde bursts into the room and totally tears shit up.
Sounds kind of like a zombie movie, doesn't it?
(And hey--those 10 friends coordinating their invasions through IRC or messenger? If they start groaning, they can attract huge numbers of zombies into their little crusade.)
There's more to the game I haven't even touched on. For example, if survivors are killed, they rise as zombies...and some skills let survivors resurrect zombies into survivors. This has fascinating implications for how you play your character; Do you like being a survivor, or a zombie? If you die as a survivor, do you try to be the best brain-eating zombie you can, or do you try to get resurrected? If you're a zombie and someone revives you without your consent, do you just jump off a building to "die" and become a zombie again?
If you're at all interested, you don't even have to play the game, you can poke around the Urban Dead Wiki. It's filled with strategy suggestions, roleplaying tips, humor and all sorts of crazy stuff produced by the (extremely passionate) UD community. Just skimming through will show you what can grow out of a few simple rules.
danman says: While I enjoy PTT's arty take on videogame culture, I also enjoy playing games where I get to blow shit up. Or, indeed, shoot monsters in the face.
Never let it be said that we don't aim to please.
Day Traders of the Dead is a Robotron-esque game (or perhaps more closely, a Smash TV-like game -- both Eugene Jarvis designs, of course). WASD to move, mouse to aim, hold the left mouse button down for continuous fire, kill zombies galore.
Sonny 2 is in many ways an impressive game -- but I have to note for the sake of fairness that it's also a game of a type I do not particularly like. Others clearly do -- almost 7.5m plays on Armor Games, and over 1m on Kongregate.
Just when you get jaded about genre derivations and overly "zany" aesthetics from the casual game sector, coupled with a sense of market saturation and imminent collapse oddly reminiscent of the US housing market, something like this comes along. Plants vs. Zombies is the latest hyper-polished, QAed-to-the-max casual fiesta from PopCap, a company whose success is driven by one part design innovation, three parts user testing, and two parts production value.
Zombie Smashers X2 is an older game by James Silva, who also created the entertaining Elite-style Ninjastarmageddon!. It's a 2D sidescrolling streetfighter in which you play a "zombie smasher" and what you fight are mainly zombies of varying types. There's an RPG-like aspect to it, with missions you complete and NPCs you talk to, as well as a sandboxy-ness to it -- there are restaurants and shops you can buy stuff at, and you can wander about and find things without necessarily focussing on the next quest.
It's something of a shock to see it on Reflexive; hard to imagine what the soccer moms make of this gritty, punk-influenced game with its over-the-top splashes of blood, the ability to pick up the heads of dead zombies and smash others with them, and so on. But of course, incongruity is the source of much amusement.
ZSX2 isn't freeware, though it's a modest $10; we link to Silva's earlier ZSX, which he's released for free, above as well.
My daughter Vicky and I were taking the ferry to Hoboken to get her nose pierced -- apparently, it's legally easier for minors to do this in Jersey than the City -- when she turned to me and said thoughtfully, "I think we should get some survival rations."
"What?"
"You know... Canned goods. Water. Weapons."
"I don't think the recession is going to get that bad. Or do you expect the Times Square nuke sometime soon?"
"No, the Zombie Apocalypse."
The piercing parlor had weapons all over the walls. Swords and polearms. "These guys are ready for the Zombie Apocalypse," I said.
The Dead is a CC-released tabletop RPG of, yes, the Zombie Apocalypse. Players are survivors, banded together Shaun of the Dead-style, trying to survive in a world gone mad. It's short -- a 36-page PDF -- and both the writing and the external persiflage -- images, documents from the world in which it's set, occasional fiction bits -- evoke a love of the subject material. It's designed either for a single session or a campaign, although you'd need to flesh things out a whole lot to make for an interesting campaign; the only background element it contains that hints at the potential is "Darkland USA", clearly patterned on Blackwater (excuse me, Xe), the paramilitary Gestapo that the Department of Homeland Security has deputized to try to control the zombie plague.
That, in fact, is my problem with the piece; most of it is system, and while "system" includes, say, rules for zombie infection, what's of interest is the setting. While certainly "the zombie apocalypse" is now such a part of common cultural currency that you can treat it almost like generic fantasy, assuming your readers will know the tropes and be able to run with a slim starting base (as, say, the original Dungeons & Dragons did), I feel the lack of something more -- interesting elements of setting to borrow, adventure ideas, fleshed-out scenarios.
Still, the system is workable, it's free, and you could undoubtedly have many pleasurable hours with this thing and a handful of friends interested in exploring the most dire of survivalist nightmares.
According to Tim Conkling, its designer, Corpsecraft is an RTS-Match 3 hybrid; but actually, the RTS-ish gameplay is closer to that of Rescue Rangers or Steam Brigade than it is to, say, Warcraft.
Each player has a base at opposite sides of the screen, and builds units (various types of zombies, for the most part) and dispatches them to attack the enemy. They stagger across the screen, fighting each other, the ultimate objective being to reach the enemy base and destroy it (over time, with repeated attacks). There are several different unit types (introduced over a number of levels in the soloplay game, so you may learn their characteristics more readily), each with different characteristics.
Playing Zombie Master I experienced an emotion I’d never felt before in a multiplayer game: Fear. Normally found exclusively in single-player games, fear requires a build up of atmosphere and level of immersion not normally found in the online FPS world. The game in question started like any other, a bunch of guys merrily laying into a horde of zombies with assorted firearms in a shooting gallery affair common to just about any online zombie game of the last ten years. There was even laughter as zombie ragdolls flew through the air. But slowly the humans went down, surrounded and outnumbered. Imperceptibly at first, things started getting claustrophobic. Ammunition became scarce. Finally, only two of us remained. We were surrounded. Then the guttural scream from the next room signified the death of my comrade who had 'just gone to look for ammo'. Suddenly I found myself alone in the darkness. A malignant intelligence was watching my every move, plotting my demise.... I felt scared.
Reiner Knizia is a boardgame god. While the German-born designer has lived in England for many years, he comes from a culture that reveres the form far more than we do in this country; in Germany, as in much of Europe, playing tabletop games remains a mainstream form of social interaction. Knizia, who holds a Ph.D. in mathematics, has designed more than 30 games, including Lord of the Rings, which requires players to adopt a cooperative strategy, and Tigris and Euphrates. Most of his games reward abstract strategies, and many, like Ra and Modern Art have an auction or bidding mechanic. Modern Art is my favorite of these games.
...when you Log In or Register. Gives you the ability to post to the forums and your own blog; to rate games and receive recommendations based on your ratings; and to bookmark games for later reference.
