We Hate Zombies

Title: Hungry Are The Dead (click to play)
Style: Side Shooter
Source: ???

Well, I haven’t done this in a while. No, I’m not going to apologize. Nonetheless, a game review, for you, by me.

Hungry Are The Dead was one of those games that has a great sounding title but a weak delivery. The graphics weren’t so hot, but I can forgive that. I muted the speakers, like always, so I didn’t hear any sound. The gameplay was cookie-cutter standardized second story window shooting, so nothing terribly innovative or what not. There were options to upgrade weaponry and barricades and so on, but we’ve seen that before.

The first time I played the game I was manslaughtered. I didn’t like it, I didn’t take it like a champ. I scrambled around clicking and slamming the keyboard and cursing, frothing at the mouth and bleeding from my pores. Why did I die right away? Because I didn’t read the damned instructions that say you reload by clicking on the pile of ammo. Oh, and you only get one bullet.

This is dumb. Maybe a nice idea in theory, but super dumb for a game. It’s like wasting your time, like making out with a hot chick and not slamming the pony. Pointless, to a point. Think about it, you have to click the ammo pile to reload, but you have to use the mouse to aim and shoot. Why put us through the trouble of moving our mouse off the enemies to reload? More lifelike? We don’t play games to live life, we play games to kill zombies that don’t exist yet.

Dammit anyway.

Still, I had fun. Shooting zombies in the head is always fun, and I liked the laser on the rifle thing. Made me feel like a newb, but also like a super-soldier. Or something. Damn I’m tired, I need to start drinking more.

Game Score:

Graphics:		2.5
Sound:		?
Fun Factor:		2.5
Satisfaction:		2
Total:

Scenario:
You are visiting the in-laws for a quiet night of passive aggressive conversation and ball-breaking. You have some sort of casserole in your hands and you are a little drunk. Whenever possible, you’ve decided that the emergency blunt you keep hidden in your belt buckle has to be smoked so that you don’t poke out your eyes with a burnt stick. After about an hour of torture, someone knocks on the door to see if anyone needs some cheap cologne. As it turns out, you do according to the wretched beast sitting in the arm chair across from the couch. Fuck her. Just then, you see the form of a dirty, stinking zombie rise up behind the window to her back. What do you do?

What you should do:
Cry out a warning about zombies and immediately find out from the old man where he keeps the gun cabinet. You should have already scoured to place, but the old lady can be such a bitch. Have everyone block the window with the couch while you go get the ammunition. Don’t use a bookcase because those fuckers are heavy as hell and impossible to move but strangely easy to tip over.

Split up into teams to get a few vital tasks completed in a short amount of time. Lock and block all the windows in the house. You should make sure that at least two people work on this project. Get all of the doors locked and take special care not to miss any of them. Make sure that the fireplace is blocked if there is one. Lighting a fire will not stop a zombie from getting in. It will just set them on fire and burn down the house. Secure the kitchen. It is the most important room in the house because it has all the food and there are also plenty of objects to use as weapons if you need to.

Once all of those things are done, try to get the word out to the neighbors and the rest of the town. There isn’t a lot you can do, but give it a shot. You will need as many friendly faces as possible. If you haven’t smoke the joint yet, go ahead. That rotten old woman can go suck a goat because you just saved all of their lives.

What I would do:
Forget about setting up a fortress. I would nullify the zombie threat myself because I know how to do it and I have the tools necessary already on my person. There would be no call for help and there would be no boarding of windows. In the mayhem, I would certainly shoot anyone who had been rude to me in the previous hours and claim I got confused in the chaos. Then I would grab anyone I cared about and get to my predetermined last stand, mote and all. It’s a magical place with enough brats and burgers and beer to last a lifetime.

Scenario:

You’re walking down the street in a busy part of town munching on some Krispy Kreme donuts at 2 in the morning on a Wednesday night when suddenly the floor drops out from under you and you tumble down with a comical face and a sound kind of like “lurp!”  As you’d been walking down the street, the sewer grating underneath had collapsed from wear, tear, and negligence, leaving you 10 feet below the sidewalk, alone, with only coffee soaked pants and half a donut to your name.  Fortunately for you, there’s a faint light coming down a branching tunnel, so you stand up, curse the day you were born, and walk quietly towards the light hoping to find an exit.  Instead, you stumble across a circle of hooded figures chanting, and there in the middle you see two things: a dead body and an unconscious woman.  The dead body starts to wake up; they’re bringing it back, and that woman is the first snack!  What do you do?

What you should do:

Whenever confronted with a strange cult situation, always check yourself before running in to battle.  The problem with cults is that they are sometimes headed by a very charismatic back-stabbing whores, like cheesecake and eclairs, so enticing and mind-blowing.  Like snakes in the grass, the leader might surprise you and render you into a pile of shit and steal your power and  turn you into zombie food.  That’s not what we want, so check yourself, clog your ears, then go in swinging.

Also, don’t make the mistake of trying to rescue the female snack.  More likely than not, she’s part of this whole debacle and would just slit your throat as soon as you turned your back.

So the first thing you do is wait for the zombie to come to life.  This will hopefully work to your advantage while also giving you a moment to relish the kill.  As soon as the zombie stirs but before it’s gained a target, throw the rest of the donut-yes, I said, the rest of the god damned donut-at the farther side of the ring.  Unless you suck at throwing things (in which case you should begin practicing now), you should hit your target or at least get close enough to cause a disturbance.

This will be like hitting the jackpot, because then they will probably not freak their shit out, but they might, and if they do you should run up and pull the hoods over their eyes like hockey players fighting on the ice.  Then knock them down toward the zombie and run into the darkness.  Dart in and out like this a few times and I’m sure you’ll have turned them all into dumb zombies.  That’s when you’re trapped in the sewers with the undead.  While typically a bad idea, I think it might work out for you just so long as you find a weapon.

Good luck.

What I would do:

Sometimes people are born legendary, uniquely American, with a sense of suave built into the hair and some sort of alluring man-essence that smells like something everyone is familiar with but no one can place.  Sometimes a man like that is born, and sometimes grows up being popular and eventually becomes president or something like that.  Other times they stumble across zombies early on in their teens and their life changes forever so that they spend all their persuasive powers convincing the public to prepare against a threat most are too dumb to even rationalize.  What a real fucking waste. Still, some listen, some know, some prepare, and it’s those few that make something out of nothing.

If you hadn’t guessed by now, I am just such a man, a man of raw power and intellect and cunning, a man who’s only fault is that he can’t think highly enough of himself.  Like Gandalf the White I would throw off my dirty, coffee soaked rags and show the true brilliance of my being.  (Someone cue the p-uhrrm-elevator music.)  Then, while everyone is stunned, in the time it takes their pupils to adjust, I would have splashed words of solid liquid gold upon their ears, and they would realize nothing but agree with me anyway, and they would pull out their hidden daggers and cut out the brain of that zombie, and then they would turn the daggers on themselves and pass out of existence.

After that, the rest is kind of a boring let-down.  Wandering the sewers for a few hours, getting arrested as a vagrant, being beaten by an insomniac officer suffering from paranoia who believes everyone is sleeping with his wife, and finally being released by the city’s up and coming police chief with coupons for free tacos.  Pretty much just the standard stuff.

The topic for today is the disguise of the enemy. Of course we’re talking zombies here, and usually zombies are easy enough to recognize. Dumb stares, the slightly gaping jaw, perhaps the eyes rolled back into their heads. The wandering, wandering, ceaseless wandering why don’t you just get where the fuck you’re going wandering. Then, the awareness, the sudden alertness, when fresh flesh is scented on the wind. Ah, the well-known drudgery and times of zombies. But what if a zombie didn’t look quite like that? What if one was, say, disguised. Would you know?

Lesson 5: Looks like a duck, smells like a duck, but is a goose…

Wouldn’t life be a lot easier if all the birds in the world were ducks and all of the insects in the world were butterflies? Why are there geese and moths? Just to fuck with us or is there something sinister at work? Well, I don’t have an answer and I am pretty sure nobody else does either, so the lesson today revolves around the chance that a zombie is disguising itself like another zombie. What would you do then?

Zombies are a curious breed. They don’t think and therefore cannot plan or deceive. Intentionally at least. The garden variety zombie is a simple piece of shit. Just a sauntering, clueless killing machine. However, there are other types of zombies that most of you probably already know about. Think of it as the corn and the nuts that add a little variety to a pile of shit. Without it, everything would be simple and mundane. Life would be good.

Probably the most dangerous error a survivor can make is assuming that a zombie who is sauntering towards you is a typical zombie. A walker as you will. If you assume that, you may let your guard down and have a little fun. These are the least dangerous of the zombie types and a little fun can go a long way. But what if you let it get too close and discover that it is actually a runner and it is currently eating your throat out of your neck? Then you die and become a zombie yourself. It’s funny how a little disguise can go a long way. Don’t get me wrong though, the zombie didn’t do anything, you just made an assumption that you shouldn’t.

To use the Left 4 Dead lifestyle as a guide, think of it this way. What if you assumed a hunter was really a smoker? You would handle it in an entirely different way. What if you found a tank and just thought it was a regular zombie. You would get too close and the tank would most certainly rape you with a fork lift and a slab of concrete. It would be worse than Oz. All because you mistook one type of zombie for another.

But how do you prevent this mistake from happening? The only answer I have is don’t be dumb. By the way, when you say your prayers tonight, there’s no need to thank me. Yet.

Ah, now here’s an epic game I can really get behind.  Before you start thinking weird thoughts and so on, let me tack a notice on the wall that reads, “I had to buy this game myself, and it hurt me very badly.  But also very goodly.”  And now take a moment to consider how close ‘goodly’ is to ‘godly’ and how that dynamic plays on the whole zombie thing.  Ah, refreshing!

Synopsis

(Left 4 Dead is a video game for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.  I bought it for the Xbox 360 and play on Xbox Live with people I know who also hate zombies enough to even kill virtual zombies that don’t even exist…)

Left 4 Dead is a game made to be played in teams online, with communication being a large part of the group’s success.  The premise is that you are a member of a small party of four survivors in a world overrun with zombies, and in each of the levels you are tasked with escaping the scenario alive.  Well, at least one person has to escape alive.  The levels are all meant to be realistic, sending the player through subways, sewers, streets, buildings, train yards, and so on.  And, also realistically, there are certain events that ‘alert the hoarde’.  For instance, getting too close to a car can trigger its alarm, which then sends a mob of zombies to bum rush your ass and make you pay for your neglectfulness.

Even more realistic are the weapons, which are not super-enhanced BFGs or any other kind of futuristic weapon.  In fact, there are really only five heavy weapons to choose from, and you can only carry one at a time.  This is quite the departure from most first person shooter games that focus on gaining power throughout the game, instead choosing to remain true to life.  One gun, a handgun or two, maybe a molotov cocktail or so on.  Those are your choices, and you have to make the best of them.  Sounds like genius to me.  This is practice baby, real life practice without dying in real life.

What I like: teamwork and zombie killin’

This game is fucking awesome.  There’s nothing like crouching at the top of a stairwell annihilating the skulls of zombies bumrushing you from below with short bursts of assault rifle mayhem.  Still, let me be more specific.  One of the game’s greatest assets is its strength in binding teams by making them work together.  This strength is a direct result of the games success at making you rely and depend on other people.  You can’t survive without a team, you can’t win without a team, you can barely walk without your team.  Not only are there masses of zombies that slow you down, obscure your vision, etc., but there are ’super-zombies’ that hunt you down and tear you apart.

The ’super-zombies’ are what really require team work because of how easily they can kill a person wandering off on their own.  Unlike real life, the game doesn’t kill you as soon as a zombie bites you, but instead employs a dynamic of incapacitation.  This means that if you get knocked down and hurt even a little, you can’t get up on your own.  Someone else has to lend a hand and pull you back on your feet.  While on the ground, the best you can do is exact revenge with a handgun and wait for death.  Sure, zombies are easy to kill, but not from the ground and not with a slow firing handgun.

Also, ’super-zombies’ can move fast and change situations immediately.  This means teams have to be close knit, there has to be order, and teams that know how to work together do the best.  Just like real life, except with less sex.  People have to react quickly, watch each other’s backs, be responsible.  As it turns out, being a hero often means doom for the entire team.  Sometimes the decision has to be made that it’s too risky to save someone, and if you take the risk upon yourself and run out with guns blazing, you might just find yourself fall into a big ugly trap.  Your arrogance, stupidity, or ignorance alone could cause the team to unravel and end in destruction.  These are life lessons here people, god damn life lessons to live by.

Of course, once you get that teamwork thing down, the game goes smoothly and the whole thing is great fun.  At the end of the scenario, assuming you survive, you get to see statistics of how you did.  I shoot tequila every time we kill more than 3000 zombies, because, come on, that has to have some real-world conversion rate, right?

What I don’t like:

There’s actually not much I don’t like, but there are some things I’m required by law to publicly state I don’t like.  For instance, in versus mode,  I don’t like playing zombies.  I don’t like that we can be intelligent and work together as a team to destroy previous humans.  If I had designed the game, the zombie players would choose a random direction to wander in whenever the player tried to move, the vision would be blurry, and the music would somehow make you hate yourself.

I don’t suppose I particularly like that there are only four scenarios, and I’m hoping that more come out soon.  I also think the game is lacking an overall stats page that maintains all your stats throughout the history of the game.  You only see stats when you finish a scenario, and if you start halfway through the stats are incomplete.  Having overall game stats would kind of fill in for this, and everyone knows Halo 3 has them…

I really don’t like some people because they are dumb and are the reason zombies are even a threat to mankind in the first place.  Dumb kids or whoever think they’re hot shots and run off into the darkness to die or lure the zombies to us or whatever.  It’s bullshit and the reason the world is a shitty place and I lay all my blame on them.  Especially when I die.  Damned sons of bitches anyway.