We Hate Zombies

Title: Pandemic II (click to play)
Style: Strategy Simulation
Source: www.crazymonkeygames.net

Unlike movie sequels which more often than not destroy the will to live, flash game sequels tend to get better, bit by bit, as the original is expanded and upgraded. Sometimes they get a lot better, sometimes only a little. We’ve seen it before in all the sequels we’ve reviewed so far, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that this game is better than the original.

To some extent, it’s the same game. You can customize your virus as it lives, and you can watch it spread across the earth and strike down the common man like a cosmic gavel in the world’s most depressing courtroom. But there are changes, updates, enhancements. For instance, you can now monitor geographic regions with more precision, determining if an airport, hospital, or school is open. You also get a better world summary that describes attempts at creating a vaccine, how many days you’ve been in the killin business, and how many people you’ve ruined the lives of. Now that’s convenient!

The graphics are also a lot better. I liked the original’s leanness, but the new version actually has something to look at. In this game, you can watch airplanes and boats move around the globe, and everything is generally just much more polished than before. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to view the whole world at once, which was kind of a downer.

As for changing the fundamentals of the game, there is now a choice between virus, bacteria, or parasite, and each one has a little different feel to it. Do you want to be the parasite that lives in a penis, or a bacterium that enlarges the thyroid? They just change things up a bit, and I’m sure that makes a bit of a difference in the game.

I liked it. It’s addictive. It takes a little while, but there’s a casual mode for people less addicted than me. Overall, it’s not a zombie game, it’s not a killin zombie game, it’s an infection game. However, this could easily be changed if only the creator added a characteristic, “Dead rise to attack living.” Then it would be like the future.

Game Score:

Graphics:		4
Sound:		?
Fun Factor:		5
Satisfaction:		5
Total:

Scenario:
It’s an unseasonably warm September day and you’re a fat, hot guy holding a lawn mower engine. You bought it at a yard sale because you thought it would be cool to rig your fishing pole with a powerful motor. It’s not that you need it to pull in the big one or anything, it’s just that it would be cool. On your way to the garage, you hear something disturbing on the radio. It’s going to be hotter tomorrow. Son-of-a-bitch! There was a box fan at the yard sale, so you walk across the street to go grab it. As you near the crowds, a fucking zombie shows up and bites you on the hand. What do you do?

What you should do:
Well, you’ve been bitten by a zombie, so you are most likely going to die, become undead, and then get killed by me but there may be hope. You’ve got to find that lawn mower and reattach the engine. Being a mechanical genius, this only takes you a few seconds. The purpose? To get the blade spinning fast enough to cut off your arm at the elbow. This will hopefully do two things.

The first, you will lose the bottom half of your arm in a clean cut way. It won’t have to break through bones and it won’t take more than a split second. The benefit of this is that it will hurt less, be easier to dress and treat, and get the job done before the engine stalls. All of these are important because if the engine stalls and the job isn’t complete, you’re definitely a goner. If it is a ragged cut, it might get infected which could lead to further death. Neither of these deaths will be ideal.

The second thing that this will accomplish deals with odds. It will give you the best odds of not becoming a zombie. It is not fully understood how zombiism is transmitted from one person to another, but odds are it has to deal with spreading the infection through the blood or tissue. If this is the case, severing a bitten limb quickly enough just might stop the bleeding. And if it did, how badass would you be? You could tell future survivors how you survived being bitten by cutting your arm off with a lawn mower blade. And if it doesn’t work, at least you will have given the rest of us some information about zombies.

What I would do:
Being a zombie survivalist is not just a full time job with mandatory overtime, it’s a lifestyle. Being as such, I will have all of my jointed extremities lined with explosives designed to blast in a concentrated area. This will limit the damage to the rest of the body while instantly severing the joint. Another plus, it may cauterize the wound, but that isn’t a given.

Once the limb is gone, I will destroy the zombie in one of three thousand possible ways that are always at my disposal. When the zombie is destroyed and I have burned its carcass, I will have to go into hiding. I won’t go to the fortress that I have designed to save up to twenty people from the zombie invasion because all of the people who can live there have directions to go there when the zombies do come. I would be putting them all in grave danger. As such, I have also designed a cell that only a completely lucid Geoffrey can get out of. There is a time lock that expires after two weeks. If I am not lucid, then I am already dead. If the zombiism has not been released from my body, I will perish there. If I am not infected, I have the tools to treat my wound and survive for two weeks. Once the two weeks are up, I will set out into the world, if a world still exists.

Title: The Last Stand (click to play)
Style: Caged Side Scroller
Source: www.zombiegames.net
The Last Stand is a sweet game. There are a lot of things I really like about it and very few that I really hated. The basic premise of the game is that you are some dude stuck in the middle of a rural area (a field) and you have built a little wall out of garbage or something to keep the zombies from coming at you. The entire goal of the game is to make it through each night without dying. If the zombies tear down your wall, they come after you and if they get you, you die. It’s a pretty standard scenario.

You start out with a pistol as your only weapon and your wall has 100% health. The zombies start from the left and work their way to you. When they get to the wall, they start attacking it like I attack buffets. All you have to do is shoot them until they go down. If you hit them in the head, they die faster. After the night is over, if you are still alive, you get to decide how to spend the 12 hours of daylight you have. You can repair the wall which is 5% per hour. You can look for new weapons. You can try and find more survivors to help you fight. The nice thing is, for each survivor you find, it adds 5% health to your wall while you repair plus when you are fighting throughout the night, they help too (I guess). You have to be careful though. You can also lose survivors while you are out scouting for new weapons or survivors.

After the daylight hours are spent, its back to the wall to defend it. As the days and nights go by, the zombies get tougher and more numerous. There are running zombies, big fat zombies that don’t like to die, zombie dogs and such. One really cool thing about the game is how the zombies look though. As the game progresses, the zombies change and they do it in a completely logical way. First they are all citizens. Then there are some swat zombies mixed in the bunch which are harder to kill because of the bullet proof vests they wear. Later on you see prisoners in orange jumpsuits. By the end, there are a lot of military zombies which are a real pain in the ass because they have vests and helmets. Oh yeah, toward the later stages, there is also a clown!?!?

The weapons are mixed up really well too. You can have anything from a pistol to a shotgun to an automatic machine gun to a hunting rifle. There are others as well like an M16 and a chainsaw (my personal favorite). Each one has its own power, its own number of bullets per clip, and its own uses. The chainsaw is totally badass, but it also means your wall is going to take a beating.

The graphics and the sound are pretty good. I didn’t hate any of it. The level of satisfaction I got from this game were top notch. I loved it. When you die, you get to retry the same night and pick different weapons in an effort to not die. This made me keep playing because as night comes to an end, the sun starts to come up and then you die. You know you can do it and you have to try again. I actually got through to the end of the game which was cool. I’m looking forward to playing The Last Stand 2.

Game Score:

Graphics:		3
Sound:		4
Fun Factor:		5
Satisfaction:		5
Total:

Scenario:
It’s a clear night on an occasion when a meteor shower is lighting up the sky. Pretty. But, unbeknownst to the world, the meteors burning up in our atmosphere are carrying the eggs of a microscopic, parasitic lifeform. It swirls around in the clouds, then mixes with the rain and falls to the earth. As the eggs hatch, the lifeform grows from something invisible to the eye into increasingly larger black slugs that can only be described as leeches.

They latch on to living organisms and feast until they mature, at which point they produce eggs and inject them into the host. These eggs move through the blood stream, fundamentally changing the brain and infecting bodily fluids. In order to spread more efficiently, this parasite takes control of the host’s nervous system and has complete command of their body, forcing it to act wild and angry, forcing it to bite other living things. And, with that bite, the eggs will spread. Then the process repeats. Alien zombiism.¹ What do you do?

What you should do:
Get a gun. And bullets. Lots and lots of bullets. And then go to Sams Club or Costco or any other wholesale retailer. Why? Because you need a ton of supplies, and if you can’t get them and defend them, you don’t have much chance. You’ll need a lot to survive, and it won’t be feasible to try to move everything immediately from the store to a safer place far away from the city.

The problem here is quite clear. The water is contaminated with zombie bugs, so you can’t trust the water. You can’t trust the rain, you can’t trust the city water, the well water, any of it. The only liquid you can trust comes in bottles and cans, so you’ll have to guard/gather as much as possible while fending off those that would spread their bugs in you. In fact, you’ll have to find enough to last the rest of your life, no matter whether you decide to fortify a base or move from place to place like a nomad.

There is, of course, a second major problem, and it deals primarily with zombie animals. Sure, some animals have always wanted to bite humans, but generally not every animal ever, like your dog or cat or mouse. And, unlike humans, animals won’t be able to avoid drinking the contaminated water, and they won’t be able to fight the parasites with drugs or whatever else might help.

So you’re facing zombie animals, zombie people, and zombie bugs, all with contaminated water cursing you like a sailor in a storm. The odds are not good, not good at all. The food should be good though, because if you cook the animals thoroughly I’m sure it will be safe to eat, but say goodbye to those rare steaks or medium-rare burgers. That time has ended.

Really, the cards are stacked against you. You can’t get caught in the rain, you can’t fall into a river or swim across a lake, you can’t do anything that might allow contaminated water/fluid into or on your body. That is, not unless you have the straight alcohol, or gasoline, or iodine, to wash off with afterward (assuming it doesn’t get inside you). And then there are zombie fish, and who knows, maybe those leeches can grow forever and you’ll eventually see whale sized leeches trying to swallow you into their veins.

Which means that there has to be a change of location to some place where there isn’t so much water, where the climate is harsh and few things tend to survive. Places like the frigid parts of Canada or Russia, or anywhere else in the world. In the remote places, those bugs might not be able to live and there won’t be near as many enemies. Of course, it will also be harder to find supplies. Once you’re out there, you’ll need to fortify the place against the animals that will want to tear into you and the zombies that might attack in masses during the thawing months.  Life will be rough after the zombie bugs come.

What I would do:
Sadly, this kind of invasion leaves us with few choices, even for veteran zombie killers like me. Despite all that I’ve already mentioned, the biggest problem is a lack of knowledge. We know how to kill leeches, but leeches don’t lay eggs in you that turn you into a zombie. We don’t know what kills these parasites, if they can mature inside you and infect you internally, if there’s a way to destroy the eggs in you before they take control. We just don’t know.

Which is why I would take every precaution. You know what kills most things? Alcohol. So how do you kill zombie eggs? Tequila. Lots of tequila. I would drink so much of Mexico’s golden finest that nothing would be able to live in my veins except me. Then I would probably bathe in bug spray, rinse off with tobacco juice, and try all of those other home remedies that are supposed to keep leeches away.

Then I would do what I’ve suggested you should do. Find supplies, stay away from the water, fend off the zombos, and otherwise be bored out of my mind. Eventually I would load up a semi-truck full of canned food and water, then move into the desert where it never rains and nothing is out there for parasites to bother except me and my mangy dog. I think a man could live for quite a while like that without too much to worry about. Of course, living wouldn’t be worth a whole lot at that point, but that’s where the tequila comes back into play.

At least there’s always tequila.

¹ Note that this is Alien zombiism, not exactly pure zombiism. It’s not clear that this scenario would actually create real zombies since the hosts may not exactly be first considered “dead” and then later “undead.”

Sure, the brain is wrecked, so there is no cure, and the person that once was no longer is, so they could be considered ‘dead’ in a sense. Also, the parasite has complete control over the body’s muscular system, so the body continues to function after death. However, the ‘alien zombie’ could be, perhaps, considered ‘alive’ since the other bodily systems continue to function to some extent, for a while, which would make them not a zombie. Feel free to chime in with a comment on your take of this issue.