We Hate Zombies

Title: Zombie Nightmare (click to play)
Style: RPG
Source: www.zombiegames.net

This game is a true nightmare. The graphics are bad, the sound is horrible, and the fun factor is not really much of a factor. In fact, I would say this is the worst zombie game I’ve played so far. I know it’s old and technology has grown up since then, but honestly. This game is not fun.

Don’t get me wrong though. I am not trying to disrespect the creator. It’s just that they made a sucky game that is short and not fun. Plus, their is an option to skip the zombie. WTF is that about. All that does is teach kids how to not get the job done. It would be like teaching a teenager how to put on a condom, but prefacing it all by telling them that if it doesn’t go on right away, just go ahead and fuck without it. It doesn’t work like that.

Have you ever felt a deep sense of regret? I have. Like when I clicked on Zombie Nightmare instead of Zombie Rampage, which looks like a badass game that I will definately have to review in the future. It’s also like that feeling you get when you eat at a buffet. You know, the one you get about six hours later when you are hungry again and you regret not eating more. It doesn’t matter how much I stuff myself, I always, always regret not eating more. DAMMIT!! Now I regret not eating more. Thanks Zombie Nightmare.

What this is all about:
There are very few times in the year when you can look “normal” while practicing for retaliation during the coming zombie invasion, and Halloween is easily the biggest of those times. After certain mishaps, Geoffrey and I discovered that we could avoid the typical Halloween “accidents” and “man-hunts” if we took out our zombie aggression on something almost as meaty and solid as the human head: a pumpkin. That’s why we started making zombie pumpkins, to express our hatred and zealotry on something other than 5-year olds in white makeup. Now you can to!

Getting started:
Find yourself a picture of a zombie online. Make it simple, preferably in black and white, and blow it up to a pretty big size that matches your pumpkin. Then you need to lay out your tools and everything else you’ll need. You can see here that I’ve already made my zombie stencil and taped it to the pumpkin. The tools I need are all on the table except the tequila, which is in my hand.

Applying the stencil:
After you have everything you need to get started, including a good buzz, use a sharp instrument (or tool provided) to outline the sections of your stencil onto the pumpkin. You can try cutting through the paper, but it will end horribly and people will laugh at you, so just outline the stencil with something sharp and then get rid of it. Make sure you outline enough of the sections that you can see where to cut and what to remove. Sometimes it can get a little ugly.

Carving it out:
You can use whatever you want for carving on the pumpkin. Good ideas include tools in carving kits, small screwdrivers, and butcher’s knives. Bad ideas include feet, empty bottles of tequila, and Chuck Norris. Now, depending on your stencil, you can either cut all the way through the pumpkin, or, as I did here, simply shave off the thick outer skin of the pumpkin. Light shines through either way, but you have more control with the latter method. The wall of the pumpkin will need to be thin for light to shine through brightly, so trim off extra pumpkin crap out from the inside.

Adding highlights:
What do you do when you want to add a little extra flair to the pumpkin? You could use makeup, feathers, perhaps pictures of naked women (or men), maybe even an ex-girlfriend. Or, in my case, you can just cut through the pumpkin completely. The holes will show more light than the skinless pulp, so they will appear much more prominently. Here I cut out the teeth and eyes because those are the most important parts of the zombie face. Can they see you and are they eating you?

Light ‘er up!
Use a light to check for consistency and to make touch-ups. Then put a big ass candle inside. And you’re done! Or whatever.

At last, retribution!
Commence your attack! Again, get the necessary materials, then do whatever the hell you want. Do notice how little fire effects the zombie skull. This is true to life, you can’t easily kill a zombie with fire.

Scenario:
It’s sometime in the morning and you wake up to the sound of something hitting the floor in your kitchen.  Sitting up in bed, you realize your signficant other is no longer present, the other side of the bed being cold enough to suggest they have been absent for some time now.  You look at the clock and realize it’s only 3:00 in the morning and you’re pissed to be awake, but in that sleepy kind of way that means you’re only mad enough to fall back asleep.  Then you hear something loud hit the ground again, and you realize that maybe something’s amiss.  You get up, walking quietly to the kitchen.  There you find blood all over the kitchen and a writhing body on the ground.  Zombies in the fucking morning, you gotta be kidding.  Then you realize that you recognize that walking carcass; in fact, you loved who that carcass used to be.  Something inside you stops working.  What do you do?

What you should do:
Realize one thing.  Once upon a time, there was a man who sang a song that suggested the truth behind making our existence both rewarding and purposeful was solely dependent upon the emotional connection shared with others in what we typically label as “love.”  Well, he was wrong, and he was wrong because he was dumb.  He didn’t know about the zombie threat, and what that zombie threat would mean.  Is that why he’s dead now?  I don’t know, but feel free to ask the jury once they come back in.

If all you needed was love, then I guess I’d recommend you kill yourself, because that bumbling flesh-pod doesn’t love you anymore.  But why would I recommend you kill yourself when there’s something better to give your life purpose and reward?  You don’t need love, you just need zombie-murder.  Mega-slam!  You see, now that your significant other has gone to the other side, you can freely swap out your previous sense of love with a fresh sense of unending vengence.  If you take a moment to think about it, you’ll realize it kind of has that new car smell to it, and I’m pretty sure you’ll find it both refreshing and invigorating.

But what am I talking about, really?  You’re probably saying to yourself, “Self, I wish I could make him stop skirting around what he’s really trying to say.”  Well, you could, if you ever left a comment, but who am I to place the blame on someone who may or may not be nonexistent?  Sadly, I digress.  

The point is that you have a job to do.  Your former-love has become unloved, and it’s up to you to seal the deal, by which I mean destroy their brain.  Grab a frying pan, for instance, and brutally bludgeon them until their skull has more cracks than a plumbers’ convention.  Sure, you could sit there and cry and weep over the death of a life you once happilly shared, or you could slip into denial and defenselessly think it’s just allergies, but that would be seriously dumb as hell.  I mean, it’s time to killa bitch.  Do it for you and the memory of them.

And once you’re done with that, upgrade your frying pan to a bigger frying pan and start cruising the streets.  There’s no way to know which zombie infected your beloved, so it’s up to you to take your crusade to each and every one of them.  I don’t know about you, but the last time my wallet was stolen, I derailed the subway train and set it on fire to get even.  Moral of the story?  The world is cruel, and zombies are cruel, and you don’t love zombies.  Unless by love, I mean kill, in which case you do.

What I would do:
I once heard that elves can die if their heart is broken.  I think that’s bullshit because elves don’t exist, but if elves did exist I would be glad that I wasn’t an elf.  Except it would be cool to see really far and shoot just about anything at all from anywhere in the world.  Of course I’m talking Lord of the Rings elves, not some other shitty kind of inferior elf that you might be thinking about.

Since I’m not an elf, I carry a bow and arrow around with me all the time.  Of course, it’s just one arrow, because I can shoot anything in the world with just one arrow and blow up an entire state.  Does that sound dangerous to you, or does it sound like pure genius?  I’m not sure either, but if you know me, then you know I like dangerous gibberish, and that’s god damn genius.  Pow! 

That’s the sound my arrow makes as it dives into the brain of the zombie that means nothing to me.  Zombies aren’t human.  That means I can kill zombies like rats, by which I mean stepping on their backs and popping off their heads.  Awesome!  Since zombies aren’t human and certainly aren’t any fun for anything but killing, I would have a lot of fun killing that undead bastard.  If this sounds harsh to you, then I’m not making myself clear enough.  The person I used to know is gone forever, and I’m not going to cry big puppy dog tears or whine about needing a cure.  Once a zombie, always a zombie, and to me that spells braincrusher.  Have a god damn good day you son of a bitch.

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.

Scenario:
You are swimming a race in the Olympics and your name is not Michael Phelps. You swim lap after lap in various strokes in an effort to win that damned Gold Medal everyone keeps talking about. If you somehow manage to win it, your going to heat it up until it glows and brand your chest with it.

That way, no matter how poor you get, you’ll always have proof that you could win Gold Medals. Wait, why are you thinking about this? You’re swimming for a Gold Medal. And a zombie is at the end of your lane. What do you do?

What you should do:
Keep swimming. You really need that Gold Medal and the chances are in your favor that someone will tackle that zombie away from the pool. If they do not tackle it away, then it will probably fall into the pool which is fairly deep and it won’t be an issue any further.

However, if they do tackle the zombie, you will most likely be up against two zombies. You will have to get some assistance from the other swimmers. Once the crowd finds out what is going on, they will be of no help. They will most likely panic and end up being zombies too. But the other swimmers will be calm and cool about it. That’s how it works in a crisis.

As a team, tie your condom helmets together into a rope. Use this rope to trap the zombie to something (a bench or a lifeguard tower or something.)

Once this is complete, use one of those benches as a killing device and destroy its head off. It’ll be messy but you might get a special gold medal out of the deal, so do it. Then be sure to burn the place down. Everything is infected with zombie blood and there is no real hope of cleaning it off without someone getting infected.

What I would do:
Since I am a world class swimmer of the doggie paddle style, I would gracefully pull up to where the zombie is located. You see, I believe that zombies are like snakes and crocodiles in that they are extremely dangerous and could potentially end the world, but if handled by experts no real harm can be done. Now I am not saying that I would handle a zombie, but I sure hell can kick its ass.

After warning a security officer not to tackle the zombie, I would hop up onto the concrete and face the beast one on one. To my right would be the pool boy, holding his pool boy net. As soon as I see it, its in my hands and I am wrestling the zombie to the ground with it. You have to keep your distance and there is no better way than with a twenty foot pole.

Once the zombie is on the ground, I would snap the pole in half and charge. Since I am wearing one of those new Speedo suits, I’d arrive at my destination quicker and in world record speed. With this gathered speed, I would thrust the pole into the heart of the zombie. This part is really just for show because I know that zombies will be unaffected by this gesture. After the crowd groans, the kids are crying, and some of the adults have lost their lunch, I finish it up with a patented moved that I created: the through-the-eye-brain-blaster. Essentially, I take the pole and ram it through the eye of the zombie, destroying the infected brain behind it.