The ZRC learned about ‘Zombie Bites’ via Google and went to see if it was as unfortunately negative for the Zombie Rights movement as the title hinted it probably was.

First, the basic description:

You’ve been turned into a zombie! In order to survive you need to feed on human beings. Press the spacebar to bite humans and restore your energy. Use the arrow keys to move and jump. But watch out, each human infected becomes an enemy you have to defeat.

Notice the way this is phrased to indicate the supposed fundamental inhumanity of Zombies. You, the player, have been turned into a Zombie. Now to survive you have to feed on ‘human beings’.

A bit subtler than your standard Romero/Kirkman stuff but the implication is clear: Zombies are not people, says the game. You are supposedly playing as a monster that spreads its own monstrousness to feed implacable hunger.

Then you go into the game itself and things only get worse.

Check out this title screen, for example:

It’s literally dripping with blood! Even the title screen is awash in violence.

Once you get into the actual game the sinister and cruel inner workings become clear. Observe:

The player character, purported to be a Zombie, starts off with an ample life bar, only here representing one’s remaining internal supply of food. See, when you start, you’re full, but rapidly this bar shortens until you starve, go into a ‘frenzy’, and perish. The only alternative is to devour the tiny pixellated humans. This is presented as an inherently bad thing, and they run in terror at the mere sight of a Zombie, whether you or the Zombie brethren you create when you ‘feed’ upon them.

Yet, look closer: these little pixel humans are either so stupid that they walk merrily to their death in pits, or are already suicidal and want to perish. Once Zombified, they do indeed feed on other living humans, but no longer seem determined to destroy themselves. Instead, they seem to be happier and more fulfilled, and unlike the player character, do not have to regularly eat Living people to survive.

So in fact, aren’t you doing them a favor, restoring a measure of purpose and contentment to their lives?

In spite of this altruism, the game’s mechanics mean that the number of Zombies in the playing area increases exponentially, and so it becomes harder and harder to find enough suicidal pixel-people to eat, and you are inevitably doomed, whereupon you see a screen like this one:

Your Undead friends and family shed tears for you! Doesn’t this indicate their fundamental humanity? Don’t they, and your character, deserve better treatment than to be forced into this grey-blocked labyrinth of woe?

As you progress in skill and points, more messages become available, indicating that your Zombified, pixellated comrades hold you in high regard for saving them from whatever problems they couldn’t face while still alive:

Yet, in spite of that mutual respect, note how they’re described: a horde.

Zombies just can’t escape the negative messaging machine, can they?

For these reasons, and for concocting such a cruel and unrealistic zero-sum game scenario between the Living and the Differently Animated, we are forced to give Zombie Bites our lowest score, that of Living Supremacist:

Tags: Videogames, ZRC Reviews

This entry was posted by John Sears on Saturday, January 8th, 2011 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.