We hope you'll find this blog an educational, entertaining, and inspiring source of information, whether you're recently undead, a long-time member of the differently animated, or a still-living friend of your fallen, yet risen again, brethren. Everyone with an interest in zombie rights is welcome!
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Posted By John Sears on October 7, 2010
I always feel good when the ZRC can engage in frank and productive discussion with a prominent media figure over the issue of Zombie Rights, and so I was delighted to see that our open letter to Stephen Notley got a response from the man himself; after some careful thought I have posted my own thoughts on his comments here.
Hopefully the healing can now begin.
Posted By John Sears on October 7, 2010
In the midst of reviewing so many Anti-Zombie Xbox games this news slipped past me for a brief time, but it’s worth mentioning as a *possible* glimmer of light in the current generation of console games. Summing up: Konami is publishing/co-developing a console shooter (PS3 and Xbox 360) called “Neverdead” which features an Undead, possibly Zombie protagonist as the main character:
Konami’s angle is that this action hero is, in fact, dead. Not dead in the stone-faced Chakan-the-Forever-Man way, but dead in the cartoonish manner where his hacked-off head asks those nearby if they’ve seen his right arm, and you, the player, are commanded to chuckle at this. Fortunately, this idea extends into the actual gameplay, to the point where our wisecracking corpse of a hero has to reassemble his body parts in order to avoid dying for good, presumably by the enemies throwing his head in a river or something.
Neverdead brings together some Konami designers, including Metal Gear Ac!d’s Shinta Nojiri, and the British developer Rebellion. Many remember Rebellion for making Alien vs. Predator, one of the few notable Atari Jaguar releases. They’ve created other games, but not much in the way of original titles. Neverdead is a departure for them and for Konami, which has made only minor concessions to the zombie wave so far.
Perhaps they’ve been resisting the ‘zombie wave’ so that they could present an alternative, and more equitable treatment of the Differently Animated! We live in hope here at the ZRC.
Posted By John Sears on October 6, 2010
Sadly, not a game about the travails of an Undead police sniper, working hard to prevent tragedy in various hostage situations.
Sadly.
Zombie Sniper 3D is, well, a game, about sniping Zombies, in 3D.
A very frustrating, boring game about sniping Zombies in 3D.
Here’s what a gameplay session of Zombie Sniper 3D is like:
Your game starts with your unseen character looking out at a simple polygonal cityscape from the balcony of an apartment about three stories high. Extremely stiff mannequin-like figures slowly… slide.. or sidle perhaps… toward the front door of the apartment building. Occasionally they emit a groaning sound to let you know that they are, in fact, supposed to be Zombies and not extras from another sequel to the movie Mannequin, or perhaps that one episode of The Twilight Zone.
Or perhaps androids from Star Trek: TNG; they look a bit like them too.
You’re obviously supposed to shoot these creatures, whatever they are, because you see the whole world with a targeting reticule superimposed upon it. (When all you have is a sniper rifle, everything looks like the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’?)
Shooting them earns you money, which somehow translates instantaneously into more rounds for your gun. Different types of shots earn different amounts, though the game doesn’t explain or document precisely how much… anywhere that I can see.
The aiming mechanism is extremely stiff, forcing you to zoom back and forth wildly so that you can move the reticule to the proper location. Zoom too far in, and you’re hopelessly slow; too far out, far too fast. Compared to a modern shooter it’s incredibly stiff and unappealing to aim this gun, whatever it is.
If you miss a target, you then get to wait about a minute for it to slide inside the building and up the stairs to appear behind you, breaking into your ‘safe house’. Which has an open front door; yet there’s a glass shattering sound when they
enter for the first time. Weird, eh?
It’s basically impossible to get enough money to reload your gun without headshots, which are very difficult to achieve until the Zombie mannequins are inside your safe house, at which point you don’t get extra dollars for shooting them. This leaves the outside play, where you can either get good shots lined up with your clumsy aim, or not get enough dollars PER shot to reload effectively. It might be possible to get fast enough to get the shots reliably… but who cares to do so?
Added bonus: if you run out of bullets and don’t have enough cash to buy more rounds, you have to wait until a Zombiequin gets up the stairs, into your apartment and eats your brain. Games that waste your time are a pet peeve of mine, so this was extra-annoying.
The ZRC gives Zombie Sniper 3D an extra thumb down. Not only is it an insult to Zombies, it’s an insult to videogame sniping and amateur assasins everywhere, plus it reminded me of a terrible 80s movie.
Uggh. Time to wash out my brain.
Posted By John Sears on October 6, 2010
(or Colours for our friends across the Pond)
Just a quick update to reiterate the Zombie Rights Campaign’s commitment to support of all Zombies, no matter their skin color, pre or post-Zombification. Here at the ZRC we’re there for all of the Differently Animated, from Voodoo Zombies to Zombies reanimated by space radiation, from Grey-skinned to Blue, and naturally the lovely greenish hue sported by so many upstanding members of the Zombie Community, like our own Spokeszombie Tim.
Even here during the darkest time of the year for the Undead, The Zombie Rights Campaign is there to help the Living and Differently Animated find their own rainbow connections past prejudice and misunderstanding, to a brighter tomorrow full of tolerance and mutual cooperation.
Posted By John Sears on October 4, 2010
It is as strange as the title suggests.
First, a bit of housekeeping: posting will be light for a few days as I recover from an apocalyptically nasty stomach bug. Right now I can’t move around too much, and can barely be bothered to type, this review is all I feel up to today. Hopefully my fragile Living metabolism will get its act back together by, say, Wednesday.
Second, I made the mistake of going to the Z section of the Xbox Live Indie Games on the old Marketplace (Tycho of Penny-Arcade suggests the abbreviation XBLIG, and who am I to argue?), and there are quite a few games with ‘Zombie’ in the title, all priced to move at 80 points, which is about a dollar, I believe. We had some Microsoft Points lying around the account anyway, so I picked up Zombie Outhouse to follow I Made a Game with Zombies In It (l33t speak translated into actual english), which was reviewed yesterday.
Zombie Outhouse.. well, it’s different, I suppose. Story wise, apparently your character, a living person, has to use the facilities at an outhouse one night, only to discover after doing so that it’s labelled as being for Zombies only, or some such.
Segregated bathrooms are a classic and tragic form of discrimination, so it’s perhaps not so hard to believe that they would exist for the Differently Animated, once society has moved beyond shooting and into George Crow laws, as it were. (Named for George Romero, naturally).
At any rate, for some reason a horde of 2D cutout ‘Zombies’ with limited animation start running toward the player’s perspective, and he/she has to fend them off with a gun. Gameplay wise, this resembles those annoying flash banner ads where you have to place a target on something and shoot to ‘win’ a prize; it’s not terribly sophisticated. The soundtrack, however, is very odd; it seems to consist of people mumbling into microphones, spliced together with random animal calls. A lot of cat noises in particular.
Questions arise from playing this XBLIG: Am I the bad guy here? Am I merely fending off the rightful users of this public restroom with violence? Whose cats are these, anyway, and why are they so agitated?
Sadly, none of these questions were answered, at least not in the time I spent playing Zombie Outhouse. Perhaps they’re holding on to the Big Reveal for a sequel; who can say?
Regardless of potentially deeper hidden meaning waiting to be uncovered by later releases, the overt violence against the Differently Animated forces the ZRC to condemn this particular game. For shame… whoever made it. For shame.
Posted By John Sears on October 3, 2010
Picked up this little, ahem, gem from the Xbox marketplace today. Apparently it’s quite a bit older, but for some reason I guess it’s been doing well in the downloads, as if I recall correctly I found it by randomly browsing the Most Downloaded tab in the Indie games section.
What to say about the game? First, I’m not typing out all that l33t-speak every time I refer to the game. Not a chance. So, henceforth, it shall be abbreviated IMGWZIT.
IMGWZIT is superficially similar to the Yet Another Zombie Defense game I reviewed a while back, in that it’s a dual stick shooter, with one analog stick controlling motion and the other controlling shooting. However here there’s no defense angle; you simply run around shooting and blasting Zombies, at first, then various strange objects, ranging from blobs to block-centipede things, then back to Zombies, then a mixture of all of the above, then new, stranger Zombies, and so forth. Graphically it’s got a bit more going on than your typical ultra-cheap Indie game; lots of fancy, distracting, even seizure-tastic light effects and strobes. Musically… well, first, it has actual music, which is more than most of these dirt cheap Zom-basher games can boast. In particular there’s a stream of consciousness, Adam Sandler-esque song about the game itself that plays intermittently, talking about what a lousy evening you’re having what with all the Zombies coming out of the ground and such.
IMGWZIT was apparently a big hit in the Xbox Indie community for 2009, ranking among its most played and downloaded titles, and netting its one-man studio at least 140k dollars in the process.
IGN inexplicably ranked it as the best Indie game of 2009, in fact. What’s up with that, IGN? Do I detect a heaping helping of Anti-Zombie bias over at your once-proud company?
As a long-time gamer, I can recognize the dual stick shooter appeal. Playing this game reminded me of Contra on the SNES, or the legendary Smash TV. In particular some of the power-ups harken back to Contra, with lasers and flamethrowers playing not unlike the top down portions of the SNES classic. The game has a forgiving difficulty curve, and quickly awards new lives after death, putting the player right back into the madness.
Plus, it’s not ALL about killing Zombies. The worst enemies for me came in the Asteroids/spacey glitter level, which involves glowing, shimmering shapes bursting into small bits of sharpnel when you hit them. The blobs are also a bit disconcerting, and the blocky centipedes remind me of the games they had on early phones where you were a blobby centipede yourself and ate more blocks to get progressively longer (and took up more of the screen, raising the difficulty). Except here, they were trying to kill me. Not eat me; they just zoom around and hit you.
I guess the developer just threw in Zombies to boost casual gaming interest. I’m not sure if that makes it better, or worse; it does assume a world where Zombie-bashing is so widespread, so socially tolerated that throwing a few virtual Zombies under the bus as a quirky advertising campaign that there’s no downside to doing so. Indeed, there doesn’t seem to have been, for Mr. James Silva anyway.
For shame, Mr. Silva. How about you donate some of that ill-gotten lucre to a worthy cause? It doesn’t have to be the ZRC; in fact, we’d rather not launder your blood money. Feel free to give some to Lynn Sage though; maybe write ‘to make it up to the Zombies’ on your check’s memo line.
Give till it hurts, just like you hurt the feelings of Zombies all over America with your game.
Posted By John Sears on October 1, 2010
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there is one part of Plants vs. Zombies we have found so far that, while not a major component of the overall game, is nevertheless at least neutral on the Zombie Rights front.
After you clear enough stages in the main story mode, perhaps more properly called the ‘Massacre Mode’, you unlock a sort of side project game called the Zen Garden, where you can grow plants in a peaceful greenhouse setting, with no conflict and no warfare between the Living and the Undead. Just you, some plants, and some accessories, plant food, bug spray and so forth.
It’s a fun little diversion for a few minutes per day. Tactically, it allows the player to raise funds they can use in the despicable virtual persecution of the Differently Animated, but as a self-contained mini-game, it’s.. well, Zen-like, at least by comparison. Just the peaceful cultivation of some virtual plants. Interestingly enough, the game is tied to real calendar days; plants only need so much attention within a 24 hour period, and then you’re more or less done, until the next day. This gives you an incentive to take five minutes a day and tend to your little garden of militarized vegetables, now home from the war, as it were.
If only the larger game could have been more like the Zen Garden.
Posted By John Sears on September 30, 2010
Having lost the treasured ZRC camera got me to looking through the files still remaining on its flash card and I remembered a couple of videos I took at the RE: Afterlife event, so I’m putting those up here in lieu of much bloggery today. Short story is, I cleaned out the storage room we rented before the ZRC moved to this lovely secret suburban location, and it took all day. Wow my back aches.
Videos below the cut.
Posted By John Sears on September 29, 2010
Today I accidentally destroyed the ZRC’s lovely Canon Powershot ‘go anywhere’ camera, the one we take to conventions and all over the Midwest generally, in our quest for Undead Equality.
That’s a real bummer. It wasn’t even on a Zombie-related errand either; just normal carelessness.
And so tonight we mourn a very useful and fairly short-lived piece of technology here at the ZRC, a camera that had the potential to illuminate many of the proudest moments and harshest struggles of our burgeoning movement, and which will now be replaced by… well, an identical camera actually.
Due to budgetary constraints this might push back the reprinting of the wristbands a few weeks. We have to have a good camera for Freakfest and the Horror Society film festival and The Dark Carnival. Priorities and all that, even though wristbands are a great seller and people love them. This time ideally I’d like to get some kind of idiot-proof warranty if I can, just because I’m apparently pretty clumsy with small handheld electronic devices.
On the other hand, we were able to salvage the SD card and battery from this one, so the replacement will be somewhat cheaper, which is good. Cheaper and have an extra battery’s worth of uptime.
The travails of Zombie Rights advocacy, once again brought to you by the ZRC.
Posted By John Sears on September 28, 2010
What follows is one of the most awful and appalling things we’ve ever seen here at the ZRC. I have to warn our sensitive readers that the matters discussed behind the cut are extremely disturbing, nauseating and appalling. Reader discretion is advised.