First of all, though the game is called “Pro Zombie Soccer: Apocalypse Edition”, it is obviously anything but Zombie Positive. I wish the publisher wouldn’t stoop to using such a misleading title, which will surely confuse consumers and possibly lead to the mistaken purchase of the title by a Zombie Enlightened individual looking for something less hostile to the Differently Animated. Less hostile than this:

In Pro Zombie Soccer: Apocalypse Edition, you take on the role of Jax, a washed-up soccer player, now homeless, who is caught in the middle of a zombie outbreak. After being bitten by his zombified, soccer-playing hero, Jax is seemingly infected not only with the zombie virus, but also the ability to take out scores of the undead with nothing but a soccer ball. As he feels the infection spread, Jax decides to take out as many zombies as he can and get to the bottom of the infection before he himself turns into one of the walking dead.

Players take control of Jax, though he remains stationary on the left-hand side of the screen. To knock out the hordes of zombies that approach from the right, hold down the shoot button, aim, and release. The longer you hold down the shoot button the more powerful the shot, which is key as there are some zombies who cannot be taken down with a normal shot. In addition, there are many different zombie types, such as underground zombies who periodically pop their heads out of the ground, armored zombies who have to be taken out with a bank shot, and disco zombies who can only be taken out with what is called a “nut shot”. That one’s self-explanatory.

After a while these iPod/iPad Zombie assaulting games really start to run together in their descriptions. You basically hold down a button and aim a shot at the right side of the screen, and.. that’s it.

Here’s a radical thought, developers: why not have the player stand on the *right* side of the screen and aim *left*. Ooooh, innovative!

To be more serious, however, yet again we have here a ‘time killer’ game that features casual Anti-Zombie violence as a way to spend a few down minutes here and there, to wedge even more callous Anti-Zombiism into the hours of the waking day than before. No time to sit down and plunk road cones on Zombie heads, ala Dead Rising, or to fight a mysterious and extremely convoluted corporate conspiracy that involves Zombies (somehow), ala Resident Evil? Only have five minutes to play until your stop on the bus? ‘No problem’, say these developers, ‘try our inexpensive hate game to plug up the tiny gaps in your hectic daily life so that you don’t have to ponder the meaning of existence anymore!’

Tragic. Eventually our population will be so well trained by these digital death merchants that they’ll instinctively desire, and then *need* to hurt virtual Zombies just to relax at all, and then where will we be?

In fact, are we there already?

Tags: Videogames

This entry was posted by John Sears on Saturday, February 12th, 2011 at 6:06 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.