Zombies

i saw her too, with lasers is the sequel to i saw her standing there, though the gameplay is somewhat different.

Unlike the first game, you do not play one of the lovers, but a mad scientist who uses lasers and holograms to guide the lovers together. They are both zombies now (the male became one at the end of the first game), so do not kill each other when they touch. And the "platforming" aspect is gone, as you do not directly control any character on screen, nor are jumps possible.

Instead, it has much more of the feeling of a switch-controlled puzzler than an action game, though there is still a bit of a performative aspect: often, you need to switch quickly from one control to another to prevent the loss of one of the zombies. The basic scheme is similar, however: on each level, guide the lovers to one another.

As with the first game, it's a nicely tuned Flash puzzler with clean, intelligent level design, and worth your while if you like puzzle games.

i saw her standing there is a nice little puzzle platformer with a fairly novel core mechanic and a somewhat disquieting backstory.

You control the player character with WASD or the arrow keys; "up" is a jump. A second (pink, inevitably) character moves toward you when you are sufficiently close; your goal is to guide her to a cage ("I loved her but she was a zombie, so I kept her safe in a cage"). Since she is a zombie, if she touches you, you die and must restart the level; but apparently she doesn't mind being caged, because a heart appears above her when you guide her there.

Not that it's really relevant to gameplay, but why is it that when games go here, the active character is always gendered male? And while I don't have any moral qualms about mutually consensual restraint (in face I, ah... better not go there), this is a pretty disquieting subtext from a gender political point of view.

The zombie-girl cannot jump, and in some levels, if you are not careful, you may guide her into a gap in a platform, causing her to die (and of course you can mistime a jump and do likewise).

As is typical with puzzle games, new puzzle elements are added over time, including risers, enemy zombies that can kill either of you, switchable laser barriers, and "holograms" of you that you can trigger to guide the zombie-girl even if you yourself are not present. There's a tasty combination of solver's uncertainty (the difficulty of solving puzzles) and performative uncertainty (the uncertainty inherent in any skill-and-action game). And the story is carried in tight, evocative texts, two lines on each level, the first displayed on level load and the second when solved. Art style is minimalist, but evocative and appropriate to the game's aesthetic.

This is one of the best games I've played since maybe Minecraft. I was like, way into it. Oh wait, for a minute I thought I was writing for Game Informer.

This game put me in the mindset of Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the JFK and Johnson administrations. We burned to death 100,000 civilians in a night, men, women and children, but at least they aren't 100,000 zombies! There's also kitschy 60s music in the soundtrack, it really goes for a 60s aesthetic, which is a nice compliment to the kitschy 50s aesthetic that the Fallout series pioneered. After all, there is no nuclear war in this scenario, only Llama bombs, Zombies, and panicked civillians.

Attack of the Paper Zombies is an indie RTS game that feels more like space marines versus bugs than the zombie apocalypse. You control a handful of heavily armed marines on a graph-paper arena with scattered zombie spawn-points, and must mow down ranks of advancing attackers, ultimately killing the cthulhoid creatures that spawn them, taking over all spawn points.

The game lacks the typical resource extraction component of conventional RTS games, but instead has a tower defense-like element in which you can build turrets at fixed locations, as well as calling down a chemical strike on a zombie-infested area, laying minefields, and creating a heavy weapons targetting area. Additionally, the weapons of your marines (initially all have rifles) can be upgraded to flamethrowers or sniper rifles (useful for taking out spawners at range). All of these consume "BPs," however, and the only way to earn more is to capture spawn points.

Although the game is continuously moving, and has a player-skill component, it feels much more cerebral than a typical action game, with careful planning and use of your constructions and special weapons critical to winning with your limited BP budget.

The tutorial is nice and fairly short; there are only a handful of designed levels, but there are also randomly generated ones (at a player-selectable difficulty level).

Graphics and sounds are obviously not startling, but the gameplay is solid and entertaining.

Rogue Survivor is an entertaining Rogue-like set during the zombie apocalypse. Though it has grainy pixel-art tiles rather than ASCII art, the usual Rogue-like rules apply; num-pad to move in 8 directions, and most everything in the game is a single key-stroke command (though you do manage your inventory with the mouse, and can mouseover objects and characters on the map for information about them).

Unlike most Rogue-likes, the objective isn't to become the mightiest adventurer in the land and delve deep into the dungeons of peril; rather, it is to avoid having your brains eaten. There are no experience points; instead, each day you survive, you level up.

This gives you an additional point of skill, but your hit points and such increase rarely if at all; even at high levels, your best strategy is often to flee.

What you can do, however, is build impressive fortifications, find enough firepower to survive -- and recruit other survivors to be your lackeys. With a bit of work, you can survive in style -- at least until the food runs out. Because there are limited resources in the city, NPCs consume them as well as you, zombies keep spawning, and ultimately there is, of course, no hope.

But then, the same is true of Space Invaders, and the enjoyment is in surviving as long as possible, beating your high score, and unlocking the 8 accomplishments in the game.

Entertaining old-school fun, particularly if you have a thing about the zombie apocalypse. I should note that the game is in alpha, though, and while I've had no problems with crashes, others apparently have.

What is it about pandemics? We've had a rash of them recently, and here's another. In this one, though, the pandemic is the zombie apocalypse.

Most games with zombies are horror apocalypse; in this one, you are, by implication, a mad scientist unleashing the zombie apocalypse on the world. It's played in a series of stages, each one set in a "city"; you trigger a zombie infection, then watch as your zombies eat the brains of citizens, sweeping your pointer about to collect coins when they die. Then, you upgrade your zombie capabilities in the "Lab." At higher levels, the humans fight back with mercs, secret agents, Spiderman, Santa Claus and other such things who are harder to infect and who fight your zombies, possibly stopping the infection before you collect lots of coins. Luckily, you get bombs and such to blow them up as an upgrade.

In honor of Halloween...Urban Dead is a web-based persistent world game; your character is either a "zombie" or a "survivor", two factions eternally trapped in an urban warzone. You gain experience by fighting, you buy skills when you level up, you have "action points" that accumulate over time.

That much is easy to say, but there are surprising depths to Urban Dead. It's worth playing for a while, and it's even more worth seeing how other people play. There are some interesting aspects of the game when you start out, like: Which skill should I buy first? How do I survive as a newbie zombie? But many players have all their skills bought, and that's where you start getting into the really interesting strategies.

If you read about game design at all, you'll eventually come across something about "second order design". The idea is that game designers create experiences indirectly; they create rules, the rules delineate the players' actions, and those actions lead to experiences that are engaging in some way. The designer attempts to create rules that lead to the kind of experience they're trying to engender. A related concept is "emergent behavior", which arises when rules interact to encourage new actions.

The designer of Urban Dead, Kevan Davis, has set down a number of simple rules delineating what someone could do during a zombie apocalypse. The persistent nature of the game implies that there have to be some times when you're logged off, but your character is still around. Zombies roam the city searching for survivors, so if you're a survivor, you want somewhere to hide. Therefore, survivors hole up in buildings and barricade them. If a building is at all barricaded, a zombie cannot enter it; they can attack the barricade, but success is dependent on a die roll and tends to take a lot of AP. Survivors can enter buildings unless they're "heavily barricaded" or above. Therefore, newbie survivors roam about looking for buildings that are barricaded well but not completely.

From the other point of view, a zombie wants to find a likely building, tear down the barricades and feast on the brains of those inside. However, if you're one zombie against a building with 10 survivors, they're likely to blast you with a shotgun and repair the barricades as soon as they log in again. You could get a dozen friends together and coordinate in real time to break into a survivor safehouse; players certainly do that. But there's another, more interesting way...

When a zombie is face to face with one or more survivors (which usually means they've broken into a building), they can use the skill Feeding Groan. Everyone within a radius of several blocks will hear the groan and its position. Zombies that hear this groan know that someone broke through a barricade--that the survivors are, for that moment, vulnerable, and that a fellow zombie is asking for help.

The result is decentralized organization. Like ants or slime molds, the zombies swarm in where there's a vulnerability. Nobody said "Attack this building"; even throwing 10 zombies at a building might not work if it's heavily barricaded, or if there aren't any survivors inside! But Feeding Groans allow the zombie hordes to organize themselves without a central authority. Each zombie is acting on its own initiative, but for the greater good (in a zombiecentric sense).

From a survivor's perspective, one zombie breaks through and starts groaning--and suddenly a huge fucking zombie horde bursts into the room and totally tears shit up.

Sounds kind of like a zombie movie, doesn't it?

(And hey--those 10 friends coordinating their invasions through IRC or messenger? If they start groaning, they can attract huge numbers of zombies into their little crusade.)

There's more to the game I haven't even touched on. For example, if survivors are killed, they rise as zombies...and some skills let survivors resurrect zombies into survivors. This has fascinating implications for how you play your character; Do you like being a survivor, or a zombie? If you die as a survivor, do you try to be the best brain-eating zombie you can, or do you try to get resurrected? If you're a zombie and someone revives you without your consent, do you just jump off a building to "die" and become a zombie again?

If you're at all interested, you don't even have to play the game, you can poke around the Urban Dead Wiki. It's filled with strategy suggestions, roleplaying tips, humor and all sorts of crazy stuff produced by the (extremely passionate) UD community. Just skimming through will show you what can grow out of a few simple rules.

danman says:
While I enjoy PTT's arty take on videogame culture, I also enjoy playing games where I get to blow shit up. Or, indeed, shoot monsters in the face.

Never let it be said that we don't aim to please.

Day Traders of the Dead is a Robotron-esque game (or perhaps more closely, a Smash TV-like game -- both Eugene Jarvis designs, of course). WASD to move, mouse to aim, hold the left mouse button down for continuous fire, kill zombies galore.

Sonny 2 is in many ways an impressive game -- but I have to note for the sake of fairness that it's also a game of a type I do not particularly like. Others clearly do -- almost 7.5m plays on Armor Games, and over 1m on Kongregate.

Just when you get jaded about genre derivations and overly "zany" aesthetics from the casual game sector, coupled with a sense of market saturation and imminent collapse oddly reminiscent of the US housing market, something like this comes along. Plants vs. Zombies is the latest hyper-polished, QAed-to-the-max casual fiesta from PopCap, a company whose success is driven by one part design innovation, three parts user testing, and two parts production value.