MustEatBrains - Update 1

In the olden days, software was bought in a real physical store, came in a physical box, and was written onto some piece of physical media.  If that software had problems with it, or lacked important features, then there was no real way to get an update out to the consumer.  I think once or twice I had a game with such bad defects that they mailed out replacement floppy disks, but it was exceedingly rare.  In general the mantra was "get it the right the first time, or don't bother."

Today's culture is incredibly different.  Digital distribution has become  the norm.  Even if you bought a box in a store, you're invariably going to get updates pushed to you from the internet.  Software has become a living, breathing thing.  And it's changed both how people develop software and how they consume it.  The mantra has shifted to "release early and often."

Given that my game lives on a internet connected device, I opted for a modern development strategy.  I don't bring any of this up to say that I rushed something unfinished out the door.  Not at all - I think my little game is awesome.  But I don't see it as a product that is done - I see it as the beginning of things to come.

For the first release I knew that certain things needed to be established.  I needed to solidify a visual style, and I needed to have the core gameplay be tight.  As long as it was fun, and looked like something I wanted to play, some details could wait.  If I tried to do every thing I wanted in one release then I'd never ever finish.

The point:  I am happy to announce that the first update for MustEatBrains is now available!

The game as it exists today is essentially a little action game where you try for a new top score.  But without being able to compete with other people there's not much meaning to that.  So it was clear that the first thing I needed to add was online leaderboards.  With the new update you'll be able to submit your scores and see how you compare to the top scores for the day or the top scores of all time.

Of course with this focus on score I wanted to give the player more info on how they got to the score they did.  So I implemented a little post-game summary page that breaks down what carnage you inflicted and how you inflicted it.  Nothing too fancy, just a little info to satisfy the data nerd in all of us.

I was really happy with the Living game mode at launch.  And I thought it was cool that you could turn things around and play as the undead.  But the Undead mode suffered from a lack of variety.  The living player has multiple weapons at her disposal, and has to keep moving around tactically in order to stay alive.  The undead player merely had to keep up an aggressive chase to maintain a steady supply of brains.  Compared to the dynamic gameplay of the living player it just wasn't fun enough.

After sitting on the problem for a while I decided the zombie player needed a better way to close the gap.  Less time chasing, more time doing what zombies do best.  So I gave the zombie a leap attack.

I wanted to keep the ravenous lust for brains a key part of the game, so I put the leap attack on a stamina system.  Leaping takes a lot of stamina, which will slowly regenerate over time; however tasty human parts will refill that meter much faster.  So as a zombie player you're always on the look out for edibles.  It adds the slightest bit of resource management, but not too much.

As it stands the undead mode is pretty hard.  I'll likely tweak that with future updates, but on the whole I'm happy with how it feels.  As a zombie you're an underdog, both working with and competing against your undead compatriots for whatever human parts are available.  It's hard, but it's thematically hard.

So, that's what's in the update.  It also includes various balance tweaks (especially around the late game) and interface refinements.  But the core features are what's listed above.

What's next?  Well, the feedback is pretty clear.  The next features people want to see are:

• Sound
• More varied environments

So those are definitely in the pipeline.  As well as some more fun stuff that I'll share with you soon enough.  Until then, sit back, relax, and eat some brains!

MustEatBrains

I present to you, my game for Windows Phone: MustEatBrains!

The marketplace description:

Choose either to fight on the side of the living or the undead horde in this handcrafted action game.  It's an all out brawl! How long will you last?

In the UNDEAD mode you play as a ravenous zombie. Chase after those meddlesome warm blooded fools and end their poor excuse for an existence. You score points for each heart stopped by your hand. Whatever fleshy parts you can salvage will bolster your undead endurance. But keep an eye out for tasty morsels of brain. The rush will make you invulnerable for a short time!

In the LIVING mode you stand alone against the undead horde. You score points for each undead soul laid to rest, and lose points for the unintentional death of innocents.  You have a firearm at your command to hold back those zombies. But ammunition is limited, so keep an eye out for supplies to keep you blasting. If you run out you'll have to depend on your _other_ guns...

MustEatBrains features over three hundred frames of hand-drawn animation. Everything was crafted by one person - the art, the code, even the fonts. It is truly an old fashioned labor of love. I hope you enjoy it.

The trailer:

Download it for your Windows Phone here.

The Path to Brains

In late 2006 (yes, this story starts five years ago) Microsoft released the first version of XNA, a development platform for writing games on the PC and Xbox.  It put all the nitty-gritty details that generally plague game development behind a modern type-safe programming language (C#).  It let developers focus on the more interesting aspects of game design.  As someone who has dabbled in game development in the past, this simplified platform sounded like a great way for me to get back into it.

I wanted a project that fit me and my personal strengths, so I decided on a 2D game where I could provide the art with old fashioned pen and paper.  This would accomplish two things: it would give me an excuse to reconnect with the visual arts, and it would produce a different visual style from most of the other stuff out there.  I imagined a sketchy hand-drawn style, like doodles in a notebook come to life.  Of course I wasn't the only one to have this idea, and in fact many games have come out in the years since with this style.  Many have fallen short because they fail to embrace the look completely, while others have pulled it off brilliantly (like the enjoyable Parachute Panic).  But from my perspective at the time, it wasn't a look that had been done.

In grade school I used to draw stick figures doing terrible awful violent things to each other.  It's one of those things little boys do to vent their natural homicidal tendencies (medical term: testosterone), similar to throwing rocks and blowing stuff up with firecrackers.  The thing that somehow makes this sort of thing vaguely less disturbing is that... well, they're stick figures.  It's cartoon violence at its most cartoon state.  I'm not going to get into a discussion about violence in media right now - I'm just presenting this a data point.

The trick with violence is that you need a morally justifiable sponge to soak it up so that the audience doesn't feel morally queasy.  Very few realistic targets hold up to that job, so we've invented all sorts of other options to fill out the ranks.  In particular, zombies are somewhat of a violence loophole.  They're almost indistinguishable from their living counterparts, yet for some reason we heartily approve of them meeting their (second) end via a chainsaw.  I think it's the outnumbered survivalist viewpoint that allows us to use a certain "vigor" in our zombie eradication methods.  It's not as simple as the "its your or me!" factor; it's the "its you or… oh god where did you all come from… must… escape...  aaaaarrrrrgh!" factor.

Where am I going with this?  Well, when it comes to video games, violence is a common crutch because our brain easily understands "death == losing".  And when it comes to violence, zombies are a generally agreeable adversary.  So when I decided to make a game, I decided to make a zombie game.  It's also possible that its just because I had recently rolled off of playing Dead Rising.  In going back to unravel the timeline I remembered that I'd actually already posted about the topic of zombie gaming here in 2007.  That post was actually a product of me thinking about what sort of game I wanted to make.  And that exercise led me down the path of discovering modern designer board games.  Which it turns out has turned into quite a hobby for me.

Well, despite the crazy cascade of events that this project kicked off, you'll notice I never released a game during all those years.  In 2008 a version of XNA was released that supported the Zune device.  At the time I worked on the Zune team at Microsoft, and developing for our little music player seemed like a fun goal.  So I took what I had built before and adapted it for the small screen.  I got it pretty far along, but in the end I lost steam because there frankly wasn't any market to release it to.  It was fun as a toy for myself, but it would never be more than that.

A couple years later XNA added its fourth platform: Windows Phone.  In the years that had passed, the iPhone had become a great market for indie game developers.  And I had software that could run on a phone, more or less ready to go.  So I got it up and running as soon as the developer tools were available.  But I never quite pushed it out the door and on to the marketplace.  Why?  Well, full disclosure, I worked on Windows Phone.  And I was too busy busting my butt on that product to have any free cycles to work on some programming side project.  I code for a living; it's rare for me to get the capacity for additional coding.

It took me another year to find the time and finish the project.  I decided to rework the art style, switch to a female protagonist, streamline the touch controls, build the features you expect of a phone game (e.g. save/resume), and of course polish it all as much as possible.  The end product is something that I'm proud of, but it isn't anywhere near as grand as the ideas that initially got me started.  It's a simple little action game.  That's it.  I think it's a good little action game, and I haven't played anything quite like it on Windows Phone, but it is a little bit of style over substance.  I'm okay with that.  This is my first ever release as an independent developer.  Now that the hard part is out of the way I can hopefully tinker more and work one some of those deeper ideas.

MustEatBrains is now available for download for Windows Phone here.

Painting Zombies

I've been having a good time with Last Night on Earth, but poking around on BoardGameGeek I've always been a little jealous of those swank miniatures that some people have painted. I've also noticed that it's very possible to confuse the heroes while playing, so the painted figured do serve some functional value. So I decided to take up an arts and crafts project to paint the pieces from my game.

I've never painted anything like these soft plastic miniatures before, so I posted a query to the BGG crowd for tips. And I'm so glad I did, because those people were ridiculously helpful. Armed with pages of discussion on optimal painting techniques I headed to Michael's to get my materials.

Supply list:

• Apple Barrel 24 color acrylic paint set - $4.99
• Apple Barrel white, 2oz - $0.79
• Apple Barrel black, 20z - $0.79
• Delta Ceramcoat matte interior varnish - $2.29
• Loew-Cornell set of four sable brushes - $6.99
• Elmer's adhesive putty - $1.99
• Solo bathroom cups (package of 80) - $2.39

Total: $21.88 (including tax)

The first step was to wash the minis. Apparently they have some residual stuff on them from the mold, and if you don't wash them the paint will have problems sticking. So I washed all the minis and left them to dry for a couple hours.

The next step was to prime them. I started with the zombies, because you've gotta screw up pretty fierce to make zombies look bad. Two coats of black paint later, my zombies were looking like freaky little tar monsters.

Someone from the boards had the excellent suggestion of using sticky tack to affix the figures to something so I didn't have to actually touch the figure while painting. Thus the plastic cups. There are two colors of zombies, green and brown, and since I needed to preserve that in my final output I marked the cups with either a "G" or "B".

With all the prep complete it was time to break out the color. I wanted to preserve the original skin tone difference between the two sets of zombies, so I mixed two not-quite-human skin colors. After the skin was painted on zombies I was able to go nuts applying various clothing colors to them, making full use of the 24 colors in my palette. Lastly I finished off the bases, starting with a dark-green base (to match the game board) and then accenting them with either a light green or brown to bring back the two zombie team colors.

The final step was to apply a coat of matte varnish to make sure that the paint won't wear down as the figures get handled during gameplay.

You can see more photos of the final result here. Personally, I'm extremely happy with how they turned out. Now that I've cut my teeth on the zombies, the next step is to tackle the heroes. There's more detail to worry about with the heroes, but the core steps should be the same. I'll post photos when I'm done.

I Am Legend

I think zombie movies are most successful when they focus on what it means to be a survivor. Take our world, fuck it up, and then tell the story of the people living in that world. The world is some modification on ours, so we can relate to it; but the world is also changed, so it's a little more interesting.

Zombie survival stories are distinct from other post-apocalyptic stories in that the world is largely intact. All the stuff that mankind has built for itself is still there. The difference is that all the people are gone. The stories generally revolve around being lonely and coming to understand how much we depend on each other (both for infrastructure and for emotional support). But of course we live in a world that celebrates the resilience of the individual, so at the same time the stories are about how one resourceful person can survive untold odds and carve out a life. And that of course is one of the other themes: transcending just surviving to rebuilding civilization. These are the nuts and bolts that hold a zombie film together. The monsters, the action, the gore… these things are all secondary.

I Am Legend is a zombie movie (although you might not know it from the preview). Well, they're technically supposed to be vampires, but the vampires exist in great numbers and resulted from a worldwide infection. Whatever, they're nocturnal zombies. Anyway, the story is most successful when it concentrates on Robert Neville's (Will Smith's character) survival story. It's fascinating to watch the desolate city, his daily routine, and his bond with his dog. That stuff is all goodness. That's what a good zombie movie is made of: a great survival scenario.

I thought everything about the movie was quite successful until somewhere around the point where he makes contact with another survivor. It's not that adding someone else to the mix was inherently bad, it just happened so late in the film that it couldn't be fully developed. And the ending was just plain terrible. Why do we need so many stories of needless martyrdom? There's a place for sacrifice, but it has to have meaning. More often than not it feels like a cheap Hollywood cash-in for emotional filler. I personally like it when a storyteller has the balls to kill off a primary character when it fits the storyline. When characters survive everything unscathed it takes the bite out of their dangerous environment. But its another thing entirely to have a character take their own life in the face of danger when there were hundreds of valid alternatives. That's just cheap. It's not like the story of I Am Legend was lacking loss. Robert Neville loses everyone he knows, his whole family, and most poignantly his last companion, Sam. But Neville's death is pointless.

But I digress. The ending left some large questions about the evolution of the infected unanswered. Supposedly Robert Neville is some sort of brilliant scientist, yet he is completely oblivious to the obviously evolving intelligent behavior in the infected. In the theatrical ending, none of that was addressed. I didn't realize it at the time, but apparently that wasn't the original ending. In the original ending Robert Neville begins to see himself through the eyes of the infected. To them he is a murderous invader; he is the villain. The meaning of the title is different: he is a legend to them, as opposed to him being a legend to the remaining human survivors for creating a cure or some crap. The role reversal is a far more interesting premise, but apparently it was deemed unpalatable by the general movie-going public.

You know, I had the same problem with Wanted last week; an interesting story adapted to film and being changed for the worse. Sure, you have to change some things to a story when it crosses mediums. But don't change the freaking premise. In doing a little research on the original book I found out that it's been called out as a key inspiration behind such films as Night of the Living Dead and 28 Days Later. This is a story that was instrumental in shaping a whole genre, and had already inspired two direct film adaptations. What about this makes a filmmaker think they can make a last minute change to the ending and have the same impact?

Okay, I'm done ranting. Seriously, I really enjoyed the first two acts. It's just frustrating that the ending was a total cop out.

28 Weeks Later

I quite enjoyed 28 Days Later. It's a zombie movie that's not a zombie movie. In this world it's not about the dead rising, it' s about a virus that turns people into rage-filled assailants. This curates a different theme from the normal shambling hordes (even compared to those movies that do have fast zombies). The story is unveiled in an interesting way too, with the events of the movie happening well after the initial outbreak. You usually don't expect mystery from a zombie flick, but 28 Days Later delivers. Thoroughly enjoyed it, and highly recommend it to anyone with the stomach for the thrills and gore.

So I decided to check out its sequel: 28 Weeks Later. And I'm decided more conflicted about this one. With one hand it makes bold statements and presents interesting scenarios, while with the other hand it frustrates me to no end with people making stupid decisions.

This movie takes place after the Infected have died of starvation and Great Britain is being reclaimed. The United States military is securing an area of London, incinerating any possible remnants of the virus, and slowly reintroducing the citizens that had escaped the outbreak. It's an interesting setting with lots of possibilities. Well, as far as moviemaking goes there's only one possibility (another outbreak), but you know what I mean.

I don't take any offense to the core events that unfold after this, but the details of how they came to pass drive me nuts. I don't like movies where the world is saved by the actions of one child's, nor do I like movies where one child's actions damn the entire world (although the latter is far more likely). There are too many key moments in 28 Weeks Later where everything goes to crap because of something stupid. There's no guard looking over the potentially infected mother; the civilians are frantically relocated to an unsecure location; nobody tells the kids nor their eventual caretakers that they might be different. These events unfold for stupid reasons, when perfectly good reasons could have been given with just a few more minutes of footage. There are guards posted over the mother, but they get distracted or just plain overtaken; There's a proper heavily-drilled procedure for locking down the civilians but something else goes wrong and the protection is compromised. Blah, blah, blah - it's not hard to switch the blame here from stupid people to something more reasonable. Yes, I realize that there are people out there making dumb decision that just might destroy us all, but I don't think that makes a good movie. That just gets you cursing that the screen, rolling your eyes, and saying "well I wouldn't have done that."

Despite these faults, the movie does manage to make some bold statements. It's not easy to get a viewer to sympathize with the military opening up on innocents, but in this movie you totally do. There's a theme throughout the movie of various people making sacrifices for the greater good. The ballsy thing about the movie is that these actions cause the end of all civilization as we know it. In other words, compassion and heroism not only leads to failure, but repercussions on an epic scale. It is by no means your standard zombie movie message, and it'll keep your brain churning well after the movie is over.

I'm finding that the movies in this genre I like best are the ones with smart people making smart decisions in a difficult situation. That doesn't guarantee success for them. That's a good message: the right choices don't always lead to success. Saying that dumb choices lead to failure is a worthless message. I liked the original Dawn of the Dead because it was a story about people trying to carve out a life for themselves in a horrible situation. You watched what they did and though "hmmm, that's an interesting idea - I wonder how it'll work out." You cared for the characters because on some level you could relate to them.

Now I'm not saying that 28 Weeks Later is a bad movie. It's not. It's has an interested setting and premise, it's well executed, and it'll keep you thinking afterwards. But there were some serious lapses in storytelling that almost ruined the experience for me. Almost. I would still take another ride through this world again 28 Months Later or whatever, but this time no freaking kids, okay?

ZombieTown

In continuing my exploration into zombie tabletop gaming, I decided to give ZombieTown a spin. From the reviews I knew that this was one best played with more people, and thankfully I had a set of patient friends willing to fill out a six player session. Unfortunately I didn't anticipate the poorly written rules that turned the entire night into one big confusing… something. I want to say "tornado," but that implies fast, which it was not.

The primary objective of ZombieTown is territory control. The zombie hoard is spreading out from the cemetery, and you need to secure the homes of the town before they get overrun. At the end of the game, you get points for the number of homes you control. Unfortunately the rules for transferring control are confusing. It's not enough to be present in the home; you need to either erect a barricade or post a survivor in order to technically get credit. Survivors die quickly and barricades are easy for other players to bypass, so you'll definitely see control switching around a lot. Unfortunately the rules aren't so crisp about what happens in these scenarios. Intuitively I would think that control means you have a warm body in the house, and that barricades exist to keep it that way, but apparently it's not so simple.

Combat is resolved by drawing cards instead of rolling dice. In theory the card determines the range of your shot, but in a six player game there are so many zombie moves between your turns that combat is almost always a reaction of a close range attack. And even if you are being aggressive, you're better off firing your gun in close quarters because the odds are against a ranged hit. Thematically it's a little odd to have all these guns, but not be able to pick off zombies before they're on top of you.

The biggest flaw in ZombieTown is that there are no rules to keep defeated players in the game. If you die early in the evening you just have to sit and watch until the game is over. Given that the whole point of a board game is to give some friends something to do together, this is flat out unacceptable. Give the player a point penalty, bring them back as a zombie… just do anything to keep them involved. It's no fun to sit on your duff while everyone else keeps on playing.

If there's one trend I'd like to kill, it would be games where the rules are in a book when they should be on the cards. There are cards in ZombieTown that have nothing but a picture on them. You have to go look at the rules sheet to figure out how that card works. There are also rules about "event" class cards, but there's no indication on the cards themselves about what's an event and what is not. Sure, after you've played the game many times you won't need to fish around the rules to figure out what a card means, but until then it's a huge barrier to entry.

Some of the rules of ZombieTown seem a little half baked, with a great example being the barricades. These come in varying strength, with each given a number that determines how many zombies it can keep at bay. According to the official rules, you're supposed to keep that number hidden. I guess the goal is to prevent other players from strategizing about exactly how many zombies they need to divert to take down a house. The bizarre thing is that barricades can have traps as well, but if the strength number is hidden then the trap number is clearly visible. I'd think I was reading the rules wrong, but the cards are not designed in a way that would allow you to hide the trap number. This was the only rule that was so obviously impossible to follow that we immediately threw it out the window.

I'm truthfully trying to be reserved with the criticism I'm giving here, because I don't think I can say with confidence that I've actually played ZombieTown yet. I've played some interpretation of it, but given the outcome I'm sure that we got several parts wrong. It's not like Zombies!!!, which was so broken out of the box that I had to go get alternate rules before it was any fun. No, ZombieTown may be awesome as it was intended, but I still need to go online to figure out exactly how to play it. I'm not ready to write it off entirely, as that I really do like a lot of the ideas behind it, but I'm going to let this one sit until I can do some hardcore research.

Zombies!!!

After my first foray into zombie board gaming, of course I was excited to try out Zombies!!!, another entry into the genre. Unfortunately I walked away with a decidedly mixed experience.

In Zombies!!! the objective is to be the first player to make it to the helipad and escape the zombie infested city. The players don't have any direct conflict, but they are competing over the same resources. The city layout is completely random every play, with the helipad not being placed until late in the game. In the end it boils down to a race, except with mobs of zombies between you and the goal. And due to the randomized layout you don't actually know where the finish line is going to be. Which unfortunately means that you don't really have anything to do until the helipad comes into play.

To combat the lack of something to do in the beginning of the game, there is an alternate victory condition for killing 25 zombies. The problem is that killing zombies without dying is hard. Combat is resolved by rolling a die, where you can use ammo counters to increase your roll or a life counter to re-roll. Statistically you're going to need to cough some of those up every other fight, and you potentially could blow through all of them on one zombie. If you die your zombie kill count is halved, making it very difficult to amass the required 25 zombies (especially because all the other players will gang up on you if you get anywhere close). The only way you can refill your ammo and life counters is to venture inside buildings, which always come infested with a host of zombies. The risk vs. reward is dubious unless you've got some sort of edge to tilt the extreme randomness in your favor. But even if luck is on your side, combat fundamentally isn't very satisfying.

You get a hand of cards to add some strategy. In general the cards seem to lean more towards inhibiting other players than helping you out directly. Almost all of the weapon cards require that they be played in specific buildings, which results in them very rarely being played. So you end up filling your hand with smack-down cards in a hope to win by being the last man standing. There's a limit to the mayhem you can unleash, as that you are only allowed to play one card per round. So what really seems to happen is that everyone saves up some uber cards until the endgame, where chaos erupts on the mad dash to the helipad.

If there's one thing this game does well, it's creating the feeling that there are a crap-ton of zombies swarming the city. The moments after the helipad is placed when everyone is scheming about that last rush are truly great. I like the theme, I like a lot of the ideas, but this game seems broken without some significant gameplay changes (which are hard to make confidently without playing lots of games). Thankfully the issues are well documented and there's a good set of alternate rules available. But I'm a little shocked that the second edition release of this game hadn't fixed more issues out of the box.

My first night of Zombies!!! Was disappointing. The second time, with more players and alternate rules, was much more satisfying. I'll happily play it again, but it's clear that the game has some fundamental issues that'll prevent it from being a favorite.

Last Night On Earth

Let's face it, I'm a gamer geek. I stand today as a video game playing computer programmer… but that pales in comparison to the path I took to get to be who I am today. In my days I've done everything from D&D to CCGs. And the sad part is that I played most of them in my head. Fellow geeks are hard to come by when you're young, so I spent more time thinking about these games than actually playing them. I think that's what defines a real gamer: someone who can fuel themselves with the mere idea of a game.

Everyone is familiar with board games. Whether it's Monopoly or Scrabble or Sorry, chances are you've played a board game with your family on a rainy day. In fact, for many people, this is what comes to mind when they hear the word "game." It's a socially approved, wholesome activity. But of course as you leave the nest the opportunity for family gaming disappears. So it is that I probably haven't played anything other than the odd game of Scrabble in a decade.

That is, until now. After all this time I'm playing a new board game and I'm experiencing something fiercely nostalgic. This game isn't anything like the board games I played in my youth. But with the pieces and the dice it connects me with some of the same sensations - physical things that you don't get from a video game. For me board games have always been a family thing, and as such I had no idea this whole subculture of adult niche board gaming existed. Hell, there's even a DOOM board game.

But enough rambling. Let me actually talk about this specific zombie-themed romp (which I mentioned earlier) called Last Night On Earth.

The board is a small village with a town square and surrounding buildings. The pieces around the square are random for every game, so sometimes there will be a police station, sometimes a high school. There isn't really a lot of variety in the board arrangement, but it's enough to keep things fresh.

The players are divided into two teams: zombies and heroes. The heroes are selected from a set of zombie movie stereotypes like the sheriff or the high school flirt. All of them have different attributes and abilities, making them feel more like characters than just board game pieces. Over the course of the game the heroes can accumulate guns, baseball bats, and other equipment to help them defend themselves, but of course the zombies make up for that in numbers.

The gameplay involves a mixture of standard rules for moving, searching, and fighting, a hand of cards to spice things up, and dice rolling. The heroes are tasked with some overall objective. This could be to survive until sunset, or it could be to fight back and destroy the source of the zombie infestation. The zombies have one objective: eat the heroes.

So, is it any fun? Definitely. The thematic element is key here, as that it wouldn't be the same game if you weren't living out some zombie movie survival scenario. As you play the cards and roll the dice you find yourself doing storytelling as well. That's where the real fun is, but the mechanics are just deep enough to keep you thinking about strategies for your next game, even if randomness is a large element.

One of the differentiating aspects of this game is that it's asymmetric: the zombie team and hero team are not playing the same game. The heroes are concerned with searching buildings and keeping the zombies at range. The zombies play a slow strategic game of swarming and surprise. Depending on the scenario it's likely that one team has more of an edge than the other. But personally it doesn't really bother me because the thematic scenarios are engaging enough to keep the minute to minute gameplay interesting, even if the victory condition is sometimes skewed.

I've definitely enjoyed the time I've spent with Last Night On Earth so far. I look forward to playing with more people, trying out other scenarios, and getting the first expansion when it rolls around. But more than that this game has reminded me of a whole genre of gaming that I've neglected for years. I've always associated board gaming with "family time," which is good and all, but I'm excited to see that there's an industry making board games for quirky people just like me.

Zombie Board Game

I've been doing quite a bit of ranting about a potential zombie video game over the last couple months. And after all of that, I randomly came across a zombie board game at a store downtown. I had no idea such a niche existed. There are people out there that are so dedicated to their zombie apocalypse scenarios that they actually carry them out in real space with miniatures and everything. In other words, my kind of people.

Not only did I stumble across a zombie board game, I came across a whole genre. There were no fewer than three games to choose from, so I ran home to go do some research.

Zombies!!! (photo)
In this game the goal is to be the first survivor to make it to the helipad and escape. The twist is that the terrain is completely random. You actually build up the town as you go, with a new piece of it being added every turn. As the oldest of these three zombie games, Zombies!!! has six expansions to it, providing a large set of possible environments spanning everything from a mall to a military base. The most common criticism I've read is that the game often runs too long.

ZombieTown (photo)
A newer game by the same creators as Zombies!!!, ZombieTown exchanges the dynamic board for more varied objectives. The goal of this game is to survive for 10 days while barricading properties, finding survivors, amassing weapons, and killing zombies. The catch with this game is that it really requires four people in order to hit critical mass, and without a steady gaming group I can't really guarantee that. Plus a good deal of the tension in the game comes from the players turning on each other in the fight for territory, and I'm not sure if everyone would be into that. But certainly this one looks to fulfill a lot of the survival objectives that I've been talking about.

Last Night On Earth (photo)
Instead of pitting the players against each other as fellow survivors, Last Night On Earth divides players up into a zombie team and a hero team. The board is a fixed shape but is made up of random modular pieces. The scenarios range from killing a specific number of zombies, to escaping in the truck, to smoking out the cult leader. One of the key draws for me is that it is designed to work well with only two players.

In doing my research there were a couple of other names that popped up that I hadn't seen in the store:

• Mall of Horror
• Dead of Night
• Zombie Plague

I went back downtown and snatched up Last Night On Earth, because it seemed to be the most favorably reviewed and was recommended for two players. I've had the opportunity to play a couple games by now, and it definitely scratches some of that zombie gaming itch. Expect a proper review sometime soon.

More Zombie Gaming

When making my request for a specific type of zombie game, I had no idea that there was in fact an entire web site devoted to that genre. So I went through and tried a whole bunch of them to see if what I was looking for already existed. Short answer: no. But some of them were close.

Boxhead: The Rooms
This overhead arcade game pits you against and endless onslaught of boxy zombies. You run around collecting ammo, blowing up barrels, and unloading whatever you've got into the zombies slowly lumbering towards you. The weapons are fun (and upgrade over time), but the selection mechanism for them isn't as precise as I'd like considering how fast the action is. The pacing is nice, with it never being too boring nor becoming entirely impossible. It also keeps driving the action forward with a combo system that requires that you chain kills together to keep your score up. This game also has one of the key elements of my ideal zombie defense game: traps. My main complaint is that you're only worried about your own skin; there aren't any other survivors or a base to defend.

Boxhead: Halloween Special
A variant of the Boxhead game above, this one requires that you rescue survivors instead of just holding off zombies by yourself. Which sounds like what I'm looking for, except that it seems to have come at the price of the fun frantic pacing of Boxhead: The Rooms. It takes awhile before you really have to worry about the zombies at all. And fundamentally the slow helpless survivors are a pain to escort (they're definitely part of the problem, not the solution). They're not really interesting to guide either, as that you always pick them up and drop them off at the same locations.

Zombie Rampage
This is another arcade survival game, except this time you also have a base to defend. The base isn't more than a little bunker, but it makes holding off the zombies more interesting. Do you let them go for the base and stay out of harm's way? Or do you risk your own neck to bait them off the base? Similar to The Last Stand the zombies come in waves, and in-between waves you can repair the barricade and get new weapons. Unlike The Last Stand there are no other survivors to help you with base defense. However there are far more options for how to upgrade your character. You can increase your movement speed, decrease your reload time, and choose from a much wider selection of weapons (including a minigun and a laser cannon). The pace of Zombie Rampage is way too slow at first (a common problem, and truthfully one that S&I had as well), and the terrain isn't interesting in the slightest. Add some fellow survivors, a more interesting settlement to defend, and some reasons to risk venturing far from the base (supplies, other survivors, whatever), and you've got a contender here.

Zombie Horde 3
It's clear that this game has a lot more effort poured into it than the games above. There's a story with cut scenes, an intricate equipment interface, a mini-map, day/night cycles, and vehicles. But it's amazing how with so much time spent on development, not a lot of thought went into the game's pacing. Before you can advance the story you need to buy a new weapon to break into the police station. Raising that money involves wandering the city killing zombies for cash. Unfortunately the city is completely barren, and the zombie spawn rate is terribly slow. A couple minutes in and I was already bored. Combat was infrequent, and when it did happen it was easy. I finally got enough money to buy a shotgun and break down the barricade, but after a short story sequence I randomly got cornered by many more powerful zombies and quickly went from bored to dead. Game over.

I hate to be so harsh on this game, because the infrastructure is high quality. Equipping your character looked compelling, I like that you get a melee attack, and the nighttime flashlight effect is nice. But being technically competent does not make a fun game. The save system ensured that I didn't lose too much time, but after dying I really had no motivation to keep going.

Guess I'll have to keep looking...

Fido

So I may not have found my game about zombie defense, but there are no shortage of movies on the subject. I completely stumbled upon Fido by chance last night. Nothing about the title or cover caught my eye, and honestly I would have skipped it entirely if it hadn't been on Xbox Live Marketplace when I was too lazy to go to the video store down the block. The preview totally won me over.

Fido can kind of be described as Dawn of the Dead meets Pleasantville. Or maybe as an extension of the resolution of Shaun of the Dead. Or as a macabre Lassie. Anyway, the concept is brilliant and the movie sports some of the funniest lines I've heard in a long time. It's kind of a one-note, but that particular note doesn't wear out before the movie's over. If you find zombies in the least part amusing you should check out Fido.

But beware old people - they are not to be trusted.

Zombie Gaming

So I recently ran into this little Flash zombie game called The Last Stand. Zombie games are plentiful, but this one is interesting in its focus on zombie defense with light RPG elements. Each night you defend yourself against the zombie horde, and each day you decide how to split your time between repairing the barricade, searching for other survivors, and looking for weapons.

The dormant game designer in me really wants to take some of the ideas from that game to the next level. While I enjoyed The Last Stand, sitting behind a barricade madly clicking at impeding zombies does eventually get old. Fundamentally zombies just don't make very dynamic enemies. You've got to add something else to spice things up. Thankfully zombies are a common topic, so we can look at some high profile games and think about what they did to keep our lumbering friends entertaining.

Dead Rising is filled with traditional zombies. They mill about slowly and don't pose much of a threat if you're paying attention. The tension in the game comes from the sheer number of zombies, the scarcity of weapons, and other survivors who have turned homicidal. The zombies are more of an environmental hazard than a direct threat. Dead Rising has a survival mode, which on paper could be exactly what I'm looking for. Unfortunately success involves gathering up food, finding a good hiding place, and watching the clock count down before you need to make another food run. The zombies will never disturb you in your high perch, so really 90% of the gameplay is waiting. Success is only achieved by being completely risk averse, and I'm pretty sure Burnout taught us years ago that risk = fun.

Half-Life has a lot to teach us here, both from a perspective of zombie variety and entertaining defensive gameplay. The basic zombies here are easily manageable, but their agents, the jumping screeching headcrabs, demand that you keep on your toes. Your foolproof tactic of waiting it out from high ground could work against the basic slow zombies, but not when there are headcrabs crawling out of the ducts and fast zombies crawling up the pipes. Half-life has also demonstrated that defending your turf can be extremely engaging (the turrets in Nova Prospekt, the standoff in the Antlion cave, and the epic Strider assault from Episode Two). It's a shame Gordon's never had to hold it out against a zombie onslaught (the closest would be the elevator sequence from Episode One, which isn't as epic as what I'm thinking of).

And of course we can't forget the "fungal zombie" that is Halo's Flood. These guys leap more than they shamble, and have maintained the ability to use firearms. Paired with the humanoid zombies are swarmy parasites that require you keep an eye on as-yet-uninfected corpses. In addition to all this, Halo 3 added Flood that can change form to prevent you from playing too defensively. The strategy of fighting the Flood never gets as layered as what you get from some of Half-life's set pieces, but the moment to moment combat is always top notch.

As we can see, two of the greatest shooters of all time have stooped to using the zombie cliché. They've mixed things up as much as possible, but you're still basically just shotgunning down shambling masses on your way from point A to point B. And don't get me wrong, that's still fun. But would a more strategic zombie game work with survivors to rescue, barricades to maintain, traps to set up, and resources to secure? Well, you tell me, but I sure think so.