Think About It: Braaaaaaains...
Excuse me if this sounds forward, but I would like to eat your brains.
Sorry, I'm just getting into character. I never really was a big fan of zombies, but something sort of clicked in me a few years ago that has made me much more appreciative of the genre. I think it started when I saw the movie 28 Days Later, which was unlike any zombie movie I had ever seen in that it was... well... good. It was well-written, smart and the zombies were fast and brutal instead of the lumbering corpses that usually populated the genre. I was not yet aware that the lumbeing corpses were part of what made zombies a unique horror creation. Y'see, a single zombie isn't really much of a threat. Any moron should be able to outrun them and anybody with a shovel and normal upper body strength should be able to kill one. What makes zombies scary is the slow, relentless march, how they overwhelm you with numbers and consume you, making you one of their own. Kinda like Scientologists.
My appreciation spread with the film Shaun of the Dead, which was a comedic take on a zombie invasion of England. A funny, funny movie that still had a few genuinely scary moments. One of my personal favorites. Then I found some cool zombie comics, like Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, and interesting books like Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide. And I started dating a girl who is, frankly, a zombie fanatic, and helped teach me why some of those old zombie flicks I dismissed were so cool.
And now I've become a zombie. Temporarily, at least. Just until someone revives me. I've started playing Urban Dead.
Urban Dead, as you may have surmised from the admission that I'm "playing" it, is a game. A computer game, although not the sort that immediately springs to mind these days, with intense graphics, buckets of blood and controllers that have more buttons than the original Starship Enterprise. No, Urban Dead is what you call a "Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game" or, to simplify things, an MMORPG. Basically, this means it's a game you play over the internet where players from all over the world can interact with each other -- games like Everquest, World of Warcraft and, my personal favorite, City of Heroes, are all good examples of these games, which have been known to be addictive to the point of ruining marriages and causing death from muscle atrophy. They're fun for the whole family.
But Urban Dead is different from all of these games. While Everquest sends you into a fantasy world and City of Heroes allows to to reinvent yourself as a superhero (or supervillain if you have the expansion), Urban Dead thrusts you headfirst into a city that has been overrun with zombies. It's also free to play, another thing that sets it apart from most MMORPGs. You can take the role of a citizen trapped in the city during the apocalypse, a military officer coming into town to combat the menace or a scientist sent in to study the infestation, with several classes in each category. That's not all, though. When your character dies in the game, you become a zombie yourself. Well... your character does, not you personally. I doubt it would be nearly as popular if the players started randomly turning into zombies in front of their screen.
As a zombie, you've still got your options. You can wander around and attack other players, thus infecting them as well, or you can go to any of several designated "revive points" throughout the city and wait for a player taking the role of a scientist to cure you of your zombie infection, turning you back to your original character. At which point, the whole thing starts all over again.
As with most MMORPGs, there's no real "end" to the game, no way to "win." You just keep playing, keep having adventures, keep having fun. Some players unite and form groups with a specific purpose -- a "Red Cross" group is dedicated to creating antidotes and curing zombies, for instance. Others decide to attack other still-human characters, becoming "player killers" or "PKs" or "jerkweeds," depending on who you ask. Yet another group has taken the role of bounty hunters, tracking down the player killers and laying the smackdown on them. These players are known as "sir."
The setup of the game is text-based rather than graphics-based, not unlike the old roleplaying games you'd play on your old Atari computers. (For you younger readers, an "Atari" was an old computer that mommies and daddies used to use before they invented "Nintendo.") Rather than seeing the game on your screen, you get a rudimentary map of the immediate area and a box that says something like "You are standing outside of the Elm Street Police Station. The building has been heavily barricaded, you see no way to enter. There are two zombies here." Then you get a prompt asking your next move -- which can be a variety of things including attacking the zombies, trying to enter the station, searching the area for any useable materials (ammunition, first aid kits and so on) or leaving to another square on the map.
For those of you who don't want to get into an RPG because you're afraid of it taking up too much time, this is definitely the game for you. You start out with 50 "action points," with each activity (searching, attacking, moving, baking a soufflé) costing one point. Action points are regenerated slowly, at a rate of one every half hour, so it takes over a full day to regenerate all your activity points. It's pretty much impossible for the game to take over your life. In fact, I've been playing for a week now and I've probably spent more time writing this column than I have actually playing the game.
So while it's a game you can play in just a few minutes each day, it's still a lot of fun and still requires a lot of forethought, because your character doesn't disappear from the game when you log off. When you run out of action points, the character "falls asleep" wherever he is. If you leave, he just stands there until you come back, and the whole time you're vulnerable to attack. If you don't leave yourself enough action points to get to a safe location before you sign off, you are, as they say in French, "le screwed." The first time that ever happened to me, I came back to the game later that day to find my character -- a military medic who'd been going around healing people and looking for first aid kits -- had been turned into a zombie in my absense. Some guys enjoy playing zombies, which I understand, but for me it "le sucked." So I ambled to a revive point and gave the universal signal of a zombie that wants to be turned back into a human being: I said, "Mrg?"
So yeah, I've got a new pasttime, something that's a lot of fun for a few minutes a day, and no I'm not going to make the obvious joke there. It's fun, it's simple, and it's worth looking into, if you're up for some zombie action.
Be sure to indicate if you prefer your brains baked or broiled.
Blake M. Petit is going to bake his into a Shepperd's Pie. Contact him with comments, suggestions or more brain recipes at BlakePT@cox.net, visit the Evertime Realms homepage or check out the LiveJournal,
blakemp.
Sorry, I'm just getting into character. I never really was a big fan of zombies, but something sort of clicked in me a few years ago that has made me much more appreciative of the genre. I think it started when I saw the movie 28 Days Later, which was unlike any zombie movie I had ever seen in that it was... well... good. It was well-written, smart and the zombies were fast and brutal instead of the lumbering corpses that usually populated the genre. I was not yet aware that the lumbeing corpses were part of what made zombies a unique horror creation. Y'see, a single zombie isn't really much of a threat. Any moron should be able to outrun them and anybody with a shovel and normal upper body strength should be able to kill one. What makes zombies scary is the slow, relentless march, how they overwhelm you with numbers and consume you, making you one of their own. Kinda like Scientologists.
My appreciation spread with the film Shaun of the Dead, which was a comedic take on a zombie invasion of England. A funny, funny movie that still had a few genuinely scary moments. One of my personal favorites. Then I found some cool zombie comics, like Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, and interesting books like Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide. And I started dating a girl who is, frankly, a zombie fanatic, and helped teach me why some of those old zombie flicks I dismissed were so cool.
And now I've become a zombie. Temporarily, at least. Just until someone revives me. I've started playing Urban Dead.
Urban Dead, as you may have surmised from the admission that I'm "playing" it, is a game. A computer game, although not the sort that immediately springs to mind these days, with intense graphics, buckets of blood and controllers that have more buttons than the original Starship Enterprise. No, Urban Dead is what you call a "Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game" or, to simplify things, an MMORPG. Basically, this means it's a game you play over the internet where players from all over the world can interact with each other -- games like Everquest, World of Warcraft and, my personal favorite, City of Heroes, are all good examples of these games, which have been known to be addictive to the point of ruining marriages and causing death from muscle atrophy. They're fun for the whole family.
But Urban Dead is different from all of these games. While Everquest sends you into a fantasy world and City of Heroes allows to to reinvent yourself as a superhero (or supervillain if you have the expansion), Urban Dead thrusts you headfirst into a city that has been overrun with zombies. It's also free to play, another thing that sets it apart from most MMORPGs. You can take the role of a citizen trapped in the city during the apocalypse, a military officer coming into town to combat the menace or a scientist sent in to study the infestation, with several classes in each category. That's not all, though. When your character dies in the game, you become a zombie yourself. Well... your character does, not you personally. I doubt it would be nearly as popular if the players started randomly turning into zombies in front of their screen.
As a zombie, you've still got your options. You can wander around and attack other players, thus infecting them as well, or you can go to any of several designated "revive points" throughout the city and wait for a player taking the role of a scientist to cure you of your zombie infection, turning you back to your original character. At which point, the whole thing starts all over again.
As with most MMORPGs, there's no real "end" to the game, no way to "win." You just keep playing, keep having adventures, keep having fun. Some players unite and form groups with a specific purpose -- a "Red Cross" group is dedicated to creating antidotes and curing zombies, for instance. Others decide to attack other still-human characters, becoming "player killers" or "PKs" or "jerkweeds," depending on who you ask. Yet another group has taken the role of bounty hunters, tracking down the player killers and laying the smackdown on them. These players are known as "sir."
The setup of the game is text-based rather than graphics-based, not unlike the old roleplaying games you'd play on your old Atari computers. (For you younger readers, an "Atari" was an old computer that mommies and daddies used to use before they invented "Nintendo.") Rather than seeing the game on your screen, you get a rudimentary map of the immediate area and a box that says something like "You are standing outside of the Elm Street Police Station. The building has been heavily barricaded, you see no way to enter. There are two zombies here." Then you get a prompt asking your next move -- which can be a variety of things including attacking the zombies, trying to enter the station, searching the area for any useable materials (ammunition, first aid kits and so on) or leaving to another square on the map.
For those of you who don't want to get into an RPG because you're afraid of it taking up too much time, this is definitely the game for you. You start out with 50 "action points," with each activity (searching, attacking, moving, baking a soufflé) costing one point. Action points are regenerated slowly, at a rate of one every half hour, so it takes over a full day to regenerate all your activity points. It's pretty much impossible for the game to take over your life. In fact, I've been playing for a week now and I've probably spent more time writing this column than I have actually playing the game.
So while it's a game you can play in just a few minutes each day, it's still a lot of fun and still requires a lot of forethought, because your character doesn't disappear from the game when you log off. When you run out of action points, the character "falls asleep" wherever he is. If you leave, he just stands there until you come back, and the whole time you're vulnerable to attack. If you don't leave yourself enough action points to get to a safe location before you sign off, you are, as they say in French, "le screwed." The first time that ever happened to me, I came back to the game later that day to find my character -- a military medic who'd been going around healing people and looking for first aid kits -- had been turned into a zombie in my absense. Some guys enjoy playing zombies, which I understand, but for me it "le sucked." So I ambled to a revive point and gave the universal signal of a zombie that wants to be turned back into a human being: I said, "Mrg?"
So yeah, I've got a new pasttime, something that's a lot of fun for a few minutes a day, and no I'm not going to make the obvious joke there. It's fun, it's simple, and it's worth looking into, if you're up for some zombie action.
Be sure to indicate if you prefer your brains baked or broiled.
Blake M. Petit is going to bake his into a Shepperd's Pie. Contact him with comments, suggestions or more brain recipes at BlakePT@cox.net, visit the Evertime Realms homepage or check out the LiveJournal,
blakemp.