Game Play: Alive 4 Ever (iPhone) Review

Setting aside the rather obvious marketing grab from the completely unrelated game from Valve, Alive 4 Ever offers a pretty decent set of zombie shooting entertainment. It's a top down, dual "stick", shooter and the controls are about as responsive as I've seen from an iPhone game. So far I've only seen the one room, but the variety of subgoals, like rescuing people and picking up suitcases full of gold/vaccines/yummy things, is well done.

My only complaint is that the difficulty ramps up pretty quickly, more quickly it seems than you can upgrade to match the new kinds of zombies, slow ass survivors, and a rapidly depleted ammo supply. The idea may be that you're supposed to replay older levels to get XP and then boost to move on.

There's also local coop available, but I haven't tried to convince The Girl to play with me just yet.

So largely a thumbs up, especially if the genre is your cup of tea.

The Math Of A Zombie Attack

“An outbreak of zombies is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead,” the authors wrote. “It is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”

Having spent a fair amount of time mixing science with beer in the wee hours while trying to finish a thesis, I’m guessing that at some point, a graduate student who had spent far too many hours tweaking a mathematical model of infectious disease in the basement of a Canadian university said something like this: “What would happen if we made it so they could come back to life?”

-- Mathematical Model for Surviving a Zombie Attack

For Sunday: Teach Your Kids About Zombies

Because it is never too early for them to learn. One of these kids totally kicks ass, I would completely trust him to have my back

Or at least be a brief distraction....



Via Chicagoist.

Game Play: Burn Zombie Burn! (PSN)

I actually thought this would be the weekend I'd properly bust into Resident Evil 5, but instead I got hooked on this PlayStation Network title, Burn Zombie Burn!. Dual stick shooters are becoming practically a genre on itself, but BZB has a few tricks which make it at least slightly inventive.

The basic strategy goes like this: zombies are afraid of fire, unless they're already burning. Burning zombies increase your multiplier, but they're also not afraid of you anymore - so the more burning zombies, the more of a fiery mob with which you need to contend. It's a bit like someone got just a bit of The Last Guy stuck in my peanut butter. And by peanut butter, I mean my boomstick.

The game itself it a cartoony parody-pastiche of zombie flicks, from a big chinned hero named Bruce to settings ranging from the shack in the woods to the evil lab where all of this probably got started. In general the game is pretty damn fun and highly addictive, my only real complaint is that some of the weapons are actually pretty useless for most situations. Your standard gun is actually pretty effective and there are times when you'll curse the game because you just ran into the somewhat-unique-and-entertaining-but-leaves-you-without-a-way-to-kill-zombies Brain Gun.

Oh, and the constant left stick/left shoulder push had a tendency to pull my tendons out of whack. Ouch. Pain aside, though, safely recommend for the $10 entry fee.

Pride And Prejudice And Zombies

First heard of this on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me during the "Stump the Listener" portion:

Few challenges, however, are as unusual as the latest foe facing Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice – a plague of the undead sent to reduce the picturesque villages of Longbourn and Meryton to smouldering ruins.

Hollywood studios are bidding to turn a radical reworking of Austen’s most popular book, now called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a parody to be published in April, into a blockbuster movie.

Desperate for new ideas, studio chiefs hope “P&P&Z” will mark the bloody birth of a feral offspring of classic British literature: “monster-lit”.

-- Jane Austen's Bennet girls go zombie slaying

That it may be made into a movie, however, is new to me. Oh Darcy, I may have just swooned.

Zombie Yule Tide 2008 Meme

Corvus doesn't have a recent version of this meme up, I caught it off Facebook - but the rules are set as thus:

You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:

1. one weapon.
2. one song blasting on the speakers.
3. one famous person to fight alongside you

My picks:

Weapon (First Choice): Bayoneted Shotgun
At one point they were against the Geneva Convention, but they exist nonetheless. I simply can't resist the possibility of bringing a shotgun to a zombie fight, but also realize that ammo will be finite. Hence, the pointy thing at the end.

That said, I acknowledge that this might constitute two weapons instead of one, so:

Weapon (Second Choice): Shamshir
A shamshir is a type of sword, similar to a scimitar but not as heavy. It's light, so it won't wear you out as you swing, it's biased towards slashing and not stabbing - which is how you should confront a zombie anyway, and it's one handed so you'll have a free hand to grab impromptu weapons, open doors, press buttons or hold that damsel in distress you find along the way.

Song: Calling Out Remix By Lyrics Born
It's an upbeat, slightly egotistic, anthem with a backbeat you can fight to ... and it doesn't sound so bad on infinite repeat either.

Celebrity Guest: Bruce Campbell
Look, I know it's cliche and I know old Bruce is an actor and hasn't actually defeated an army of darkness before, but c'mon - it's Bruce freaking Campbell and zombies. That's like peanut butter and chocolate for the most part. Plus, I would assume Bruce would be irrationally optimistic in such situations, which is the kind of attitude I would want around.

A co-worker offered up Simon Pegg as a reasonable alternative, should Bruce be otherwise occupied by 100 other requests.

Apokalyptica 2008: Tales of the Zombie War

Tales of the Zombie War is an interesting mashup between a zombie genre fansite (a la but not limited to World War Z) and short fiction contest. The next round of fiction is due March 1st and offers a $50 prize.

That's actually pretty decent purse for a shortfic setup that doesn't try to require any door fee or whatnot. And the rules are clearly trying to cast the lot above normal fanfic. For a site unaffiliated with Max Brooks, it's a damn nice thing to do.