About zombie games and FPSs. A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine and I, as fans of FPSs (we're just so looking for for Crysis and Quake Wars), we were talking about how certain genres were rarely exploited in the video game industry. Underused. Not necessarily as a whole, but left out of a very specific kind of games which would obviously suit them perfectly.
We were sitting fat, in front of the telly, going through Dawn of the Dead. The latest one with those people homing full throttle on the nearest piece of walking fresh meat. Zombies. Now they have to run. I have a kind of mixed feeling about that. It's scary as hell in a way, but I also like Romero's explanation about how the bodies keep rotting over, and as such, they're just getting weaker and weaker. Well, anyway...
After digesting the final clips from that nice and dismaying flick, while there were those NIN and, I think, Disturbed scores playing in the background, I turned towards my pal, and told him how I'd love to play a FPS full of zombies, really. In a supermarket, if possible. Or a castle. Or a ferry. Some place. I don't know. A bank? A lab!
Needless to say, we couldn't agree more!
I had Stubbs and Dead Rising in mind, when it comes to recent zombie centric games, but as I said previously, they're not First Person Shooters. Serious FPSs above all.
The question was, where are those games? While I had in mind the ol' sort of zombies from Quake, we could only think about the grunts of Doom 3. Or eventually, a few happy targets in Half-Life 2.
A miserable constation. They're always minor mobs.
City of the Dead? Talk about a game that was already dead before being given birth.
It made us remember a nice guy we knew some time ago, who joined a team to devlop a zombie mod for Unreal Tournament, called Zombie Hunter.
I can't say the mod's design was full of good ideas back then, and the mod's probably dead now, but it was good to see people agreeing on the same unfortunate conclusions, and it was also already clear that there was room for more, and potential to find an audience.
Now, years later, that incredible void seems as dark and empty as ever.
On the other hand, the video game industry is crawling with futuristic or WWII shooters.
So unless we've been linving under rocks for all these years and missed a huge FPS hit, we just couldn't find any proper zombies games. A genre that is largely underexploited.
I'm not asking for a tame exploitation of a style about how zombies are the first meat targets before being replaced by cacodemons and whatever other mutants, like copycats of uncle Nemesis.
I'm talking about a FPS where it's all about zombies. Plain and simple.
The only genuine vanilla game I played to ever match the feeling of being cornered, and fighting against hordes of creatures coming in by every single fraking hole, was... AVP.
On the same hand, the only mod I can remember which provided such emotions was Invasion, if I recall the name correctly, for Unreal Tournament (can't remember the edition, unfortunately).
The principle was relatively simple: we were thrown into a deathmatch map, with the simple mission of having at least one last man standing until all the flooding waves of respawning demons picked from the solo game would be anihilated.
We were trying to cover every possible angle, moving in a hurry from one position to another when one of our mates was down. It was a frenzy! I personally never thought mowing down entire packs of mindless swarming monsters guided by a stupid AI would be such a source of fun.