“It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be sufficient…”

Bum Lee is a is an animation artist and freelance illustrator, who, in 2004, developed this cool little Flash zombie shoot-em-up game. In the screen shot above, you are the weedy silhouette on the left, and, on the right, is the shambling hordes of animated walking corpses. You need to take your trusty six shooter and mow them down before they reach you.

The Meat

Like all fun games, the interface absurdly easy to use and the pay-off is immediate; just click away to your hearts content while the body count rises and the levels rack up.

The animation is also very well done, body parts fly off your enemies in reaction to your shots, and the scripted sequences (the death scenes) are fantastic.

The Bones

Allthough the game has some loose references to H.P. Lovecraft’s novels (Specifically the fantastic - Herbert West: Reanimator) , and provides links to his various fiction works - it would have been nice to have that feature more prominently in the game.

The Taste

De-Animator is a minimalistic 2d zombie shoot-em-up game, it’s very fun, addictive and a good time-waster.

You can get to the game by clicking on the screen shot at the top of this post - try it out!

Pro-Tip : Use the undocumented shift-key to switch weapons, also, shoot at their feet.

Stubbs the Zombie is a fantastic video game which was released by Wideload Games in 2005 for both the Xbox and the PC. The avatar and anti-hero is Stubbs the zombie; initially a traveling salesman, Stubbs was brutally murdered by his girlfriends father after their union was unexpectedly blessed with fruit. Now, 26 years later, Stubbs has risen from the grave driven by a thirst for revenge and brains.

The Meat

Stubbs digs himself up in the city of Punchbowl during its opening ceremony in 1959. Punchbowl is a fictional retro-futuristic 1950’s city with lazers, hovercars, robots and a hell of a lot of civilians, police and military - ripe for the biting.

Whenever you kill somone with Stubbs they has a chance of returning to life as a zombie under your control. These zombies, when not specifically given an order, will lurch around and bite any humans they encounter - turning them into zombies as well; like some sort of cannibalistic pyramid scheme.

In order to facilitate the creation of your own zombie horde, Stubbs has many inventive and fun options to choose from when killing the humans who get in his way. Stubbs can: Tear off people’s arms and beat them to death with them, Fart so corrosively that nearby enemies are stunned with sheer horror, throw organs pulled from his own ribcage that explode with damp furiousity, possess enemies with his left hand that detaches and runs around by itself and even bowl his own head at the enemy.

Stubbs weapons are slowly revealed to him throughout the story where they are necessary to get him out of more and more sticky situations and game itself is filled with lots of dark humor which makes it very entertaining and funny.

The Bones

Because Stubbs is a zombie he is unable to speak, except for saying the word “Brains”. This is wholly sensible behavior for a zombie and is to be expected, but, it makes it very difficult to understand the reason Stubbs does things when he literally doesn’t tell you. Wideload games did their best and Stubbs is a very emotive character but every so often Stubbs does something that is not well explained that left me lost and trying to understand why I was in this particular situation and what i needed to do to get out of it.

The Taste

Luckily, if you missed this gem of a game the first time - it is available on Steam and the Xbox Live Marketplace! For approximatly $20 you get all the brain eating, organ throwing, head bowling action you can possibly handle.

Get and play this game, if you haven’t already. Its offbeat humor, engaging retro-futuristic environments and the fact that you actually play a zombie controlling hordes of undead makes this game a must-play if you are any sort of a zombie fan.

Playable only on the 360, Dead Rising has you piloting Frank West, a photojournalist (he’s covered wars you know) who jumps from a helicopter onto a zombie infested shopping mall to take some happy snaps of the denizens within.

Seriously.

The helicopter pilot is coming back for Frank in three days. During this time Frank can spend his time taking pictures, getting eaten by zombies, telling people he is a photojournalist and ferrying people back and fourth from relative safety. Generally all this occurs at the same time and because of the save system and terrible survivor AI this can make even a short trip out of home base a frustrating, television screaming, controller throwing, and nail biting experience.

Fun though.

The Meat

Killing Stuff

As it turns out, the entire zombiefied population of the fictional town of Willamette have decided to go shopping with Frank. To offset ceaseless masses of zombies milling around between objectives, Frank can hit the turned former-citizens with damn near everything that is not nailed down to the floor. Unfortunately, most of these things are completely useless (See: Nerf Weapons, Water Pistols, Pizza Boxes, etc.) and those weapons which are more effective (See: Samurai swords, Axes, Chainsaws, Lawnmowers, etc.) have a duration of half-a-dozen hits.

It’s a sad moment when the chainsaw you had to fight a god-damn sadomasochistic clown for falls apart in mid swing, leaving you stranded in the middle of an angry zombie horde with nothing but your fists and a prayer.

The ability to smack zombies with signs, bits of the roof and other zombies is incredibly fun to begin with, but quickly gets old. As Zombies spawn constantly from anywhere outside your field of view you are left with a feeling of futility which results in you just pushing past the zombies at later levels when the killing thrill subsides.

Of Sandboxes and Persistence

Dead Rising is a so-called “sandbox” game. Your avatar, Frank, can decide what to do with the hours he spends waiting for this elusive helicopter lift. If you want to run around and hit zombies with televisions until your ride arrives - you can! Or, you’re supposed to be able to.

You see, Dead Rising is built upon the premise that there is so much to do, you need to play through the game a bunch of times in order to see it all, get all the endings, reach all the achievements and unlock all the goodies. This is not a new game mechanic, however, in order to encourage this your character (who levels up during the game allowing you to be eaten more and sometimes pile-drive zombies into the ground) levels, items and clothing rolls over to the next time you play.

Yes, your clothing rolls over from game to game. Dead Rising lets you customize your Avatar, Frank, with a variety of fancy looking Headgear, Torsogear and Footgear. Different shops in the mall contain different clothing and these clothing items persist even in mission cut-scenes. I think this is a really cool feature and although Avatar customization is by no means a new feature in games nowadays, wading though hordes of zombies while you search the mall for the “perfect’ pair of sunglasses for your character has a certain charm I enjoyed

Unfortunately Dead Rising’s system of level rollover also means that Core missions (Missions which reveal portions of the story behind the infection) are almost impossible at a low level. Some enemies Frank needs to beat can kill you instantly at low level - meaning that you have the option to either wander around the mall, hitting zombies for experience, or constantly restarting the game, rolling over your character, until you can pass the missions. Needless to say, I found this incredibly irritating and only started to really enjoy the game when I was about level 25 (50 is the max level Frank can be).

The Why

You reveal portion of the games back story by completing core missions in the alloted time. Sometimes, if you do not complete a mission fast enough, you will not have enough time to get to your next objective and will loose all your progress up to that point. If you have saved poorly, this may mean that you need to start the game again.

Regardless the story is enjoyable, I found myself driven to find out more about this outbreak throughout the game, especially in the second half “Overtime”.

The game also provides a series of endings, depending on how well you play, a nice touch and a testimony to just how many different way you can be eaten by zombies.

Story Modes

Once you complete the normal game with the “good” ending you unlock Infinity Mode. This simply means you constantly loose health and you have to kill other survivors in the mall for food. The aim is to survive in the mall for as long as you can. If you survive for 7 days you get a laser sword! woo!

Wait… Thats 14 hours of continuous play….

With no save..

The Bones

Saving

I could go on about the saving for this game, but i’m not going to. I’m sure by now you have picked up the gut wrenching hate I have for the so-called saving procedure, I’ll just sum it up.

The saving feature is evidence that this game hates you.

The Janitor

Otis the Janitor is, quite frankly, the most irritating game dynamic I have ever encountered. He reminds me of Clippy from Microsoft Word, before right-minded people made him illegal.

Otis will call you on your Walkie-Talkie/Mobile-Phone device and offer you helpful-hints about where you are in the mall, what you can do there and the location of survivors he can see on the security monitors.

If you pick up his call (which is announced with a piercing ring) you are unable to fight anymore until Otis finishes rambling on about whatever useless bit of information he thinks YOU need to know. If you get attacked, or hang up on Otis out of frustration, he will call back, continuously, forever, until you listen to his entire spiel.

He will even tell you that “you were rude for hanging up on him”.

The one redeeming feature of this game, regarding Otis the janitor, is that he is the very first survivor you get to kill in Infinity Mode. I must have started that mode half-a-dozen times, cackling like mad as I beat Otis senseless with a handy Gas canister.

AI

The Artificial Intelligence for the Survivors for this game is bad, real bad, coupled with your indirect control of their actions may stop you from playing this game. You can tell all survivors to go to a place specified by you, or tell them to follow you, thats it.

If you do tell them to run to a distant wall, you need to be prepared to run around them and clear any: Flower pots, Zombies, Anything, Invisible walls, Other survivors, visible walls, on their way.

It really feels like the game is somehow punishing you for trying to save other people.

The Taste

Dead Rising has its problems and they are big ones. So big it makes me wonder if the people who made the game actually played the game. It also makes me wonder if, Capcom, developed this game to give me a rage induced heart attack.

Because no matter how much I yelled at the screen, I would always pick that controller back up to play again.

I don’t believe that you should purchase a XBox 360 just for this zombie extravaganza, but if you already have one, you could do a lot worse.

And hey, you can kill zombies with a lawn mower.