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AUGUST 13 . 07
Kill the Zombies (Guards? Prisoners?) .. PLAY ME!
The objective here seems to be to shoot some zombies, although I have to admit that the only thing cluing me in to the fact that they were supposed to be zombies was that the word “zombie” appeared in the url. At first I assumed they were guards, since I was in some kind of doorless, windowless prison cell. I slowly began to realize that they were unarmed, and really not making any kind of threatening movement toward me, so I decided that they were probably just fellow prisoners. Then I stopped shooting them, because it felt kind of wrong, and walked around trying to figure out if there was something else I was supposed to be doing instead.
There wasn’t. The guards/zombies/unarmed hostages pop up occasionally behind a couple of cardboard boxes, and disappear if you shoot them. Granted, they also disappear if you don’t shoot them, which makes the challenge of the game to kill them before they just kind of leave on their own. The control scheme utilizes the mouse and wasd keys in PC-first-person-shooter fashion, so if you play a lot of Half-Life 2 you’ll have a head start. Which only means you’ll reach the inevitable conclusion that there’s no actual game here that much faster.
Someone did work really hard on the background, though – the afternoon sun casts long shadows across the earthy tones of the room’s floor (despite the fact that, again, the cell doesn’t have any windows). And there’s a framerate counter, which probably (hopefully) means that this whole thing is some kind of flash development tool, and not anyone’s idea of a finished game. (For the record, my framerate did creep up now and again to the desired level of 28 - 32, but this did not make my experience feel any more “optimal.”)
So yeah, I don’t know what this is all about. After a few kills the enemies stopped appearing behind their boxes, leaving me alone to think about what I’d done. Hmm. All I know is that if our captors wanted their prisoners to play nicely in the autumn sunlight of their windowless prison cell, they shouldn’t have given one of us a gun.
-Matt
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