Great Games            Site MenuWorth Checking Out                  LinksLink to us
Here are some button images you can download. We have buttons for
fans, and buttons for developers that have been featured on the site.
ArchivesRecent Visitors |
 While many games have edgy titles with clever word-play, or fancy buzz words, ‘Endless Zombie Rampage‘ (by Sean McGee) is so much more than a mere title. It’s a complete description of all the game has to offer. Endless zombies…. You will have to forgive my cynicism, you see… after playing ‘The Last Stand‘ my hopes for the defense game genre were sparked after having been extinguished for years. Then I played this pile of mediocrity and it pissed on the embers of my newfound hope, leaving only a smelly column of urine steam. First, lets explore the graphics in this game. They are okay, but there is NO variety here. There is a base that’s got no detail… the hero who’s legs only move front to back no matter what direction you walk, and the zombies, which are all the exact same sprite with some color swaps. Like ‘edgy’ games of the 90’s, this game relies on blood to make it ‘cool’. Well, if blood is enough to make a game good in your opinion, this game deserves to be published on every major console, because it has plenty of that. Unfortunately… if blood is the only reason you buy a game… you can’t play it anyway because you are 12 years old and the ESRB rating would be too high for you. The sound on this game is on par with any generic defense game… it has gun shots… blood splatters and one background loop. The loop is actually decent… a nice moody ambient deal that would work well with a better game. At it’s core, this game is just a generic bit of crap whipped off in no time at all to get some money from CrazyMonkeyGames, one of many sites (*cough*ArmorGames*cough*) that is more concerned with branding a large quantity of games rather than being associated with quality. Not that there is anything wrong with that… if it makes money, it’s hard to fault them for it. I just can’t help to think back to the old Atari days when publishers used to shell out for any crappy old game too. The strategy almost killed an entire market. In this game, you run around a big patch of dirt and aim with whatever gun you happen to have, at generic zombies. They take a lot of ammo to put down, and the reload times are just painful. The mechanics keep you frustrated rather than satisfied with shooting the crap out of whatever you can. The zombies are all the same, barring some variances in their speed and health. AI-wise… there is nothing special about any color of zombie. When you survive a day, you are rewarded with exp points that you can cash in for weapon upgrades. While this feature COULD have been enough to make a player strive to unlock things, the rate at which you are rewarded is slower than a paraplegic track star with downs. It took till about day 4 before I could get a weapon that was going to be any better than my basic pistol, and after all the mundane repetitiveness I had to endure to get that far, the novelty of having a new gun was short lived. Don’t bother trying the other game modes if you die… they aren’t really any different… the zombies just change their primary target. On that note, dying in this game is actually a relief. You can quit playing… and while you don’t feel like you accomplished anything, you at least have some closure. Give it a try and tell me what YOU think.
Bookmark this page on Digg, Kinja, FURL, Redit & other sites 12 ResponsesLeave a Comment
|
May 18th, 2007 at 11:03 am
lol.. its a yawner alright
May 18th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
I hope you’ll like our game more
Check out the trailer: http://www.c404.net/games/stranded2_trailer.html
May 19th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Stranded 2, so far, looks like this game, only with more unique baddies. The multiplayer looks exactly like stick arena with new art. This is still in very early development I hope, because it has a TON of potential! When you get a beta up let us know and we’ll do a preview article to build some hype!
May 21st, 2007 at 11:53 am
Defenders are saturating the market too heavily, especially with the same formulas and style. I need something new besides zombies and guys with guns. Nonetheless, a polished game, I couldn’t play for more than a minute before moving on.
June 18th, 2007 at 10:41 am
[...] Some people are wondering what actually inspired this experiment. Obviously, making money is a big part of it all… but it really started the day I reviewed “Endless Zombie Rampage“. This game, while not the worst defense game, was the proverbial ‘last straw’. [...]
June 23rd, 2007 at 1:46 am
Hey, this is Eli-I’m doing the code for Stranded 2 (luksy posted above about it).
As far as I’m concerned, a game can have a new idea or a unique feature in it that makes it more interesting, but the gameplay is all that counts. A game can be generic as can be and still be fun to play-A great example here is Halo. Nothing original there, really, but Bungie spent a long time making sure that the game felt good to play.
I really wanted to talk to you about generic-ness in games, because I’ve got a pretty different view of it than you, and I’m curious what else you have to say. I’m making a game with Edmund right now, so I can probably get into contact with you through him, unless that’s a problem. Alternatively, send me some contact info in the email. See you soon.
June 23rd, 2007 at 10:02 am
Comparing this game to Halo is a really weak argument for any view on the issue.
Please allow me to clarify my views a bit. I am not against this genre of game in any way. What I am getting tired of is the same generic crap over and over, with minimal effort put into it because sponsorship sites will pay for anything.
While Halo is a poor comparison to this game, I think it’s a great title to make a point. Back in the 90’s, there were so many lame-ass generic fps games that none of them really stood out. Developers started relying on multi-player modes to sell the FPS genre, and arena games continued to flood the market with uninspired crap.
Sure, a few of these games had decent followings of hardcore PC gamers… but the market in general had lost interest.
Halo, while certainly not the best game technically, brought something that was missing. It put the story and immersiveness back into the fps game. It presented a fresh take on the genre and presented it to a whole new audience.
But wait… games like half life had already done that… and there were certainly games that had the cool vehical combat too… So why does halo get the props?
Simple, generic crap FPS games pushed people away from that genre of PC gaming. While the true believers and hardcore gamers were willing to tough it out, and eventually get rewarded with the good games that would come out… the casual player didn’t even give those games a chance.
With web-based gaming, our audience IS the casual player. If we flood them with crap, they are going to lose interest until a new platform comes around that can revitalize the industry.
So in summary, generic game genres are fine if the presentation and mechanics offer something creative and inspiring, but most of these new games don’t take that extra step… they just collect their sponsorship check and move on to the next cookie cutter game…
June 23rd, 2007 at 4:21 pm
I don’t think it’s possible to improve the gameplay of this kind of defense game. The genre itself kind of limits how much you can change around the gameplay without pissing people off.
Starcraft 2 is a good example of this. If Blizzard had changed it a lot from the technically-perfect Starcraft 1, people would complain that it lost the feel of the successful original. But if all Blizzard changed was the graphics, people would complain that it wasn’t innovative enough. In this specific case, I think it would have been fine if all Blizzard did was upgrade the graphics of the original, and package it with some cool cinematics and shit. But in my mind, that works because the original graphics were so obsolete (SC1 ran at 640×480 resolution).
Flash defense games today aren’t more graphically advanced than the ones made a year or so ago, and because the gameplay is basically as good as its going to get, they aren’t getting any better overall. People don’t read the instructions for Flash games anyway, so changing around the gameplay is just going to confuse retards, giving the game a lower score at NG, and the developers less money from sponsors.
June 24th, 2007 at 1:20 am
Yeah, Josh, I wasn’t comparing this game to Halo, but instead the idea of a game that doesn’t do anything particularly new.
I was thinking about this when I was working on Stranded. The good news is that we’re working very hard on making the game feel good, and do at least a few things that people wouldn’t expect in a Flash game. A lot of the work we’re doing is based on people’s current standards-we’re meeting or beating all the standards we can think of. Things like bloom-gamers gradually start to expect this out of a “big” 3D game, so we worked that into our game.
I’m getting kind of off topic, so I’ll stop here…erm…talk to you later.
July 6th, 2007 at 11:22 am
You’ve helped convince me not to go to Armor Games or Crazy Monkey Games for sponsorship. I will try going for more exclusive sponsors such as Stick Page, or smaller portals with which I can have a closer relationship.
And I’ve gone and lowered my rating of Endless Zombie Rampage on Kongregate. :p
March 11th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
this needs better music ands needs to be a llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllloooooooooooooooot harder
July 15th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
this would be a decent defender game if the reload time was on par with the actual time that it states in the upgrade catalog that you purchase your weapons and level of performance .its way too slow to keep you interested for any decent amount of gameplay.Furthermore after youve used all the weapons in the excercise mode whats the use inplaying the survivol or defender mode anyway??? duh!