I was going to have a salad for lunch, now I want a cheeseburger.

Okay, PETA? What made you think that this was even remotely okay?

I have no words. Okay, I have words, but most of them start with the letter “F.”

Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.

I love this game.

I play Urban Dead. So should you. I play as a zombie. It’s great.

Some of the things I love about this game:

1. Logging in to find that my zombie has been killed by a headshot, seeing that the guy who dispensed said headshot is still standing right there, biting the guy and infecting him with zombie germs (this infection does 1 HP of damage for every action), beating the crap out of the guy, and walking off and leaving him at 1HP. Bonus insult to injury: doing so within sight of a hospital that could have cured the zombie germs if he could have gotten there without dying.

2. Rule of thumb: people with stupid names die first. My personal variation: people named after food die first. I mean, taking a name like “Hot Wings” or “Dan Active” (as in the yogurt, yeah, I’m fairly sure that’s what he was after) in a zombie game is, uh, kind of asking for it.

3. There is nothing quite so wonderful as breaking into a building, infecting every survivor therein with zombie germs, and then leaving. As the Intarweb Boyfriend said: you don’t get a lot of XP by doing that, but it sure will ruin their day.

4. My zombie is currently carrying around a cell phone, a fuel can, a shotgun shell (singular), and a can of spray paint. None of which can be used by zombies. The can, phone, and paint can be handy if I get combat revived (more on that in a minute), but the shotgun shell is useless without a shotgun. I still keep it, because I am amused by the mental picture of a zombie who can put the concepts of “shotgun shell” and “weapon” together, but can’t quite figure out how to make it work and just tries beating the survivors with the shell, to little effect.

5. Combat revives. Oh, how I hate this. See, there are designated revive points where zombies can ask to be stuck with a revivification syringe and brought back to life–most cemeteries are assumed to be RPs, some buildings are as well. But sometimes when a building is under siege by zombies, survivors will revive the attacking zombies to make them stop. Exactly what good this is supposed to do, I don’t know. Because when I get combat-revived, I find the nearest zombie mob if the one I was part of has moved on, stand in the middle of it, and yell “FREE HITS.” I get to be a zombie again. My fellow zombies get XP. Everyone wins. Well, except the survivors. They’re fucked.

6. Death Rattle. This is an ability zombies can buy. It allows the zombie to speak. …sort of. One is limited to the letters A, B, G, H, M, N, R, and Z. So some… creative vocabulary becomes necessary. The Zombie Lexicon is a hoot, seriously. And then every so often you see singing zombies. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what they’re singing, on account of the limited alphabet, but I saw one singing “Another One Bites the Dust” while raiding a building, and my personal favorite is “nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, hrh hrrh, grrbah”, preferably immediately after dragging a dying survivor out of a building and into the street.

7. By default, zombies don’t know how doorknobs work. So every once in a while you come across the sad, sad sight of fifteen n00b zombies standing around outside a building after knocking down its barricades, only to find that nobody knows how to open the damn door. Fortunately, remembering how doors work is a skill you can buy. And then if you come across one of those poor sad mobs, opening the door for them just gives you a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

8. Speaking of n00bs: survivors who fail to budget their 50 daily action points and run out of AP in the middle of the street, gotta love ‘em. Bite, infect, take down to single-digit HP, leave stranded. That’ll learn ‘em to watch their AP.

9. Graffiti! As I mentioned, if you have a spray can and you are alive, you can tag things. Some graffiti is informative. Some is just there for entertainment. There is a particular building, called the Buckoke Building. I could not help but tag it such that its description read “Someone has spraypainted a huge white splat here.” And then there was one of my favorites, the plea of a n00b left out in the street sprayed onto another building elsewhere: “let me in the gd mall aholes”. There was a dead body nearby. I like to think it was the tagger.

10. And finally: hammering on a mall or a military base for a week and being right there watching when the last survivor gets dragged out into the street is a wonderful thing. XD

Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.