Opinion

Days Of The Living Dead

The increasingly high production values of modern games are taking us further and further from what really matters, argues Steven Poole.

Sometimes you need to go lo-fi. Ears fatigued by commercial music tweaked to homogeneous living death by boffin producers using 70 plug-ins per channel can be perked up by the rough magic of one musician’s homebrewed chiptune. The libel-cautious, obediently safe ruminations of well-padded corporate newspaper columnists may be thrown into stark relief by one inventively obscene blogger. And the domesticated surrealism of computer-generated horror-movie blockbusters pales into infantile scribbling when set beside Alain Resnais’s authentically shocking and disturbing, but comparatively technically primitive, Last Year At Marienbad.
 
Enter, then, Barry Steakfries, sweary and cigar-chomping hero of Halfbrick’s instant lo-fi classic Age Of Zombies. I discovered it quite serendipitously. A couple of friends came over for the weekend, and late one evening they suggested we play some games. I soon realised that not only would it have taken hours to explain to them what all the buttons do in Modern Warfare 2, but that they would anyway have been more a flailing hindrance than a help in Special Ops, and I would probably end up shooting them myself. Right from the start of Age Of Zombies, however, when the hero simply shoots the villain to the accompaniment of a jerky blood-shower animation and a delicious squelching noise, we were all laughing helplessly and passing the pad around.
 
But Age Of Zombies is not brilliant simply because anyone can pick up and play it. The same is true of a game that, superficially, is almost mechanically indistinguishable: Zombie Apocalypse. The latter has far more graphical bling, but they are both essentially Robotron derivatives with zombies (or, as we might have to start calling them, Zombietrons). Apocalypse boasts an additional risk-reward aspect with its chainsaw moves, and far busier and more impressive environments. Yet to me it felt superlatively ‘meh’, whereas Age Of Zombies induces from the start consistent tension, satisfaction and delight.
 
One perhaps not-so-trivial reason for this lies in the question of collision detection. In Age Of Zombies’ rectilinear top-down view, with pseudo-3D figures casting helpful disc shadows, it is always clear enough whether you are touching a zombie or not. Apocalypse, on the other hand, affects a vanishing-point aerial perspective where the question of bodily proximity to rotting flesh is much more muddied. It is a fundamental prerequisite of the fairness of any Robotron clone that dying should be your own fault, and that the game should always give you complete information as to your own doom’s incipience. Zombie Apocalypse’s extra fraction of a pseudodimension, as well as its general gloom and hyperactive effects, make it feel notably more soggy and arbitrary.
 
This vice is not limited to Zombie Apocalypse alone, of course. One of the virtues of 8- and 16bit gaming that modern 3D games have rarely equalled is the precision and predictability of collision detection between bunches of pixels on a flat (or effectively flat) plane. We have grown accustomed to the apparently inherent woolliness of contemporary games, muttering to ourselves “I’m sure I didn’t actually touch that” while steering our expensive, stiff-lumbar’d avatars through insanely detailed canyons of rock, glumly contemplating what is next on the shopping list. Maybe it really was better in the old days.
 
So Age Of Zombies’ old-school 16bit style is not just a smile-inducing homage to our shared gaming heritage, it is a perfect marriage of kinetic form with representational style. Add the pitch-perfect vocals (from the beautifully hilarious zombie moans to the variety of silly voices in which weapon pickups are announced), and the deceptively deep strategic possibilities for exploiting the environment and delaying weapon pickups, and you have a game that does just what it says on the tin, and does it perfectly.
 
Barry Steakfries’ own cynical and wonderfully rude commentary on proceedings, meanwhile, is just the kind of thing one imagines a big-studio executive demanding be entirely rewritten, out of fear that it will offend some confused Iowa granny. Playing the game thus induces a delightful kind of complicity with the developers themselves: not only are you shooting thousands of zombies in the face with guns, you are also sticking it to The Man.
 
Last but not least of the virtues of Age Of Zombies is the fact that it is so blessedly short. After a couple of hours you have saved humanity and are watching the credits roll. At four quid, that turns out to be much better value for money than a blockbuster game you give up playing after eight hours because it has become such a tedious grind of token-collection and levelling. Indeed, these days it is looking increasingly as though the big corporate games are all about shopping, while the indie games are all about death. After a few thousand years of artistic experiment, I think we already know which is the richer vein.