10 Year Apocalypse

It was the ten year anniversary, on the 3rd July, of the launch of the browser game Urban Dead, and to mark this special occasion the games owner \ designer, Kevan, has sent out a survey for players to fill in. Which was not quite what I was expecting for this landmark occasion.

 Given that the game has not had any significant development in the last five years it's a bit of a surprise that the survey strongly hints at a new wave of features, and that he's finally asking players for feedback\ideas (other than the game wiki suggestions pages, which was little more than player squabbling). But I do feel that this is 3 to 5 years too late to have a major affect.

Dead Again

The Urban Dead online game has finally left the doldrums! The balance of power has shifted in Malton and, according to the stats page, the zombies now outnumber the living by 4:1.

The cause of this shift? The Dead have returned after having launched an invasion a few years ago, organised by the Something Awful forum in early 2008 as an attempt to ruin the game. Apparently they are at it again, The Dead have returned.

The first invasion was a big one, but was, in my opinion, one of the best times to play the game as it had a real apocalyptic feel to it, what with hiding and sleeping in ruins, because all the 'safehouses' were overrun and ruined. There was real difficulty in finding vital resources such as first aid kits and revivification syringes until Kevan, the game's designer, tweaked the search rates and sort of spoilt things. I feel too many people are stuck in their comfort zones in the game; and the furries that occasionally pop-up in Malton Zoo are even stranger than the idea of a zombie Apocalypse so kudos to the Dead for hunting them.

A certain amount of revisionist history in the linked forum thread above, as they didn't come close to their intent of trashing the game the first time round; ruined buildings always were viable locations for searching and living in, it's just that the standard survivor is afraid to use them and prefer huddling together with the lights on waiting to get eaten. Also those who whinged about being dead (lowercase) are probably without friends to priority revive them. The original Dead had a good rampage, trashed the place big style and then things went quite, with only around 10% of invaders carrying on; This still made them the biggest single group in Malton.

Unfortunately, regardless of the current record ratio, the numbers are not currently as much as last time and despite the Danger Map on the wiki being mostly red (for zombie controlled) or grey (ghost town - few zeds or survivors) the humans are still holding out, they just can't hang around one spot too long. Time for the old 'river tactics' of ducking and diving behind the zombie 'wavefront'. Thankfully the actually density of the zeds compared to map locations is low enough to make hiding possible. The 10000 locations in the game (more if you include inside of buildings as distinct) are too much for even the 1500 members of The Dead to cover.

Update: (22 May) The maps slowly changing to a more friendly colour, less Red and more Orange, but not in the area I'm currently camped. Kevan has tweaked the search percentages again so very easy to find first aid kits and revive syringes. My group is currently trying to set up a series of decoy repaired buildings to distract the zombies a bit and continues to work on the still long revive queues.
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Diet 2 Night

Got suckered into playing another online Zombie game after seeing an advert on the Urban Dead login page.



Die2Nite is very different to UD in that you are humans who are facing an inevitable demise in a small desert community (each isolated town only has a population of 40). The goal is to survive as many nights there as possible, each night more zombies attack, and it is a race to find and use a limited amount of resources to build more defenses. Once your zombie food your soul moves to another town and you hope you can do better.

It is apparently an adaptation of an existing french site, which might explain some of the strange selection of objects available and some of their unusual uses. Unlike a lot of games it actually comes with decent tutorials and a wiki.

There are achievements that can be obtained, some automatically just by surviving or dieing. I've already manage to obtain the cannibal one, well you've to eat haven't you! It's currently free to play, but like a lot of games you can get bonuses by coughing up some money.

Still visiting the Urban Dead game, but not much is happening and if any thing the survivors now clearly have the upper hand in an increasingly thinning active population, so it's boring playing a human and futile playing as a zombie.
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Pumpkin Head

It's Halloween in the zombie infested city of Malton. And that normally means that the great creator Kevan the programmer has laid on something special.

This year it was Pumpkins. By going to the various parks in Malton, and dodging zombies along the way, a survivor can pick a pumpkin and carve it.

So my brave character took the risk and ducked out of the hospital in Dartside to wander to a park and pick pumpkins. Turns out that though extremely heavy they don't affect you encumbrance; I picked three and ended up at 150%+ encumbrance, which lead to a slight problem when I tried to carve the things.

Apparently a hand axe is no good for this, and with no knife there is not much I could do. There was no point in searching for one as I'm already over encumbered, so I decided to get creative and started attacking people with pumpkins! Turns out they're not one shot weapons and doesn't turn people or zombies into pumpkin heads.

Malton itself has gone a bit quite. It's increasingly difficult for zeds to go on city wide rampages and they are now restricted to certain districts and small travelling hordes. Nothing as fearsome as The Dead invasion.

I run both a survivor (part of Tikhon Medical) and undead (mainly acting feral and hovering around Grigg Heights) characters to keep some form of balance, but having both maxed out in levels things have descended into familiar routines.
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Urban Dead Set

From Urban Dead News

Latest News - 28th October 2008
With the launch of Charlie Brooker's Dead Set on E4 and 4DVD, the Borehamwood outbreak is now open to Urban Dead players, with permanent zombification, fast zombies and a battle for the Big Brother house. The map will remain open for four weeks.

The login page has also turned bright red with some horrid wallpaper background.

Not seen the series yet, but hope to catch it on E4 when its shown this weekend. With it being from Charlie Brooker it's probably either going to be funny or totally condescending to its viewers.

Hope this one turns out better than the Diary of the Dead promo tie-in. That failed initially due to the permanent take-down rule for both zombies and humans and the fact that the Map of Monroeville was too big. The modifications then tilted it into a Zombie\Player Killer heaven. In fact more survivors were probably killed by other survivors than Zombies. Monroeville being based on the real-life Monroeville stateside, famous for being the location for 'the mall'.

In the main Map, our survivor group is planing a bit of 'Trick or Treat' for our local neighbourhood. Normally on Halloween in Malton things get a little different, with shops suddenly having sweets available to loot, and Zombies the ability to knock on doors!

Also according to the spellchecker: Nearest match to zombification is syllabification; which could do with exactly that.
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Online Games I play

Other than the occasional game of Day of Defeat (a WW2 shoot'em up) I not a big player of online games and games such as WoW, Eve and LoTR online have never really appealed to me.

I prefer more primitive games that may not be nice lookers but do require a bit of thought. The current batch that I'm playing includes...

Battrick - Cricket Management game.

Signed up a couple of months after my friends did and have managed to put together a semi-respectable team.

Urban Dead - a game of zombies vs survivors in the fictional city of Malton.

Two characters in this game, one Human and one Zed. The zed was put on hold will I was playing in the Monroeville tie in for Romeros latest Zombie flick.

Popmundo - the music career game (formally known as Popomundo)

Read about the existence of the game on Battrick so decided to give it a go. Currently running a Blues Musician who's recently broke into the Blues top 200 rankings after a year playing the game. Strangely enough this also contains elements of Zombie hunting.


These games all have one thing in common and its the thing that makes me more likely to play this type of game than other more advanced online games. Its the fact that there is a limit to what you can do in in each game, there's only a minor advantage in spending hours on each game rather than minutes. And you can leave them for days on end without really damaging your position in the game world. They are also playable free of charge, but with optional payment to support the games you can get additional tools that make playing easier but still maintain the level playing field for payers and non-payers alike. No power ups involved.

I've recently finished a game of Travian, a game which does eat up more time than you would expect, and to get the most from this you do need to have a 'sitter' to enable for 24\7 coverage on your account else you can end up logging in and finding yourself destroyed. There's also the fact that the game has victory conditions, and eventually all your hours of work basically amount to nothing as the world resets and a new crowd of players enter. It has also started to feature a pay option, but this does directly effect game play - the ones who spend most get the advantage.

Further back in the past I was a player of the text based MUD Avalon RPG. Despite playing it regularly for a number of years I eventually quit as the background world, despite being remarkably well detailed was static, overall unchanging, even the in game politics didn't really allow for change. Basically all four cities just took turns in conquering each other, same with the Guilds. The 'modern' history could never match up with the background story and the world just became boring.