I don’t love zombies, but I’m probably gonna eat up I Love Zombies

Gotta be honest here…I’m not a huge fan of zombies.

Nowadays, the gaming trends seems to be “add zombies.” They’re coming soon to Red Dead Redemption, they’re swarming about in Borderlands, they’re funnily enough in PopCap puzzle games, they’re in Crackdown 2, they’re sort of in Fallout 3/Fallout: New Vegas, they’re in Mass Effect (don’t try and deny it, Husks), they are most definitely in the Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising series, and they are most likely not going away any time soon.

Hey, some people really dig ’em. Me? Not so much, and not just because I’d totally die super fast during a zombie outbreak.

Of course, there are exceptions. I’m totally in love with Cherie Priest’s books Boneshaker and Dreadnought, which feature zombie-like minions, nicely dubbed rotters, and I also happen to have really enjoyed Tobias Buckell’s Sly Mongoose. Guess I don’t mind the undead too much in fiction form.

That said, Zombie Daisuki (“I Love Zombies”) looks like a lot of fun. It’s a recently announced new Nintendo DS game that puts the player to the task of rebuilding one’s farm during a mass zombie outbreak. So, a survival farming sim? That’s gotta be twenty-six times better than a boring fantasy dungeon crawler farming sim, right? Check out how adorable it looks so far:

I Love Zombies will be released in Japan on January 20, 2011, for JPY 5,040 (approx. USD 62.36), with a B rating (12 and up). There’s not a lot of information out currently, but I’m definitely going to be keeping tabs on this one. It could very well be the title that changes my snobbiness towards zombie-heavy videogames for me.

DEMO IMPRESSIONS: Crackdown 2

I recently downloaded the demo for Crackdown 2 and found myself very confused. No, the demo itself isn’t confusing; in fact, our narrator tells us what to do with a lot of tongue firmly in cheek, and you can either go after the main demo missions or just run around collecting orbs, jumping off buildings, and shooting freaks until the allotted thirty minutes of free gameplay is up. That I can do. Where I’m struggling here is with the game itself: I just don’t get it.

I never really tried the first Crackdown, save for downloading the demo and running through it once or twice. That one is not timed and is basically just an open world to run around and explore. You can throw cars and shoot people and climb buildings. Had a very arcade-like feel to it, and the graphics were certainly that of the first generation of games for the Xbox 360. Good, not great. And overhead, always there, was the implication that you had to make your own fun in Crackdown.

That seemed to carry over with Crackdown 2. I entered the demo and immediately started shooting people. I was told they were bad, and thus they deserved to get shot. Had to secure the area and all that jazz. A big problem here though–and this is mostly because I’m now spoiled by Borderlands where every gun has a different feel and recoil to it–is that firing weapons felt fairly hollow. I had a hard time even telling if I was hitting these dudes, and then there’s the close-quarter-combat, which, if I can be honest here, felt like my agent was punching a department store mannequin. There’s no sense of realism, and I understand that’s a silly thing to expect from a game like Crackdown 2, but without it everything just comes across as goofy and cartoonish. Driving cars, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, even throwing a grenade; I just didn’t like the way it felt. I guess it’s harder to explain, but there’s a deep love and following for Crackdown 2, and I don’t understand why. The demo graphics did not seem to be a big upgrade from the first game, and the sequel’s big twist is the addition of “freaks” at night, also known as zombies.

Why must every game add zombies now (hi, Dead Rising, Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Plants vs. Zombies, and The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned)? They are not the new fun. Try something else. Add…oh, I don’t know…mutated sheep monsters. Anything but more undead!

One interesting thing about the demo is that you can unlocked demo Achievements. Basically, these are the same Achievements in the full retail game, but you can unlock them now, and then they will pop and add to your gamerscore once you buy Crackdown 2. It’s a nice incentive and something I hope other demos will look into trying out. I unlocked two of them, but will never see truly get them as this is most definitely not my kind of game. I’m still have a hard time figuring out why.