Review: "Halo" Just won't Die, Creates an Army of Undead for fun
After November 9th, 2004, the gaming world waited in impatient eagerness for the next installment in the Halo series of games from Bungie Studios. What they didn't expect was Wideload games, started by the founder of Bungie Alexander Seropian, and what it brought to the party: namely, a former traveling salesman named Eward "Stubbs" Stubblefield. "Former", of course, meaning that he was "former"ly alive. Always down on his luck, his story truly began when he was brutally murdered. Over 20 years pass while he lays rotting in a shallow grave, until one day in 1959 when a rich industrialist decides to build the city of Punchbowl, Pennsylvania. Punchbowl, a technological marvel, a futuristic utopia, a light on the hill for all the world to look to, is built atop Stubbs' final resting place. Alienated in this new world around him, he does what any self-respecting zombie would do in his place: eat brains.
In Stubbs the Zombie in "Rebel Without a Pulse", you play as... you guessed it, Stubbs the Zombie. With an arsenal truly fit for the undead, you take on the best a technologically-advanced city in the 1950's has to offer: flying cars, robot labor, Barney Fife-esque police officers, and only the tastiest brains. As you progress through the game, you learn more about your abilities now that the restrictions of life no longer hold you back. Jump twenty feet into the air, attack the fine people of Punchbowl PA, and eat their brains. Better(!): rip off your arm and control it as it runs around looking for a victim. Found one? Great! Now grab them by the head and control them like a puppet to achieve your goals. Control a cop to shoot at other armed officers! If you feel like you're too much the center of attention, attack someone (brain-eating optional). Once they're dead, they'll rise up and join you on your mission! If you find yourself being attacked from afar, reach into your chest through the rotting hole in your ribcage, pull out a decaying organ, and chuck it. It will explode on-command from the build-up of gases. If you feel the urge to go bowling, you can pop your own head off and roll it at your foes; it'll knock them right over, and if that doesn't do the trick, it'll even explode, and with more force than your guy grenades! Rip arms off of passers-by, and beat them mercilessly with it; I'm sure the irony won't escape them. Heck, if you find yourself surrounded by Punchbowl's finest, just cut loose a wickedly foul fart to stun them while you snack on their grey matter. The world's cranial cavities are your oyster!
Complete with all the same features you'd expect from a game built on the Halo engine, there are vehicles you can drive (and flip over, should you get caught upside down), gravity-defying jumps, and rechargeable health (hey, no wonder zombies never seem to stay down in the movies!). Unlike Halo, however, you play the game in 3rd-person view from start to end, and the graphics are greatly improved since Halo first graced the store shelves. True active reflections accurately show your every action perfectly, and high-detail shadows add to the immersive environment that is the towering city of Punchbowl. To be fair, I actually played the game on the Xbox360 via the console's backward-compatibility. I can't verify that the graphical performance of Stubbs is any different than playing it on Xbox. I just know that the reflections, shadows, and other effects seen in this game were far better than I witnessed in the original Halo.
The soundtrack for Stubbs is quite impressive, featuring modern remakes of 50's classics, such as Cake covering "Strangers in the Night", the Raveonettes remake of "My Boyfriend's Back", Death Cab for Cutie's rendition of "Earth Angel", The Dandy Warhols' "All I Have to Do is Dream", and my personal favorite, The Flaming Lips take on "If I Only Had a Brain". They add an extra level of humor to an already hilarious game.
Gameplay is effectively the same as playing Halo (surprise). Wideload really spared nothing with the humor found in the game; nearly every citizen Stubbs attacks has something to say about it. As I've only played the first couple of levels, I don't feel I can do the game much justice yet in regards to plot, but so far I've had nothing but fun playing it.
One thing I immediately noticed about Stubbs the Zombie is that there is no multiplayer mode, so once you take over Punchbowl with your zombie horde, that's it. You don't get to duke it out in a police-vs-zombie undeath match, although there is a co-op mode where you and a buddy can team up and tackle the town! The only other downsides I ran into were only visual in nature. I did notice what I interpreted to be visual glitches when playing Stubbs: the first level is played after an "old time" movie (black and white reel-to-reel clip), and the "old time" feel stuck around while I moved through the first level, with vertical black lines moving along the screen as I played. After moving on to the next stage, I noticed that this effect went away, but it was unfortunately replaced with a slight blue hue to the world, and grainy visuals, almost like looking at an old photograph. I'm not sure if these issues are an intended aspect of the game, if they're a glitch that shows on other versions of the game, or if they only show up on the 360 due to an issue with the backwards-compatibility.
Considering the lack of multiplayer gaming, and the apparently short campaign (I've yet to beat it myself, but the reports aren't very kind in this regard), I'd recommend this game to anyone who's always wanted to know how our undead brethren really feel. If you want to be able to sit down and really enjoy a game for what's been put into it, Stubbs is right up your alley, but if you're looking for a game to play for 13 hours straight at a LAN party, this one just won't measure up. I give Stubbs the Zombie an 8.5 out of 10.
In Stubbs the Zombie in "Rebel Without a Pulse", you play as... you guessed it, Stubbs the Zombie. With an arsenal truly fit for the undead, you take on the best a technologically-advanced city in the 1950's has to offer: flying cars, robot labor, Barney Fife-esque police officers, and only the tastiest brains. As you progress through the game, you learn more about your abilities now that the restrictions of life no longer hold you back. Jump twenty feet into the air, attack the fine people of Punchbowl PA, and eat their brains. Better(!): rip off your arm and control it as it runs around looking for a victim. Found one? Great! Now grab them by the head and control them like a puppet to achieve your goals. Control a cop to shoot at other armed officers! If you feel like you're too much the center of attention, attack someone (brain-eating optional). Once they're dead, they'll rise up and join you on your mission! If you find yourself being attacked from afar, reach into your chest through the rotting hole in your ribcage, pull out a decaying organ, and chuck it. It will explode on-command from the build-up of gases. If you feel the urge to go bowling, you can pop your own head off and roll it at your foes; it'll knock them right over, and if that doesn't do the trick, it'll even explode, and with more force than your guy grenades! Rip arms off of passers-by, and beat them mercilessly with it; I'm sure the irony won't escape them. Heck, if you find yourself surrounded by Punchbowl's finest, just cut loose a wickedly foul fart to stun them while you snack on their grey matter. The world's cranial cavities are your oyster!
Complete with all the same features you'd expect from a game built on the Halo engine, there are vehicles you can drive (and flip over, should you get caught upside down), gravity-defying jumps, and rechargeable health (hey, no wonder zombies never seem to stay down in the movies!). Unlike Halo, however, you play the game in 3rd-person view from start to end, and the graphics are greatly improved since Halo first graced the store shelves. True active reflections accurately show your every action perfectly, and high-detail shadows add to the immersive environment that is the towering city of Punchbowl. To be fair, I actually played the game on the Xbox360 via the console's backward-compatibility. I can't verify that the graphical performance of Stubbs is any different than playing it on Xbox. I just know that the reflections, shadows, and other effects seen in this game were far better than I witnessed in the original Halo.
The soundtrack for Stubbs is quite impressive, featuring modern remakes of 50's classics, such as Cake covering "Strangers in the Night", the Raveonettes remake of "My Boyfriend's Back", Death Cab for Cutie's rendition of "Earth Angel", The Dandy Warhols' "All I Have to Do is Dream", and my personal favorite, The Flaming Lips take on "If I Only Had a Brain". They add an extra level of humor to an already hilarious game.
Gameplay is effectively the same as playing Halo (surprise). Wideload really spared nothing with the humor found in the game; nearly every citizen Stubbs attacks has something to say about it. As I've only played the first couple of levels, I don't feel I can do the game much justice yet in regards to plot, but so far I've had nothing but fun playing it.
One thing I immediately noticed about Stubbs the Zombie is that there is no multiplayer mode, so once you take over Punchbowl with your zombie horde, that's it. You don't get to duke it out in a police-vs-zombie undeath match, although there is a co-op mode where you and a buddy can team up and tackle the town! The only other downsides I ran into were only visual in nature. I did notice what I interpreted to be visual glitches when playing Stubbs: the first level is played after an "old time" movie (black and white reel-to-reel clip), and the "old time" feel stuck around while I moved through the first level, with vertical black lines moving along the screen as I played. After moving on to the next stage, I noticed that this effect went away, but it was unfortunately replaced with a slight blue hue to the world, and grainy visuals, almost like looking at an old photograph. I'm not sure if these issues are an intended aspect of the game, if they're a glitch that shows on other versions of the game, or if they only show up on the 360 due to an issue with the backwards-compatibility.
Considering the lack of multiplayer gaming, and the apparently short campaign (I've yet to beat it myself, but the reports aren't very kind in this regard), I'd recommend this game to anyone who's always wanted to know how our undead brethren really feel. If you want to be able to sit down and really enjoy a game for what's been put into it, Stubbs is right up your alley, but if you're looking for a game to play for 13 hours straight at a LAN party, this one just won't measure up. I give Stubbs the Zombie an 8.5 out of 10.
posted by IcarusFountain at
6:48 PM
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