The Undead Can Drive

8 February, 2011 - 3 Comments by Marco Fiori - Games, One A Day

Courtesy of IronHammers

Zombies. Sluggish, meandering creatures who roam post-apocalyptic cities in a relentless search for human brains. Maybe that’s not the case – you might be a fan of the Z-On-Crack reimagining shown in films like 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead. It’s the same in video games – whether it’s the lumbering biters of Resident Evil or the suped up runners in Left 4 Dead, the undead are constrained to convention. Ever since Call of Duty: World at Snore brought wave-based zombie killing to our screens, developers have been obsessed with raising the dead wherever possible.

Never you mind whether they fit the genre that they’re appearing in – that doesn’t matter to the hordes of mindless executives who think it wise to blend game mechanics together. In fact, you could argue that they’re as zombified as the digital representations they petition for. After all, who thought it’d be wise to bring a zombie mode to DiRT 3?

Is it not bad enough that the rallying title went all Mad Max with its sequel? Over-energetic professionals like Ken Block are happy to do doughnuts over McRae’s grave as long as it makes the attention-span lacking millennials happy. OK, that’s overly harsh – DiRT 2 is a fantastic game, it’s just that it’s not DiRT – it’s been muddied by the unrelenting drive for simplification. It doesn’t matter if your dashboard is as lit up as a Christmas Tree, you’ll still clock up world-record leading times.

That said, I can forgive DiRT for its GRiD’ifying. I can’t however understand Codemasters’ choice to bring this so called zombie mode to what was once a hardcore simulative franchise. According to Kotaku:

In that multiplayer mode one car becomes undead and has to infect the others before time runs out. The designers had considered putting zombies — actual (virtual) shambling, undead people — on the track. Maybe you’d drive right through them, they thought. But the car manufacturers they were working with didn’t want their cars hitting anyone that looked human. Thus, no zombies to drive into, just cars that can sort of act like zombies. Coleman said a driver of a zombified car will notice their screen change color. It will look like the windshield has some green slime on it. The player/driver is meant to feel infected.

Seems serious and realistic doesn’t it? Zombie Driver has shown that zombies and cars can mix, but only because it focussed on running them down. How about the developers fix the issues with over-happy collision junkies that ruined DiRT 2′s multiplayer? Or maybe some more tracks and rally stages to relieve the repetitive campaign fatigue?

Of course that’s too easy. Gimmicks work wonders on the sheep of the gaming world. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see ranking and prestige in DiRT 3 when it finally sees release.

Leave me a comment about your thoughts on DiRT’s zombie mode. Likewise, drop me an @ on Twitter if that’s too time consuming.