Sigma Team sale

Hey, remember a while back I wrote a blog entry about Alien Hallway and said it was a cute distraction that's worth maybe a dollar or so? And how I also wrote about Alien Shooter, and Zombie Shooter, and said they were fun?

Well, for a few days, you can go to Indie Game Stand and get all three of those (on Steam) plus a fourth game called Theseus: Return of the Hero (which is a sort-of sequel to Alien Shooter) at an attractive price point of, like, a buck or two. Or just Alien Hallway (not on Steam) for twenty-five cents. I think either deal is good value, and I endorse the mini-bundle.

There are a surprising amount of these games, by the way. Alien Shooter, Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded, Alien Shooter 2: Conscription, Zombie Shooter, Zombie Shooter 2, and now this Theseus thing. It's a pretty solid concept, so I suppose I shouldn't be shocked.

But yeah. Check out the bundle, blow up some aliens and/or zombies, and all that good stuff.

Zombie Shooter

So a while back I played Alien Shooter, a game where you shoot aliens. Alien Shooter was developed by Sigma Team, the same guys who made Alien Hallway, a game where you fight aliens in a hallway. Sigma Team, of course, well-known for its lineup of games such as Hallway Shooter, Shooter Shooter, Alien Tower Defense, Game With Aliens In It, and It's Just Some Game 2: Why Do You Guys Always Want Names For Everything. But hey, that's what happens when you get Leonard of Quirm to name all your stuff.

Anyway, I liked Alien Shooter. Thanks to Steam's summer sale, its also-aptly-named spinoff title Zombie Shooter was on sale for a dollar, so I picked it up to give it a try. It's pretty much the same game, but with zombies instead of aliens, right?

...Yeah, as it turns out, that's more or less an accurate description.

There are a few differences. One particularly noticeable change is that in Alien Shooter, the aliens are fast! They scurry and run all over the place. Zombies, however, are contractually obligated to shamble. (It's true--they have a union and everything.) There are some zombie rats and zombie dogs that are straight re-skins of identical enemies from Alien Shooter, and I suspect there will be "Elite Zombies" in later stages who are able to run, but your basic zombie mook has weaker ankles than an alien monster, which can give the gameplay a different feel.

Also, Zombie Shooter has a straighter level-up system: you collect XP, fill up a meter, and tick up your stats between missions as a reward for leveling up. In Alien Shooter, you could tick up your stats, but you did it by spending money on a permanent stat boost or by finding a permanent stat boost in, like, a crate. (Crates in video games have a union too. They're contractually obligated to contain money, health, and ammo pickups.)

But aside from those minor changes, it's more or less the same game as Alien Shooter. This is fine with me, of course, since I liked Alien Shooter, and that just means it's exactly what I was expecting. So I'll endorse Zombie Shooter as a solid example of why third-person shooter games are great. It's good, clean fun. Well, okay, it's good, ludicrously gory, wade-in-rivers-of-zombie-blood fun. Gibbing hordes of zombies with shotguns and grenade launchers is the spaghetti marinara of video games: you wouldn't eat it for dinner every night, but when you do cook it up, it's very difficult to go wrong.

Also, if you get a big lump of spaghetti marinara, it sort of looks like you're eating a brain!