Thanks to Arsian special*dark for posting this on his blog. Here’s the important question at hand:

You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:
1. One weapon.
2. One song blasting on the speakers.
3. One famous person to fight alongside you.

Weapon can be real or fictional; you may assume endless ammo if applicable. Person can be real or fictional.

Here’s my reply:

Yay, zombies!

1) Olympic Arms AR-15 pistol.

2) “March of Death” by Zach de la Rocha and DJ Shadow

3) Randy “The Natural” Couture

I wrote a review about zombie board game Last Night on Earth this January. I praised the production value of the game, but disliked the ambiguity of the rules and felt that the humans were very over-powered. I found the humans to be unstoppable with their fast movement and higher combat rolls. Even if a zombie player could corner them, it was nearly impossible to hurt a human, let alone kill them.

The good thing about a blog is that people eventually find out when you bitch about stuff. A few people responded to my negative post about LNoE and suggested I was playing it wrong. Despite their efforts explain it, or say that the game was really slanted towards the zombies, I kept my nose pinched shut and shelved the game for about four months.

Luckily, my friend The Accountant™ was in town and we gave LNoE another try. We read the rules for EVERYTHING, even if we felt like we already had a grip on what to do.

Turns out I was wrong on a very fundamental but game-changing issue: humans roll, but do not add their 2D6 combat dice. They just choose the highest die. G Ramon Gomez tried to tell me, but it bounced off of my thick skull. Sorry Ramon, you were right.

Suddenly the game became a challenge. Humans weren’t wading into zombies unarmed or searching a two-space building while five zombies were knocking outside. That isn’t to say the humans were defenseless; The Accountant™ stumbled upon a nasty combo that allowed one of the characters to roll four combat dice: one for the chainsaw, and one for a hero event card that also killed zombies any time she won instead of when doubles were rolled. The headshot: she was also “lucky,” and could make a zombie player re-roll any one die. I attacked her with about ten zombies and she killed them all without a single bite.

The rules are still unclear in parts, particularly for some scenarios such as the Manor. We decided to draw a different scenario altogether after trying to discern a particular scenario rule. This game needs a real FAQ, forum, or examples of combat, none of which Flying Frog has readily available.

I liked playing LNoE so much that I am considering buying their Growing Hunger expansion. Now if I just had a large enough tabletop gaming group to play it consistently ….

I saw Fido last night, a Canadian zombie film from 2006. Mankind has survived a zombie apocalypse through the inventions of ZomCom, the most important of which are huge fences that surround communities and the zombie control collar. The zombie control collar turns the zombies into semi-intelligent, docile servants that deliver milk, act as butlers, and yard workers.

The story is set in the 1950s, and the color palette of the film matches accordingly. Everything is bright, from the cars to the homes, to the clothing. The short history of the Zombie War views just like a “duck and cover” nuclear safety movie. Everyone is over-smiling and gee-whizzing through life, while bossing the undead about like second-class citizens and living inside a fenced-in utopia.

Zombie movies are part survivalist fiction and part social commentary. Fido definitely leans more towards the social commentary aspect of the film, but there is a decent fight scene near the end.

If you haven’t seen it yet, give Fido a view. It is available from Netflix in case Blockbuster doesn’t stock it.

It’s a good thing I don’t believe in omens. Otherwise I wouldn’t have shown up for my first day of work yesterday. Besides the natural sizes (full moon, torrential downpour), there were a few portents that almost kept me in bed.

I also missed my alarm. I sat up bolt upright in bed, and had snapped the table lamp on without realizing it. My heart pounded in my chest, and I picked up my watch to see what time it was. I hadn’t missed my alarm at all: it was 12:34, just a half hour after I had closed my eyes.

This is the first time I had to regularly report to a position within “normal” business hours since 1999. It’s unnatural — and highly undesireable — to wake up before 8:30, let alone be in dress code at my desk. I am pretty sure my little “alarm” anxiety is due to this, hopefully it won’t happen again.

I also treated myself to a zombie dream. I only have those when work is stressful. The zombie theme combined with my guns jamming in the dream … not the first time this has happened, but certainly the first time this happened prior to starting a new position.

Lastly … I got a new video card from someone on Ars, and either the card itself or the drivers for said card corrupted my Windows XP install. My XP install CD developed some kind of cancer since I used it last and wouldn’t load critical DLLs during the install. I tried making a new boot disc, but the only computer left in the house with a media burner was my file server … which had its resolution set too high for my spare monitor. Starbuck took pity on me and brought over her XP install disk. I’m trying to rebuild the machine as I write this. At least I had a spare hard drive just for this purpose.

I am going to try really hard to remain positive about my new job. As a few of my friends have already said, “at least it’s not [the last place you worked].” Yeah, we’re also only on day two, but the drive in and the corporate culture is already making me nervous.

Wednesday is a new day.

Never, in my entire life, has it felt so good to quit a job. I just put in my two week’s notice where I was contracting. I am going to work for a company here in town, but even without a place to jump I probably would have left after today anyway.

I had a dream last night that I told my boss to shut up during a conference call. It almost came true today.

“DrFaulken,” she said in her extra-loud voice, “why didn’t you review the Web site I sent you and evaluate it for this wireframe [that I had built]?”

What the fuck was she talking about? I began to sweat.

Everyone else on the call was silent.

I am a paranoid dude by nature. I’m the guy with over two thousand rounds of rifle ammunition, for fuck’s sake. But working for this woman the last three months has taken my ass-covery to a whole new level. I flipped back through my notes, a trickle of sweat rolling down my left side.

“On March 24th you specifically told me not to evaluate that site as it was using a new technology and it would generate more questions than answers.”

The line was silent again, and then she continued on without missing another beat, talking about why she loved this other site so much and how we should redo all of our work to replicate it.

She apologized to me in private after the call was over.

I feel badly about leaving some good people behind and not trying to be part of the solution, but simply ducking away from the problem. However, I would become accustomed to my boss’s behavior, and come to accept it as business as usual, and not the gross lack of professionalism that it was.

Please keep discussion of the business or people involved anonymous, Gibberish gets spidered by search engines and I don’t want this popping up somewhere when people search for “pissed off employees of XYZ.”

Whew.

Desire often trumps logic. Sometimes we want something so badly that we overlook flaws inherent in people, jobs, movies, or games. In my case, Last Night on Earth. The game seemed perfect: a co-operative, competitive table top game that pits human heroes against my favorite undead. The game comes with five different scenarios, eight different playable heroes, and a mostly-randomized set of map tiles that mean each game is just a little bit different from the last. LNoE comes a TON of awesome collateral such as an old truck, gasoline, and townsfolk tokens, and most importantly, a bunch of plastic zombies. The production value on this game is outstanding. With scenario titles like “Die, Zombie, Die!” how could we go wrong?
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It’s been awhile since we’ve had one of these: a Just Say Hi’s zombie survival quiz. The quiz has a good balance of preparedness, ethics, and combat questions. It reinforces my belief that as Science Fiction is to social issues, zombie fiction is to disaster preparedness — an easily accessible way to talk about surviving a total breakdown in society.

I rated a 70%, and I’m not sure why. I answered “scream and jump” to the scary movie question, and had a few compassionate answers. Like most of these quizzes, I wish that this one explained the author’s weighting behind the choices. I chose to stay away from the police station and hospital, and I wonder if that hurt my percentage. I was surprised at the absence of a farmhouse or similar zombie staple.

70%

How did you do?

My Year of the Zombie game ran last Tuesday. The group decided to break out from the Magic Kingdom’s underground utilidors and try to find more survivors at nearby Epcot. They then proceeded to go above ground and play tag with the undead in a park full of tens of thousands of zombies.

I always enjoy watching what the players decide to do, especially when a plan collapses. Last session was no exception. I would like to think we’re just playing a game, but a part of me believes that the campaign amplifies normal human responses. Perhaps YOTZ may be used as a model in a real disaster situation, the presence of animated corpses notwithstanding.
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It’s been a little over seven months since I re-started my Year of the Zombie campaign. Year of the Zombie is a D20 Modern ruleset put out by UKG Publishing. With the help of Fantasy Grounds and Skype six of us have been playing on and off since the early part of November 2006. I thought I’d post a little recap on where the campaign is right now, but mostly about what it has been like to run a online zombie game, and where I think things are headed for the rest of the year. Gibberish gets a lot of search results for various zombie things, so this information might help others start games of their own.
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Until last year, I played massively multiplayer online role playing games for the better part of six years, starting with EverQuest during its launch in 1999. I spent the bulk of my time in Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft. I also played quite a few other MMOs, including Shadowbane, City of Heroes, Lineage II, EVE Online, and the beta for Star Wars: Galaxies.

Besides being online, these games had a few things in common: they kept me busy, and they kept me from feeling socially isolated. Whether I was living in a small mountain town in Oregon or working from home in Virginia with a very small meatspace social circle, MMOs were a way for me to jump online and adventure with friends. While MMOs are a significant commitment and aren’t always fun, I will not deny their entertainment and social value. Not only have MMOs allowed me to keep in touch with friends across the country, but they have helped me make some very real friends in “meatspace.” For some, like Alexa and Fathir, their real-life relationship started in-game.

I felt like online games were keeping me from doing other things, like writing for Gibberish. So I hung up my avatars for good last July. I haven’t regretted this decision, although Lady Jaye and I joke about rejoining WoW. After almost a year off, I’ve noticed that something strange has happened to me and my video gaming: console games are not nearly as compelling as their online role playing counterparts.
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