Tag: Urban Dead

Mafia Matrix

Gaming

Since dumping Urban Dead, I was looking for another free web game to play and thanks to Ryan over at Nerfbat, I was pointed toward Mafia Matrix.

In an odd way, Mafia Matrix is almost the complete opposite of Urban Dead.  While the zombie game only penalized you with time, death was just becoming a zombie and you could be revived, this little mob system simulator is much more harsh.  Death is death.  You can make a new character, but a dead character is dead for good.  Of course, there is much more to do in the Matrix than just killing people.  You work jobs, collect money, buy stuff, steal from people, and there is a real community.  See, in Mafia land, players get to be the Mayors of the cities, the judges, the lawyers, the store owners, and the gangsters.  If you go whack someone without permission of the local don, you might find yourself dead.

It makes for interesting game play.  I, for example, have gone the route of being a legit lawyer.  I don’t commit crimes, but I will take any case and make sure that all my clients are given the best defence the law allows.  Of course, every criminal I get off means that the city doesn’t get that fine as revenue, so even defending criminals could get me killed, or at least run out of town, if I deny the city too much money.

Anyway, for now I’m enjoying the game.  If you play and want to look me up, I’m Jhaer and I spend most of my time in Miami.  And if you do decide to play, do so from one of the links in this post, I get something for the referral if you stick with the game.

Urban Dead is dead to me

Gaming

Ten months ago, I was first introduced to Urban Dead.  A free online game about fighting hordes of the undead and surviving the zombie apocalypse… or so I thought.  About seven months ago, I was excited to be playing the game, casually fighting zombies and barricading myself inside buildings while I slept.  The game wasn’t and isn’t overly graphic, but I was more than capable of filling in the narrative myself.  After getting myself skilled up a bit, four months ago, I decided to create a project for myself in the game, and a week later I had to modify that project due to what had become the glaring flaw in the game’s design.  After I abandoned Munford, I took residence in the Pickford Cinema over in Osmondville…

At this point, I really wish I could say that things took off, the movie theater was made secure, we fortified the doors and beat back the walking dead, slowly spreading out to other theaters and growing a network of safe havens for people to pretend they are watching movies as the undead shamble out in the streets.  I really wish I could.

The major design flaw in Urban Dead is that you, as a survivor, cannot win.  And I don’t mean that in a “this is an MMO with endless grinding, a virtual world, and there will be no ‘You win! The end!’ screen.” sort of way… I mean that in a “There will always be more zombies because you can’t kill them for good because they are not NPCs, they are the other players.” sort of way.

A month we spend inside, making neighboring buildings safe, keeping the free running paths clear.  Trips to the mall for supplies, gas from the gas station to keep the generators running… life was pretty good.  Then a horde of zombies comes through, breaks down all the barricades, kills all the people, and makes a mess.  Now, all us survivors are zombies.  Luckily it doesn’t take too long to wander over to a NecroTech building with a revive point, but it does take nearly three weeks to get all those people revived (it takes 20 action points to make a syringe -but you can search for them and cut that down- and 10 action points to revive someone, after you spend a point DNA scanning them, so that 1 person, even if they already have the syringes, can only revive 4 people a day).  It takes us another two weeks to get all the buildings back in good order, then the zombies come through again…

I don’t want to be a zombie.  Obviously some people do.  But when my game, as a survivor, is actually 75% of the time spent trying to recover from being killed… I would rather lose levels than this.  Especially since I have no say in my deaths at all… they all happen when I’m offline.

I tried.  I really tried.  Its just not worth the frustration.  I play games to be the hero, the guy that “wins”, not to be just another victim.

I’ll still be keeping my eye out for zombie games, and I still desire to make one… but for now, Urban Dead, as far as I’m concerned, is dead.

Urban Dead Greasemonkey

Gaming

I have been messing around in the world of Greasemonkey lately. If you don’t know what Greasemonkey is, it is an add-on for the FireFox web browser that allows javascripts to run after a page loads. That may not sound special, but you can do some very interesting stuff with it. For example, the main reason I’ve been dabbling is that I use a Greasemonkey script that someone else wrote for Conquer Club that does some map analysis that the creator of the website doesn’t do, like keep track of card set redemption values in escalating games, hover over attack paths on the maps, and more. Nothing game breaking, nothing you couldn’t do by hand yourself, but very nice in that you don’t have to do it by hand. Well, recently an upgrade to the Conquer Club website broke the Greasemonkey script, so I’ve been looking in to fixing it.

But this isn’t about Conquer Club, as I haven’t finished that script yet. This is about Urban Dead.

One of the fastest ways to get experience points in Urban Dead is to use first aid kits to heal people. And the best way to do that is either to start as a doctor, or make sure the first skill you buy is Diagnosis (maybe second, Freerunning is very important). Diagnosis allows you to see the health of each player in the same block as you. Without it, you just have to randomly try to heal people, wasting action points as the game tells you that they are full of health (you don’t lose the first aid kit though, which is nice). Once you have Diagnosis, the next stumbling block is simply seeing who needs healing. In some places with five or ten people around, its easy, but if you go into a mall where you are likely to find in excess of one hundred people per block, it becomes a giant pain in the ass.

To that end, I have begun working on the ProbablyNot’s Urban Dead Goggles script. If you are an Urban Dead player and have Greasemonkey, click this link to install it. Right now, all the script does is change the text color of the hit point count for anyone with 50 or 60 hit points, which likely means they are full of health (people at 50 might have the Body Building skill and be able to go up to 60, but that takes effort or wasting action points to find out), it make the hit points appear black. If the person is not full (if they have anything but 50 or 60) it will leave it the normal white color. So with the script running, all you need to do look for the people with white hit points and heal them.

Very basic, but also, in my opinion, quite helpful. If I think of more things to add, I will.

Urban Dead – Revisited

Random Thoughts

Nearly three months ago, I mentioned a game by the name of Urban Dead. At the time, I checked it out, messed around one day and then dismissed it. I just wasn’t interested in a web based text adventure.

Things change.

I have been checking out all sorts of games since my recent abandonment of all my usual MMO haunts. With City of Heroes/Villains and World of Warcraft canceled and Lord of the Rings Online only holding on by the skin of its founder price, I really wanted something low impact that I could just play at now and then without investing any time (since any time I invest will be in beta tests or my 360). I stumbled back on Urban Dead and decided to give it a go, this time from both sides of the fence.

Everything in the game is controlled through Action Points, which you earn at the rate of 1 per half hour and you max out at 50. As a survivor, walking from one block to the next costs 1 point, and so does just about everything else. Searching, attacking, talking, entering buildings, etc. As one of the undead, walking takes 2 points per block, at least until you get enough experience points to buy the Lurching Gait skill that allows you to move as fast as the living. The limit of points you get per day means you have to keep track of where you are and how long it will take you to get back to safety. The living don’t want to get caught outside, the dead don’t want to wind up standing alone near lots of people. Really, this is where the strategy of the game comes in.

While the game does contain “levels” and skills that you purchase with your experience points, there isn’t, at least for me, a huge rush to max out and get to the top because this game has no “end game”, its just about survival.

I’m really enjoying the game far more than I thought I originally would, and its totally worth the cost… free. If you decide to check it out, I’m Jhaer on the living side and Reahj on the dead side.

Urban Dead

Gaming

Thanks to Sanya, I’ve learned about a game I must investigate as I pursue my own endeavor.

Urban Dead is a browser based text adventure. Sure, its not ground breaking, but it is free.

I’ll be checking it out.