It's zombie season!

It's only about a month and a half until The Walking Dead season 3 arrives... and it's nice to have zombies to kill in the mean time, isn't it?  One thing that's not bad is Zombie Pandemic, a free game where you create a character and search a post apocalyptic city for supplies, weapons, and other survivors who send you on profitable missions.  Along the way you get to waste hordes of the undead, and your "achievements" section keeps track of how many walkers you've killed, for example, with an axe, a handgun, a sub machine gun, or simply beaten to death with a golf club.  You can build safe houses as you explore, and form a "clan" that other friends can join.  There's no animation at the moment, but I see that the development team is always working on it.  The other day I saw animated smoke coming from an Army vehicle.  The game play typically involves an overhead view of a grid section of a city block, but when one enters a mission area or encounters zombies, the view changes to a first person view with text and/or attack buttons.  At the moment there are about 9,000 grid sections to explore.  It's fairly addictive at the beginning, but be prepared for the action to slow down around level 15 or so.  As you explore and fight, your stamina points diminish, and eventually you have to stop.  The levels rise quickly in the beginning, and with a SP (stamina points) boost at each level, you can keep going.  As you get higher in level, they come less frequently and you won't be able to play as much, which is fine if you haven't gotten sucked in and addicted.  Ok, I admit it, I had to get their "premium" and get more SP, faster SP replenishment, and an extra 3 characters.  What the heck, only a few bucks, right?  If any of my friends out there want to find me, join up and write to Schlongulus.  :D

What I wouldn't recommend is their "forum".  If you absolutely have to, if you're having a problem and just can't find the answer yourself, as a last resort go ask on the forum.  My limited experience there showed me that it's populated mostly by anal, uppity dweebs who probably have power or control over nothing in their real lives and who live on those boards to exercise their superiority over others.  Their peevish and disparaging attitudes would make an 18th century etiquette lesson look like the food fight in Animal House.

An example of this would be the weapon I've been thinking of since I started watching The Walking Dead several months ago.  It's an 8 fot long 2 x 2... with a hole drilled in each end and a 3/8" or 1/2" steel rod held in with nice strong two part epoxy.  About a foot of steel would be left sticking out on each end.  Then the tips would be ground down to a sharp point.  The center of the 2 x 2 is wrapped with hockey stick grip tape.  Simple and efficient, a bunch can be made quickly and easily.  I can only imagine how quickly a whole herd of walkers can be dropped by ten people with these brain pokers.  When I posted this in the forum, figuring to have a friendly chat with others abut killing zombies, I found that my first mistake was to write one post, then several minutes later, I had a few new thoughts, so I added them in a reply to my original.  Big mistake evidently.  It seems like my two posts confused people and threw a couple of them into such a tailspin that they felt the need to deride me for it.  My second mistake was expecting an enjoyable conversation.  I was treated to criticisms that epoxy wasn't needed, duct tape would do, and that the weapon needed blades at the front and other changes that I had already considered and rejected.  First, duct tape??  Go ahead, make yours with duct tape and when your point comes off in the head of your zombie, don't come crying to me.  Second, this isn't a battle axe, it's not a sword.  It's a skull poker.  I call it "The Cortex Tickler".  It's eight feet long, for cryin' out loud!  Swinging that with a blade at the end would be unwieldy.  The whole "point" of the weapon is to be able to jab at walkers from a distance of about 4 or 5 feet, and poke their brains at a rate of about one every 3 to 5 seconds, maybe faster, but that would mean that they're getting pretty thick and you need to take out your Uzi.  Think about it, 20 walkers per person per minute.  A herd of 200 is down in two minutes by five people. 

Enough for now.  Enjoy the game but stay away from the forum.  See y'all again soon... I have a beef with a fairly major retail store that I'm going to address next.