Fugdale’s Funhouse

What if you had to kill to stay alive? What if what you killed didn’t stay dead? Find out in these Zombie-themed games. Two distinctive shooters will have you spilling your blood for more.

The following games are rated on a scale of Heaven to Hell.

De-Animator - “Zombies ripped my skinny spine out”

This quick little trip to hell will send you on a zombie killing spree. Based on stories of H.P. Lovecraft, De-animator has a great graphical design and eerie sound effects as well. You play as a skinny old man with glasses and a 6-shooter. Blast the undead in the head to kill them most of the time. Some of them continue lurching toward you in a headless form. The lanky ones usually die if you knock them off their feet. The zombies come in a few different sizes and your bullets don’t always land too well.

You only have moments to aim and shoot before the creepies catch up to you and send you to a gory death. Those six shots don’t last long either and your character takes quite a while to reload. Best to hit them in the head as they rise from the ground to save ammo. As you kill, the zombie-hit-counter will tick up in the center of the screen.

Bum Lee’s design of the zombies and the haunting black silouhette landscapes and figures give this game a ghoulish comic book feel. Fun for some tension mounting shooting moments. Supposedly you can play more than the first two stages, but not if they rip your guts out like they did to me. Not a great game, but a nicely executed one worth a few plays.

Zombie Grinder - “Zombies ate my fat leg off”

Zombie Grinder, by designer Olle Hemmendorff, has a bit faster pace than De-Animator. Actually I’d say it has a manic pace. You guide your little fat man down the city streets, teamed with zombies, in an obstacle course of 2-D scrolling action. The action is frantic and wild heavy metal music fuels your rampage as you blast the guts out of several zombies. Avoid fire and collect extra bullets along the way. You won’t have time to hit all the zombies, so just plow on through.

The character designs look cool using line drawings and flicks of color and the backgrounds have a lot of detail as well. But with all the running and bloodshed you won’t have time to stop and look at the graphics, except for the occasional times when the game play slows down in Matrix-like sequences. The game involves running aiming and shooting with the mouse, and running and jumping with the arrow keys. So, I don’t recommend the game for right-handed laptop gamers as you have to control the trackpad, click button and arrow keys at the same time–a task made much easier with a mouse and keyboard.

Although the game has intensity for a little while, the fun fizzles out after a few minutes of gameplay. But see how far you can go.