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I'm a big fan of the whole "zombie apocalypse" genre. It's been huge

these past few years, bigger than just TV and a few video games. There are

firearms manufacturers and custom shops making zombie-themed guns and

shooting accessories, mostly colored garish green and red and all

"tacti-cool." This speaks of a deeper fascination than just a pop culture

fad.

Zombie stories represent a lot of different things. They can be a

representation of our collective fears about natural and man-made

disasters, or apocalyptic plagues straight out of the bible. They can be

dark satire of mindless consumer culture and social conformity. They can

be a commentary on how reliant we have become on certain technologies that

will be rendered useless or irrelevant in a crisis. They can be a

frightening look at the darkest version of ourselves, stripped of reason

and emotion and reduced to raw, animalistic hunger. Zombies are the

personification of our own mortality, a fear that is perverted and turned

against us. Or, in video games, they can represent man-shaped targets that

can only be killed with challenging head-shots - an extra level of

challenge for the twitchers out there.

I am a fan of AMC's The Walking Dead in particular. The

TV show, anyway - I haven't read the comics or played the licensed games,

in large part because I don't want to spoil the surprises coming up in the

TV series. But also because the comics don't have the Dixon brothers.

Merle Dixon, the racist redneck

goon you love to hate and hate to love.

It's an awesome show, and if you haven't seen it, you should probably be

deeply embarrassed. Get on Netflix, go pick up the season box sets at

Target or Wal-Mart, make nice with a friend who has the current

three-and-a-half seasons on his TiVO - do what you gotta do and watch it.

Start from the beginning and get all caught up before you continue reading,

because I'm gonna be dropping spoilers. You've been warned.

The Walking Dead does two very important things: firstly, it puts the

zombie apocalypse on television instead of just the big screen (or the

direct-to-dvd bargain bin); and secondly, it examines the huge,

bewildering array of emotions and personal conflicts surrounding great

tragedy. The survivors have lost so much - family, friends, home, hope -

but they dig down deep into that primal nugget of id, down underneath all

the emotions and everything else, and they try to carry on living and

rebuilding what they can, however they can.









Marcus, Ed and Maya, just when s**t is

starting to get real.

As The Walking Dead is to zombie apocalypse movies and television, so

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/3077">State of Decay

is to the slew of zombie titles on the market now. Most of them are justshooters, or games with a primary focus of killing all the zombies. Youcarry around a ridiculous amount of ammo and an arsenal of rifles, SMGs,pistols, axes, bats, chainsaws and various otherskull-smashing/head-and-limb-removal devices, and the whole point ofeverything is to score a bajillion head-shots. Some of them arehorror-survival or adventure games where you solve puzzles in darkhallways, occasionally get startled by sudden loud noises, fight your waythrough fixed groups of mobs and then fight a boss monster every twentiethor so encounter.

State of Decay is much richer and grittier than that. It's the Walking

Dead of the zombie apocalypse video game - even moreso than the actual

Walking Dead games, which are adventure stories and not sandbox

RP-survival games. The Walking Dead TV series is the very essence of

"sandbox" - the characters are basically free to do whatever they want

because the rules of society are dead and gone. They can boost cars,

desecrate corpses, go live in a jail, go out exploring, root around in

peoples' houses for supplies, start a new town, declare war on another

group of survivors, or whatever, and they generally do all of those things

all the time.









Rick, returning to base from a

scavenging run. He found Stack of Ammo.

The story of State of Decay is about a group of survivors rather than

just one character in particular. While Rick Grimes is very much central

in The Walking Dead's story, the show explores the group dynamic, spending

a lot of time with the other characters to show how they are reacting to

the world around them, and it makes you care about them. Usually,

immediately before killing them off in the most devastating way

possible.

The same is true in State of Decay, only the story is less centralized.

You're not playing just one character the whole way through - you play

pretty much all of them. Most of the survivors in your group end up being

playable, or recruitable as companions, or both. Each character has his or

her own backstory, revealed in snippets during quiet moments between

scavenging and skull-bashing. You spend a lot of time with each of them

and get to know them.









Marcus on a much less successful

scavenging run.

And, just like The Walking Dead, it seems as though all characters in

State of Decay are expendable. As soon as you get attached, that's the

moment you stumble into a horde with a Feral planted in the middle of it,

without any backup. That's what seems to happen to me, anyway. And when

that character dies, the group carries on without him. If your character

dies while out on his own without backup, the game switches you to whoever

is next in line back at the base, and you get a little snippet of Lily

saying a few words in remembrance.Then she gets back on the radio and

reminds you that there's some shit that needs to get done.

Here's a quick comparison between a few State of Decay characters and

their Walking Dead equivalents:

State of Decay character Personality Walking Dead equivalent Alan Gunderson Hard-liner who mistakes his own psychosis for pragmatism,

eventually needs to be "dealt with" Shane Sam Hoffman Prickly warrior-woman who masks her humanity behind a wall of

scowls and anger Michonne Lily Ritter Core member of a survivor group, looking after her family; has a

good heart and acts as the group's moral compass, keeping the

members grounded Hershel Three Random Survivors picked up early on in the game A group that has been having a rough time surviving on its own,

and needs the security offered by a larger, more established group;

they aren't afraid of some hard work and tough rules, but they are

also entirely expendable The new guys who have joined the prison group at the start of

Season 4

There are other similarities with the storylines, too, beyond the obvious

zombie apocalypse setting. State of Decay starts off with Marcus Campbell

and Ed Jones returning from a 2-week fishing trip vacation on a remote

lake, only to be attacked by zombies immediately after making landfall.

This sort of mirrors Rick waking up from a coma only to discover that the

world went all the way to hell while he was unconscious. Both Rick Grimes

and Marcus and Ed have to blindly stumble forward to figure out just what

in the hell happened while they were away.

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Rick and the gang, house-shopping.

The rest of cast of State of Decay has a very familiar feel to it, as

well. One could easily draw parallels between any of the game's survivors

to equivalent characters in the show. Not all of The Walking Dead

characters are represented - there's no Daryl, or Dale, or Laurie, or Carl

(or any other children) - but there seem to be a heck of a lot of Jims and

T-Dogs and the other secondary characters. There are even groups of other

survivors with their own agendas: the Wilkersons are kind of like a

hillbilly version of the Governor. Imagine a smaller version of Woodbury

run by Merle and Daryl Dixon, and focused around brewing moonshine.

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Merle and Daryl would have felt right

at home here.

Both the game and the show explore the question, "how do you survive

after everything ends?" The Walking Dead approaches this question from a

more emotional, human standpoint, focusing on how people react when they

are pushed past their limits and are forced to discover new ones.

State of Decay takes a more practical view, focusing more on hardscrabble

living after the lights go out. Keeping a group of people alive requires

food, medicine, tools, weapons and other supplies, and since you can no

longer just pop down to the local Wal-Mart and fret about such things as

natural versus man-made fibres when buying a new t-shirt, that means

scavenging what's available from everywhere you can get into.

Everyone turns into a Glenn Rhee - the guy who goes out and gets stuff.

State of Decay has a finite amount of resources available. Once a house

has been looted, those supplies never respawn. That house is done, and

only serves as zombie shelter (or possibly a mission waypoint) from then

on. Mind you, there are a lot of supplies around, and the other characters

go out on looting expeditions when you're not controlling them and when

they're not recuperating from the abuse you put them through. But they are

finite, and the group has to range out farther and farther from base to

find them as the game progresses.

This is particularly true of vehicles. There are only so many working

cars available. You can use pretty much all of them, but once a car is

smashed because you've been using it as a high-speed plow to clear

dangerous hordes off the streets, it stays smashed (unless you have the

upgraded workshop at your base, and supplies to repair them), and you have

one less car to get around in.

It's also particularly true of bullets. They are a fairly rare commodity,

and characters have a very limited carrying capacity, so each bullet needs

to count. Every bullet that hits anywhere other than the head is one more

zombie that needs to be killed with a tree branch.









Daryl's style of pragmatism works

well in State of Decay. But alas, no crossbows in the game.





Rick and the gang run into these sorts of troubles fairly often. It's why

they made the bargain with the inmates at the prison for half the food,

and it's one of the reasons why Daryl uses a crossbow instead of a rifle.

Crossbow bolts can be re-used over and over again, which can't be said of

bullets. And even the most citified among them no longer balks at eating

owl, possum or squirrel meat, and most of them will even happily nosh on

canned dog food during lean times.

It brings to mind the opening scene of Season 3, when Rick and the gang

are bouncing from house to house trying to find food and a place to rest

for the night. They break into a house and explore it room-to-room without

a word. The gang settles in to chow down on some dog food, but Rick is

upset that they have come to this, and he snatches the can away in

disgust. Their moment of rest is interrupted by the arrival of a handful

of zombies, so they bail out of the house and keep on truckin'.









They can't show zombie battles this

poorly-lit on TV.

State of Decay's food situation is a little less specific than that. In

terms of group supplies, food is a somewhat non-specific resource that

gets stockpiled. You don't really know exactly what the food is, but you

know how many units of it you have stocked up. In terms of food that can

be carried and eaten by the characters, the icon looks like Twinkies

packages (undoubtedly a wink and a nod to the movie Zombieland, where

Tallahassee could find any food except Twinkies) and the item description

is "Snack," but when the character eats it, it looks like an apple. And

the description on the resource bundles found in homes occasionally

describes the food as "stale but probably still edible" or "pickled in

brine." Perhaps it's for the best that the food is not described in great

detail - after all the delicious soups, beans and SPAM have been consumed,

all that will be left is canned turnip and pork brains in milk gravy. And

Alpo, I guess.

Another common theme is the usefulness of crude melee weapons rather than

guns. Guns are generally quicker and can be more efficient in the hands of

someone properly trained to use them, but they have a number of fairly

significant disadvantages. They require ammunition, which can be difficult

to obtain, might not work if it's old and can be very easy to waste. Some

of them employ complex mechanisms and must be subjected to routine

maintenance. A pipe wrench never misfires. A machete never runs out of

bullets. A crowbar never jams, no matter how caked it gets with zombie

blood and bits of skull and brain and matted hair.









Leveling up was not an easy

task for Rick Grimes.

But, even more importantly, guns are frickin' loud. Rick and the gang

figured this out fairly early on - if you shoot one zombie, that zombie is

dead, but the gunshot is going to attract a crowd because zeds and walkers

are drawn to loud noises. Bats and pipes and golf clubs are silent - they

take significantly more effort to use effectively. But with a melee

weapon, you can get away with only killing a couple of zombies rather than

starting a deadly standoff against a slavering herd because you thought it

would be quicker to just shoot one zombie in the head.









Maya makes sure it's not Daryl before

she pulls the trigger.

If you really just can't wait a few more weeks for the second half of The

Walking Dead's fourth season, State of Decay might give you a half-decent

zombie survival fix. It won't tell you how Rick deals with the most recent

spate of heart-wrenching losses, but if it helps, you can scream out

"HERSHELLLL!" at the top of your lungs the next time you ram your pickup

truck through the middle of a horde.

Some terrible things are going to happen to your characters, but rarely

will it ever be as heartbreaking as this.

How do you think State of Decay compares to The Walking Dead? Or to the

Walking Dead games? Or to other zombie-themed games in general? Let us

know in our comments!

