Popular Xbox Live Indie Game, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1, has sold 308,000 copies in addition to getting their popular theme song on the Rock Band Network and getting their own line of t-shirts at Hot Topic.
Buddy Acker of SpawnFirst writes: "The Xbox Live Indie Games section of the Xbox Live Marketplace is depressing. I’ll actually go a step further: it’s utter junk. Most of the games available on it are poor clones of popular games, games filled with pictures of barely clothed cartoon women or farting games rife with quicktime events. Most people will stick with Xbox Live Arcade when attempting to find an independent game to play because otherwise their efforts will be akin to searching for a dime in a fountain full of pennies and cement."
This week for Gaming Irresponsibly’s Indie Game of the Week, we are going to take a trip in the ‘wayback’ machine a couple of years to 2009. Back in ’09, Ska Studios’ James Silva developed an indie smash hit that received tons of praise, I Made a Game With Zombies In It (or as the official title puts it, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1).
For some time, zombies in video games were associated with only one franchise: Resident Evil. The shambling monstrosities in the 1996 classic were so iconic that they defined the undead horde for a generation of players. Recently, though, they've begun to show their rotting faces in many titles. It's become de rigueur for designers to populate their games with a range of variations on rejects from Michael Jackson's Thriller, but why?
I know I might be wrong but I am going to say because of how well received Call Of Duty: World At War Zombies was received. After that, companies took the lemmings route and decided to implement zombies into every Tom Dick and Harry of a game.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not mad at what Treyarch did because it made the game fun but I am disappointed at the other companies that put in unnecessary undead in order for their game to pocket sales.
I think zombies are an interesting genre...It is a shame that so many crappy games tried to copy and paste the formula from the bigger companies and just over-saturate the market with bland zombie games. Same thing occurred with the alien genre.
There actually is plenty of room for an innovative zombie game.
