zombie

Not your ordinary zombie game

Plants vs. Zombies is a fun, funny, and remarkably well-designed game that should prove addictive for newcomers to tower-defense games, as well as challenging and satisfying to serious fans of this real-time-strategy subgenre. The interface and gameplay start out simply: you must plant seeds, collect sunlight, and tend a gridded garden that is your only defense against ravenous waves of the cartoonish undead. Zombies advance right to left in rows, and you have to decide which kind of plants to use and where to put them, whether you choose sunflowers to accelerate sunlight production or a variety of other plants … Read more

2D zombies are still scary

Zombieville USA is a 2D, side-scrolling arcade game in which you use a variety of firearms to kill an endless supply of zombies across a series of increasingly treacherous levels. The running, zombie-killing part of gameplay is very straightforward: you tap on arrows on the right and left side of the screen to move, and you tap the bottom of the screen to shoot, occasionally ducking into houses to avoid zombies and collect money and ammo. Even with its cool, cartoony graphics (including some whimsical gore, of the flying-eyeball and bits-of-brain variety), Zombieville USA can get a little repetitive--especially playing … Read more

Bargain apps and zombies attack: iPhone apps of the week

It's happened to just about everyone who has bought an iPhone application at the iTunes Store: At some point the application you paid $7.99 for goes on sale for $1.99--sometimes it's even free the next day. I've had this happen to me many times, but only because it's part of the job to get applications when they're hot off the presses. Fortunately, as part of the job, I don't have to (personally) pay for the applications I review. Most people aren't so lucky.

Fortunately, an application made for bargain hunters that … Read more

Stop the undead hordes

Zombie Attack Free is a free preview of Zombie Attack, a "tower defense" real-time strategy game in which you fight off a horde of zombies with strategically deployed gun turrets. An endless stream of zombies (punctuated by progressively more difficult levels) rushes across a field, trying to reach and attack your humble shack, as you run around on the field (by tilting your device, or using touch-and-drag controls) placing and upgrading gun emplacements. You earn money for every zombie you drop, and the game ends when the zombies destroy your shack.

Like other tower defense games, the heart … Read more

Download 'Left 4 Dead' (PC) for $24.99

Here's a smokin' deal for PC gamers: Valve Software's Left 4 Dead is on sale for $24.99, down from the usual price of $49.99. The catch: It's a weekend-only deal, so you gotta jump on it today.

Update: As of 8:55 a.m. ET Monday, the deal was still active.

Actually, there's another small catch: You must use Valve's Steam software to purchase and download the game. (No box for you! This is an all-digital deal.) No complaints here; I use Steam all the time.

I haven't played Left 4 Dead (… Read more

Rumor: 'Left 4 Dead' coming to PlayStation 3

The news seems to be getting better and better for the PlayStation 3 in terms of game titles in 2009. Possibly joining the list of games is the popular Xbox/PC zombie shooter Left 4 Dead.

EA is known for releasing game titles on multiple platforms; however, some would say that this is just wishful thinking. With that being said, you make the call. HMV has a link where you can preorder for a June 5, 2009 release.

Whether this is fact or fiction remains to be seen. I guess we will just have to wait until June to find … Read more

Hacking programmable road signs

We see them everywhere these days, digital signs by the side of the road telling us about road conditions or that we should prepare to stop or that our local bridge might be closed next Tuesday from noon to midnight. And if you're like me, you've always just assumed that the message on the signs is legitimate and properly authorized.

But what if the sign, instead of reading something like "Ice Ahead" was flashing the message, "Zombies Ahead"?

It's true that in San Francisco or a few other cities, such a sign could … Read more

Google jokesters ward off zombies

Google, whose servers constantly crawl the Web, doesn't have anything against spiders. But zombies, well, that's another matter.

Showing some timely techie humor, the search giant updated its robots.txt file for Halloween. For the uninitiated, search engines trying to index Web sites look for robots.txt files for instructions about whether they're permitted access to particular pages.

The Google robots.txt file on Friday begins with the following exclusion:

User-agent: zombies Disallow: /brains

Most of the time when people do this sort of thing it's called an Easter egg. Is there such a thing as … Read more

Study: Uptick in spam-sending zombie PCs in September

Compromised computers that send spam as part of their regular botnet activity increased dramatically in September, according to a Symantec study (PDF) released Monday.

The Symantec report follows a study from MessageLabs also illustrating the increased use of automated spam relays.

After seeing a 37 percent drop in botnet-related spam for August, Symantec reported a 101 percent increase in September. The growth appears to be focused in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, with South Korea experiencing the largest increase at 4,236 percent. It was followed by Kazakhstan (761 percent), Romania (607 percent), Saudi Arabia (555 percent), and Vietnam (… Read more