by: John Olin

October 25, 2005

Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse has been in the making for quite sometime, yet very few people have any idea what it is. It has been one of my personal most anticipated games and safe to say, it has been worth the wait. Built by a team of a handful of ex-Bungie employees, specifically Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian at a team called Wideload Games, it introduces a lot of first. This is the first game for Wideload Games, and the first Xbox game published by mostly Mac publisher Aspyr Media. It is the first game outside of the Halo franchise to use the Halo engine, which makes sense since the guy who formed the developer helped create the engine itself. It is also the first game ever to put you in the shoes of zombie.

Stubbs the Zombie is basically about a reanimated guy who is reanimated, coming back to wreak havoc on an unwitting utopia of a futuristic city in the 1950’s. Within minutes into the game you are eating brains, and there are plenty o’ brains to go around. High school teenyboppers, cops, men in suits, it is a buffet of delectable brain matter. When you eat someone brain, they die in an extremely violent way with chunks of skull and brains, mixed with shots of blood, flying everywhere and staining the surrounding area in crimson. Soon after, they to become zombies and eventually you will have a zombie horde, the zombies acting on their own free will, eating brains while they follow you in your path of destruction. If they stray off of the path, all you have to do is glance at them and whistle, and with a comedic “Huh?” they limp over to you. The game, unlike Halo is in a third-person view, and it is extremely unique in many ways, while at the same time borrowing a lot of the elements you would find in Halo. To be blunt, the game is definitely a blast but for only six or less hours, and then it comes to a screeching halt. The game has other difficulties, such as an insane difficulty, which is the equivalent of Legendary in Halo. Also like in Halo you can play co-op with another person, there character looking just like you. So playing it by yourself you might play it a few times through on different difficulties, but you also have the co-op. The bad thing is, you can’t play it online and there are no online options to speak of anyways. One great thing about going through the game a second time is a hippo icon that is just lying around. When you pick up one of these icons, you get some commentary from designers Patrick Curry and Alex Seropian for about three minutes and it gives you some interesting bits of information.

The game’s humor is definitely on key, and very smart but simple at the same time. There are a lot of random screams, and jokes that will keep you coming back for more. There is one when you have to dance against a midget police commissioner, and another where Stubbs is giving a speech to his zombie heard and all he keeps saying is “BRAINS!”