18-Nov-2005 There's quite a buzz beginning to grow around Stubbs and it's not just the flies either There's quite a buzz beginning to grow around Stubbs the Zombie, and it's not made by flies either. Good things are being said about this Halo-engine powered zom-com, and word has it that it's shaping up to be GTA meets Destroy All Humans meets Night of the Living Dead. You're going to rise from the grave, possess the living, and ultimately turn the world of man into a planet of walking homicidal corpses.
"I don't think any of us consciously thought 'Let's do something totally unlike Halo.' We just threw a bunch of ideas at the wall and waited to see which ones stuck. Stubbs, being somewhat grotty, stuck quite well," says Matt Soell, Wideload's 'writer guy' (his words, not ours). "He also had the most compelling gameplay mechanics - we thought possessing humans to do your bidding and converting enemies into zombie allies would make for a fun game."
Stubbs' story is a sad one, though. He's not your typical game hero, either. The story of Edward Stubblefield (to give him his human name) would be too depressing to fully relate, so we'll just say that his miserable existence as a traveling insurance salesman came to an end one night in the early 1930s when he angered a potential customer and ended up in a shallow grave in a Pennsylvania field, dead from a shotgun blast to the belly. Twenty-odd years later, that same field is the spot chosen by billionaire Andrew Monday as the site of Punchbowl, his city of the future. With money to burn and the best scientific minds at his disposal, Monday creates a city based on technology and automation years ahead of its time. It's a shining beacon of hope for the rest of the world, and Monday throws a big party to introduce his baby to the world. The perfect time for Stubbs to crawl out of his shallow grave, angry at the world and hungry for brains.
To sate his bottomless hunger, Stubbs can possess unsuspecting humans and coerce them to do his bidding via a detachable hand. Sneaking up behind people and grabbing their skull enables you to control their actions. If there's a posse of shotgun-toting humans guarding a street, Stubbs can possess one, use him to shoot the rest, then shuffle down the street without any hassle. Stubbs doesn't use any weapons himself, instead using the power of possession to turn whole swathes of humans against each other.
The Halo engine has been used to power the juicy bits such as graphics, audio, physics - in fact, the whole bloody enchilada. Soell tells us that a lot of time was spent modifying and enhancing the Halo engine to make it suitable for his epic braineating extravaganza. A lot of this is under-the-hood stuff that might not be apparent at first glance, such as enhancing the AI of enemies and zombie allies. Some of those physics will also be used to control cars, and although Stubbs the Zombie is "more about brainjacking than carjacking", that won't stop him nicking a tractor and scooping up crowds of fleeing yokels. Gives a whole new meaning to 'drive-thru restaurant'.
"The best part of development is getting the game to the point where it's not only playable but fun to play. It's always fun to be pleasantly surprised by what you're working on. At the moment I'm very impressed with the combat. Eating brains just doesn't get boring, no matter how many times I do it," Soell tells us. Somehow, we can believe it.
We'll have more on Stubbs the Zombie when a UK publisher has signed it up, something we suspect won't be that far off.
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