Image credit: Treyarch Studios
Round 30 and I’m sprinting to keep ahead of the pack of undead behind me, I turn the corner, two dozen stinking reanimated corpses appear from every angle. Up comes my RPD and I rip through the nearest zombie’s skull, draw the others to the left, then dodge right. Sprint, jump, stab right and left. Somehow I make it through.
The two guys playing with me are sitting in front of the same TV split-screen and either don’t have a mike or aren’t talking. I like this map because the games are usually pretty quick, and when you’re playing zombies with dudes that don’t have mikes they’re usually even quicker. This time though, we keep miraculously reviving each other when one of us goes down and the rounds keep ticking away.
Back up a bit, because those of you unfamiliar with the game or just gaming in general are beginning to drift.
Before I became obsessed with blogging I was obsessed with zombie video games. The original “Nach der Untoten”* that was unlocked when you completed Call of Duty : World at War got me hooked. The map was tiny and dark, almost claustrophobic. The zombies were extra unspeakably evil because they were friggin Nazis.
Call of Duty zombies has you complete one round after another. With each round you get more zombies and the bastards get harder to kill. They’re also faster. You have to score points by slaying zombies and boarding up windows to unlock doors and obstacles. In one of the rooms there’s a mystery box that gives you a random weapon, some of them better than others.
For me, the beauty of the game was it’s simplicity. When I first played I was terrified and physically shaking. I don’t think I got past round 2, but pretty soon figured out some strategies until I could survive by myself to around round 16. The bodies piled up and I loved it!
So anyway, after “Nach der Untoten” I played another zombie classic Left 4 Dead. The creature sounds in that one are voiced by none other than Mike Patten of Faith No More (I’m a big fan). However, maybe because I’m an old dude on a bunch of meds, I get confused switching from one game to the next because the layout of the controller is always different. Luckily Black Ops came out and along with it a whole bunch of new and unique downloadable maps.
Fast-forward to Black Ops 2 and the downloadable map “Nuketown 2025”. Nuketown was a popular multi-player map from Black Ops 2 that was supposed to be a mock town that the government was about to use to see what would happen when they dropped an H-bomb on it. Nuketown was complete with 50’s era cars and houses with funky sofas. Dummies decked out in polyester stood around waiting to get incinerated.
Nuketown 2025 takes place after the bomb has been dropped and the Zombies come out. (There is a whole back-story about an evil Nazi named Dr. Richtofen and time travel and some device that controls the zombies, but that’s beyond the scope of my really giving a crap) In this map there are no windows to board up, and every so often a random perk machine drops down from the sky and lands in a random location. Your survival depends on the right perks dropping. Perks machines were something that evolved after “Nacht der Untoten” and let you survive into higher rounds by giving you special powers. The perk dispensers look like retro soda machines, but the tonic they dispense packs a kick! The most essential in my book is Juggernog, which lets you scoot around zombies and get hit a few times without going down. As for the others, I think it’s a matter of personal preference and which weapons you have. The real challenge with Nuketown is that you may not get Juggernog in time to survive the deadly horde of unholy flesh that’s closing in on you from all sides.
Round 36 and I become entangled in a swarm of clawing zombies. Then I’m down, the freaks leave me and race to the last surviving member of our little platoon, who’s trapped in the back yard of the green house and will never be able to revive me. The blood red stain clouding my vision begins to turn black. The world begins to fade away. There are only shadows.
*”Night of the Undead” See, the two years I spent on German in college was not wasted!
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The Dark Chalice 