why do we have to choose?

I think I like Shambling Zombies better because they represent death as a slow inevitbilty and I think the sense of dread is more satisfying then panic.

Because slow zombies are more disturbingly inhuman and therefore scarier. fast zombies are just hungry injured people, slow zombies are walking corpses.

Anyway, this looks like the closest thing I've ever seen to a game remaining faithful to the romero-style zombie story. I've always wanted a sandbox-type zombie game, where there are thousands of slow zombies, the only way to kill them is to shoot them in the head or blow them the fuck up, and a single bite is game over. I think it could work pretty well.

People who like running zombies are probably the same kind of people who thought 28 days later was a zombie movie.

Zombies don't run. They also don't starve to death, or die when you shoot them in the stomach.

You must remove the head or destroy the brain. If we are going by classic zombie rules, left 4 dead is not a zombie shooter either.

In fact, almost every videogame to feature zombies has failed at one point or another in the semantics.

Running zombies work better for infection movies. Shambling zombies are the classic undead monsters and therefore, in my opinion, superior. Running zombies are just annoying
It's easy to mistake 28 days films as zombie films since Dawn of the Dead blurred the line between crazy-infection 'zombies' and undeath.

Magic undead slow zombies are as appealing in the fast zombie-era as a Lugosi vampire is to a tween Twilight fanatic. Boring, I'd rather run for my life.

all I got from your comment is that you love Twilight. Shame on you.

You actually have the gall to insinuate that we are in a "fast zombie era". Cease that nonsense.

When zombies surround and outnumber you by about 200,000:1, they don't need to run. Running zombies are for people with short attention spans.

I can explain this easy: Traditional zombies are more frightening because they invoke a sense of realism. A dead body reanimated from the grave is not going to be able to just jump up and run 80 MPH. It will be crippled and rotted and slow but (and here's the important thing) DETERMINED. They might be slow, and maybe easily avoided in small groups, and generally not hard to kill, but they are relentless. They won't stop. At all. Ever. They just keep going, driven by whatever, weird, unexplained supernatural thing that makes them function on that base, barely-living level. A few might not be scary. But then their numbers grow and grow until it is a throng of shambling corpses who can only be stopped by having their brains blown out. They just keep coming. And coming.
Fast, crazy zombies might make for snappier games and films, but traditional walking corpses invoke much more fear and atmosphere and malevolence.

My gripe is just the gameplay factor. The basic concept behind the zombies is that there is a deadly swarming factor. How you make that fun depends entirely off of how well you balance the side of the survivors against the zombies. If you have lethargic zombies slowly shuffling their way over to a group of men with a seemingly endless supply of shotgun shells, chucking grenades and moving quite fast, then there really isn't much tension is there? If you want slow zombies you better make the game really interesting. You have to make the penalty for using guns and loud weapons so steep that people would be forced to use more minimalistic weapons. The challenge shouldn't be how well your aim is, but how well you can defend against a siege of extremely powerful enemies that are seemingly endless.

If you use fast zombies in a game, then it instantly has more dynamic tension to it. There's panic, fear and adrenaline. If you use slow zombies, then you have to milk the overwhelming sense of exhaustion, dread and futility; mixed with the notion that your weapons are far too inefficient to properly do the job. That's a heavy burden to put on a game designer. Slow zombies are better suited for the cinema, while fast zombies make better video games.

Also, Dead Rising is an excellent example of a good slow moving zombie game. Why? Because you very rarely ever get or use a gun. Guns don't even work that well. If you were in a situation where you were surrounded by zombies, would you have a gun on you or even know how to get one? Most likely not. So in that game you do what anyone else would you. You start picking up every random item you can lift and use it as a weapon to get away from the fucking things. You'll throw your own shoes if you think it'll do some damage. That's the proper way to create tension and panic when you have slow zombies.

^ This is fundamentally incorrect. Consider all the aspects of zombie mythology that are routinely ignored by game designers out of convenience more than an earnest attempt at making an interesting game - the spread of infection to the uninfected, the idea that one bite could be it, the idea that you can't kill a zombie unless it's a headshot, but you can slow it down by blowing it's legs off - all these things are valid gameplay design ideas. Punching a hole in a crowd and then running the gauntlet and heading for the high ground - don't tell me that's not an interesting gameplay scenario. Truthfully, fast zombies could be *anything* - there's nothing that distinguishes them from any other monster you might want to kill in a videogame other than 'crap AI'. People are just making fast zombie games because they discovered, hey, people like zombies. They could be aliens, robots, giant insects - anything.

Oh. That was a response to your first post - I agree with the second part.

Anyway, this game looks boring and I'm glad it was never released. Not because the zombies are slow, but because everything is just recycled. It's the same shit, all the way through: See zombies --> kill zombies --> sneak into a building looking for zombies or something --> oh shit more zombies

And it doesn't seem to matter whether you hit them in the head or not.

Wow.

Freshly infected just turned zombies can run because their bodies haven't rotted yet. As they decay they get slower and weaker. Bodies returning from the graves are also slower.

There's plenty of room for zombies of every shape and speed. Unless it's in a movie directed by Uwe Boll.

IE: Crap?

They weren't all this ugly. This is basically using SWAT 4 (maps and all) which ran on Unreal 2.5, a broken stop-gap of a game engine.

The hospital level in SWAT 4 co-op would develop a memory leak every time because it used too many static meshes. Everyone on the server would have to type /flush in the console periodically or it would be unplayable.

That said, SWAT 4 was a very good game. I think it (and SWAT 3) influenced Chet and Left 4 Dead more than a little bit.

Until you run out of room and bullets.

Also, you can keep that up for hours, but they can keep it up forEVER.

You better hope you can keep it up for eternity, because that's what a slow-zombie story is all about. Trapped in a world of walking corpses, alone, forever.

"Also, you can keep that up for hours, but they can keep it up forEVER."

This is the big lie about slow zombies - they'll rot away and die eventually, so they won't keep it up forever. The other big lie is that some slow zombies are pretty fast - in every movie I've seen it depends on their state of decay/ how much of them has been eaten/proximity to victim. The very first zombie you see in NotLD is a runner.

Yes but you see, since they're slow, they can't actually take over the whole world. So it's really me briskly walking away from a zombie and going a few streets over and finding my neighbors who've all walked briskly away from the same zombie.

A Zombie RPG would rock.

The d20 table top game, 'Year of the Zombie' would be a good foundation.