BoxHead

February 15, 2007 11:44 AM

BoxHead - An entirly addictive zombie shot 'em upper. (via digg)
posted by Dr.James.Orin.Incandenza (71 comments total)

A little early for Flash Friday, I know, but I was feeling antsy today...
posted by Dr.James.Orin.Incandenza at 11:45 AM on February 15, 2007 [3 favorites]

When the devil shoots fireballs at you, it looks like he is creating them through pelvic thrusting. Also, is it too damn much to ask that all Metafilter posts involve zombies in some way? Thank you doctor.
posted by ND¢ at 11:57 AM on February 15, 2007

All the comments should also involve zombies.
posted by Astro Zombie at 11:57 AM on February 15, 2007

Any particular zombie?
posted by Astro Zombie 2 at 11:58 AM on February 15, 2007

Nah. Just whoever's on hand.
posted by Astro Zombie at 11:59 AM on February 15, 2007

Nice little free flash game.

Similar to Crimsonland if you like this sort of thing.
posted by WinnipegDragon at 11:59 AM on February 15, 2007

Hey, I'm happy to help out where I can.
posted by InfidelZombie at 11:59 AM on February 15, 2007

GRAAAH NNNG KRRRRR
posted by cortex at 12:03 PM on February 15, 2007 [2 favorites]

shit wrong account
posted by cortex at 12:03 PM on February 15, 2007

Astro Zombie 3?
posted by Astro Zombie at 12:04 PM on February 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

NO I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT

*chews arm off*
posted by cortex at 12:05 PM on February 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

BarrRROOOWR FFTTTHTH GAAAR GRRR!
posted by Astro Zombie 3 at 12:08 PM on February 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

Aw. Look what you've done. Now he's angry.

-er.

He's angrier.
posted by Astro Zombie at 12:09 PM on February 15, 2007

I bet other people have said this before, but if they have I haven't seen it, so this is original in that respect. I think that zombies terrify people because they are a metaphor for death. They are mindless. They are not out to get you specifically, they are out to get everyone. They aren't planning to get you, they are just going to get you one day, no matter what you do. They are relentless. You can run away, you can board yourself up in a house or mall or church, but they will just keep coming. Vampires, werewolves, frankenstein, etc. There was always some thought behind what they were doing. Zombies don't think. They don't plan. They don't scheme. They just come at you and come at you and keep coming until they get you. Zombies are death. Run away all you want. Board yourself up in your house. It doesn't matter. One day the zombies will get you, and they will eat your motherfucking brains. Just like death.
posted by ND¢ at 12:12 PM on February 15, 2007 [5 favorites]

This game showed up on Fazed a little while ago. I've been playing it a lot. Be sure to get lots of the power-ups early with grenades, and then when your shotgun gets beefier it can be used for crazy kills.

Past level 15 or so, set up a perimeter of claymores so you can retreat, and start each level with a barrel layout or three.

Fun stuff.
posted by craven_morhead at 12:13 PM on February 15, 2007

I should have added 'zombies' as a tag.
posted by Dr.James.Orin.Incandenza at 12:19 PM on February 15, 2007

Great game -- though it's crashed Safari twice now. Both times when I was doing really well.
posted by hifiparasol at 12:20 PM on February 15, 2007

Too bad they haven't found a way to make the high scores honest, yet. Otherwise a terrific game.
posted by IronLizard at 12:28 PM on February 15, 2007

Wow! Now it crashed Firefox too.
posted by hifiparasol at 12:32 PM on February 15, 2007

Fun, thanks. It takes some getting used to that your gun does, indeed, have to line up with the bad guy.
posted by Skorgu at 12:34 PM on February 15, 2007

I never did figure out how to use the chargepacks. They just sat there, doing nothing. :(

But yes, it's the shotgun that seems to become the most useful, especially for taking out those red guys.

Much fun.
posted by evilangela at 12:39 PM on February 15, 2007

You can still add the zombie tag, I think. It really needs to be done.

Zommmmbbiiiieeeeeessssss.
posted by miss lynnster at 12:40 PM on February 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

Great, I lost. Now I'm a zombie. Urrrr gnnghaaah!
posted by Elmore at 12:45 PM on February 15, 2007

Yeah, the chargepacks suck. Sometimes they exploded on me, other times not. bad news bears.

I like experimenting with different explosive barrel layouts at the beginning of each round. And the shotgun. The sweet, sweet shotgun.

The rocket launcher can be nice to cover a retreat, but it's explosiveness gets me into trouble (read: dead) sometimes.
posted by craven_morhead at 12:53 PM on February 15, 2007

ND¢, I've always interpreted it in more of a paranoiac sense. They're the many, and they're out to subsume your individuality, just like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. At least, the dread I feel in my various body snatcher and zombie nightmares is exactly the same.

Uh-oh, I just heard a loud and distant groaning 1 block to the west and 4 blocks to the north.
posted by kimota at 12:54 PM on February 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

This has crashed every swf running app that I've tried in OSX (safari, camino, firefox, shiira, iswiff), unfortunately - it's a really fun game.
posted by god particle at 12:55 PM on February 15, 2007

To add a bit more to ND¢'s comment, Reason magazine recently published an essay on the politics of zombies.

Anyway, the author says:
... [T]he zombie movie has been among the most consistently political forms in American popular culture. The politics tend to lean left, but zombie entertainment approaches a level of discontent more elemental than mere anti-capitalism or shopping mall burlesque. Apocalyptic and piously disdainful of the carnal realities of human life, zombie cinema is a shocking, uproarious meditation on the nature of death—on what, if anything, we owe to the dead.
posted by pfafflin at 12:59 PM on February 15, 2007

BRAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIINNNNNNZZZZZ
posted by Mister_A at 1:09 PM on February 15, 2007

Reason magazine recently published an essay on the politics of zombies.

You = Awesome.
posted by ND¢ at 1:19 PM on February 15, 2007

Hmm, while I agree that the scary thing about zombies is that they just don't freakin' stop, I'm not sure that they are socio-political or symbolic interpretations of death or what we owe the dead.

For me, zombies are about the nameless faceless masses. Unfortunately there are lots of nameless, faceless masses. Communists, the poor, Third World people, even society or "normals" if you will.

If you really look at the movies, that's sort of the notion behind all of them. One person or small group standing against hordes of zombies. Just substitute your favorite horde for zombie hordes.

Also, my 2nd favorite Onion article ever.
posted by BeReasonable at 1:31 PM on February 15, 2007

This point from the article pfafflin linked to kind of meshes with your point BeReasonable:

The conservative blogger Tim Hulsey sees the undead as a Randian nightmare vision, a mobocracy in which “weak and incompetent corpses band together and achieve a dominance over the living minority that they could not otherwise attain.” For Hulsey, “when the zombies attack, their arms are outstretched toward the victim, as if they were begging for something. Which, in a manner of speaking, they are.…The idea of being overwhelmed by stinking masses, of being forced into a way of life (or death) we would not choose for ourselves, lies at the maggot-infested heart of the original Dead trilogy.”
posted by ND¢ at 1:36 PM on February 15, 2007

Oh, that reminds me. My favorite zombie sing-along,
RE: Your Brains.
posted by gemmy at 1:38 PM on February 15, 2007

I think zombies have become more popular recently because zombie narratives tend to be apocalyptic. You'll notice that more zombie movies started getting made after 9/11...
posted by brundlefly at 1:41 PM on February 15, 2007

The railgun sucks.
posted by IronLizard at 1:56 PM on February 15, 2007

Fun game!!
posted by ObscureReferenceMan at 2:31 PM on February 15, 2007

Man, the game gets so much more fun when you find the BFG
posted by tehloki at 4:05 PM on February 15, 2007

Fun game indeed (also, am I the only one who wonders, every time ObscureReferenceMan comments, that the comment is some sort of obscure reference that I'm not getting?)

Re: Zombies, what does it all mean?
I remember a point Stephen King (IIRC) made in Danse Macabre about how popular the original Night of the Living Dead had been in 1950s West Germany. I seem to remember that he used that to buttress a theory that zombies were a metaphor for the imminent nuclear apocalypse. My thought was that the Germans could have seen the zombies in two other ways. 1) As a metaphor for living in a brainwashed society (i.e. zombies as nazis) 2) The inexaorable horrors of war, with advancing hordes coming atcha from all sides, with no escape (i.e. zombies as allied soldiers).

The bigger point is that inhumanity of zombies illustrate a central facet of human existance, namely that each and everyone of us only has access to one mind, our own. Of course we know that everyone else has a mind, but we don't know know, we've never experienced the thoughts of someone else. Therefore, everyone can put themselves into the position of the still human protagonist of zombie flicks, and so can impose their own worldview on these films. Same goes for "pod people" films.

There's some connection between all this and the Philip K. Dickian (hur hur hur... Dickian) concept of the android. Basically, PKD had the thought, while reading diaries of a SS concentration camp guard, that there are people who aren't fully human, who lack the ability to empathize, and he called these people androids.

TypoFilter: I mistyped apocalypse as acopalypse. Now, there really should be a cop/zombie movie called Acopalypse. If someone knows Simon Pegg, if you could suggest to him that his next film should be the Hegelian synthesis of his two previous films, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and be called Acopalypse.
posted by Kattullus at 4:21 PM on February 15, 2007 [2 favorites]

And then a sequel set in the tropics: Acapulcolypse
posted by cortex at 4:35 PM on February 15, 2007

Don't get me wrong, I love this game as it's the best Flash game I've played in a while. Good post, I might add.

But it seems like after level 9 or so, it just stops. Like, zombies stop coming at me and I'm just there. And it's at the point where I have all the cool weapons too. Is this just me?
posted by champthom at 4:37 PM on February 15, 2007

Chargepacks explode on the second space-bar click (the first one lays one down).

I cannot get beyond a couple million points though. I kill all zombies, and am left to roam the blood-splatted waste alone. Strange glitch.
posted by Laotic at 4:41 PM on February 15, 2007

I think ND¢ raises a good point above about zombies representing the unstoppable inevitability death in our culture. Zombie movies on the other hand, I think are more about our efforts and resourcefulness in avoiding, or at least postponing that final outcome. Zombie movies are rarely actually about zombies. I think they are more about people's reactions and ability to adapt, and in this respect, zombie films really are just a small subset of survival horror genera; tornadoes, killer bees, sharks, aliens, ghosts, rabid dogs, take your pick. They all are an exploration of the human condition when put under pressure, and forced to make decisions that are uncomfortable.

This is, of course, why I love them so.

Zombies are just a nice quantifiable enemy against which a director can play out his story. We know they are slow, we know they are strong, we know they want to eat you. They are basic and primal. They work well because it's a kind of short hand for audiences today, we don't need to have the intracity of their behaviors explained to us. Like the gold standard, we know where we stand and can spend our time focusing on the characters trying to defend themselves.

On some occasions the director tricks us and changes part of that behavior. Sometimes that change works and terrifies us (28 Days Later's fast zombies) sometimes it's more than we are willing to accept (Land of the Dead's gun wielding zombies), but generally zombie movies work because they are just an exploration of our own resourcefulness in the face of something we have no control over.
posted by quin at 4:43 PM on February 15, 2007

Champ, I noticed that in a few of the levels. In one of them, (slot maybe? where it's pretty open and they only come at you from the left side) they just keep on comin', at least up to level 20 or so, where I usually die.
posted by craven_morhead at 4:50 PM on February 15, 2007

Great game by the way.
posted by quin at 5:01 PM on February 15, 2007

If you haven't already, World War Z is good for y'all chewing your brains over the zombie question.
posted by mr_book at 5:14 PM on February 15, 2007

I remember a point Stephen King (IIRC) made in Danse Macabre about how popular the original Night of the Living Dead had been in 1950s West Germany.

I think you mean the late 60s or 70s, as the movie was made in 1968.

Love the game, terribly addictive.
posted by aldurtregi at 5:15 PM on February 15, 2007

If you're big on remurdering the recently-deceased, here's my zombie game roundup from a while back, in case you missed it.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:30 PM on February 15, 2007

Absolutely right you are, aldurtregi (gaman að sjá aðra Íslendinga á MetaFilter), I don't know why I thought Night of the Living Dead was made in the fifties. I think I was so taken with my own idea I transferred the movie's release date back a decade. Though that raises the point if it was inspired by the rise of the hippies :)
posted by Kattullus at 5:40 PM on February 15, 2007

Bub is cool and I miss him. I want a Day of the Dead 2: Further Adventures with Bub. Do you hear me, George Romero? Good.
posted by Tuwa at 5:59 PM on February 15, 2007

If you're big on remurdering the recently-deceased, here's my zombie game roundup from a while back, in case you missed it.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:30 PM EST on February 15 [+]
[!]

I don't know how I missed that one Stavros. Thanks. I will be checking those out at work tomorrow.

Seconding World War Z. It is one of the best zombie-related things ever in any medium.

Finally, I have to disagree with quin's idea that zombies are merely an excellent example of any external force that allows for a story about people having to deal with that force. I just think that it goes beyond that. I would never watch a movie about people trapped in a house by killer bees. Zombies are more than an outside force bent on destroying the heroes of a movie. I am not sure why I think so though.
posted by ND¢ at 6:42 PM on February 15, 2007

Why are zombies such a compelling, dreadful force? Well the desecration of human corpses tends to do this and when it comes to desecration, you can't go a whole lot further than being filled with undeath to go on a human flesh eating rampage. Also, they're scary as fuck, so long as you're in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. (other zombie flicks, not so much) As for them being some special case because of what they represent, I don't think they're any different from, say, triffids (if you caught the old British production, a very similar vibe). They're just a hundred times cooler.

See you in Malton.
posted by dreamsign at 7:32 PM on February 15, 2007

The zombie genre gets amazing treatment in the newish "The Walking Dead" series of comics by Kirkman, they're on the fourth collection and it just gets better and better. For a completly new take on "zombies" there's "Girls" by the Luna brothers, and that one has boobs!
posted by mikoroshi at 7:43 PM on February 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

What you want to do is set up a choke point. There's not much that can stop zombies; hell, there's not anything that can stop them. But you can slow them down by choking them with their own undead. They're not terribly smart; fortify everything but a window or doorway and they will all come pouring in. Then it's just up to your ammunition and your intestinal fortitude. Some of those bodies are pretty far gone, and the stench gets to be ungodly. It's enough to nearly blind you. But you've got to keep firing away into that writhing mass of fetid, necrotic tissue, blending it into a thick pureé the consistency of a deep red molasses. It gets to be so thick with body parts that the zombies can't readily make their way through. You may get a moment's respite then, if you can rest amongst the moans and the sounds of the undead chewing on flesh that is still moving, animated by some unholy force. It's not unlike termites chewing away at the walls, but more deadly and much more sinister. And it'll just be you, the noise, and the scent of decay and gunsmoke. Repeat as necessary until you're almost out of ammunition. But make sure to save one last round; you'll need it.
posted by Eideteker at 9:10 PM on February 15, 2007 [2 favorites]

Box Head?

Wait, no, that's Pyramid Head.

Silly Pyramid Head.
posted by sparkletone at 9:44 PM on February 15, 2007

ND¢, I'm actually about 50 pages from finishing World War Z (should chew through it on lunch tomorrow). It's an amazing piece of work. I also think it's why I made my comment earlier; as the book is actually a pretty good example of what I was talking about, the zombies are central to the story, but what is really important is the trials and tribulations of the human storytellers. It's about the reconstruction of our world after a cataclysmic event. It could have been about almost anything and had a similar theme, but Brooks chose to make it zombies. [And of course, thereby made it awesome]

I get what you mean though, there is something powerful about the mythos we've created for zombies. Something hard to describe. I think you nailed it in your first post, that they are an anthropomorphism for our fear of death. And in that context, our fascination with them is obvious, but I still maintain, that in films, it's the humans response to the undead that makes the movie interesting, more so than the ghouls themselves. We may just have to agree to disagree on this one.

And I got to level 9 and the damn Zacks stopped attacking. I was well armed and ready for them too. :(
posted by quin at 9:46 PM on February 15, 2007

Kattullus, I think what you're thinking of was this passage about Dawn of the Dead, not Night:

More often the horror movie points even further inward, looking for those deep-seated personal feers--those pressure points--we all must cope with. This adds an element of universality to the proceedings, and may produce an even truer sort of art. It also explains, I think, why The Exorcist (a social horror film if there ever was one) did only so-so business when it was released in West Germany, a country which had an entirely different set of social fears at the time (they were a lot more worried about bomb-throwing radicals than about foul-talking young people), and why Dawn of the Dead wen through the roof there.
--Danse Macabre, Berkely ed., 1983, p. 131

Oddly enough, I'd written about the same passage some time back in talking about the Body Snatchers works, and I'd also misremembered it, thinking King tied Dawn's West German success explicitly to commercialism.

I think you could make the case that zombies are both a threat to individuality and a metaphor for death (which is also a threat to individuality).

re: the railgun: yes, it's slow. It's useful if you wall a narrow corridor from the N and S entrance and have the zombies all in a row, but that's about it.
posted by Tuwa at 10:13 PM on February 15, 2007

Thanks Tuwa for tracking it down and setting me right. Well... I still like my theory, despite the fact that it seems rather boneheaded.
posted by Kattullus at 12:18 AM on February 16, 2007

Kattullus: I think Tuwa's right. Night didn't come out til 1968.

I love zombies so so much. I've mentioned it here before, but fuck it; I wrote my dissertation on Night of the Living Dead. It's one of, if not the, most important and influential horror movie ever made. There are entire books written on the subject of zombies and zombie movies, for good reason. They're the most complex of all horror movie monsters because, effectively, they're us.

I need to get my hands on World War Z. Loved his Zombie Survival Guide...
posted by slimepuppy at 3:57 AM on February 16, 2007

Pfafflin's link to an essay on the politics of zombies is worthy of an FPP of its own. If only I had had this article to help me out a few years ago... (Though I have read most of the books he references.)
posted by slimepuppy at 4:05 AM on February 16, 2007

8 million. here's the trick: select "strip", don't be shy, just stay tight on the left side with the shotgun, walk up and down. they can't attack until they are fully onto the playing field.
posted by Meatbomb at 5:25 AM on February 16, 2007

Another day, another zombie discussion on the blue.

Life is good.
posted by Skygazer at 5:49 AM on February 16, 2007

The bigger point is that inhumanity of zombies illustrate a central facet of human existance, namely that each and everyone of us only has access to one mind, our own. Of course we know that everyone else has a mind, but we don't know know, we've never experienced the thoughts of someone else. Therefore, everyone can put themselves into the position of the still human protagonist of zombie flicks...


Okay, I was thinking about that, and it made me think. Zombie mythology really didn't evolve until the 20th century, though it has tenuous roots in earlier superstitions. Maybe the zombie is a reflection of the post-industrial loss of connection between human beings. When people lived in villages where everyone knew everyone and there was no television so that people talked to each other for entertainment everyone knew knew that the people that they saw everyday were people with opinions and feeling and hopes and dreams because they talked to these people and knew it. However, when everyone moved to the cities and lost their connections to each other, and the only people that they talked to were their spouse occasionally, and when they would see hundreds of people on their walk to work everyday, but not know anything about them, when they would see someone everyday but never have spoken to them, it became much easier to imagine that they were the only real people, surrounded by an army of faceless automatons. Suddenly people went from being surrounded by people that they knew intimately to being surrounded by people that they knew absolutely nothing about. An army of unspeaking, unfeeling, unthinking nonhumans. It must have been like being in a zombie movie. Zombies are merely the extension of the people that you see everyday, but have no connection to, and therefore no reason to think that they are actually real. We have seen the enemy, and he is us.

However, I think that the internet may be the answer to this zombiefication of humanity. The cliché is that the internet is connecting the whole world, but maybe it is just allowing people to connect to someone other than the people that live in their home. We have lost our connections to our extended family and our neighbors and our community (what is your next door neighbor's middle name?) but we still have a chance to see that people are still people, even if we have to see that through strangers typing things on the internet. When I am walking to work surrounded by people who I have never spoken to and never will speak to and I start to think that all the people surrounding me have no thoughts or feelings because I don't get exposed to them because I don't talk to them I can think about the fact that that dude on Metafilter wrote that cool story about the punishment wheel the other day and think "Wow, people are really people. They really do have their own minds." I am reminded daily that I am not surrounded by souless zombies, but by real people with real ideas because I see these people expressing these ideas everyday. Even if that idea is merely "Meh I've seen this before", at least I am exposed to the thoughts of others and am reminded that people are people, not zombies. Thereby Metafilter becomes the ultimate zombie killing machine.
posted by ND¢ at 7:22 AM on February 16, 2007 [17 favorites]

This is strangely addictive for such a simple game.
posted by Mitheral at 8:10 AM on February 16, 2007 [1 favorite]

Pfafflin's link to an essay on the politics of zombies is worthy of an FPP of its own.

By all means, take it and run -- I was actually thinking about posting it as an FPP before this thread came up, but wasn't sure if it was too "Zombiefilter." And, since you seem to be an academic of the undead, you could probably add more meat to the post (no pun intended).
posted by pfafflin at 9:43 AM on February 16, 2007

Thereby Metafilter becomes the ultimate zombie killing machine.

I don't know man, I can't see it replacing the faithful lawnmower.

That said, your insightful comment needs further response. I'll have to think about it. I like the inversion of the old chestnut that the internet adds to alienation. Though do you remember the 'Metafilter is a hoax' hoax? There's always the fear that on the internet, everybody else is a zombie.

But I need to think some more.
posted by Kattullus at 8:30 PM on February 16, 2007

There's always the fear that on the internet, everybody else is a zombie.

Christ, tell me about it.
posted by cortex at 8:35 PM on February 16, 2007

Cool, I got over 20 million points. I did the box level, starting from level 1. Drop a couple of walls in the bottom entry way and they only appear from the top. A little shotgunning does the rest. Oh, and engage the red guys as soon as you see them, the uzi or shotgun work best.
posted by tomble at 12:05 AM on February 17, 2007

They fixed Boxhead! Lvl 25! It gets pretty damned fast, too.
posted by dreamsign at 4:16 AM on February 17, 2007

Hey, I just noticed that this was designed by Sean Cooper, who worked on a lot of the classic era Bullfrog games. No wonder this reminded me of Syndicate.
posted by Kattullus at 3:31 PM on February 17, 2007

I should mention that the Halloween special game is even more like Syndicate.
posted by Kattullus at 3:33 PM on February 17, 2007

ahhh... syndicate. Now tht was a great game!
posted by Dr.James.Orin.Incandenza at 12:56 PM on February 18, 2007

All I have to say is, 290 million points.
Fully Upgraded Shotgun, as much as possible.
posted by Richard Daly at 10:14 PM on February 19, 2007