By Joel Smart (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 7, 2012
Not much gets the adrenaline running like the hungry growls of the looming undead. It’s what makes The Walking Dead such an exciting show, and Left 4 Dead such a compelling video game series. Now you can finally turn that energy boost into a performance-enhancing workout inspiration, with the recently released Zombies, Run! – an immersive story-driven iPhone and iPod Touch app (coming to Android devices this spring) available for $7.99. Couch potatoes have long been looking for a fun way to become active, and a thrilling zombie adventure might be just the answer they’ve been looking for. Just put in those headphones and see if you can escape the ruthless zombie hordes.
In the game, players will assume the role of the silent protagonist “Runner 5” as they seek to complete all 30 short missions in the game’s first “season.” During a mission, players attempt to collect specific packages or items, such as medicine or batteries used to keep their safe house operational, or to trade with other characters in the game. The game is completely audio-based during the running portions, with scripted broadcasts and horrifying zombie-chases bookending your own music playlists. Once you finish your run, you get to allocate the items you found. “When you get back home, who needs [the supplies] more: the soldiers or the doctors? Which buildings need extra defences? It’s up to you – and the bigger your base, the more missions you can play,” reads the game’s website www.zombiesrungame.com.
Six to Start, the company responsible for the game, found funding for the game using KickStarter, a site that asks the public to donate to projects they’d like to see completed. They asked for $12,500, but nearly 3500 people loved the idea and the project took just six days to fund – with a total financial backing of $72,627. Its simple premise: run at your own pace, along your own preferred routes, and improve your stamina and fitness level at the same time you’re saving hundreds of lives in the fictional Abel Township.
Games have the power to energize you, to involve you, to motivate you. If fingers could get buff, you can trust that most gamers would be showing off their glistening finger muscles to all the babes. So, it made sense to me when our resident fitness guru Ken Muir wrote about a social network site called Fitocracy in last week’s issue of The Cascade. On this site, gamers could track their workouts, and win “achievement badges” among other things for completing specific exercise quests and accomplishing their fitness goals. By applying game mechanics to the often dreaded activity of getting in shape, Fitocracy has managed to merge the specific qualities of gaming that are so often missing from a workout. Yet, despite rewarding players after-the-fact for their hard work, the site fails to really immerse players in the heat of the action – the moment when extra motivation would be the most useful. Zombies, Run! aims to remedy just that issue.
The only immediate negative of the game is trying to get out of bed the morning after the “let’s see what happens next” phenomenon hits and you accidently run a 10k marathon on your first night of exercise in four years. Undead might seem like an improvement.
