So, I’ve been hooked on Urban Dead since sometime last week. It’s essentially an HTML interface survival horror game, with emphasis on the “survival”, and not so much on the “horror”. You join hundreds thousands lots of people online in a persistent world that is one large, sprawling city. You gather up with a group of those people (such as the Evil Avatar-ians) and simply try to survive.

The best part of the game is that, as a group, you get to decide on your own established set of goals, just like if you were huddled together in a warehouse attempting to live out a REAL zombie apocalypse. For instance, our group is currently trying to keep a hospital secured to use as a field hospital for gathering before and after major raids on established zombie centers of activity. The overall goal of the group is to regain control of Scarletwood, one of the suburbs of the city.

You are given a portion of action points to use during the day, and these regain at the rate of 1 per half-hour, so you are expected to use them wisely. When you end your turn, you have to try to make sure you are within a barricaded building that is relatively safe from the next cataclysmic zombie uprising.

At the moment, I’m nothing more than a lowly level 1 doctor, trying desperately to scavenge enough materials to create some first-aid kits that I can use to heal fellow survivors. Healing others is the only way I can gain experience points and level up. It all probably sounds pretty confusing, but I was surprised at how quickly I understood the foundation and mechanics of the game after reading through the wiki and our own group’s threads at Evil Avatar.

So, yeah. That’s what I’m wasting my time on these days. That, and Battalion Wars 2, which I’ll talk about some other time.