Finally, some details! And now I know less about the game than I did when I knew nothing.
RTS and tower defense would make me think you have some control over the creeps. Maybe it’s you vs. an AI or another player where your forces autonomously march out and fight Demigod-style, but you take turns placing towers from cards to turn the tide? Who knows. All I know is I want it now.
“With collectable card games–but in a casual context”???
Please… Wake me when someone is actually making a Zombie X-Com.
If there is one feature that is missing in casual games, it is tower defense mechanics.
They’re doing WHAT? Did I HEAR you PROPERLY? That’s fucking EXCELLENT!!! I’m so hooked on Defense Grid right now that the conjunction of “PopCap”, “tower defense”, and “zombies” has me downright excited.
This reminds me a bit of that Flash game that we all played a while back–where you have a group of survivors making a stand against a zombie onslaught over a series of days and locations, slowly making your way to an extraction point. The “towers” would be the various survivors, and if you can control them and move them around, then it would definitely have an RTS vibe.
I would love to see a Popcap take on that game. Yeah, it’s no zombie X-Com, but it could be an awesome game in its own right.
nice! I was wondering why there were no zombie tower def games, seems you could do a nice varied amoutn of levels (small towns with your ‘guns’ on rooftops, mall exteriors and interiors etc…)
I’d imagine it with say, guy with pistol, guy with shotgun, guy with sniper rifle, guy with molotovs as weapons and increasing romerostyle zombie horde waves, but whatever these guys are doing could be fun too…
RTS and TD go hand in hand. I have trouble seeing how card game is going to fit into that in any interesting way.
Cards for weapons, cards for survivors to fight with you, cards for special abilities… it’s really not all that hard to fit a card game mechanic into any type of strategy game.
Ok. How about they make it less stupid, then, and change “cards” to “features.”
And Zombie X-Com sounds like a terrible idea. There is nothing about a zombie apocalypse that fits into X-Com’s mechanics.
I think they were playing video game design boggle and those are the phrases that came up.
That said… I’ll be downloading it on release day.
I think some people would disagree with you:
Yeah, and they’re all terrible fucking ideas. The actual good ideas are the ones that aren’t actually like X-Com at all. The GeoScape mechanic and base construction, recruitment, etc. not conducive to a zombie apocalypse. Looking at X-Com as just an isometric turn-based-shooter is only half the story.
Leave X-Com the fuck alone!
What’s stupid about cards? A number of great strategy games use a card mechanic (Culdcept, Armageddon Empires, Pox Nora, Etherlords, etc.). It’s an interesting mechanic that is familiar (and thus easy to understand) to everyone–especially if you just go ahead and call it what it is, rather than performing pointless semantic contortions to try to avoid using the word “card.”
And Zombie X-Com sounds like a terrible idea. There is nothing about a zombie apocalypse that fits into X-Com’s mechanics.
Ah, I see. You’re trolling. Or an idiot, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Just in case, I’m going to trademark “Z-Com” so I can screw with anybody who tries it.
Eh, yeah you’re right, I guess “cards” does serve a useful all-encompassing purpose for a lot of features in a game of this sort.
Try reading those threads, and then you’ll see that what they’re actually talking about isn’t X-Com at all.
Who cares? Much like your complaint about using the word “card” to describe a card mechanic in a game, I’m not sure why that has any bearing on, well, anything. It’s a cool concept inspired by X-Com. Call it whatever you like, if your compulsive need to obsess over semantics so dictates.
To me, the use of the word card implies that certain things I can and can not do in the game will be dictated by card draws, which is usually completely up to chance, which I’m not a fan of. I’m not saying I hate all card and card-related games, but I don’t like it when control is arbitrarily taken away from me.
Plants? You’ve got to be shitting me.
When I think zombies, that’s the first thing that springs to mind, botany.
I can’t wait for the follow up, Vampires vs Carebears: The Hidden Object Adventure.
X-Com says something very specific that RTS does not, it’s that simple.