« Review : The Legend of Zelda : Twilight Princess for Nintendo Wii | Main | !W00t! The Xbox 360 December '06 Back Compat Update is now online »
Review : Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse for Xbox
The Xbox game Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse is a sarcastic but fun action game that uses the Halo engine and was made by former Bungie employees at Wideload games.
Stubs the Zombie is a third person action game staring a voiceless zombie in a ripped suit gaping flesh wounds and a cigarette. Stubbs pops out of the ground and back to life in the retro futuristic city of Punchbowl in the late 1950s. You stagger through town eating the brains of the living and take over the city with a giant zombie horde one delicious brain at at time. Punchbowl is full of hover cars with tail fins and mad scientists with ray guns, It is sort of Leave it to Beaver meets Flash Gordon. A dark sarcastic humorous look at Americana permeates through the game and gives it a very unique tone not unlike Destroy All Humans
After a few smacks to a human they will stupor a bit and then you have a chance to grab their head and munch out their juicy juicy living brains in a huge splatter of particle based fleshy blood spray and screaming. The brains also make you stronger and the corpse will turn into a mindless zombie faster. The mindless zombie horde with follow you around and seek out humans to fight and eat. using the horde is necessary to fight large crowds of heavily armed humans. You can push your zombies into the humans and use them as shields from their firearms. Fights go quickly from having no zombies to help you to having the tide swing in your favor as the majority of humans turn. Now Stubbs can not run very fast since he is undead so you have to hold in account that the humans are quicker than you. Stubs can also rip out an organ and throw it as a grenade, bowl his exploding head, fart poison clouds and rip off his hand and have it crawl on the ground and posses a living human by grabbing the back of their head. This is actually the deadliest weapon and if you take over a human with a powerful ray-gun they can take out humans.
The Halo engine can handle huge environments, semi-intelligent crowds and vehicles and it is very refreshing to see it used on something besides a first person shooter. This game works like a charm on the Xbox 360 since the Backwards Compatibility team made damn sure that Halo worked and it was also released on Macintosh and PC. It is a pretty rare cult game and that is too bad because it is probably the most Zombastic game out there besides Dead Rising.
There is some really great soundtrack song of the 1950s and 1960s being done by hipster bands like The Flaming Lips, Phantom Planet, Ben Kweller, The Raveonettes, and Death Cab For Cutie but they are only at certain parts of the game and most of the game has no music but the rhythmic cries of the undead moaning BRAINS!!!"
There was a bit of controversy when everybody favorite anti-videogame Jowl-clad senator Joe Lieberman (I - Naboo) said that this game encouraged cannibalism in children. Of course the game is rated M for Mature and can't be purchased by kids and since Stubbs is a zombie eating human brains is not technically cannibalism. The game developers wrote a sarcastic statement saying that Joe Lieberman discriminates against the undead.
This game can be found for twenty bucks and it is a blast to play. It is not the most in depth epic game in the world but it can be a lot of zombastic brain-eating fun. One would think that a brain-eating based combat system would get boring but the every bite of the flesh of the living is as tasty as the first.
Jake at December 14, 2006 
Reviews
