Sometimes the best mods are mods of mods that already exist… mods….

Do you like puzzle games? Do you like survival themed games? Do you love guns? Do you love crowbars? Do you love squashing your friends beneath giant stone blocks to the sound of Russian folk music? Then this particular map for the Half Life 2 mod Zombie Master, which is essentially a mod for Zombie Master itself may be just the bout of insanity you are looking for! Whilst today’s feature may be short and sweet, it’s completely worth the subject matter. Full write-up after the cut.

Zombie Master is a survival horror modification for Half Life 2, in which one player it designated the ‘Zombie Master’, and must spawn zombies in on objective based maps for a team of survivor players to deal with and hold out against until they reach the end of the map. In today’s feature, I will not be talking about any of this, except maybe the survivors. I’ll leave a full write up of Zombie Master for another time, but for now I am going to take some time to talk about a specific map for Zombie Master that changes the way the game plays significantly, and always provides absolutely hilarious results. That specific map is known as zm_actualtetris, or to my friends and I ‘Zombie Master Tetris’ (creative, I know), with the zombies that the Zombie Master usually spawns in being replaced by giant stone blocks in the shape of the famous puzzle bricks we all know and love.

For the survivor team, play begins on a small stone platform, looking out toward a transparent walkway that stretches off into the distance. A turn to the left reveals four crates containing pistols, ammunition and crowbars for you and your team mates. There is also a melon. Once you and your team have prepared for the arduous task ahead, you must venture out onto the walkway, and I strongly advise looking up, because it is very possible that a giant blue S-shaped block may be hurtling toward you at great speed.

For the Zombie Tetris Master, you will begin staring at a giant wall of glowing orbs with a vertical line of Tetris blocks floating next to them. Each of the orbs on this ‘wall’ are what you must click on in order to drop a block on the unsuspecting survivors below. Vertical orientation decides the style of block that will be dropped, and horizontal orientation determines where the block will drop from. All of the blocks are stackable, and follow pretty realistic physics (using the Havok physics that the Source engine is coded with). The blocks also pass through the transparent walkways that the survivors traverse to make it through the stage, so to catch survivors with clever physics based traps you will have to stack them to reach higher areas. Bear in mind however, that the left and right sides of the map are ‘safe’ areas for the survivor team, with invisible walls that stop the blocks from reaching those sides. Each of the blocks also uses a certain number of resources from a counter that sits in the bottom left corner of the screen. You resources regenerate over time, and you get a fair amount back for successfully ‘eliminating’ (read: crushing) a survivor player. Be careful not to waste resources, as you can really screw yourself over later on if you don’t keep an eye on it.

The blocks available are as follows (with their resource costs):

-Square block, teal in colour. (100 resource)

-Lightning block, green in colour. (at least that’s what ‘d call it! It looks like a lightning bolt… 100 resource)

-T-block, grey in colour. (150 resource)

-S-block, blue in colour. (150 resource)

-The stupidly long and painfully cheap L-block, hot pink in colour. (200 resource, but oh so worth it when you need widespread crushing death)

You have to be very tactical in your decisions of which blocks you should use. It may seem like a great idea to just start throwing L-blocks down, but they will eat through your resources very quickly. An often used tactic of mine (which is never met with a particularly joyful response), is to pile up a line of T-blocks on the opposite side of the stage form the survivors, and then use a square block or S-block to bring the whole tower toppling down across the stage. Very effective, and gives you some nice debris to build on later if necessary.

The objective for the survivor team is to simply make it to the top of the stage, and then to the very end of the last walkway. As you work your way along each floor, you will come to a wall at the end that you must climb to reach the next level. There are four levels in all, and it is not going to be easy with all of those blocks blocking your path and/or hurtling straight down toward you. Luckily, the weapons you picked up at the beginning of the stage can be used to destroy the blocks to help clear a path if something is blocking your way. However, this can be a very dangerous thing, as randomly smashing a block that just happens to be in your path without paying attention to what may be above it may cause a fatal landslide of puzzling death to come crashing down on you and your friends, although this is usually met with uproarious bouts of laughter. Blocks always take the same amount of damage from the weapons – four hits from a crowbar or eleven pistol bullets is enough to remove a single block. A great tactic (that is more than certain to annoy the hell out of the Tetris Master) is to have one survivor stay at the bottom level and remove blocks as they fall so they do not pile up too high, which can effectively make travel less hazardous, and only a single player is needed to reach the end for the survivors to win. However, the fact that the stage is more open gives the Tetris Master an easier time in just hitting the survivors straight on with a falling block. Survivors camping in the spawn are generally met with a nasty surprise, as another orb will appear at around a minute in just above the spawn area. Clicking this orb (which costs 250 resource) will basically fill the spawn area with pure pain, causing the players standing around here to take damage over time until they either finally leave, or die.

The most fun from Zombie Master Tetris comes from games that end up with giant walls with piled blocks of varying different shapes, and single players trapped in a small pocket of this physics based hell trying to decide what block is ‘safe’ to remove next (even though it is usually never safe). I have experienced some of the most entertaining moments in gaming in spectator mode for this mod, watching as a single player is being so very careful to inch his way forwards without causing a giant collapse of stone destruction, only to be smashed in the back by a block that had been jarred loose from hitting another block recently falling on top of it.

As far as problems go with zm_actualtetris, there can be one or two annoying bugs that crop up from time to time. The physics every so often tend to misbehave and a block might land and stop perfectly stable at an impossible angle (like a square block standing on a corner), although it doesn’t happen all that much. Sometimes when survivors are picking up weapons at the beginning, it can be possible to ‘accidentally’ pick up two crowbars, which can be an issue with a lot of players and one person ends up without one. There are also never enough pistol bullets to go around for everybody.

Graphically, the map really isn’t all that great. The textures used for the walkways and walls is the mattress texture from Half Life 2, although the blocks are textures exactly as you would expect giant stone Tetris blocks to be textured. And could it hurt to just put ladders on these climbable mattress walls? There isn’t really much to complain about however, the visuals are completely simple just to keep the game as simple as it needs to be. People running away from giant falling Tetris blocks doesn’t need normal mapping or high polygon models. The music really gets you in the mood to play some Tetris, but the famous theme can get grating after a while.

In all, whilst Zombie Master Tetris may not be the kind of game you would play for weeks at a time, it can be great amounts of fun to grab a few friends and play for a night ever so often. It is pretty much the only way I myself even play Zombie Master at all these days, as I find this alone the best thing about the entire mod (which is why I chose this to talk about specifically). The group I play with will spend a night or two once every couple of months just playing zm_actualtetris (usually to Aevan’s dismay, as I will be laughing and yelling fairly loud), and it has become one of staple games for the whole group. So go grab the mod and the map and give it a try!

Again, you can grab Zombie Master here, and zm_actualtetris4 here (thanks to DraconicDon for quickly hosting the map on FileFront for me at such short notice, the old FileFront link for it was broken).

Also, once I get home this evening I’ll have another gameplay video for you folks to watch, but I don’t have access to those at work, sadly.

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