Hackers these days do a lot in the name of activism, but how about a good old-fashioned prank?

Montana TV station KRTV reported Monday that it was hacked and broadcasted a simultaneously hilarious and terrifying alert about the impending zombie apocalypse.

“The bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and are attacking the living,” a fake announcer warned during the broadcast. “Do not attempt to approach or apprehend these bodies, as they are considered extremely dangerous.”

KRTV later explained to viewers via its website that the alert did not come from the station.

“Someone apparently hacked into the Emergency Alert System and announced on KRTV and the CW that there was an emergency in several Montana counties,” the station wrote. “This message did not originate from KRTV, and there is no emergency.”

The Great Falls Tribune says the hoax generated at least four calls to police to make sure the broadcast was fake.

Check out the broadcast in the videos below.

>Zombie Walk 2012 photo via Grmisiti/Flickr

Here’s a countdown of some of the most interesting new features you’ll notice in the new Call of Duty: Black Ops II video trailer for the Zombies cooperative multiplayer mode. Activision Blizzard and its Treyarch studio have cooked up an expansive new world for Zombie co-op play. It’s like a game unto itself. The game arrives Nov. 13 for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

1. The zombies have pretty glowing blue eyes, as if they were wearing Google Glass.

2. You can fight on the bus and run over zombies.

3. Some of the zombies are on fire. That will present some difficulties: You’ll likely find yourself dodging them as you gun ‘em down.

4. The Tranzit mode features a map that you can progress through with each round. It takes you to new venues such as a barn, where you can fight.

5. The zombies are crafty; they slide off the roof of the diner to ambush you.

6. You can set up a shield to block zombies and then melee them with it. That saves ammo.

7. Multiple new human characters are playable, including a woman.

8. Don’t get overconfident: The zombies can climb on to the moving bus.

9. Flames, smoke, and fog can obscure the zombies. This won’t help your aim.

10. Clearly, this is a mature-rated game. The fountains of blood are a pretty good clue.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Activision Blizzard is unveiling more about the Zombies cooperative multiplayer mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops II video game today. And once you see today’s new Zombies trailer, you’ll realize it’s going to be bigger than ever. In fact, it’s going to be a big, bloody, burning massacre inside a much larger open world; it’s such a big experience that it could be considered a game unto itself.

The zombies mode has no part in the story of Black Ops II, but it is part of the multiplayer experience because of popular demand by fans, said Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia in a meeting with journalists. (Treyarch is the Activsion-owned studio developing Black Ops II.) Shooting zombies in a postapocalyptic world is an increasingly popular past time with each Call of Duty game, and it’s a big reason why Call of Duty has become the fastest-selling game in history, with recent annual versions generating more than $1 billion at retail.

The various Zombies modes require players to cooperate. You either shoot the waves of attacking zombies or helplessly watch as the zombies eat your flesh. In the video below, the zombies are fast, and they leave little margin of error for someone who is a poor shot. You can blow a zombie’s head off and see a shower of blood erupt, but you’ll barely have time before another enemy accosts you. Some of the zombies are on fire, forcing you to run away from them or be consumed.

“This is the third game within a game,” Lamia said, in addition to the single-player and multiplayer games within Black Ops II, which debuts on Nov. 13. “It is born out of the passion of the team. It’s our cooperative mode where the team gets creative. We owe it to fans. It exists because they demand we make it. We are so happy about that. We love making this part of the game, too.”

Zombies was born out of the passion of the team, which has more freedom to innovate in an “anything goes” environment. The last version of Zombies came in the form of downloadable content (DLC), or cooperative multiplayer maps, about nine months after the release of Black Ops in the fall of 2010.

The new version will feature one to four players squaring off against hordes of attacking zombies. The trailer, which could quite possibly be one of the bloodiest ever in the game business, reveals a number of new playable human characters who use any weapon they can — including a big transit bus — to beat back their foes. And this mode is looking like it has a real story behind it, and that will probably get the fans speculating, Lamia said. Mainly, Zombies is just about fun core game mechanics.

“The story is crowdsourced,” he said. “People wanted to attach a story to it. This is our largest zombies world ever. It’s a big, expansive world, really open.”

The only thing that Activision says about the story behind the zombies is that it is a postapocalyptic world where the undead are rising. But the trailer shows that the human characters try to rally to a Custer’s Last Stand position on the bus, where the bus actually moves through the map and smashes zombies. Once players beat a level, they can take the bus and move it to a new location on the map. There, they fight more zombies and then move on again.

“There are new zombies and new special zombies, such as flaming zombies, and there is game play around them,” Lamia said. “The bus is a good or a bad place to be.”

One mode is called Tranzit, where you play a story. It is playable with one to four players in a massive world. You can gather with the other players at the bus and cover all approaches. But you’ll eventually be overwhelmed. You can also run out into the fog and take your chances alone. There, you might find some Easter egg-style rewards while alone on foot, Lamia said.

“There are exponentially more strategies than any we’ve put together before,” he said.

You can also play in Survival mode. Players can create their own custom-made playable areas. They can find mystery items, perks, and other kinds of goodies as rewards. And then they try to survive as long as possible.

And another way to play is in Grief mode. In this version, four humans square off against four humans, with the zombies fighting everyone. The human players can shoot each other, but they can make life harder for the other team. The zombies try to kill everyone, and the last surviving team wins. You can play it with two to eight players. You can cause trouble, or “grief,” the other team.

Players will be able to see more stats than ever with the new Zombies mode. Lamia said the game will have leaderboards for each game mode and each map. Players can also create custom games where they start at level 20 or something like that, making the beginning of the round more difficult. Gamers can play a match where only headshots count or the magic items are turned off. Matchmaking has been improved in the new version, Lamia said.

The soundtrack for the trailer is dubbed “Carry On” by the band Avenged Sevenfold (A7X). Check out the video below.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Deadlight, part of the Summer of Arcade promotion on Xbox Live, is a visual, aural, and tonal masterpiece. It uses the Unreal Engine to great effect, opening vistas behind platforms and hallways that will motivate players to explore beyond the strict, horizontal path set by the title’s left-to-right, two-dimensional style gameplay. While jarring at first, the painterly visuals of the comic-book inspired cutscenes perfectly fit the mood of the downloadable experience, bringing the miniature and silhouetted characters from the main gaming sections to light. The broad outline of the story is compelling enough, though the implementation of the plot via melodramatic dialogue falls flat. The score is tense, moody, and suspenseful, and the end-credit track is a stunning and restrained exploration of the game’s tonality as a whole.

WHAT YOU’LL LIKE

Thematic mechanics
Avoiding zombies is an art form rarely explored in video games, and Deadlight’s focus on sparse ammunition, restricted weaponry, and a very human stamina mechanic is a welcome one.

The gameplay is compelling enough and moves from stage to stage with visual grace and charm. The running, jumping, melee, and firearm animations are smooth, fluid, and thematically constrained. Combat is an option in every section but rarely recommended. The axe, once found, can only be swung a couple of times before the scene becomes blurry, shaking at the corners. Running any distance, or hanging from a carefully chosen wire while mindless shadows gurgle below, produces the same exhaustion symptoms. Getting close to zombies is a sure way to be eaten, and the ability to try and escape by mashing on the B button produces a delightful frisson of hope and despair.

Engaging storyline
The plot line is solid if not very unique. We meet protagonist Randall Wayne in medias res, having just killed a member of his survivor group who had been bitten by the enemy. His motivation for the rest of the game is to find his wife and daughter, and he runs endlessly across the wastelands of 1986 Seattle to find them, stopping only to collect IDs of dead strangers and bits of his own diary. The hallucinatory sections, while few in number, add a richness to the story not often seen in downloadable games. The final twist ending comes as a satisfying conclusion to a well-paced tale throughout.

Beautiful scenery
The visuals are simply stunning. Each detailed scene includes moving parts, smoke, destroyed buildings, ruined factory machinery, and shambling zombies. Environments include enough cues to make puzzles feel solvable, and they — aside from two specific areas — involve only a modicum of practice to complete.

WHAT YOU WON’T LIKE

Cheesy acting and dialogue
The excessive melodrama in the writing is only exacerbated by the voiceover work. Randall Wayne’s actor turns in a particularly egregious two-dimensional performance that only hits the notes of “intense” and “very intense” in both reactions and expository internal monologue. At one point, he utters, “Darkness doesn’t exist. What we call darkness is the light we cannot see.” Wait, what?

Show, don’t tell
Just blaming the voice work would be too easy. The diary pages found across the city show a similar lack of finesse or logic. They’re not as bad as many translated-from-another-language video game text, but the writing within the diary pages isn’t interesting enough to warrant further reading. The text is full of phrases like, “A homeland that doesn’t want you when you’ve given all for her is like a father that abandons you when you’re a kid.” Is it? Is it really?

Inconsistent controls

Controlling Mr. Wayne (an unfortunate choice of name in this era of big-screen Batmen) can be a struggle at times. For the most part, getting his avatar from one end of the screen to the other is quite intuitive. That makes it all the more frustrating when the controller refuses to cooperate. Certain puzzles ask too much, requiring microscopic adjustments to the analog stick as well as a superhuman ability to see the tiniest of details. This only occurs a couple of times, but the frustration is almost a deal-breaker.

Loading screens
These types of games typically require trial and error before sussing out a solution. In other words, the player-character is going to die. A lot. Loading screens, then, should be short, if nonexistent. The checkpoints should not include excessive, over-the-top reading of purple prose. Deadlight’s post-death loading screens aren’t excessive in and of themselves — they lead to a two-or-three second delay at most — but the cumulative effect of so many of them in a row grows tiresome. Keeping the checkpoint ready to go in the background would have avoided this continual time sink.

CONCLUSION

So, is Deadlight worth the time and money? Yes. The satisfaction of solving well-designed puzzles set in a visually interesting post-apocalyptic version of an alternate-history Seattle is worth it. The tone and excellent aesthetic design of the title only increases its value as a gaming piece of art. While first-time developer TequilaWorks took some missteps with the experience, the fact that this game is as good as it is while remaining available as an inexpensive download speaks volumes.

Score: 80/100

Deadlight releases on August 1, 2012 for the Xbox 360 as part of the Summer of Arcade downloadable-title promotion. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a download code for the purpose of this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This week’s VBWeekly got a little goofy, while our anchor Jolie O’Dell was traveling to the East Coast. We hit on some serious stories, including more on the Facebook drama unfolding post IPO, and a sexual harassment lawsuit that hit venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. But that was all interrupted when some undead buddies showed up to chat with GamesBeat Editor in Chief Dan “Shoe” Hsu.

Also, there’s a chance I’m crying in a veil.

Here’s the recap:

• Kleiner Perkins partner Ellen Pao made light of a lawsuit she filed against the venture firm this week. Pao claims she was sexually harassed and retaliated against when she brought the issues to light.
• Facebook can’t catch a break following last week’s IPO. The company is being sued by its shareholders and is considering a switch from the NASDAQ stock exchange — which delayed its IPO by 40 minutes due to technical issues — to the New York Stock Exchange.
• Zombies come to chat with us after a San Francisco Zombie Walk put on by gaming company Zynga.

Hope you enjoy the show!

Imagine the zombie apocalypse has finally hit and you’re scrambling to find shelter, food, and a sawed-off. In between shooting zombies in the head, you can grab a computer and go to Map of the Dead, a website that turns Google Maps into a zombie survival map.

I had a roommate in college who planned out what she would do if zombies attacked. I was not as prepared. While she was plotting ways to make it to the marina, commandeer a boat, and sail into the Pacific Ocean (because zombies can’t swim apparently), I was concentrating on more important things, like nachos and baseball. Should an 28 Days Later situation arise, I would need Map of the Dead to survive.

This helpful website overlays Google Maps with “Danger Zones,” areas with man-made structures where zombies could easily attack you. In San Francisco, that’s pretty much the entire city, save for Golden Gate Park. And because escaping hoard of brain-hungry zombies is only half the battle, the map outlines grocery stores, gun stores, airports, harbors, and other places where you can get supplies to fight the uprising.

Since you can bet the Internet will go down in the wake of a zombie attack, print out the map ahead of time, laminate it, and save it in your zombie survival kit right next to your shotgun. As long as you’re doing advanced prep, brush up on the CDC’s zombie preparedness guidelines.

Advertising agency Doejo released the map, hoping to help us all when there is no hope left. I don’t know you about you, but I feel safer now.

[Update: You can now read a first hand account of surviving this experience.]

For many of us, going to the mall is a terrifying experience. In the United Kingdom, that experience is set to get a whole lot scarier, as “real” zombies take over an abandoned shopping mall. Participants will engage in a terrifying full-immersion survival horror story, then fend off waves of the undead in a series of video game-style missions.

Taking inspiration from everything from George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead to video games like Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil, the Zombie Shopping Mall experience — also known simply as The Mall — is an example of how real-life informs our fantasy experiences and vice versa. If it were an attempt to market a video game, it certainly would be an attention-grabber.

The real-life game will subject groups of 15 survivors to over three hours of tense, nerve-wracking survival horror. Speaking to GamesBeat, Lee Fields, director of Zed Events, explained the inspiration behind The Mall: “I’m 40 and I’ve been a fan of zombies ever since I was a kid, watching Betamax and VHS video tapes and then gaming. There’s a nod to pretty much everything in there.”

Fields’ background is in special effects, movie props, and costumes, and he is combining that expertise with his experience of running Airsoft events. For Fields, The Mall is all about “the quality aspect,” and it promises state of the art special effects and props, to help create a suitably horrific atmosphere.

Participants will be armed with Airsoft guns, which shoot plastic pellets, but these alone won’t help them survive. “The guys start off with very little ammunition,” said Fields. “The weapons only hold a few rounds. They can pick up melee weapons as they go around, like cricket bats and baseball bats. These are all foam live-action role play (LARP) weapons, and they’re designed so you can have a bit of a tussle with the zombies.”

The Mall experience comprises two dramatic sections, the first of which plays out much like a movie. “It has its peaks and its troughs,” said Fields. It ebbs and it flows. It has lots of quiet times, when you really are just creeping around in the dark. There are other times when all hell breaks loose, and you’re having to run for your life.”

The second part of the experience is more akin to a fast-paced video game such as Left 4 Dead, and it features a number of shorter missions. These will provide some tough challenges for the survivors. “You’ll have fairly nasty zombies in there,” said Fields. “We don’t do the big Resident Evil-style grizzly creatures, but we have zombies with body armor, who are very difficult to put down. Much more of a slant towards the Left 4 Dead-style gameplay.”

The zombies themselves are mostly what Fields calls “professional zombies.” Many have been featured in movies such as Outpost and The Zombie Diaries, and Fields met many of them while participating in zombie walks in London, “walking round and scaring the tourists.”

Unlike in many video games, these zombies don’t require head shots to take down. In fact, head shots are actively discouraged. “We don’t really want the zombies to be getting head injuries. Much like Resident Evil, it’s not just about head shots; it’s what can you damage on the torso area to take a zombie down.” But do the zombies mind being repeatedly shot in the chest? “We use quite low-powered guns. The guns hold very little ammunition. They’re very accurate but not so powerful.”

The 250,000-square-foot shopping mall situated in Reading (about 25 miles west of London) has been empty for years. It may be demolished, but Fields is hopeful that Zed Events will have use of the venue at least until the summer. He has been using the site for a variety of Airsoft events for over two years, and it attracts visitors from all over the world.

As well as The Mall, Zed Events continues to host two other zombie-themed events, based in run-down manor houses in the northwest of England. Fields doesn’t rule out the possibility of taking these events outside the UK either, if the right opportunity arises. As he says, “It’s a proven formula. We have a proven way that it works. We’ve been doing this sort of thing for 20 years.”

Tickets for The Mall can be purchased for £119 ($188) from experience provider Wish.co.uk. A plane ticket to the UK may cost a little more, but it will probably be worth it.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Gree has become a billion-dollar company in Japan with its mobile social games network. Now it is launching Zombie Jombie, the first title made by Gree’s U.S. developers for an American audience.

The title is an important one for Gree, which is competing with a larger rival Japanese firm DeNA, which has launched its worldwide mobile social network Mobage in an attempt to expand far beyond its audience of 35 million Japanese users.

It also marks the beginning of a big marketing campaign that includes a $50 million advertising budget, most of which will be spent when Gree launches its own mobile social network for gamers in the second quarter. To put that amount in perspective, it is the same sum Sony is spending on its enormous launch of the PlayStation Vita gaming handheld in the U.S.

Gree and DeNA are locked in a fierce battle to turn American mobile gamers into lucrative audiences in the same way that phone-crazy Japanese fans are. Both are vying to figure out the mobile social game market before rivals such as Electronic Arts, Gameloft, and Zynga do. The first one to do so could enjoy vast riches, said Naoki Aoyagi, CEO of Gree’s international subsidiary, Gree International, in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Like DeNA, Gree has figured out how to monetize Japanese gamers, who make lots of purchases of virtual goods in games downloaded from Gree’s mobile social network. But Zombie Jombie will test whether Gree has what it takes to cater to U.S. tastes.

The new iOS-exclusive game is a free-to-play card-based game where the zombies are the good guys and the humans are the evil destroyers. (I guess that’s what it takes to be creative in the crowded zombie game market). A “Jombie” is a powerful being that can raise and control zombies and battle tough human bosses. Gree promises that, due to the variety of ways players can power-up their cards, no two players will ever have the same deck.

“The truly talented team members of the North American studio have really focused on creating an innovative game experience that ties together strong gameplay and great social features, an approach we plan to implement for all of our games moving forward.” says Eiji Araki, senior vice president of social games at Gree International.

Last year, Gree started preparing for its entry into the U.S. market with its acquisition of OpenFeint, a U.S.-based mobile social network. DeNA, meanwhile, purchased Ngmoco to take DeNA’s Mobage network to a global level. Other rivals include Electronic Arts and PapayaMobile.

Gree also recently created a 40,000-square-feet game studio in San Francisco. Thanks to OpenFeint’s large network, Gree can now reach 190 million players through 7,500 game apps. Among those developing games for Gree’s network are Ubisoft and Gameloft.

“Developers need a comprehensive social gaming platform with support for iOS and Android,” Aoyagi said. “There is a lot of competition, but there is no big winner like Facebook yet in mobile. The market is still fragmented, and it is going to be so big.”

Gree’s platform for social mobile games will launch in the second quarter. That means it is behind DeNA/Ngmoco, but Aoyagi said his company focused on building its team first. Gree International has around 180 people, and it has hired 50 people in the last two months, Aoyagi said.

Aoyagi believes that larger companies with “massive financial capacity” will come to dominate the mobile social gaming market. The social network will help with the problem of game-discovery, which has gotten worse as hundreds of thousands of game apps compete with each other for attention in mobile app stores. Gree will help developers with distribution, engagement, and monetization.

“We are in the best position, and in the next six months or 12 months, we can become a leader,” he said.

Will the U.S. become like Japan? It’s a tough question, Aoyagi notes, as the Japanese market is unique, with best-selling titles such as role-playing games and cat collection games.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The content agreement is one of many Netflix has signed to boost its subscriber rate. By signing multiple content agreements, Netflix hopes it will keep people from fleeing for a growing number of streaming video service competitors like Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime Instant Video (as well as cable and satellite TV providers).

Starting yesterday, Netflix subscribers will have access to the first season of The Walking Dead. Future seasons will become available just prior to the beginning of the following season’s TV premiere. The deal isn’t exclusive — meaning both Amazon and Hulu are bound to sign similar agreements at some point.

In addition to past seasons of both Breaking Bad and Mad Men, the agreement with AMC Networks will also bring other programming to Netflix, such as shows from IFC, Sundance Channel and WE TV.