The last game by ConArtists is called The Last Stand – Union City. Unlike its predecessors, it is a side scrolling action adventure type of game. You play the role of a guy (or girl) who awakes after a car crash to find out that zombies have taken over the once pretty neighborhood.

The game has several RPG elements which become apparent right on the character generation screen. You can pick one of the preconfigured roles, e.g. military man, fire fighter or create a custom character.

Characters have five major attributes and twelve skills to choose from. Each attribute defines specific traits of the character. Strength for instance lets you carry more and put more force behind blunt weapon attacks, while precision makes you deadlier with guns.

The survival skills can be compared to the skills of the Fallout game. You increase them to be more proficient with a certain type of weapon, improve your ability to use first aid, break security or increase your overall survivability on the streets.

You control the character with WASD on the keyboard. The AD keys move the character in the selected direction, W jumps and D ducks. Attacks are carried out with the left mouse button. Tab opens the character menu where you can equip weapons, eat food, use first aid or equip other stuff that you may need in a specific situation.

The game has many parallels to the Fallout game series. You find books for instance from time to time that you can read to increase your skill sets.

You use the E key to interact with objects. This can be a door that you want to open, a trunk or items that you want to pick up. You need to move with the mouse over the item before the option to interact with it becomes available. You also use E to talk to people. These people may give you quests that you can complete for some extra experience points. Sometimes, you need to complete a quest before you can processed to the next block of the street.

Other keys that you will need are R to reload a weapon, F to turn on the flashlight and G to give a weapon or save a companion.

The game itself is pretty straightforward. You basically move from the area entrance to the right and investigate every building that you come across that you can enter. Not everything that you find in the game has a purpose. You will find lots of junk items on your way that you should not pick up as you’d reach your maximum carrying limit very fast otherwise.

The Last Stand – Union City is a well designed browser game with nice graphics and gameplay. The game will keep you entertained for a long time, and even if you beat it you may want to replay the second game mode that is offered on the start screen.

Head over to Armor Games to play the game in your browser.

The job

First things first, I am going to create a very simple job so you can practice this task on. Let’s create a file with some very simple contents. Do the following.

1. Open up a command prompt.
2. Enter the command echo "this is my test file" > ~/test_file.
3. Issue the command less ~/test_file to make sure the previous command worked.

You should now have a very simple test file with a single line of content. That’s the file we are going to work with.

The commands

There are two commands we are going to work with:

• bg: Lists the current zombied programs.
• fg: Brings a zombied command to the foreground.

Before we continue I should probably explain a couple of things. First, a zombied program is a program (or command) that has been sent to the background. In order to do this you must issue the command in the terminal window and, while the command is running, hit the Ctrl-z combination. When you do this the command output (or just the command if it is not returning any output) will disappear and return you to your bash prompt.

So…let’s use our sample we created above. If you look at your terminal window, you should still see the contents of the ~/test_file, which will read “this is my test file”. That should be the only thing you see. You do not have access to your bash prompt so you can’t run any more commands from that terminal window. Hit the Ctrl-z key combination and the contents of the file returns and the contents of the file are “gone”. The command less is now in the background.

Now, to see what commands are currently in the background enter the command bg. You should see something like:

[1]+  Stopped                 less  test_file

To bring that command back you would issue the command fg less. That will return the contents of the ~/test_file back to your terminal window. Now, if you close that command (in the case of the less command hit the q key to quit) and you issue the command bg you will not see that particular command listed among any background commands you have.

NOTE: The bg command will not take into account any system daemons you have running. This command ONLY takes into account the commands your particular user has placed into the background.

Final thoughts

You might not be able to come up with any useful need for this nice Linux feature right away. But some time you are going to be working in the terminal window and you will need to do exactly what is prescribed above.

But I don’t want to rant about other games, back to Zombie City Tactics. The turn based strategy game is quite simple to understand but hard to master, just like chess for example. You start on a beautiful map (hrhr) with some forces of your own and your task is to beat all the zombies on the map. Your forces consist of milita, soldiers and slayers from weakest to toughest.

Militia may move one space per turn and slay the every zombie that has one hitpoints in the space they enter. Soldiers have the advantage that they do not have to move into the space to defeat a zombie, they can stay in their own space and slay adjacent zombies. Slayers are the fastest type of units the player has at his disposal. They can move 2 squares but end their turn if they slay an enemy.

Zombies on the other hand have the advantage of the generators. Those pour out zombies every round and you should take care of them as quickly as possible. Some zombies are harder to beat having more hitpoints.

You can train new solders by using energy that you collect by occupying squares on the battlefield. Every square adds 2 points of energy and you need 20/30/40 to buy Milita, Soldiers or Slayer units.

This game is nice. I always loved turn based strategy games like Shining Force and Panzer General and this is just a basic version of those games. You have to think a lot in the later levels to beat the computer who is playing fine most of the time.

The game has 100 levels which should keep everyone busy for days.