Tasteless fun featuring an undead Sarah Palin and a crowbar.
After the gentle ribbing of PMQs: the Game comes a reminder that American political humour is often a little more . . . in your face. In your cold, dead, rotting face.
In Tea Party Zombies Must Die, you get the chance to callously murder undead versions of Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, as well as hordes of “generic pissed-off old white guy zombies”.
Cheap lolz can be had from the fact that the Glenn Beck zombie is billed as being “back from the dead” (he recently parted company with Fox News) and from the ultimate boss being the Koch brothers zombie, a terrifying, two-headed, four-armed revenant. In between, there are serious messages about the discrepancies between key Tea Party slogans and reality (example: only 12 per cent of Tea Partiers know that their taxes went down under Obama).
It’s perhaps not the most tasteful of games — not really sure why the “Michele Bachmann Harpy” is in her bra — but it’s well-executed, with a simple control scheme, and it will run in most browser windows. Pro tip: the crowbar is easier to wield than the gun, which is hard to aim.
The company behind it, the Brooklyn-based Starving Eyes, have a background in “advergaming” (shudder) for big companies, so I can’t help feeling it’s quite brave of them to risk Tea Party wrath with this one. (Jason Oda, the head of the company, told the Media Research Center: “The game was just a personal project. I am not worried about it affecting business.”)
The game has already attracted the ire of the right-wing Pundit Press blog, which complains that it is “decidedly racist (there’s a swastika visible within moments of starting your game)”. What it doesn’t mention — and, after all, there is limited space on the internet — is that the swastika appears on a Tea Party poster about “Obamacare” reproduced in the scenery.
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