Game:

Organ Trail (2011)

Duration: 12:58

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1

No sooner do we get underway than do we find ourselves faced with a new challenge... besides my questionable luck and/or driving skills, for a change (and no amount of inspirational stories can stop the arbitrary vomiting!) ...it's a horde of zombies! Wait, seriously? Even more hordely than the hordes that will be magnetically drawn to anyone out scavenging for any length of time whatsoever? (Really gotta get that zombie powder out of my pocket... will probably have to bleach that pair of pants and everything to get it all out, too.)

A horde is basically the Organ Trail's answer to the analogous river crossings for pioneers in the old Apple II's untamed west... only I'm even less sure of the safest answer based on how the game describes the situation. Uh... caulk the wagon! That always works! Do that!

Uh... so... the horde doesn't seem too bad, maybe they just somehow won't notice a car slowly trampling a few of them. I sure don't want to try the guns blazing option, because what if that expends precious ammunition?! This phenomenon clearly needs more testing, but I'm glad not to have to worry about it again... for now.

Anyway, who's up for some shopping? We've made it to... "The Mall"! ...y'know, I'm pretty sure a strange preponderance of zombie stories all take place in the same generic mall complex full of sprawling areas, just about anything the plot mandates, and tons of mismatched decor for each survival effort to self-segregate itself into so that they don't run into each other and interfere with the dramatic tension.

Wait, waht? Oh, right, anything we could need! ...and by that, I mean it's effectively the same as any other pocket of decaying civilization. This time, we've got a different job type and a combat skills trainer to check out!

The Shootout job type is actually pretty simplistic in basis, even if the act of clearing it out is pretty complex... it's just a shooting gallery with waist-high cover to keep you safe. In theory, this job should generally provide the lowest overall cost in terms of ammunition compared to the other on-foot activities you might undertake, since there's going to be a fixed number of targets, each requiring a single bullet to put down... if your timing's good, anyway. Problems only start cropping up when you've got a ton of eagle-eyed enemies all pelting your position with projectiles as you must somehow pick out the attacker that will poke his head out first after a lull... it's not trivial, but it all feels rather natural once you get into it.

As for combat training... it's basically another thing to spend your precious disposable income on, but this time it will assign a passive benefit onto your ground-level activities. They're even more prohibitively expensive than normal, and my early foraging experiences lead me to believe we'll be lucky to afford even just one among our myriad other needs... though I can't personally see a faster bullet speed being all that advantageous, since zombies are slow and handling bandits even seemed to derive crucial benefit from delayed-flight projectiles reaching their marks later rather than sooner.

Other than that, I think we have a pretty stern reminder NOT to go hunting for scrap and such when the zombie activity rating is too far towards the "Deadly" side of things...

Besides all that, looks like our crew needs a patching up across the board, including our trusty station wagon... which, if I have to say, isn't that hard to fix up, I guess... but it does look like you'll need quite the supply of spare scrap to make any lasting repairs stick, especially if you're not so great at timing the whacks of your wrench to ...I guess throwing junk at things to fill gaps in the internal machinery. (Internal combustion is easier technology to manage than I figured!)

...unfortunately, the one thing we can't easily repair is the party leader's health, apparently. It seems to take special road events to actually cause any damage, but on the flip side, resting doesn't help any to recover from any damage incurred. For that, we'll need the rather costly Medkits to do the trick. (On the upside, it looks like passengers are pretty easy to please as long as you can feed them and take a little breather if they're not feeling so well.)

Further examination also seems to indicate that the fishing option is basically resting by another name with a time-consuming minigame involved... but yeah, no time passage at all. You can even queue up several hours of fishing in a row, but regardless of how many consecutive casts you make. (Repairs also seemed to indicate that time should pass, but it remained the same time.)

At any rate, it feels like trying to stand your ground and turn a "profit" of converting bullets into money, scraps, and food probably won't be yielding much of a surplus all on their own, especially if we need to tend to a whiny leader constantly bleeding to death from every little boo-boo... so I guess we'd best mosey onward.