Space Pirates and Zombies

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"The hull has been breached and the science is leaking out!"
—Unknown Scientist

Space Pirates And Zombies (And Bounty Hunters) is a top-down action/strategy/RPG game in the vein of Star Control II, Starscape and Escape Velocity, made by Minmax Games. It can be found on Steam, Impulse, and several other digital distribution platforms. In March 2012, it got a free Expansion Pack update that adds a Bounty Hunter faction to the fray, hence the new subtitle And Bounty Hunters.

The plot follows Don Gibson, Elsa Young, and Dr. Carl Memford as they embark on a quest to the center of the galaxy in search of a mythical motherlode of Rez, setting out from the ruins of Earth-That-Was in their cobbled-together starship known as The Clockwork. Assembling a band of followers from outcasts, press-ganged prisoners of war, and anyone else who wanted to join them, they put together a small fleet of additional vessels and set forth on a voyage that will have consequences nobody could have foreseen.

Humanity has spread all across the galaxy but is split into hundreds of unorganized factions, loosely classified as the United Terran Alliance and the Civilians. As mentioned above, there is also the new Bounty Hunter "faction" to contend with. They'll be after you as you rack up bounties for wrecking UTA and Civilian ships, clear gates, and complete certain missions. Compete in their arena matches, destroy zombies, and their ships, to earn Respect and lower your Bounty level - or hire them to help you in missions and clear particularly tough blockades.

The cutscenes/intermissions were narrated by Total Biscuit, aka The Cynical Brit. It has its own wiki here.

Tropes used in Space Pirates and Zombies include:
  • Absurdly High Level Cap: In order to research every single possible upgrade in the research table, you would need to reach tech level 261. Technically, it is possible, but you must be incredibly grindy, since you will usually be nearing the end of the game before you are even close.
  • Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: You have to be friendly with whatever faction has upgrade plans you need to buy. And if they don't already like you it can take a while to earn their trust via missions, or a whole lot of rez. Then again, if you're strong enough, or the base is a weaker one, you could always just attack the station, then steal the technology after destroying it.
  • Alliance Meter: One for the UTA and the Civilians. In general, you'll more often than not have good relations with Civilians and hostile ones with the UTA.
    • Averted once you hit Act 4. The humans are no longer fighting each other, since they now have a common enemy in the zombies. Instead of buying their loyalty, you now give them resources to increase their defenses, so that they can better withstand zombie attacks.
  • Artificial Stupidity: Your AI wingmates are... not exactly the most intelligent pilots out there, to put it nicely.
  • Attack Drone: Several ships can use 'Drone Hives', which deploy around a dozen automated attack drones. They come in three main types, and each have a variant that can cloak at the expense of health.
  • Awesome Yet Practical: You might think that the Titan Beam, used to power/open the special warpgates between the core and rim sectors, is little more than fancified door opener... but no! It also doubles as a mindbogglingly powerful Wave Motion Gun when the Clockwork comes under attack. You'll wish it didn't while trying to take down the Level 4 Bounty Hunter base for One Hundred Percent Completion, which has one mounted on a turret.
  • The Battlestar: The UTA Sunspot and Civilian Carrier both employ drones, but that doesn't stop them from packing in a respectable amount of firepower. On a larger scale, the Clockwork itself, as it can field up to four ships of varying sizes and capabilities as well as being very well armed, especially once it gains the Titan Beam.
    • Larger Starbases also have their own drone bays, and several other weapon systems to defend themselves.
  • Beam Spam: Ships equipped with lasers can do this. Enemy Manta Rays often invoke this, armed with 8-10 forward facing beam cannons.
  • Big Bad: Don, who does a Face Heel Turn in Chapter 3.
  • Boarding Party: Delivered either by the "Suicide Cannon" (which essentially fires a modified escape pod that drills into the enemy ship) or the Grunt Shuttle. Ships with enemies aboard move slower and their weapons fire more slowly. If there are no defenders, they take hull damage and eventually explode... or get turned into zombie ships, if the boarding party are zombies.
  • Break Out the Museum Piece: The Hound is said to be a ship model that has been mothballed for decades and replaced by the Saucer for the UTA. However, during the lockdown wars, civilians refurbished a large amount of them, and they've proven themselves to be competent fighters regardless of their aged design.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The ships you control are coloured blue, UTA ships are red, Civilian ships are green, Bounty Hunter ships are yellow, and zombie ships are a sickly purple colour.
  • Crippling Overspecialization:
    • Some stations and ships use missiles and drones exclusively. Equipping all your ships with Point Defence Modules will turn them into oversized roadblocks that ineffectually spit rockets and drones at you.
    • While the game supports many different build types, some are better than others in the last act fighting against the zombie horde. For example, a stealth build will cause lots of problems for you due to lack of shields preventing zombies from infesting your ships should they catch wind of where you are.
    • Some of the Bounty Hunter ships like the Claw falls under this as well, focusing entirely on forward firepower while having no missile or turret mounts.
  • Critical Existence Failure: Mostly averted, as ships and stations will suffer from hull breaches as they take damage, venting hapless crew and stored resources in great plumes. Crew loss will have a serious impact on the ship's self-repair abilities if it did have any crew beforehand. Shields never let damage through until they fail completely, although armour simply offers a damage reduction and doesn't block damage to the hull entirely. Ships closing to destruction or being invaded also get slowed considerably, to a crawl when about to be destroyed.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Pretty much what happens in the end-game, as the Clockwork's crew finally destroy the source of the zombies - which has been kicking around for millenia. But the zombies are the source of the Rez. No more Rez, no more gate network.
  • Deflector Shields: One of the two lines of defense. As mentioned above, they block all incoming damage until broken, at which point they require some time to recover. Variants offer faster recharge time at the cost of lower overall capacity and vice versa.
    • Can be switched for a cloaking device, which acts as a much weaker shield that hides the ship from view until depleted, it also slows down the player's ships when active.
  • The Dreaded: Fighting huge size ships, especially several at once, when you don't have one of your own yet can invoke this. This is made worse by the fact that in systems with high infection levels, zombies may show up with any huge hull, ranging from the relatively harmless Freighter to Hammerheads, Mammoths and Manta Rays.
  • Earth-That-Was / Earth That Used to Be Better: Earth is now a highly toxic backwater planet, all but forgotten. The situation is never explained in detail, but the system itself is pretty much abandoned, save for a small mining base and a tiny UTA outpost.
    • Sort of justified in that Rez is much more plentiful the closer you get to the galactic core, so most of humanity migrated closer to it.
  • Enemy Civil War: Can be invoked prior to Act 4 should you end up being hated by both the civilians and the UTA in a star system, then enter an area where they're fighting each other.
  • Enemy Mine: In Act 4, the UTA and the Civilians band together against the Zombie invasion
  • Evil Mentor: Don's motivation for reaching the galactic core was not for the REZ, but to unleash the zombie hordes. Didn't seem so eager to betray his comrades, though.
  • Escape Pod: Human ships in this game eject them before being destroyed. You have the option to pick them up with your ship (where the occupants will be either forced to join their crew or Thrown Out the Airlock, the more crew you have on the ship and the lower the relationship you have with the occupants' faction, the more likely the latter will happen), and after a minute or so they'll just spontaneously burst open, leaving the hapless occupant to suffocate in space (presumably they can only maintain life support for so long). Like ships, they're Color-Coded for Your Convenience, and escape pods containing your crew are immune to friendly fire.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: You are Space Pirates! There are Zombies! And Bounty Hunters!
  • Explosive Decompression: 'I wonder if your eyes really do pop in space'
  • Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: The Clockwork's Titan Beam, when used as a weapon. Additionally, any time you fit a ship with a Fixed Turret Mod. Most weapon slots not placed onto a turret, for that matter.
  • Frickin' Laser Beams: One of the three primary weapon types, alongside cannons and missiles. They're mainly effective against shields but fare less well against armor and hull, some of them are designed to serve supportive roles, such as disabling enemy ships or draining their energy capacitors.
  • Gang Up on the Human: The zombies seem particularly fond of this, and will often attack whichever ship you're controlling at the time.
  • Guide Dang It: Fighting the zombies requires a vastly different technique than fighting against non-zombie opponents. With non-zombie ships, you only have to worry about their shots. With zombie ships, or zombie-infested areas, the zombies in space that aren't shot first can hang around outside the ship, and if there's enough of them, they'll eventually overwhelm your ship and take it over. And if this happens too quickly, you'll end up fighting against too many ships at once.
  • Holiday Mode: 2011 saw the addition of a Halloween and a Christmas mode. Both can be played outside the actual holiday, but they were the default for them. Both modes modified the three main character portraits and the graphics for rez, asteroids and other objects to suit the theme. Halloween also lets you "Trick or Treat" friendly starbases, which can cause various effects. The Christmas mode spawns milk and cookie pickups from destroyed ships, which in turn summon Santa to drop a bunch of presents (and a Specialist elf, if you're lucky).
  • Hyperspace Lanes: How travel from system to system is conducted.
  • Inhuman Resources: It is implied that Goons who are recruited get equipped with exploding collars and are freely used as payment for various tech and favors. 'Retiring' a specialist is shown to be ejecting them out the airlock.
    • Goons taken by one of your ships that refuse cooperation also get tossed out without hesitation.
  • Jack of All Stats: The Big Brother and Carrier do a little bit of everything in terms of loadout, capable using cannons, beams, missiles as well as drones, but their stats are fairly average.
  • Large Ham: The quote on top the page.
  • Lightning Bruiser: The Hammerhead is fast and packs a lot of firepower, but lacks crew capacity and has relatively low hull strength. The Manta Ray has more firepower, is still reasonably mobile, and is more durable than the Hammerhead; its trade-off is having so many gun mounts that it easily drains its capacitor, and all of its guns are fixed in a forward facing position.
  • Macross Missile Massacre: Can be invoked on ships that have a lot of missiles as weapons such as the Volley, the Pelican or the Carrier.
  • Meat Moss: Zombie tissue can be used to form this and glue several shipwrecks together to form new breeder ships. One early radio broadcast has a scavenger mention that he boarded a derelict with "shit growin' on the walls". Infested versions of regular ships also have purple veins and biological growth all over them.
  • Metaphorgotten: "In space, no one can hear you scream... unless you're broadcasting on the right frequency"
  • Mighty Glacier: The Star Cruiser is tough and packs a lot of firepower... but lacks speed and maneuverability.
  • More Dakka: The Particle Cannon. Especially if combined with Cannon Boosters. Ship-wise, the Claw is this for the Tiny-sized hulls, the Colt and the Cyclops are this for Small-sized hulls, and the Manta Ray is this, period.
  • Mystery Meat: Two of the optional missions have the crew pick up some supplies for a burger meat company; the first involved toxic waste and the second zombie tissue. Dr. Memford reasons that the material is safe to eat given proper preparation, but cautions against drinking the smoothies.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The UTA built the core gate to lock in the zombie invasion. The Clockwork breaks through it. Whoops
  • Our Zombies Are Different: To put it simply they're Type PS themselves, while their ships are Type C, as they cobble together wrecks and infest human ships.
  • The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: The amount of pirating you choose to do is entirely up to you. If you want to, you can go around bribing everyone and essentially trading and mining your way through a lot of the game. However, a key part of the trading involves what's essentially slave running.
    • Then again, trading is largely based on slavery in this game.
  • Pungeon Master: Every time Admiral Jamison shows up, Dr. Carl Memford has to poke fun at the fact he's missing an eye.
  • Schmuck Bait: In Act 4, a cache of survivors is discovered from the original Clockwork. Dr. Memford immediately points this out. Don even lampshades it
    • An early optional mission offers great rewards for responding to a distress call. Turns out the message comes from a bunch of spam satellites.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: The Galactic Core Gate, it's existence is concealed from public knowledge and the gate itself is cloaked.
  • Self-Destruct Mechanism: You can order your ships to self-destruct in the advanced tactics section of the tactics menu. Handy for those truly desperate situations, such as your ships being full of zombies and with nothing to stop them from 'turning'.
  • Space Is Noisy

"In space no one can hear you scream, unless you're broadcasting on the right frequency."

  • Space Mines: A fairly effective support weapon if you invest in them, but a little too situational for most players to use seriously.
  • Space Police: The UTA was formed to help control the flow of traffic and minimize the risks of potential disease outbreaks... supposedly.
  • Stealth in Space: Cloaking devices hide ships from view and allow them to deal as much as three times their normal attack damage with proper research investments, but reduce movement speed and maneuverability. They can also absorb damage like shields, but are much weaker. Until you get to a fairly high research level, of course. Then the speed negatives are removed and your 'shield' strength is enough to survive most enemy assaults.
    • For some reason, cargo containers with cloaking devices are fairly common.
    • Some missions require a stealthed ship in order to successfully complete it. Thankfully all but one of them are optional, so you can skip most of them if you so choose.
  • Stern Chase: After Admiral Jamison [catches wind of/figures out] what you're trying to do. It's more of an Informed Chase though, since you aren't harassed by the UTA any more than normal apart from a couple of optional missions. His reaction to you tearing his new Clockwork-esque super-capital ship a new super-sized exhaust port is priceless.
  • Technically a Transport: The Star Cruiser, Big Bus, Yacht and Grasshopper all started out in life as passenger ships, but now weaponized for combat.
  • Terminally Dependent Society: Since Rez is so vital for space travel and construction, there is a 'gold-rush' of richer and richer deposits of it. The zombies create Rez as a lure for sentient species across the galaxy, and the humans are not the first ones to fall for this trap.
  • This Cannot Be!: Jamison's reaction when you defeat the UTA's version of the Clockwork in a sidequest.
  • Thrown Out the Airlock: 'If any of those hostages give you lip, you throw them out the window.'
  • Token Good Teammate: Elsa.
  • Villain Protagonist: Let's see, Don is extremely ruthless and is actually The Dragon to the zombie hordes, Memford is basically Space Mengele, and even Elsa, who is by far the most moral of the trio, has a Hair-Trigger Temper when it comes to men flirting with her. Even after the zombies overrun the galaxy, its made pretty clear that the "heroes" are motivated purely by self-preservation.
  • Wanted Poster: An entire billboard for Dr. Carl Memford. His crimes include Grand Theft Auto, Genocide, and Murder. Don also states that Carl has been accused of crimes against humanity.
  • Wave Motion Gun: Any of the beams in Large or Huge mounts. The Grinder is based around a Wave Motion Mining Gun. The Clockwork's Titan Beam.
  • We ARE Struggling Together!: Invoked once the zombies start showing up.
  • Wham! Episode: "Opening Pandora's Box". The Rez Motherlode turns to be a trap by the Zombie Essence, Don reveals that he's been a Zombie sleeper agent all along, and has been for centuries, the Zombies pretty much overrun the galactic core, and the Clockwork is destroyed, stranding the protagonists on a backwater planet for five years. When they're finally able to build a new mothership out of the wreckage of Admiral Jamison's flagship and escape, they find that both the UTA and the Civilians are in tatters and the Zombies pretty much control everything. This all occurs in the span of a few minutes.
  • Worthy Opponent: Jamison has shades of this. He actually compliments you after you destroy his Hammerhead in "Big Fish".
  • You Kill It, You Bought It: Hull upgrades are done this way. And yes, usually you have to kill "it" multiple times to get its hull.
  • Zerg Rush: You thought you'd seen the last of TURBO DEFENDER 9000-EX? Nope. Cue waves of suicidal cargo haulers abusing their Self-Destruct Mechanism!
    • Zombies are also pretty fond of this tactic, minus the self-destruction.