I know what you're thinking -- Urban Dead isn't much of a looker. In fact, with its near-luddite pure HTML basis and lack of graphical finery, you might wonder why I've decided to talk about it.

Well, because in its own strange way, it's one of the truest MMOs I've ever experienced. Beginning to play Urban Dead is easy enough – pick your character's class, pick their name -- I went for "Echo Bunniman" (an obscure reference to Ian McCulloch, star of Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2, by way of Ian McCulloch, singer in Echo and the Bunnymen) and made him a consumer (one of the hardest classes to start out as) due to my interest in really "roleplaying" the experience.

Dropped in a church in Havercroft (a suburb in the middle of Malton, the game's location) I was immediately lost -- but realistically so! After all, do you know what you'd do in a zombie outbreak? I set about doing the obvious -- trying to find myself a weapon and then shelter. I searched the local police station but didn't turn up much of use, so headed off to find a fire station, where I got my hands on a fire axe, as good a melee weapon as I could imagine. On seeing that the fire station had been very strongly barricaded (Urban Dead's buildings have a barricade level, from "doors open" to "extremely heavily barricaded" -- a barricade level so high that even human players can't get in unless they have the right skills to bypass the barricades) I so decided to rest, as I was nearly out of action points. Action points are replenished at one point every half an hour, which sets the game apart from many other browser RPGs which tend to "tick over" once per day. The reason? So players don't get stuck in dangerous places for as long as 24 hours without a chance to move.

The most important thing to remember when playing Urban Dead is that every other human or zombie in the world is another player. So while playing the game it can feel odd -- a frozen world, where you weave in between motionless zombies while using up your action points -- for all you know any one of those zombies could be a live player ready to attack you the minute you log out.

And the way my game continued bore that out. After resting at the fire station and wandering about lost for a few days more, stocking up on supplies such as first aid kits in hospitals I stumbled across and picking up a radio which, when correctly tuned, informed me of what other players were saying, I found I had gravitated to the nearby Ackland Mall. Under siege by zombies, I took the opportunity to dash inside the mall during the confusion (malls are usually extremely heavily barricaded, barring new players from entry) and hid in the "safety" of the north-east corner healing other players with my first aid kits -- secure in the knowledge that my fellow players would repair the barricade and keep us all safe.

But then I didn't log in for a full 24 hour cycle – and when I returned, Ackland Mall had fallen; Echo Bunniman had been sadly killed, and everyone in the mall now lived again as zombies!

I was not particularly pleased, but as a zombie you have just as much potential to raise your skills and play an interesting game, only one far more interested in death and destruction. But I didn't want to play as a zombie, because I was having quite a good time playing as a human. So I shambled across to the nearest "revivification point" – locations designated by players as places where zombies can stand to wait for other players to inject them with a special syringe that will turn them back into a human.

And since then, that's where I've stood. Waiting. And I'll probably wait quite a bit longer, as zombies far outnumber human players -- who are definitely fighting a losing battle. But it's one that I was having fun fighting.

You might notice that I haven't discussed the social aspects of the game in very much detail -- well, that's because while there are many possibilities for socialization, they're limited by a strange decision for it to cost action points even to speak! As a result most players remain quiet, but in cases such as the defence of malls, players actively work together (even if sometimes silently) and with every agent in the game controlled by a player, simply stepping back to watch the ebb and flow of the zombie/human war is a quite remarkable thing to see -- but I'll go into more detail on that in the upcoming conclusion.