Atom Zombie Smasher, a 15-year-old game, just got updated out of the blue on Steam

Atom Zombie Smasher has been in my Steam account about as long as I’ve had one. I held out for as long as I could, but eventually games on CD started demanding I install Steam to run them, so I caved and soon after got Portal and a handful of digital-only indie games like Audiosurf, Uplink, and Blendo’s zombie tower-defense game. It was basically all over for my free time from then on.

Which is why it’s wild, more than a decade later, to be reminded of Atom Zombie Smasher’s existence by it being patched. This 15th anniversary update isn’t going to transform the top-down rescue sim where the zombies are tiny pink squares into The Last of Us 3, but it does add a horde of little changes.

For starters, where before you could slow time down to 10%, now you can drop it all the way down to 1%. That’s so slow you’re basically making Atom Zombie Smasher turn-based, a change I approve of in any tactics game. Also changed: you can deselect units with the Escape key; the seams around cutscene vignette art are gone; and when you’re on the Behind the Scenes screen the scroll limit works so you don’t scroll too far and end up looking at the game as it would be seen from a passing aeroplane.