The Hordes are Coming

   "The Horde Mode" was a concept that been around in some form or another for many years on PC games, but its introduction , to wide spread fame came along with its name as well in the video game release of Gears of War 2. It caught on so much that many other games added there own form of "Horde Mode" to there titles. Some are really bad others are forgettable, and some have taken the concept to new heights. Wether your a gamer or not you probably heard of some of them. I want to focus on 3 that stand out.


   First and formost there is "The Horde Mode" the one that really started this new craze, and soon to be followed up by "Horde 2.0" in the upcoming Gears 3. Horde mode ended up being the star of the Gears of War 2 multiplayer lineup.  You and four other players pick a Gears character and choose weapons. Then you’re dropped on a relatively small map littered with ammo and perfect areas for cover, sniping, and dying like an idiot when you get cut off from your group.
The idea is to survive wave after wave of Locust hordes that the game throws at you. You lose if every member on your team is killed. You win when you kill every Locust in a wave of the horde – after that, the game pauses to show you which players had the most kills and then chucks you back into the map with another wave. Chances are Gears 3 Horde Mode will set a new standard for other games.

   Next up is "Fire Fight" , Bungie's answer to epics Horde Mode, Fire Fight added a competitive feel to it as if you were in a tournament of some kind, rather raw and some times unforgiving in its first form (ODST) and refined for its Matchmaking debut in Reach. and it offered staggering amounts of customization making the replay value very high. Now that 343 industries is handling the Halo franchise all to themselves it will be interesting to see where they take it.

  
   Last but not least its the Zombie mode aka Call of Duty Zombies, a mode at 1st that seemed like a cute little easter egg tack on that was added to the end of COD World at War. Treyarch added there own identity to the COD series and set themselves apart from Infinity Ward's versions of COD, with this. Infinity Ward then added "Spec Ops" to there subsequent entry but it did not achieve the same level of success, a good mode in its own right, it did not strike a chord with players like Treyarch's Zombies did. While treyarchs mode had no competitive feel like Horde or FireFight, and almost no customization, it more than made up for it in  easter eggs, and nods to the player. And most of all made it fun. Black Ops Zombies gave the players even more easter eggs and a bit of back story to the zombie madness.

   Will these 3 hold the top spots in the future? Or will some one create the next big thing, only time will tell, All I can say is I can't wait to whats next out there.