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Gamers love zombies. Graveyard grown or individually infected, shuffling hordes or 100 metre athletes, sole, sneaky souls or an endless sea of walking corpses, we love them. I am firmly under the misguided belief that I could end the inevitable zompocalypse with no more than a shotgun and a few witty one-liners.
With Left 4 Dead, industry darling Valve's innovative and alternative zombie FPS, gaining fantastic reviews and selling over three million copies in under a year, the green menace is as lucrative as it is loved. Check out the atmospheric trailer for Left 4 Dead 2's downloadable content, 'The Sacrifice';
Zombies are perfect gun-bait; they are not human, so seem to avoid certain issues some wussies have with simulating slaughtering living people. In fact, they nearly always represent a threat to humanity, practically gagging for amateur crowbar surgery. They don't even require introduction, thanks to the wider zombie culture of books, films and comics, and some explanation in games only goes as far as “Yup, they're zombies. Go nuts.”
Most of all, zombies are scary. They represent of our fear of others, of crowds and of death. With the added bonus that you can rip those fears apart with a chainsaw. `1` Of course, this makes the fear ridiculous, which is in turn strangely fun. One could argue decapitating animated dead guys is just a proxy for decapitating animated soon to be dead guys, although I always gave the average gamer enough credit to tell the difference between a hideous, flesh-eating corpse and your neighbour Gary.
Zombie philosophy aside, the genre has variety. It has infected nearly every gaming platform, from arcade shooters (in the literal black hole for pound coins, House of the Dead), your humble Wii (the ingeniously named Zombie Massacre Wii) to the PC/Mac straddler Zombies Versus Plants (apparently featuring more militant plants than usual). The true variety, however, from the huge umbrella 'Zombie Games' manages to spread over.
The Zombie Survival sub-genre has horror game settings and trappings. The concern here is less about killing, more about being killed. Alone in the Dark, proudly inspired by Lovecraft, sets the tone, while the utterly terrifying Silent Hill 2; a dark, foggy, psychological thriller, fuelled nightmares since 2001. The Biohazard games, most likely known to us westerners as Resident Evil, are vastly popular, with their sinister Umbrella Corporation launching its own fashion range.
I've chosen these three because they each suffered the same fate as the average pedestrian in a zombie film; hungrily ripped apart, still screaming, before being reanimated as a sick, twisted perversion of their former self. Alone in the Dark was remade into a shockingly dull, blandly generic and mind-numbingly crap attempt at a game, while Silent Hill was ripped clean in two; the game series stagnated (I will buy a copy of the upcoming eighth addition simply to snap) and an equally dim film came out in 2001.
Poor, poor Resident Evil. Few other games have spiralled to such depths. What made it worse was Resident Evil 4, a fantastic game, that seemingly to pulled the joystick up on the nose-dive, before 5 decided that the ground actually looked quite inviting and finished off the series with a fireball of just, well, bad. Really bad. Really, really bad. On side note, the films seem to notice this decline and decided rather to start, and remain, awful. I'm convinced they took direct inspiration from voice acting in the first Resident game;
Gun-toting, arse-kicking, grenade-throwing Zombie Shooters are all about the action. The above-mentioned First Person Shooter Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 revived the genre, adding 'special infected', elite zombies that, respectively, smash, vomit, tongue, pin, charge, ride, spit and scare the holy shit out of you. They are playable online, along with an iconic team of four 'survivors'. Even the AI is good. If the online mode banned douchebags from playing, the game would be perfect. But we can't have everything.
Continued in part two…
Why isn't this published under 'games'?
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