It can't be easy being a zombie.
There you are, living in empty contentment, six feet under in the moist cool ground with nothing but worms and beetles for company.
Except you don't really need company as you're dead.
Which is just as well, as insects aren't really the best conversationalists. So you lie there in an eternal slumber, slowly decomposing and returning nutrients to the soil, part of nature?s grand cycle and a simple cog in the great circle of life.
So just imagine how annoyed you'd be if, there you were minding your own business in the afterlife, only to find some inconsiderate sod spill toxic chemical X, purposely unleash rampant virus Y, or cast undead summoning spell Z, forcing you to up sticks and return topside.
Six feet of earth is hell to shift, particularly if you've got severe muscle cramp from lying in a wooden box for an unknown period of time (or possibly even being so desiccated that you have no muscles at all).
When you get to the surface its invariably night.
And raining.
It's probably blowing a gale with thunder and lightning to boot (you know, just for extra atmos).
So you'd be in a bad mood and groan a lot too.
And after all that time underground, you'd have a powerful hunger. With no cash and no resources at your disposal you'd turn to the next best thing - human flesh, the cheap and plentiful substitute for conventional meats. Let's be honest everyone knows the tastiest part is the brain.
Unless you're extremely unlucky (or just late to the resurrection party), the chemical / virus / magical incantation won't have resurrected just you and there'll be at least a handful of others with which to share the undead experience.
This'll serve two purposes. Firstly, it's someone to pass the time away with in-between bits of you falling off and waiting for any careless humans to blunder into your path. Secondly it'll improve your chances of getting closer to the more agile humans and their tasty brain meats. Let your colleagues provide a distraction and hopefully draw fire, while you close in, crack open some heads and feast on the gooey treats inside.
One of the important rules for a zombie is always safety in numbers.
If you're really lucky, you'll have been revived as one of the new fangled (and increasingly popular) running models, meaning that being slow and cumbersome is not really an issue. However there is one universal factor and rule number one in the Zombie handbook:
Protect your brain.
No doubt whoever decided it was time for you to` wise from your gwave`, won't have been considerate enough to provide you with head protection, meaning any cranial damage hard enough to puncture the old noggin means its back to taking a dirt nap ? but with two added problems. You'll either a) be thrown on a big pile of fellow downed zombies by some rednecks and burnt or b) left to rot in the open air, food for all sorts of wildlife such as birds, foxes and rats. At least the underground insects didn't spread bits of you all over the place as they helped you turn to mulch.
Neither option a) nor b) is a magnanimous ending to a zombie's career.
Zombies - the main stay of video games since their inception. Need a standard enemy inserted into a game that can act as general cannon fodder and doesn't take much to design? Something that can create an air of horror and suspense, but can simultaneously avoid the ethical minefield of the having to kill another human being? Then zombies are just what you need.
They've had a distinguished career, from pixelated sprites in Zombies Ate My Neighbourhood and Ghost and Goblins, through to the more solid looking roles in the illustrious Resident Evil series. The human undead seem to have been the vanguard of gamings progression.
Given the right environment and conditions, zombies seem like the perfect gaming adversary. Slow and shambling or even fast and furious as required, games like Resident Evil have proven that these creatures can be an effective way of frightening and startling players when jammed in tight confines from which there is no escape, (particularly when all they have left is a handful of shotgun shells against the flesh hungry hoard).
But is the use of zombies in video games getting stale? (pun fully intended)
Games have come on leaps and bounds in the last few years. Those who look back at older titles will find that the games that scared them witless when they first appeared often don't cut it anymore in today's world of hyper-threading technology and graphics cards which need more fans than an office in Manila.
Everyone remembers the moment they came across the first zombie in Resident Evil. For many this was a defining moment in their gaming life, their first survival horror memory, as it turned its attention from its stop-gap snack on the floor and lumbered forward. But revisit the original game now and it's not hard to see how pitiful this jagged collection of polygons looks compared to some recent endeavours.
In short, zombies are the victims of their own success and flagrant over use. Indeed even the infamous gaming series that championed the zombie has turned its back on the humble undead foot soldier in its latest incarnation ? replacing them instead with much more intelligent, mutated villagers (once again cleverly avoiding the minefield involved in killing other human beings).
The capabilities of the hardware and the skills of developers have come on in leaps and bounds during the past five years, but the common or garden zombie seems to have suffered in some respects. Rather than become more and more akin to their celluloid counterparts, they have still been confined by the current limits of technology. Those who have experienced the delight of Romero?s zombie films (and countless other Zombie celluloid masterpieces by any number of directors) will know that the true horror of zombies comes from their decaying, rotting appearance.
While some have become visually more impressive and prettier (if there is such a thing) like those used in the Resident Evil remake, for the most part they still lack a lot of the effects that make the creatures most powerful. Where are the missing limbs, chunks of visibly flaking rotting flesh and protruding broken bones? Where are the visibly throbbing tendons and sinews? Even games that have attempted to be more visceral, such as the recent Doom3, which featured flayed skulls and exposed intestines, fell into another common trap ? repetition of characters.
Nothing breaks the illusion of believability in the gaming world (something strived for in greater amounts by developers) more than seeing the same character model repeated over and over throughout the course of a game. By trying to make zombies more detailed, this has often been done at the expense of variety (something which even the much lauded Resident Evil 4 suffered from even though they weren't using zombies per se).
As capabilities progress, games are becoming more and more about open areas rather than tight confining corridors or rooms. Here the impact of sluggish enemies is completely lost in larger scale areas. The inclusion of faster zombies does work, but this tends to break away from the traditional visage of zombies and developers may as well go the whole hog and just introduce altered humans.
And what about simply giving the other traditional horror stalwarts a chance? Vampires and werewolves are just two of the other groups that seem to have been largely neglected for the past few years, but both offer excellent opportunities to act as powerful gaming adversaries. Or could developers even spend a little bit of time coming up with original enemies that are not simply variations on the reanimated dead human?
Upcoming games such as Stubbs The Zombie and Possession prove that there is still life left in the undead, but rather than being the adversary, the player is placed in their shoes ? a unique enough twist to mask the feted stench of overuse.
As much as I'm looking forward to Land of The Dead: Road to Fiddlers Green and the Dawn of The Dead inspired Dead Rising, I can't help but shake the feeling that these games are a little behind the times before they start, needing to pull some special tricks out of the bag to compensate if they are to stand out (something that Dead Rising actually seems to have in spades).
As much as it?s helped push gaming forward, maybe its just time that developers put a well placed bullet in their brains and that Zombies were put to rest for a while?
There you are, living in empty contentment, six feet under in the moist cool ground with nothing but worms and beetles for company.
Except you don't really need company as you're dead.
Which is just as well, as insects aren't really the best conversationalists. So you lie there in an eternal slumber, slowly decomposing and returning nutrients to the soil, part of nature?s grand cycle and a simple cog in the great circle of life.
So just imagine how annoyed you'd be if, there you were minding your own business in the afterlife, only to find some inconsiderate sod spill toxic chemical X, purposely unleash rampant virus Y, or cast undead summoning spell Z, forcing you to up sticks and return topside.
Six feet of earth is hell to shift, particularly if you've got severe muscle cramp from lying in a wooden box for an unknown period of time (or possibly even being so desiccated that you have no muscles at all).
When you get to the surface its invariably night.
And raining.
It's probably blowing a gale with thunder and lightning to boot (you know, just for extra atmos).
So you'd be in a bad mood and groan a lot too.
And after all that time underground, you'd have a powerful hunger. With no cash and no resources at your disposal you'd turn to the next best thing - human flesh, the cheap and plentiful substitute for conventional meats. Let's be honest everyone knows the tastiest part is the brain.
Unless you're extremely unlucky (or just late to the resurrection party), the chemical / virus / magical incantation won't have resurrected just you and there'll be at least a handful of others with which to share the undead experience.
This'll serve two purposes. Firstly, it's someone to pass the time away with in-between bits of you falling off and waiting for any careless humans to blunder into your path. Secondly it'll improve your chances of getting closer to the more agile humans and their tasty brain meats. Let your colleagues provide a distraction and hopefully draw fire, while you close in, crack open some heads and feast on the gooey treats inside.
One of the important rules for a zombie is always safety in numbers.
If you're really lucky, you'll have been revived as one of the new fangled (and increasingly popular) running models, meaning that being slow and cumbersome is not really an issue. However there is one universal factor and rule number one in the Zombie handbook:
Protect your brain.
No doubt whoever decided it was time for you to` wise from your gwave`, won't have been considerate enough to provide you with head protection, meaning any cranial damage hard enough to puncture the old noggin means its back to taking a dirt nap ? but with two added problems. You'll either a) be thrown on a big pile of fellow downed zombies by some rednecks and burnt or b) left to rot in the open air, food for all sorts of wildlife such as birds, foxes and rats. At least the underground insects didn't spread bits of you all over the place as they helped you turn to mulch.
Neither option a) nor b) is a magnanimous ending to a zombie's career.
Zombies - the main stay of video games since their inception. Need a standard enemy inserted into a game that can act as general cannon fodder and doesn't take much to design? Something that can create an air of horror and suspense, but can simultaneously avoid the ethical minefield of the having to kill another human being? Then zombies are just what you need.
They've had a distinguished career, from pixelated sprites in Zombies Ate My Neighbourhood and Ghost and Goblins, through to the more solid looking roles in the illustrious Resident Evil series. The human undead seem to have been the vanguard of gamings progression.
Given the right environment and conditions, zombies seem like the perfect gaming adversary. Slow and shambling or even fast and furious as required, games like Resident Evil have proven that these creatures can be an effective way of frightening and startling players when jammed in tight confines from which there is no escape, (particularly when all they have left is a handful of shotgun shells against the flesh hungry hoard).
But is the use of zombies in video games getting stale? (pun fully intended)
Games have come on leaps and bounds in the last few years. Those who look back at older titles will find that the games that scared them witless when they first appeared often don't cut it anymore in today's world of hyper-threading technology and graphics cards which need more fans than an office in Manila.
Everyone remembers the moment they came across the first zombie in Resident Evil. For many this was a defining moment in their gaming life, their first survival horror memory, as it turned its attention from its stop-gap snack on the floor and lumbered forward. But revisit the original game now and it's not hard to see how pitiful this jagged collection of polygons looks compared to some recent endeavours.
In short, zombies are the victims of their own success and flagrant over use. Indeed even the infamous gaming series that championed the zombie has turned its back on the humble undead foot soldier in its latest incarnation ? replacing them instead with much more intelligent, mutated villagers (once again cleverly avoiding the minefield involved in killing other human beings).
The capabilities of the hardware and the skills of developers have come on in leaps and bounds during the past five years, but the common or garden zombie seems to have suffered in some respects. Rather than become more and more akin to their celluloid counterparts, they have still been confined by the current limits of technology. Those who have experienced the delight of Romero?s zombie films (and countless other Zombie celluloid masterpieces by any number of directors) will know that the true horror of zombies comes from their decaying, rotting appearance.
While some have become visually more impressive and prettier (if there is such a thing) like those used in the Resident Evil remake, for the most part they still lack a lot of the effects that make the creatures most powerful. Where are the missing limbs, chunks of visibly flaking rotting flesh and protruding broken bones? Where are the visibly throbbing tendons and sinews? Even games that have attempted to be more visceral, such as the recent Doom3, which featured flayed skulls and exposed intestines, fell into another common trap ? repetition of characters.
Nothing breaks the illusion of believability in the gaming world (something strived for in greater amounts by developers) more than seeing the same character model repeated over and over throughout the course of a game. By trying to make zombies more detailed, this has often been done at the expense of variety (something which even the much lauded Resident Evil 4 suffered from even though they weren't using zombies per se).
As capabilities progress, games are becoming more and more about open areas rather than tight confining corridors or rooms. Here the impact of sluggish enemies is completely lost in larger scale areas. The inclusion of faster zombies does work, but this tends to break away from the traditional visage of zombies and developers may as well go the whole hog and just introduce altered humans.
And what about simply giving the other traditional horror stalwarts a chance? Vampires and werewolves are just two of the other groups that seem to have been largely neglected for the past few years, but both offer excellent opportunities to act as powerful gaming adversaries. Or could developers even spend a little bit of time coming up with original enemies that are not simply variations on the reanimated dead human?
Upcoming games such as Stubbs The Zombie and Possession prove that there is still life left in the undead, but rather than being the adversary, the player is placed in their shoes ? a unique enough twist to mask the feted stench of overuse.
As much as I'm looking forward to Land of The Dead: Road to Fiddlers Green and the Dawn of The Dead inspired Dead Rising, I can't help but shake the feeling that these games are a little behind the times before they start, needing to pull some special tricks out of the bag to compensate if they are to stand out (something that Dead Rising actually seems to have in spades).
As much as it?s helped push gaming forward, maybe its just time that developers put a well placed bullet in their brains and that Zombies were put to rest for a while?
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