The Walking Dead – Episode 5: Wildfire

There are two basic rules when it comes to killing zombies: Act fast and aim for the head.

Unfortunately, in “Wildfire”, things became far more complicated for the group of survivors as everyone was forced to deal with the painful consequence of previous week’s zombie attack.

First, Andrea declined to leave Amy’s side. It was great seeing Amy resurrect as a zombie and struggle to bite Andrea. I was expecting Amy to take a bite at her sister but I was surprised when Andrea shot her sister in the head. I was glad that it was Andrea who finished off her sibling, but she didn’t have to be that close. Despite the need of closure with her sister, I think it was a really risky move on her part.

Carol had to deal with her husband’s death, and she went to town on his head with a pickaxe. Viewer discretion was definitely necessary here, as Carol repeatedly hit her husband’s head and parts splattered everywhere. I guess he was simply taking out her anger over the abuse that she had received from him or maybe she blames herself for his death.

Lastly, the group found out that Jim had been bitten. We got a chance to see how a small zombie bite can affect someone. Zombie nightmares and delusions don’t seem like fun. I just wish Jim had been around a little longer instead of playing a crazy gravedigger one moment, and sick zombie victim the next.

Rick and Shane on the other hand, were at odds over how to deal with their situation. Rick wanted to lead the group to the Center for Disease Control but Shane simply wanted to keep the group out of harm’s way. A little difference of opinion is sometimes a good thing, but not when it causes Shane to consider shooting Rick. Maybe he’s still hung up on Lori.

Overall, aside from the dramatic tensions that seeped into the character driven moments, the story progressed well. The group of survivors finally decided to head up to the CDC.

The CDC scientist’s introduction added some short background information on the zombie outbreak. The video journal logs looked great, but for some reason it reminded me of the film, I Am Legend. I guess it is hard not to make comparisons with other great zombie/apocalypse movies.

Like the previous episodes, the ending of Wildfire had me glued to my seat. The impending darkness, lack of food and shelter, and the threat of more zombies approaching added to the tension of the group. As Rick began to break down and the rest of the survivors panicked, I was expecting more zombies to come around the corner. Instead, the CDC’s door opens up and a haunting image of a flooding light encased the group as the minutes closed out. What a great cliffhanger!

Will there be assistance and answers inside? We’ll have to step into the light to find out on next week’s season finale.

The Walking Dead – Episode 4: Vatos

It’s about time for Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead, to come forward with an episode from his own hand and one that features the least material from the original source. With this episode it is almost as if the series is saying “Yes, this might be The Walking Dead, but it’s not The Walking Dead you are used to.”

It seems that my fears about the series’ slow pace following episode three were baseless – Vatos picks up the pace perfectly, continuing on from Tell It To The Frogs, with our hero Rick (along with his small group of survivors) still in Atlanta trying to retrieve the bag of guns he left behind when he was being chased by zombies in the first episode, only with a minor complication… another group of survivors!

Vatos spends a fair amount of time on character development, but unlike the previous episode it isn’t at the expense of the pacing and the action – showing just how much of a handle Robert Kirkman has on the universe he created, striking a perfect balance between character, story and action in much the same way as the comic. And although Vatos does have a lot of similarities with the original comic in the aforesaid terms, where it does differ is in the introduction of the second group of survivors in Atlanta.It is an interesting idea, and one that may pay off in the future in this television iteration – but for now, in this episode, the new characters and the circumstance that leads from their introduction is definitely used to great effect, showing us just what type of leader Rick Grimes is, and will be.

As the group of heroes deal with the situation in Atlanta, there is another situation building back at base camp as insecurities, instabilities and tensions come to the fore and the survivors begin to crack mentally and emotionally – and as the series goes on I can see this coming to the fore even more, really giving an emotional human core in the television iteration of The Walking Dead.

Although the story in this episode does avert from the comic for the most part, it does not take long for it to come back to the source material for a horrifying and suitably gory denouement that leaves our group of survivors reeling. Suffice to say that in The Walking Dead no one is safe!

Game Review: Dead Nation

Dead Nation is an addictive and gruesome twin stick zombie shooter from the developers of Super Stardust HD. During the past couple of years several zombie shooters have been released, and have oversaturated the market depending on your tastes. Does Dead Nation have what it takes to stand up on its own? Or is it an infectious scourge on the PlayStation Store? Hit the break for my verdict.

Dead Nation will definitely be one of the most addictive and well-polished PSN titles you will play all year. Dead Nation occurs in a deserted city where everyone has been turned into flesh eating zombies. The main character, the only survivor, miraculously remains immune to the virus that has infected everyone in the planet. The story which focuses on your desire to survive is both cliché and well presented. Dead Nation features rough, yet beautifully drawn cut-scenes that are used to progress the story. Combine that with great voice acting and you have a story that is more intriguing than it should be.

Anyone that has played Geometry Wars and Super Stardust will be able to step right into Dead Nation. The right stick controls aiming and the left stick controls the player movement. Any player can step right in and start blowing chunks out of the infected. Dead Nation features a number of best looking dismemberment by any arcade game. Zombies are very eager to taste your flesh and a few require quick moves in order to be dealt with. Dead Nation has an amazing amount of enemy variety, which is essential to making a deep experience. Players can expect slow and burdensome enemy types all the way to extremely fast and frisky enemies. In fact, Dead Nation does a very good job of including every type of enemy you can think of.

Dead Nation is an exceedingly moody game, and features some of the best graphics and lighting in an arcade title. Despite the deep atmosphere, Dead Nation also brings about frequent breaks of humour, which helps the game from having an overwhelming amount of depressing tone. If all the previously mentioned elements weren’t enough, Dead Nation is also cleverly paced. Enemies, appear, hide and swarm you in the most inconvenient moments, helping to keep you engaged at all times. So many instances that developers have failed in one area or another, still even the sound design is outstanding. The ambient noise that plays in the background, combined with the sound effect, enemy chatter and music helps create another layer of fascination that is lacking from some retail titles.

Dead Nation features both offline and online 2-player co-op play. It was hard to assess if there were any latency problems since only a few people were online playing. Perhaps my favourite feature is the way Dead Nation handle their leaderboards. Not only does it do an impressive job of tracking stats, but it also counts your country’s stats. The more zombies you neutralize, the quicker you can help clear the infection from your country. This leaderboard does not only facilitate competition between players, but it also encourages competition between countries. It creates a unique sense of competition that I haven’t experienced within an arcade game in quite some time.

I highly recommend Dead Nation. I would encourage you to purchase it as soon as it gets released on November 30^th. It’s an impressively polished, very addictive, and highly atmospheric game that no one should miss out on.

Scary Movie You May Have Missed: [REC]

You mention the words “found footage” to most horror movie fans, and they immediately sigh and recall The Blair Witch Project, which was a huge indie hit at the box office, but is most often seen as lacking in entertainment value. So, it’s a victim of its own hype, but I don’t include myself as one of its detractors, and I’m fond of footage movies. Yes, they are made cheap, but when you strip a horror movie of a large budget and studio conventions, you usually end up with a thriller which relies on tension and creativity to be highly effective. There’s usually a heightened level of intimacy with these films, especially if the film is publicized as “real”, and the more emotions you invest in the film, the easier it is for you to be scared.

I’m not certain I would call three films in one calendar year a renaissance, but in 2007 there were three really good films in this genre: Paranormal Activity, The Poughkeepsie Tapes and, the best, the Spanish import, [REC] that I’ve seen this year. [REC] is, in my opinion, the best horror movie since Neil Marshall’s The Descent.

[REC] starts with young reporter Niña Medeiros shooting a segment for her late night TV show, While You’re Sleeping, at a local fire station. It was a slow night, as Nina tries to fill her segment with interviews and a basketball game. Until a call finally comes in, it’s just a low priority call – tenants in an apartment building are complaining about loud screams coming from one of the apartments.Both police and fire department respond to the call, and Niña and her cameraman, decide to come along for the ride. When they arrive in the building, the neighbors have all assembled on the main floor while the emergency staff and the television crew investigate upstairs and find an old woman in her apartment in an enraged state. While it appears that the situation is of minimal concern, everyone inside the building as about to come face to face the most extreme fear possible.  There is something evil in the building, and there is no way out, except for death.

The Walking Dead – Episode 3: Tell It To The Frogs

This episode of The Walking Dead follows immediately on from the end of the episode two as Rick and the group drive out of Atlanta and to the survivor’s camp. The first half of the episode slows things down – as Rick meets up with the other survivors, including his wife and son, and his best friend and former partner Shane, who just happens to have been having an affair with Rick’s wife Lori. The first meeting of Rick with his family is really a touching moment and is definitely the highlight of the series so far.

Tell It To The Frogs then spends its time showing what life is like at the survivors camp, introducing us to the major characters in the series, before taking a cue from the comic book and heading back to Atlanta as Rick and three other survivors try to rescue the repulsive Merle Dixon, who they accidentally left on a rooftop in the last episode, and grab the bag of weapons that Rick dropped in his pre-tank scuffle with the zombie horde in episode one.

Episode three also introduces  Merle Dixon’s brother, who is the driving force behind their return to Atlanta and like his big brother he’s not the most pleasant of characters, although he is a damn sight more likeable thanks to the outstanding performance of Norman Reedus – even if he’s not really supposed to be…

By the third episode of The Walking Dead the TV version it seems that it is headed in a different direction and deliberately much slower paced than the comic book source. Tell It To The Frogs seems to be the low point in the series, the slow pace actually works against the narrative – with a lot of time spent contemplating and pontificating rather than doing which, compared to the first two episodes, is a bit disappointing, especially since the series only has a 6 episode order. If the series continues at this slow pace then I can see many of frustrated viewers, myself included!

Movie Review: Resident Evil Afterlife

High on action and matrix-like fight scenes makes this an action-packed film. But too short progress in the story line is somehow a let down. This is how I would summarize my review on the latest instalment of Resident Evil. It’s the fourth movie of the Resident Evil movie franchise which focuses on the developing story of the Umbrella Organization’s role in the release of the deadly T-Virus, which was responsible for the zombie outbreak.

The film begins where Resident Evil: Extinction ends, the set of Alice clones attacked the Umbrella headquarters in Tokyo and she was able to get injected with the anti-T Virus, which she believes would make her human.

“Resident Evil: Afterlife,” introduces a familiar character from the game, Chris Redfield, who now joins her sister Claire who suffered from memory loss after the Umbrella Organization put a memory loss device into them. Claire managed to meet Alice on her way to Arcadia.

Experience a New Dimension of Evil

The film was more thrilling and exciting on 3D especially the battle scene where Claire and Alice fight against the large demonic butcher with a huge clever like weapon. The scenes were really captivating.
On the other hand, the battle in the end with the Umbrella Organization’s leader was also great but I felt it was too short. Alice together with Claire and Chris managed to free Arcadia but there is still an imminent attack from the Umbrella Organization.

The film ends there and hints of the next plot for the fifth sequel. Who wouldn’t want a part five especially if Resident Evil: Afterlife topped the Weekend Box Office during its release with $26,650,264 in the United States.

‘Blood Drive’ Splatters onto PS3 and Xbox 360

Activision has just released their vehicle-combat game Blood Drive on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. What is Blood Drive you might ask? Well, to begin with it is not Activision going around asking people to donate their blood for local blood banks. No, we’ll save those blood drives for people like the Red Cross. This Blood Drive is all about armoured cars and zombies.

In this game, players control the cars and battle each other and the hordes of zombies as they compete in a televised game show.

According to David Pokress of Activision Publishing, “Zombies and over-the-top vehicular combat are two things that go great together.” And it is kind of difficult to find fault in his statement.

Love for the Undead

I mean zombies still remain to be very popular. Adding zombies to things continues to rack up sales and interest no matter how many times it has been done. But this was not always the case. Some may remember Carmageddon — pretty great game for its time, lots of fun. But then along came Carmageddon 64, replacing the pedestrians you could run down from regular people to zombies. And man did gamers dislike the change. But now we love zombies, be they communist or nazi.

Blood Drive features 6 different environments, and multiplayer allowing up to 4 players to drop-in and drop-out as they wish. While zombies might be very popular now there was a time when vehicular combat games ruled the gaming world. Now with growing interest in the vehicular combat genre – with games like the upcoming Twisted Metal perhaps leading the charge – this might just be the perfect time for Activision to cash in on two fads at once.

Blood Drive was released on November 2, 2010 on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

The Walking Dead Review

I just finished watching the first episode of The Walking Dead. It’s pretty cool. After reading the graphic novel, it was not really what I expected, but it still wasn’t that bad. There might be some content in this article that could be considered spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it yet… Well, I didn’t exactly say anything about the scenes anyway so just keep on reading on.
The show is pretty detailed, and keeps the psychological analysis of living with zombies. That’s the reason why I was drawn into this graphic novel. They misplaced some of the stuff a bit and they added something to the story which is kind of a spoiler so I’d rather not mention it.
I dislike some of the characters though. Sure, they were based from the comic, but in the show their personalities are a bit too extreme. In the comic, they seem like just normal people. They weren’t good nor bad. They were just lucky to survive.

A major part of the series for me was when they started to change. Not on the physical aspect, but emotionally. With their attitudes, they might as well be fed to zombies. Not like in the comics where you’d wonder if anybody would die, and not hope if someone did. Here you really beg to see them die. Nice job ruining the characters Frank Darabont!

The zombie effects though are great. I love how horrendous some of them look. They don’t look like the usual zombies we’ve seen in recent zombie films. I find them a lot scarier as they could really be people you know who turned into zombies. The effects are outstanding, and really look decomposed. Two thumbs up for the great graphics.

On the whole, I’d say the series will go a long way. I just hope they don’t deviate from the comics that much, else I might end up liking the graphic novel better.

The Horde: Zombie Action at its Best!

“La Horde” has to be the best zombie film that I’ve seen in a long time. It’s an insanely “violent and gore” French film. The Plot is really action-filled, but none of the characters are likeable. Cops and criminals work together to survive in a tower block as the end of days happen and the dead return as aggressive bloodthirsty zombies. The origin of the zombies has only minor explanation but I really didn’t care much as I was focused with the fast and brutal action.

The Plot

The story begins with four bent cops out to avenge the murder of another policeman by a group of ruthless gangsters , trapped in a condemned building. The gangsters were about to execute the cops when the nightmare occurs: hordes of cannibalistic blood-thirsty creatures appear and savagely attack everyone. The survivors run up to the roof only to discover that the entire city is in chaos. The streets are filled with hordes of countless cadavers and the whole city is in flames. Despite their mutual hatred, the gangsters and the cops must join forces if they want to survive against a sudden zombie horde, all within the confines of a high-rise building. They’ll have to go down thirteen floors full of ravenous creatures but the worst threat lies elsewhere…

My thoughts on this film

The action and tension were very good from the outset I was almost wishing it wasn’t about to turn to a zombie film. But when it did, I wasn’t disappointed. My only criticism of the film is that it shouldn’t have been openly advertised as a zombie film, leaving their appearance as a surprise. But this doesn’t stop it from being one of the finest zombie or action films around.

If you like a lot of action, brutality and violence then I highly recommend you to see this. The scares were very well thought and the tension is gradually built higher and higher. The only complaint is that the ending wasn’t clever despite being different. Watch it as soon as you can!

Watch trailer here

Double the Sequel, Double the Terror

Here’s an early Halloween treat for you – feature of two zombie games you might be interested playing.

Dead Rising 2

If you’re up for some zombie rampage, then this game is the right pick for you. The sequel is much better in terms of gameplay than Dead Rising. There are many missions in store for you. On your journey to completing them, you need to sweep thousands of zombies off your way. Get ready to take the role of Chuck Greene and lambaste those stinky zombies to make sure they succumb to death. In Dead Rising 2, there are several weapons that might put you to excitement; you can customize weapons in the latter part of the game and see which ones can make you a deadly berserker against zombies. Available in multiplayer mode, Dead Rising 2 is sure to make a hit. The game had reached thousands of consoles after its release two weeks ago. Capcom is such a genius for developing this sequel.

Left 4 Dead 2

If you are familiar with the Resident Evil games, then you can understand this game flawlessly. Left 4 Dead 2 is a sequel to the successful first-person shooter game developed by Valve Studios. This new sequel features four survivors from the spread of the infection, as told on the first game. They must fight their way out and accomplish their mission. How far can you go to help them?

This game shares many similarities with Resident Evil. There is a pandemic of a certain disease that mutates people to scary-looking beasts, otherwise known as zombies. It also has a resemblance to the movie I am Legend. The four survivors in the game are immune to the virus and this makes them become freely uninfected. To keep you from reading spoilers, grab a copy of the game now! 🙂

Left 4 Dead 2 was released in Mac on October 5, 2010.