Now that whatever winter solstice-related holiday you celebrate has come and gone, you probably have some spending money, some free time, or a bit of both. But what to spend it on? Certainly, you could pass endless hours seeking out only the choicest torrents or perhaps indulging in the finest sporting activities television has to offer (new American Gladiators broadcasts January 6!), but there’s bound to be something else to eat up your time.
And, in this case, your brains. The perfect thing to liven up your holiday season is some zombie-related merchandise! Everyone knows about the Resident Evil series and the recent million-seller Dead Rising, and what zombie aficionado, even a casual one, is unfamiliar with George Romero’s formidable body of work or the recent British zombie(-esque) films 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later? But if you’re looking for brain-munching entertainment that isn’t a Hollywood blockbuster or another Capcom title, we’ve got some suggestions for you to drop some holiday dough on.
If you’d like, you can kick back in front of the fire with a couple of pieces of zombie related literature. For starters, you can familiarize yourself with the coming zombie apocalypse and learn how best to protect yourself and your loved ones with the hallmark piece of zombie-related literature, the Zombie Survival Guide (Wiki) by Max Brooks. When you known your enemy satisfactorily, follow that up with World War Z (Wiki), Brooks’s second work in the zombie fiction vein.
The Zombie Survival Guide is really something of an end-of-the-world/Stephen King’s The Stand-style scenario survival guide, just with the zombie content tacked on. This is by no means a bad thing. The book is both insightfully written and always in character, and responds in a tongue-in-cheek manner to a number of common zombie horror film tropes (for example, it decries the shotgun for its lack of range and puts down the chainsaw as little more than a glamorized zombie dinner bell). In addition to naming the best weapons for tangling with zombies (repeating rifles and trench knifes are at the top of the list) it outlines strategies to help you level the odds against even massive swarms of the undead (always use a choke point when possible, create a high ground by demolishing staircases, and don’t try to fight them with conventional military tactics, since they never tire and have no morale).
Brooks doesn’t stop there, he goes on to outline the best tactics for fighting the undead in almost every environment imaginable, what vehicles to use if you have access to them, and how to set up a personal fortress for you and your loved ones that will repel both sizable zombie swarms and roving human brigands. The book is supplemented with a number of historical anecdotes (laboriously freed, the author tells, from the hands of governments who tried to cover them up or explain them away) that lend credence to the tactics discussed earlier. The book is exhaustive for a fictional survival guide, and is worth purchasing for the subtle wit alone, but is a must-have for would-be zombie hunters.
If the Zombie Survival Guide was exhaustive in its contemplation of the undead enemy, then World War Z challenges a reviewer to find an adjective to describe it. A finer work of prose than the Guide, World War Z consists of dozens of first-person accounts of a zombie pandemic that nearly wiped out humanity and destroyed civilization as we know it today. The book runs the whole course of the zombie war, from infection to the final mop-up, and describes how the war was fought across the globe and in the most hostile of conditions. The icy wastes of Canada, in the sewers of Paris, on board a Chinese nuclear submarine, and even in orbit on the International Space Station, the war is recounted with impressive creativity from the author and frequently gripping narratives.
Both the Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z are worth purchasing, reading, re-reading, and lending out to friends as many times as you care to. If you had to pick one to spend your money on, World War Z is probably the better read, and is definitely the more entertaining of the two. The fact that the Guide will make you evaluate pretty much everything in your garage by its effectiveness at getting read of a zombie or two may count as a positive or negative depending on your own opinions of the undead.
If your interests run more towards tabletop gaming, you can pick up a shotgun and battle some zeds in the aptly-titled tabletop game Zombies!!! by Twilight Creations (Wiki). A handful of players have to fight their way through a zombie-infested town, ultimately winning by either killing enough zeds or making it to the helipad (no easier, as it’s swarming with them too!). Players enter combat, rolling a six-sided die to determine the outcome, and boosting their odds either with a bullet token to add 1 to the result or a heart token to reroll the die. When you’re out of hearts, it’s back to the start. Better still is that at the end of your turn you get to move some of the zombies on the board, (hopefully) frustrating your opponents and saving your own hide.
Players pick up ammo and health from the tiles placed one-per-turn, and also draw action cards that allow faster movement, improved combat ability, and the chance to escape undeath…temporarily. The game’s not perfect–you may find some modifications are needed to the original rules for balance. The game can also get quite slow if the helipad tile doesn’t turn up, with dozens of zombies crowding the streets and ammo and health becoming scarce. Still, it’s good fun for an evening if you’ve got a couple of buddies to play with and the large number of expansion packs add even more ways to play the game.
For the gamer who loves zombies but hates spending money, consider checking out Urban Dead (Wiki), a free browser-based MMORPG that lets players live and die in Malton, a quarantined city during a massive outbreak. Players can choose to be either a zombie or a survivor, and there’s plenty to do. You pick from military, scientist, and civilian roles, with nine different classes offering a wide range of skills and difficulties, or from a starting zombie class to begin the brain-munching. You build or destroy barricades, claw at or heal survivors, and stand or fall as massive roving zombie hordes move from suburb to suburb.
Over the two years of its open development, Urban Dead has grown in spurts, with new features added intermittently. Players and zombies alike gain experience by attacking each other (or healing, or revivifying, for survivors), and use earned experience points to purchase new skills that improve current abilities and gain new ones, such as improved item-scrounging, automatic latch-on zombie claws or a crippling headshot attack. Death in Malton is impermanent, allowing players to experience both sides of undeath given enough time. Based on a tick system, the game gives one action point for every half-hour of real time, for 48 a day, making your commitment bite-sized. The readily available Urban Dead Wiki helps give new players guidance and advice, and makes it easy to find a survivor or zombie group to fall in with.
That’s all for now. May all your Christmases be braaaaaaaaains.
Specie on 
Entries (RSS)