More Zombies in the Crosshairs

Like I stated in my previous post, zombies are becoming a very popular theme of video games. The new Borderlands game has become the first very popular RPS game for a console with allows the player to explore large lands and with the creation of Gearbox’s AI which allows for “87 Bazillion” guns to randomly drop, to complete the game and all of its side quests consists of many, many hours of gameplay.

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Gearbox set this game up also so that downloadable content would be available throughout the future. Sure enough, the first expansion is “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned”. This expansion, which is $10, provides new swampy areas to the Pandoran land, which are ridden with zombies looking for fresh brains. Whether they’re jumping from trees, midgets running after you, or torsos crawling after you, you will get your fill of zombies.

Although the main story quests can be completed in under 4 hours, the side quests, just as in the main borderlands area, will add many hours to your game play. The story also adds much more interesting humor than the original game did. Many recordings of other adventures advise you to not in any way engage in any oral activity with zombies. Headshots produce zombie brains which you can collect to turn in for a quest reward. I loved playing the original Borderlands storyline and I will for sure be purchasing this expansion and doing my fair share of zombie slaying. The artwork and variety produced by the game’s A.I. provides a massive amount of diversity in the weapon drops you receive. If you haven’t played it yet, you should definitely pick this one up around Christmas time.

Shoot ’em up

When you think about zombies, what combines with zombies to make the epic time waster? Video games. Steadily, more and more video games are coming out with zombies, allowing the player  to slay hundreds upon hundreds of the walking dead. One of the first games to introduce such zombie shooting galleries with the introduction of the flood. More and more games have progressed in the zombie shooting endeavours, and one of the most popular games involving zombies is Call of Duty: World at War.

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Set back in World War II, it involves a side game known as Nazi Zombies where you and sometimes a friend are trapped inside a small map that spawns waves of zombies that want your brains. Every kill earns you cash with which you can use to buy weapons from the walls, open new boundaries, or purchase random weapons from a weapon trunk. Very interesting strategies have been created to survive as long as possible, but with each door opened, more entrances are made for zombies to ambush you. Every wave survived, the zombies become harder to kill. At certain intervals, even zombie dogs are released to swiftly hunt you down.  This type of game play can become extremely addictive, especially at 2 am, with you and your friends trying to exterminate the infinite amount of zombies. If you haven’t played this game yet, I suggest you do. It’s full of gun sling action, zombie ambushes, and waves upon waves of blood thirsty zombies. If played too long, you may begin to get a little jumpy.

What Activision  and Treyarch have done well with this game, is building a trend in video games. The storyline and online play of World at War, were not extremely impressive. But the survival mode involved in Nazi Zombies have been an instant hit, and been put in many games recently. Gears of War 2 involves a survival mode in which waves of the enemy attacks you. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 also has introduced games in their Special Ops part of the game in which waves of the enemy surround you and force you to fight your way out. Many people even believed Activision would keep the Nazi Zombie game play, and rumors began of an “Alien Invasion” survival mode. Unfortunately, we were only left with the Spec Ops games. Hopefully, the next Call of Duty will involve another Nazi Zombie game, and we can shoot up as many zombies as we please without risking our own neck.

How To Survive

At this point, your only questions may be, how am I to survive a zombie invasion?!?! Simple, Max Brooks Zombie Survival Guide.   This book written by a famous zombie author is exactly as it’s titled, a book for “complete protection from the living dead”.

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It’s actually quite comical, flipping through this book. Brooks wrote this book after writing his book World War Z, which is a collection of stories from survivors during the world war against zombies. The style of this book is as if Brooks sat down and actually planned for a zombie invasion. It is full of tactics, weapons reviews, and anything you can think of when you plan your stronghold. The cover includes a picture of a machete and an M1 garrand as the author found that these are the perfect combination of mid range and close range weapons.

Further review of what buildings provide the best and worst protection, what types of land will be the least infested, and what types of vehicles will provide the quickest and safest escape. While reading this book, chapters will either have you laughing hysterically (the part about how a mullet will eventually get you killed) or have you thinking, why didn’t I think of that? (such as why living at sea could be the worst decision, even without zombies there). In the back of the book, Brooks provides stories of actual zombie attacks dating back to 60,000 B.C. in Katanda, Central Africa, to 2002 A.D. St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Brooks even provides multiple pages for recording outbreak journals  when the outbreak does occur. This book is pretty entertaining whether youre preparing for an attack or just looking for a good laugh.

The top 10 lessons for surviving a zombie attack:

1.Organize before they rise

2.They feel no fear, why should you?

3. Use your head: cut off theirs.

4.Blades don’t need reloading.

5. Ideal protection=tight clothes, short hair.

6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.

7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.

8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!

9.No place is safe, only safer.

10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

Zombieland

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So seeing as the new Zombieland movie came out a few weeks ago, I see it fitting to write a review on it here for those thinking about getting out to see it before it leaves theatres. Seeing as it is a movie about an apocalyptic world with zombies, it fit the criteria for this blog just fine.

Zombieland, like i said, is about an apocalyptic world where zombies have taken over and all hell has broken loose, pretty much what you would expect from any zombie infested world. The story follows a character who is going by the name of Columbus, the place he’s trying to get to. The beginning of the story is quite entertaining. Columbus is an awkward teenager, who by living by his rules of experience alone, has somehow survived the zombies. Columbus starts the story off by introducing us into his story and explaining his rules to survival. The funny part about these rules is that they randomly appear again in the story in an ironic, almost predictable way. He then explains that he is on a quest to get to Columbus Ohio to see if his parents are still alive. 

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The story then kicks off when Columbus meets up with Tallahassee who is the “bad ass” persona of the movie. Driving an Escalade with a shunt and number 3 painted on the door, drinking whiskey, and  “>weilding many types of crude weapons, Tallahassee is on a quest to find the last twinky left on Earth. Tallahassee and Columbus make some sort of deal and Tallahassee agrees to take him a good ways on his travel.

Eventually, the two run into two sisters in a store who identify themselves as Wichita and Little Rock who are trying to get to an amusement park near Los Angeles which is rumored to be zombie-free. Without giving anything away, the story coincidentally ties the sisters to Tallahassee and Columbus for good times and bad.

After seeing this movie, I walked out of the theatre without the feeling that I had wasted 7 dollars. Ultimately, I’d give this movie an 8 out of 10 for its creativity, crude humor, and its completely entertaining story. The movie uses a combination of all of these to keep the viewer captivated and laughing at the characters on the screen. This is definitely a movie I will be buying when it comes out, and I definitely recommend that anyone who likes crude humor or comedy/action movies go see this film.

 

But on a completely off topic thought, one question remains. In a place such as zombieland where the zombies are slow and stupid and people kill them with falling pianos, survival wouldn’t be too difficult for people with half a brain.. As I searched for content on the net for my next blog, I came across a statement which was somewhat intriguing.. Someone on another forum said something to the extent of “The idea of a zombie infested world draws many people to it because the idea that killing another human as a zombie without the guilt of murder is appealing.”

Now is something like this just rubbish, or if you take the time to think about it, actually a true statement? And if it is true in a creepy sort of way, is there anything wrong with that? I know I wouldn’t mind dropping pianos on some brainless zombies…

The Walking Dead

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Ok, so no new updates on the possibility of a zombie outbreak. So to pass the time, I’ll talk about a comic I read in my Contemporary Literature class about zombies. The Comic is title The Walking Dead and is written by Robert Kirkman who is coincidentally from the great state of Kentucky. My initial impression just flipping through the comic was that it was going to be just another comic about people shootin’ up zombies… However, my favorite thing about the first volume was Kirkman’s introduction to the comic.

The first three pages of the comic was Kirkman discussing what the comic was going to be about, why it was being written, and what could be expected throughout it. In a nutshell, Kirkman explained that his intentions were not to scare the crap out of his readers, but to use a zombie apocalypse as some type of metaphor to show how people would physically and mentally handle the fall of modern society. After reading this intro, I was somewhat suspicious of the comic and wondered if I would even be able to stand reading the entire thing. Boy was I wrong.

The comic starts out with Rick, who wakes up in a hospital bed with no one attending the hospital. He stumbles around the hospital until he is confronted by zombies. Dodging zombies left and right, Rick attempts to make his way home when he runs into a father and son who are staking out in their home. Rick soon learns that modern society has fallen due to the outbreak of a disease that allows the dead to walk and spread the disease. Rick is also a police officer and heads to the station to gather supplies to find his wife and child. He soon departs leaving the father and son with a car and shotguns. Without revealing any more of the story, the 1st volume is pretty much his journey to find out what happened and find out if his family is still alive.

In conclusion, this comic was definitely worth the time to read. The plot was great, the illustrations were entertaining, the dialogue wasn’t cheesy. I finished the entire volume the same day while I was at school, so it wasnt a dense read. However, it was a thrilling comic and it had really no boring parts.. Those interested in reading it, it was somewhat vulgar with some gory images, if thats possible through comics, and a hint of foul language. To get your hands one of these isn’t too hard or pricey. Amazon has them new from around 15 dollars to used if you get lucky about 5 bucks. Overall, this is definitely one of my favorite comics I’ve read and I can’t wait to get my hands on the second volume.

This is the Beginning

Ok, so as for my first actual post, we will begin with the topic that started the idea for this blog. Yes, it was kind of a joke at first, but after delving into the subject even more I decided it would be a fun experiment to try out. What caught my eye when researching blogs in general was this article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2009/08/researchers_when_zombies_attac.html

Yes, this is actually news on the subject of zombies. In summary, Universities in Canada mathematically modeled another case just like they do with any epidemic; except this time they used zombies. You might be wondering, “How in the world can you actually model a serious mathematical study that includes zombies?”

Well, its quite simple really. The models that they use for other infectious diseases, when casualties happen, the people “die” in the model and the numbers dwindle. However, in this model, those infected did not die. Instead they stayed alive and were place in a different category and continued to infect the living. The zombie numbers increased exponentially.

As you can tell, the government isn’t planning for a zombie epidemic right around the corner. And of course these models aren’t really the most accurate thing for something that’s never occurred. It’s safe to say that there will be no zombie attack in the near future.

But what I’ve caught myself wondering a few times after reading this article is, “Is it really possible?” My AP statistics teacher seems to think that robots have a better chance at becoming sentient beings first. But in all reality, is a virus that infects the human body and turns it into an undead, cannibalistic nightmare really possible? I don’t see why not. It would definitely take some seriously mutated virus, probably genetically altered in a lab to do it, but it seems entirely plausible. Maybe this is just the beginning, and we’ll look  back a few years from now and wonder why we didn’t take it serious. But maybe I’m just delirious.

My Blog

Hey guys, my name is John, and this is my blog. As you can tell from the name, it’s a blog about zombies. In all seriousness, this is not going to be a legitimate blog where I talk about how we’re all doomed because zombies are going to take over the world… It’s far from that. I plan on just having fun with it, talking about movies, comics, books, and even news (yes there is news) involving zombies. So please no flaming, I’m trying to get a good grade.