With Halloween ever bearing down on us, late-night network and daytime cable television are being flooded with our favorite films set to get us in the spirit to have our pants scared off us right after we’ve soiled them. Everything from creaking doors, to howling moans to the screams of teenagers getting torn to shreds is in the air and no more is it more appropriate than during one of my favorite months of the year, October. That’s right, vampires, mummies, haunted houses and of course, zombies. There really are few things scarier than an impending horde of undead shuffling towards you because they are absolutely relentless and they have zero concept of fear. And short of getting down, dirty and stepping up to take their heads off, you might as well be zombie food. So, what better way than to start preparing that by sitting down and getting your game on. After all, if nothing else, you’ll be able to enjoy yourself before the dead start rising again.
10. Dead Rising Case Zero: Giving players a small taste of things to come with what many described was nothing more than a glorified demo, Dead Rising Case Zero did what the first few pages of a book do – grab hold and refuse to let go until the ride has come to some sort of conclusion – for good or bad. Dead Rising Case Zero not only did this perfect, but for an introduction to a game that hadn’t even been released yet, it tied things up in a neat little package for delivery to the masses who were hungry for a taste of some more Dead Rising. And while the narrative was a bit contrived, it acted as a succinct prologue for the story that would be featured in Dead Rising 2 as well as allowed those who were really excited to get their zombie slaughter on, get even more excited for DR2 and level their character a bit in preparation for their own undead genocide.
9. Zombies Ate My Neighbors: Anyone who has read these for a while knows that I have a bit of a love for retro games and no game encapsulates my love for zombies in a retro kind of way better than Zombies Ate My Neighbors! Why? Because it takes the classic 1950s vibe of Night of the Living Dead and puts it into a video game format that is not only well-balanced and memorable, but also makes a case for a potential HD remake on Xbox Live. The story is relatively simple – Zombies arrive, players pick a spunky young boy or a gorgeous cheerleader and set out to cleanse their neighborhood of the undead scourge. It’s summarily simple in a way I wish some of the other games would be on this list, unfortunately the fact that the game is almost fifteen years old puts it behind the curve a little bit. But if there is one thing that has proven to be a bit timeless, as far as video games are concerned – it’s killing zombies.
8. Crackdown 2: Okay, Freaks aren’t really looking to eat just your brains so much as they want to eat you, your family and every neighbor on your block outright or carry you off to the sewers and turn you into one of them – there is something distinctly terrifying about them in a way that makes them unsettling to fight even in the boots of an agent. Simply said, it’s the odd relationship they seem to share with the Flood combat forms from Halo along with the distinguishing characteristics that allow them to stand out as somewhat human even when a group of flockets are flying into a massing of them. While the idea of facing down a group of them in the middle of the night on some dark corner seems like insanity, at least as a soft, tiny human – the thought of taking them on as an agent is still pretty damn cool – even if being an agent means your enforcing some dark, political agenda designed to keep control of the huddled masses. But hey, at least the freaks serve some purpose, right?
This feature top 10 list continues on the next page, please click below to see our next couple games that you should be playing before a zombie apocalypse.
