Up, close and personal

After re-reading the title, most of you could probably be waiting for something else, but, nope, this is exactly about games. Board games I played this weekend until we couldn't stand awake anymore (that's 6am to you, buddies) while the guys who could not join the board played Left for Dead 2 in team (we managed to end it in a run and everthing :D)

NOTE: We are NOT the people in the videos. Not that we are not freaky enough to tape it, only we did not think of it soon enough ;P



The first one was one of my faves: Galactica. It is obviously based on the TV series, shortly after the pilot, and you can start playing as one of the main characters or as a cylon in disguise. There are many tests you have to deal with, like lack of food, cylon attacks, low moral ... and everyone has to contribute to the trial with cards from their hands; only cylons in disguise may contribute negatively, mind you. For the first time, I got to be the skinjob and did pretty well my job :D In the end, I got all humans in prison or infirmary before revealing myself and Galactica surrounded by ships and crowding with centurions. After I burst the presidential ship, their moral went down to the sink and we won. It's good to be bad! The best part was that I based my whole strategy on the other's paranoia, just like in the series :D



A second game was Pandemia. In this case, it is a collaborative game, were players conform a team including doctors, scientists, engineers and managers that have to fight four different plagues before they outbreak in the unsuspecting world. This game is strange. Initially, it seems quite complex. After five minutes, you realize it is easy. And only after you've lost like 5 times you realize that it is indeed complex, but not because of the game rules, just because it is really easy to lose even when you think you've got everything under control. A really nice game and it's got an advantage: you won't end in a hand to hand combat with all the other players :D



The final choice was Last Night on Earth, a survival zombie game where part of the players play the zombies and the rest need to end one out of five missions in the game. The zombies just want dinner, but they get 4 nifty cards they can use against you, like "lights out", "oh, the horror", "I just forgot the keys in..." and such. Humans are faster, but they only get one card per location (not turn) and if they don't get a weapon, they might as well be wearing sauce. Oh, and if you get infested ... you'll become a very fast zombie in the next turn. Gross! In this case, I was very happy running around the board with the bad guys on my track until I arrived to a location with a male human player and the zombies used their "Last night on Earth" card on me. Go figure. I lost my last three turns and they won. No hard feelings, I had just blasted a few hundreds of them before in the XBox :)

Since I don't have much time to write lately, I've decided to gather here some old, long lost posts that could still be of use. Of course, this one was written before the Twilight thing that seems to be the Beverly Hills, 90210 of the decade, only with (some) blood and pretty, pretty boys ...

"When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth"

So vampires are out! We had our deal of vampire projects both in films (Blade, Underworld, Dracula ...) and comics (20 days of night, I am legend ...) some time ago, but zombies seems to be in now.



Zombies were traditionally soulless bodies meant to obey a sorcerer as slaves, both in chinese and voodoo folklore. However, their rol in horror mostly started in 1968 with Romero's Night of the living dead", where they served no master, but an insatiable hunger for living flesh. Zombie basics were stated here: i) they are awaken by some virus or experiment; ii) they can only be killed by destroying their brains; iii) they are driven by hunger; and iv) if you're bitten, you are a goner. Zombies are dumb and slow, and their strength lies in their number and also in the fact that they are virtually unstoppable unless beheaded. Plus maybe you knew some of them in life ...

"Dawn of the dead" and "Day of the Dead" soon followed and then, for a while, almost everyone did a gore zombie flick. Some people stuck loyally to zombies even in the 90s. For example, Peter "LotR" Jackson did Braindead in 1992 and Raimi's Ash trilogy. I personally enjoyed Tom Savini's "Night of the Living Dead" 1990 remake, with Pat Tallman as a Barbara definitely more lethal than the poor undead. However, the zombies revival would not come until the last years and it was probably another remake, "Dawn of the Dead", that brought them back. The novelty of the film: now zombies ran like hell!
Obviously, the Resident Evil games and films helped as well. RE1 was very cool -as any Paul Anderson film- and had an intelligent plot that absorbed my attention all the way to the end. RE2, however, seemed boring to me and the characters, even Alice, were flat. RE3 was not up to it, either.



I also have a thing for The Undead, but, be warned, you really need a sense of humour to watch this one!
We also had the horrible -in a bad sense- "House of the Dead" and the somewhat different, "Shaun of the Dead". But let's talk comics now.



I guess the current run started with Dark Horse "Zombie World", by Mignola and McEown. Mignola was already well into Hellboy and he wrote the first limited series of this short lived project. An evil ancient priest came back from the dead and tricked humans into blasting him to pieces, despite the efforts of the main characters, a group of paranormal investigators. Of course, his "death" brings the dead back to life and he becomes their king. These series were released prior to the new zombie fever and only lasted for 3 limited series and a few specials.


IDW released Niles and Dwyer's Remains, a very well drawn series with a somewhat simple script. Some brain decides to destroy all nuclear weapons by putting them all together in a so called "nuclear oven" and burning them in a public exhibition, only there's free access to jackasses and a red button with a bright sign "Do not touch me". Obviously, there's an accident and the resulting blast turns everyone around into zombies. The main characters, however, were locked inside a vault in Reno -don't ask- and save their lives only to find themselves surrounded by thousand of hungry zombies. Hungry evoluting zombies.



Next zombie project is a cool one: Kirkman's "The Walking Dead", a very well told soap opera with zombies. The series start like "28 days". Rick Grimes awakes alone in an empty hospital. While he has been in a coma, the world has gone to hell. Somehow, the dead are now roaming the country and eating everyone and he has to find his family in the reigning havoc. However, the series is not about killing zombies, but about relationships, social dynamics and human interaction in a extreme situation. Not that there's no zombie killing, also :)



And now, things I have not read yet ...

-Barbara's zombie chronicles: Barbara was one of the main characters of Night of the Living Dead and, being the main character in these series, she must have been taken from the remake (she did not end that well in the original film), so expect guns and attitude! The art is not my piece, but maybe the story is ok ...

-Containment: zombies in space! Apparently, something goes VERY wrong with hibernating astronauts in a ship ... Haven't seen anything on this one yet.

-Romero's Toe Tag: A classic. In a nick of time, the undead have taken control of Earth and a few survivors struggle to keep surviving... It's Romero, after all!

Plus there are more projects, included in this zombie comic list.