Michael Jackson reportably collapsed at his home Los Angeles with cardiac arrest and died at the UCLA Medical center.

You can find more information about this tragic turn of events here.

You might be asking “Why is this being reported on a Zombie blog?” and the answer is very simple - In my opinion, Michael Jacksons song “Thriller” is easily the most recognisable and best zombie dance ever created.

You can listen and watch the thriller video on his official youtube page here.

Personally I’m going to mourn Michael Jackson’s passing by learning how to dance it.

Here are some resources which are going to help me to just that - a bunch of instructional videos, an image and a fantastic threadless shirt.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is over for another year and so its time to round up all the Great Zombie Related Games Announced!

Undead Knights (PSP)

In Undead Knights you get to play all three members of a family who have made a deal with a demon - and can now turn people into, and control, zombies.

The Game looks Interesting and there has been blessed few games where you actually get to play as zombies - since the excellent Stubbs the Zombie.

I also like the promised mechanic of using your Zombie army to solve  puzzles.

You can find a full preview at IGN here.

Zombie Apocalypse (PS3, XBOX 360)

A multiplayer game at heat, Zombie Apocalypse drops your characters (and your friends, if you have them) into a level - and you have to fight off/survive the oncoming hordes of the undead.

This game looks like good, wholesome and mindless fun. It actually reminds me of a lot of top down sprite shooters that I have played in the past - brought into the present day.

You can read a comprehensive review of this game here at Gamespot.

Left4Dead 2 (PC, XBOX 360)

Wow - Left4Dead 2! Valve is promising us more everything plus controversy.

“Featuring new Survivors, boss zombies, weapons, and items, Left 4 Dead 2 offers a much larger game than the original with more co-operative campaigns, more Versus campaigns, and maps for Survival mode available at launch.”

I would just like to say a quick note to Valve: Take my money, go on, take it, It’s yours.  it’s going to belong to you anyway.

Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles (Wii)

This actually looks really enjoyable.

You can find a full preview and screenshots here at Kombo.

Dead Rising 2 (PC, PS3, XBOX360)

I played the original Dead Rising a lot and wrote a very (to my standard) comprehensive review on the game.

I loved the game - despite its many faults (*cough* OTIS *cough*) and despite the fact that it was trying to give me a stress induced heart attack.

You can find a lot more information about it on its wiki page, and here is a gameplay trailer.

I can’t wait.

KOMO News is reporting that a man dressed as an Umbrella Corporation Security Force Employee on his way to a  Zombie crawl for promoting the Crypticon Horror Convention was detained by police.

He was only detained for a short time - enough time for the police to ensure that his knives, machine gun and grenades were all made of plastic.

Apparently somebody saw the heavily armed umbrella corporation mercenary walk into the shopping mall and thought they were under attack.

Heaven knows what they thought about the actual zombie crawl, that happened later that day.

You can see a video here of police handling the plastic grenades in a plastic evidence bag.

The KOMO News story is found here.

You can also find much more information at seattle-geekly.com including an interview with the man in question!

In case you haven’t heard, Plants VS. Zombies is Popcap’s new casual tower defence game. In the game various zombies spawn on the right side of the screen and make their way to the left side; in order to eat your tasty tasty brains. 

Your last line of defence is your garden, which is made up of various sentient plants sworn to your protection. You grow your stoic garden as the zombies attack using the only resource available - sunshine (Sunshine either falls from the sky - or is generated by plants like sunflowers).

I have been playing this game for a while now - I completed the adventure and played the extras (such as survival mode, the puzzles, the mini-games and I grew a bunch of stuff in the Zen Garden) and am now ready to give you my frank review.

This game is really fun, energetic, funny, way cool - and I will probably never play it again.

The Meat

OK, so you have seen the pictures, and heard the hype; your either excited about the game or curious and, as it turns out, you should be - its a good game. 

The problem with a lot of non mazing tower defence games is amount of down time between rounds; you build some towers, then hope for the best as the creatures wander past your towers… rinse and repeat.

Popcap have solved this by having five different straight paths on the battlefield. Random types of zombies (from a pool of zombie types which is presented to you at the start of the level) spawn randomly across all these paths - all the time. There are also occasional large zombie waves in which a tonne of zombies will spawn across all the paths.

When the zombies get to your plants, they become vegetarian and chow down on them so its your job to prevent that with various blocking plants.

As a result, you are not playing one - but five different path tower defence games simultaneously.  You might encounter situations where you can only afford one type of tower but you have two separate paths with zombies that are weak against that tower.

Add this decision making to the resource mechanic, where you need to click on the generated sun balls in order to collect them before they disappear - and you have a hectic game with very little boring downtime.

Also, the different types of zombies and plants mesh well - and do not feel out of place. They also have a funny little bio for each character which had me checking the provided almanac after unlocking each new plant or zombie.

The Bones

Unfortunately the game was too easy. I don’t know if it’s because I am a veteran of tower defence games - but I did not loose once during the games adventure mode, or during the mini-games/puzzles which I actually got to play.

This was very disappointing, especially when I beat the last level of the adventure - and did not realise that it was the last level. At the time I thought it was just a sub boss.

I did mention earlier that I am probably not going to play the game again and the reason for that is when I completed the adventure, then completed a large portion of the mini-games/puzzles the game deleted my save.

That’s right. 

Now, this is a known issue and if you check the last page of that steam forum post you will find a comment by one of the developers:

“I just want to let everyone know that we just pushed a new version of Plants vs. Zombies to Steam that addresses a number of the problems people have been having with save files. We’ve been working around the clock to solve this once we realized there was an issue. This was one of the very difficult programming problems that is hard to reproduce and involves interactions with lots of different code.

Again, I want to apologize to everyone that has lost their game progress. I know how frustrating that is and I want you to know that I’ve been doing everything I can to fix it.“

–tsemple

It appears they have fixed the issue with a new patch, and I would definitely like to continue playing some of the mini-games and puzzles - but the game only unlocks these as you progress through the adventure.

So I would need to play the entire adventure again, just to unlock and play what I want to play.

As I thought the game was too easy the first time, I don’t really feel like it. Which is definitely my problem and not the games - but there it is.

The Taste

The game is cute and fun - I would recommend it to anyone who likes zombies and casual games; just backup your saves!

This morning - Zombies attacked Sydneys Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station.

The Zombies lurched around a bit, attacking commuters - then broke into the dance that all zombies know intuitively - Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

The attack was a promotional stunt for Plants vs Zombies.

Check out the video from theage.com.au above!

On the 5th of May, Popcap games have decided to turn their gigantic casual game making machine around and release a family friendly game about Zombies.

What? Family Friendly?

It’s called Plants VS Zombies and looks incredibly cutesy, funny and from the makers of Bejeweled and Peggle - I am willing to bet that its going to be really Fun!

You play the plants in a tower defense type game, where you protect the innocent people in the house from the cute swarming hordes of the differently alive. To facilitate this guardianship you build different types of plants to to stop the zombies, each with different abilities and strengths and weaknesses against the different types of zombies.

I’ve already pre-ordered a copy, through steam, so we should have a full review up when the game releases.

You can check out some of the screen shots of the game from the steam site.

It’s unsurprising that the iPhone has a plethora of zombie related stuff (wallpapers, ring-tones and applications) since we all know the the humble zombie has driven the progress of media technology for generations.

However, I didn’t actually expect any of the iPhone zombie games to be actually good, and it seems that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I have now purchased and played all of the Zombie games on the iPhone (or, at least the ones with ‘zombie’ somewhere in the title) and I am ready to give my opinions of them; starting with the one I play/get angry at the most… Zombieville USA.

You are a dude, a human survivor presumably - passing from left to right through a level. Zombies spawn from off the screen, and pop up from the ground to harass your progress.

You shoot them with whatever gun you currently have equipped, and pick up some cash for doing so.

Along the way you can also loot empty houses by spending some time inside them, they usually relinquish cash or ammo.

When you have reached the end of the level, you enter a safe zone, allowing you to spend your hard earned cash on bigger and better guns to defeat the zombie menace and try to pass as many levels as possible.

The Meat

I love the look and minimal feel of this game, its very cool and funky -  plus the touchscreen controls make the game very simple to pick up and play. The game does include a little video tutorial - so you can check that you haven’t missed anything, but you probably wont need it.

I also love the choice of weapons which was put into the game: shotguns, chain-guns, chainsaws, flamethrowers and lasers oh my! It’s like some sort of zombie killing heaven.

The zombies look cool and funky and die in very satisfying ways, plus, as you progress you get to see some different types of zombies (like the fast white zombie, or the hardy red-eyed zombie) and kill them.

The Bones

Every so often the game does slowdown for no real reason that I can determine. It’s not because of the number of zombie creatures on screen… and it doesn’t happen often - but when it does you will be chewed on. That’s irritating.

The game has no save. I understand the point of the game is to see how far (level wise) you can get without dying, but I would have loved to see some sort of save so you can get past the beginning levels and get right to the meat/fun of the game - the weapons near the end. It’s a small nag, but it’s there. It does have a resume function - which starts the game from the beginning of whatever level you were up to.

The game comes with music, but its repetitive and gets irritating after a while. It would have been real nice to allow the player to use the built in iPod and supply their own music.

The Taste

This is currently my “go to game” on my iPhone, it’s fun, quick to get into (when you are waiting for a bus, or whatever) so I suggest you give it a go.

The full game is also very cheap - at $1.19 for this kind of quality entertainment? Snap it up quick.

You can buy the full version here, but there is also a free light version - if you want to try it out.

The Look

LOLcats are not new - and, surprisingly to me, neither was inevitable derivation of captioning Zombies from our favorite movies.

You can see a bunch of excellent LOLZombies here at http://lolzombie.livejournal.com. 

So, in order to jump up and down of this bandwagon of funny - we have put together a couple of LOLGhouls - taken from stills of the public domain Night of the Living Dead!

We found the stills at the excellent Dead Source fan site.

You’re Welcome.

Left 4 Dead is one of those fantastic Zombie games which I am playing - but have not reviewed. It falls happily into the category of “So good that I don’t think my review would do it justice” with a select few other Zombie related media.

When it comes to reviewing things like Left 4 Dead - I would prefer to leave it to the professionals.

Saying that, how could I resist bringing to your attention the greatest Left 4 Dead Birthday cake I have ever seen?

Two photo’s of the cake can be found on Ashelia’s Flicker page here and here.

Both pictures are zoomed in quite closely on the Left 4 Dead signature hand logo, it would have been nice to get a more zoomed out picture of the whole cake - but I will take what I can get.