Not exactly new! But cer­tainly the most enjoy­able musi­cal remix of Res­i­dent Evil which I have ever watched.

Uploaded to msffasfafafa’s youtube chan­nel, which con­sists entirely of music remixes for video games (Mario and Res­i­dent Evil) entirely for songs which I must dis­s­a­point­ingly admit to hav­ing not heard before.

Check it out!

Bricks of the Dead is a fan­tas­tic web comic which suc­cess­fully com­bines two of my favourite things: Zom­bies and Lego in one ghastly bloody enter­tain­ing mess. The comic has released 33 episodes as of this post and they illus­trate for us a bunch of zom­bie apoc­a­lypse sur­vivors trekking from the rel­a­tive safety of their house to a “safe zone” reported on the news, acted out via Lego.

You can start at episode one by click­ing here.

The Meat

The gar­ish bright colours of the Lego blocks pro­vide a stark con­trast to the grisly zom­bie apoc­a­lypse story and turn seri­ous moments into funny ones. It’s a great mix!

I love the “Zom­bie Cliche Look­out” blog post sec­tion of each strip, It’s eas­ily my favourite part of the comic. In it Dave iden­ti­fies and explores zom­bie genre cliche’s that are present in that days strip. it’s an excel­lent addi­tion to the comic .

The Bones

As the char­ac­ters are made of Lego, they unfor­tu­nately do not show much emo­tion as essen­tially their emo­tional range is restricted to the num­ber of dif­fer­ent facial expres­sions heads the cre­ator has — and he appears to be lim­ited to either a pleased happy face, or a ter­ri­fied face.

As a result of this, emo­tions are gen­er­ally con­veyed through speech bub­bles — but then you get sit­u­a­tions like this:

Where zom­bies have just crashed into their sup­posed safe house, and are lurch­ing through the door. Her screams and her pleased facial expres­sion does not really mesh together, and fails to express the emo­tion the cre­ator was try­ing to go for, HOWEVER this wooden act­ing does lend a par­tic­u­larly pleas­ant b-grade movie feel to the comic, so I am torn on this.

The Taste

It’s far too early to com­ment on the story of the comic, but so far it is hap­pily fol­low­ing the stereo­typ­i­cal zom­bie sto­ry­line (if there is such a thing) of sur­vivors trav­el­ling from one place to a “safe zone” only heard about. This is not a bad thing as stick­ing to zom­bie story tra­di­tion does allows the cre­ator to explore and illus­trate the Zom­bie Cliche’s of each sit­u­a­tion which I really love.

This is an enter­tain­ing web comic and def­i­nitely one to watch, as the authors skill and col­lec­tion of Lego can only grow from here!

So, cre­ative use of Lego, fan­tas­tic decon­struc­tion of zom­bie genre cliche’s and comedic sit­u­a­tions equals good stuff.

Lets hope he sticks with it! I’ll be reading.

Do you have a sur­vival plan for when the dead rise and walk the earth? Surely you had thought about it, whether its to head to the near­est shop­ping mall, a prison or Pacific Play­land — every­one needs a plan for the inevitable.

How­ever if your plan is to sit at home on the couch, shot gun in lap watch­ing the end of civil­i­sa­tion on tele­vi­sion until all the news anchors get eaten — then you are going to need food, and if you need food then you are definitly going to need frugaldad’s fan­tas­tic arti­cle on how to stock­pile food for sur­vival.

At the very least, if you suc­cumb to the undy­ing hordes — you leave an essen­tial food cache for the human race’s last survivors.

MajorNeese has been steadily releas­ing parts of a  fan­tas­tic video series onto YouTube for the last five months, finally cli­max­ing two weeks ago with the final instal­ment of his Res­i­dent Evil and Maniac Man­sion mash-up — and let me tell you, its nostalgariffic!

Through this series, MahorNeese has suc­cess­fully com­bined the ter­ri­ble voice act­ing and b-grade movie plot of the first Res­i­dent Evil game, with the quirky backgrounds, characters and style of Maniac Man­sion — with a few other game cameos.

If you don’t know what I am talk­ing about: Maniac Man­sion was one of the first Adven­ture Games that I never played — and I played it on a NES. It was a beau­tify crafted, qwirky, funny game, with mul­ti­ple end­ings depend­ing on the char­ac­ters you chose to bring into the man­sion and the deci­sions you made while you were there. If you have not played Maniac Man­sion, you may well have played its sequel — Day of the Ten­ta­cle, another mas­ter­piece in the Adven­ture Game genre. I sug­gest you play both, if you haven’t before.

And Res­i­dent Evil needs no intro­duc­tion on any zom­bie blog.

You can watch Part 1 of Res­i­dent Evil the Maniac Man­sion inci­dent above, fol­lowed by Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 on YouTube.

Enjoy!

If you use the code “NOTDEAD” on any thinkgeek.com order over 30$ until 11:59pm EDT on May 28, 2010 — you get $10 off!
You can use that dis­count on any­thing you like, but I sug­gest get­ting 2x con­tain­ers of Zom­bie Blood a new Caf­feinated energy drink sold in an awsome transfusion-style blood bag.

Pok­ing around in io9’s site this week, after their in depth syn­op­sis of Dr. Schlozman’s The Sci­ence of Zom­bies Lec­ture, I ran across yet another 10 Ten list which the Inter­net seems to thrive on these days.

This one, how­ever, peaked my inter­est, as io9 put together a Top 10 list of the Great­est Space Zom­bies of All Time. “Fan­tas­tic” (I Thought) “I’ve always had a soft spot for the meld­ing of clas­sic hor­ror and sci­ence fic­tion that is the space zombie”.

As you are read­ing this, I’m sure you are aware that Zom­bies are great — but like clas­sics some­times we need to mix it up a bit in order to keep it inter­est­ing. This was why Pride and Prej­u­dice and Zom­bies was such a run-away hit. A harsh envi­ron­ment like space gives us fan­tas­tic new oppor­tu­ni­ties to be scared, tense and appre­hen­sive with our tra­di­tional zom­bie stereo­type. The space envi­ron­ment also adds plau­si­bil­ity to any extra-terrestrial ori­gin of our Zom­bies, and gives the writer the oppor­tu­nity to mix the Zom­bie with other sci­ence fic­tion ele­ments (like cybernetics).

Zom­bies loose on a space ship, for instance, could traps all sur­vivors in an iso­lated area. Because the sur­vivors are unable to escape into the cold recesses of space, they will need to band together — either fight­ing or sneak­ing past the Zom­bies in order to make it to the escape pods.

And that’s just one example.

io9’s list is com­pre­hen­sive, and like all good zom­bie resources con­tains a bunch of ref­er­ences which I have heard of, and agree with their inclu­sion, plus some I haven’t — giv­ing me some leads for my own Zom­bie entertainment.

I was espe­cially happy to see the inclu­sion of the Dead Space Necro­morphs, as I believe the Necro­morph was one of the best dead army re-imaginings which I have seen in a long time.

I notice some small incon­sis­tency, how­ever, as Firefly’s Reavers were included, which — like the really angry peo­ple in the 28 X later fran­chise are not Undead. I don’t have a prob­lem with their inclu­sion, but it seems to me if you can include the Reavers, and the cyber­netic Mass Effect Husks while exclud­ing the Borg from your list you should prob­a­bly review your selec­tion criteria.

Also, where was the Space Zom­bies from the Doom Games? They are in space, they have been in a total of three video games and have made major cul­tural impact on mul­ti­ple gen­er­a­tions of video gamers. I’m pretty sure they should at least get some sort of hon­or­able mention.

All in all very enter­tain­ing arti­cle, you can read it here.

Dr Schloz­man is an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of psy­chi­a­try at Har­vard Med­ical School and a lec­turer at the Har­vard School of Edu­ca­tion — he is also con­sid­ered the world’s lead­ing author­ity on the neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy of Zombies.

The above lec­ture was recorded for the Sci­ence on Screen lec­ture series at the Coolidge Cor­ner The­ater in Brook­line, MA. The lec­ture was called “The Neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy, Phys­i­ol­ogy and Cul­tural Over­tones of the Zom­bie Film Genre”

For the lec­ture, Dr Schloz­man stud­ied by watch­ing lots of Zom­bie films, read­ing Zom­bie books, inter­view­ing great Zom­bie film direc­tors and amass­ing Zom­bie mer­chan­dise, all tax deductible. I’m very envious.

The sci­ence fic­tion blog io9 has writ­ten an enter­tain­ing com­pre­hen­sive syn­op­sis of the lec­ture, here.

For more Dr Schloz­man, you can check out an inter­view with Woke up Dead here.

I Love Sarah Jane is a won­der­ful Aus­tralian Short film writ­ten by Spencer Susser, David Michôd and directed by Spencer Susser under blue-tongue films.

It is a brief snap­shot into the lives of a gang of Aus­tralian kids and teenagers who have been orphaned by an ongo­ing Zom­bie holocaust.

The film is 14 min­utes long, and it uses all of that to weave a fan­tas­tic story about sur­vival, how dif­fer­ent peo­ple cope with extreme cir­cum­stances with a lord of the flies back­drop. I loved it!

You can watch I Love Sarah Jane in its entirety in the above embed­ded youTube viewer or on the blue-tongue film home­page.

Under­neath It All is a fan­tas­tic piece of pixel art cre­ated by Eric Poul­ton for the 2006 Last Man Stand­ing com­pe­ti­tion at ConceptArt.org.

It’s here because it has a delight­ful zom­bie sur­prise just a lit­tle way down the top, or a lit­tle way up from the bot­tom — depend­ing on which way its flipped.

You can view the art here, and check out some of Eric’s other work here — which includes some very cool steam­punk work.

(Image from Zentastic.com)

When I bought my (now gone) pan­el­van I’d con­sid­ered paint­ing an old­school mural on the side, some­thing with wild ani­mals and scant­illy clad women. Rep­re­sent­ing the local Depart­ment of Zom­bie Dis­posal would have been a much bet­ter idea and cer­tainly in keep­ing with the rusted-out post-apocalyptic look of the vehi­cle. Instead I’ll just have to admire Shan­non Larratt’s truck and keep the idea in mind while look­ing at get­ting another car.