They've come for brains. I'll give them... bullets!

Our Tivo has been working lots of overtime this summer. Last month it was busy recording hours and hours of Tour de France; this month it's the non-stop Olympics coverage. Since our Wii is connected to the same TV as our Tivo, there hasn't been much video gaming of late. But, that doesn't stop me from blogging about video games!

One of the greatest video games of all-time is House of the Dead 2. The premise is simple: kill as many zombies as you possibly can. What makes it so great?


Bad graphics
By today's standards the graphics are terrible. You know right off the bat that this isn't a high budget game. But that doesn't matter at all; the game is so much fun that the bad graphics actually fit right in.

Comically gross violence
By far the best part. You're advised to aim for the head to kill the zombies quickly, but if you aim for their body, they stumble from the shock, arms/legs go flying off, they'll have holes blasted completely through them, but they'll still keep coming. Which leads us to the next point...

Lots of green zombie blood
This speaks for itself.

Hilariously bad voice acting
There's no way to describe how superbly awful the voices are; you just have to hear them. Anybody can do bad acting, but to make it so bad it's funny takes some serious talent.

Staying power
I first encountered the game in arcades years ago; you used a light gun to shoot at the screen which was (and still is) way cool and tons of fun. I could never justify the time and money to get good at it, so I played it infrequently.

The next time I encountered the game was in college as a PC game, only this time it had been reformatted as Typing of the Dead. Now, each zombie had a word next to it, and typing the word correctly fired bullets at the zombie.


Again, TONS of fun!! Whoever came up with that idea is a genius. I was never able to finish the game, though, because it got too hard; towards the end you had to type entire sentences to kill the zombies, and my typing skills just weren't up to par.


Recently, it was bundled with its sequel, House of the Dead 3 and released for the Wii. The Wii is perfect for the game, since it allows you to use the Wii-remote as a light gun, just like the arcade version. I bought the game soon after it came out, plus I bought the Nyko Perfect Shot accessory to make the Wii remote even look like a gun.


This worked well for a while, but I found that the Nyko gun tired out my trigger finger too quickly. I then got a Wii Zapper and discovered that it's the way to go. It's not as cool looking as the Nyko gun, but the trigger is much easier to pull and using both hands allows for much greater accuracy. I am pleased to report that I have, finally, beaten House of the Dead 2! Once the Olympics are over I plan on starting House of the Dead 3.

And, the reason I wrote this blog post in the first place is that today I discovered another House of the Dead game is coming out for the Wii. This one is called House of the Dead: Overkill and there's a trailer for it here (if you enjoyed the movie Grindhouse, then you'll dig the trailer). Here's hoping Overkill is as much fun as House of the Dead 2.

Finally, a post about zombies just isn't finished until I inflict a super-lame zombie joke that Wendy shared with me recently:

What do vegetarian zombies eat? (scroll down)














GRAAAAAAAAINS!!!