Ask any person who may not even consider themselves a gamer, per say, what it was that they enjoyed about any game made prior to the year 2000. You’ll most likely notice a glaze over their eyes as they stare into space, as if they were literally looking into the past, and then present you with information concerning simple stories, epic struggles of good, evil and turtle shells, hours spent playing with friends and family, and how enjoyable every last bit of it was. I, for one, remember waking up early and running to the houses of friends and cousins, getting there before even our parents were awake, to play games of Mario, Star Wars and the like.

Years later, when gaming had evolved and become more interactive with various peripherals, most notable of the lot being light guns, arcades seemed more fun than playing the consoles at home. Many of my favorite games of all time involved shooting aliens, zombies, and various other baddies. Unfortunately, I didn’t always have the money to attend the arcades or to even, later, buy consoles, games and peripherals to play the old games I fell in love with at home in my very own bordello of game lust. It is thanks to, let’s be real, emulators that I was able to play many a classic title, and many more obscure ones. One of the best, lesser known titles of all being The Typing of The Dead.

There are many awesome things about arcade games concerning their peripherals. There’s the light guns, sure, and ones that embarrass you a bit, like the Dance Dance Revolution stage, but then there’s cool ones. Cool ones where “cool” equals “geeky”, but not “nerdy” because you’re totally using a keyboard in an arcade to kill zombies by typing.

[-] What is it?! [-]

TotD, not to be confused with “thought of the day” … though it should be one, wasn’t originally a typing game, oh no. TotD is, actually, a modified version of House of the Dead 2, which is part of a series of awesome all about using a light gun to blow away all sorts of creatures who have no business living, dammit! **SLAMSFIST**

There is a bit of story that prequels TotD, seeing as how it’s actually a sequel, and all. It’s got something to do with some sort of evil corporation that developed some kind of something that turns animals into giant, evil things and people into zombies. It basically is just another version of the same story that’s in Resident Evil and the like. All that’s important is that you are here to kill zombies by typing at them with the SEGA Dreamcast that’s attached to the back of your sexy, sexy suit.

[-] My Experiences [-]

GRAPHICS

Considering this is a game from 1998, and it’s a SEGA game (you know what I’m talking about, here), the graphics are pretty suck.

The characters look like someone took those cardboard blocks you used to play with as a kid, stuck them together and made people. The textures are pretty lame, too. Somehow, though, the game is able to combine enough sucky graphics in just the right way to let you get a good picture of what’s going on. It really does give you a sense of urgency.

I blame the constant camera movement, a technique that action and survival movies only recently started using en force.

SOUND

The sound is pretty crappy, too. I have to admit.

Sound effects get the point across when coupled with animations or graphics, but probably couldn’t stand alone. I know that when I hear something that sounds like yetti screaming at me from ten years ago through a microphone connected to a guitar peddle set to “grunge” using the sound production quality of an ear bud, something bad is probably about to happen. When I hear the same sound, only shorter, I know someone shot a gun.

The music is also pretty terrible quality, but not terrible composition. I can feel the emotion they’re trying to convey (terror), especially when the music is used in the background, as it should be.

Voice acting? Except for the typical SEGA announcer guy with the dead voice, the voice acting is crap. It’s not really acting. I suppose I could give them credit for being the most monotoned persons ever to speak into a microphone and then have it published, but I’m not.

GAMEPLAY

I really like light-gun games. I don’t have to worry about moving my character around with a controller, mouse or keyboard. I just let the camera go around and I shoot things. It’s much more of an interactive movie experience, really, and TotD does it well.

As I mentioned before, the constant screen movement, even while focused on one scene, helps add to the realism and sense of urgency. The flowing hordes of zombies flying at the screen helps with that feeling quite a bit, too.

Another huge feature that adds a lot to this game is, of course, the keyboard. Typing to kill zombies may sound ridiculous to read, but think about it. If you had to type like your life depended on it, could you survive a zombie apocalypse? Oh, it starts out easy enough. Just type a quick “To” here or a random “KO” there, but pretty soon you’re blasting out sentences connected to a central theme while a giant, headless monster is chasing you with a chainsaw as you run backwards through a maze. Here’s a video of it.

What could possibly add more awesome to something already that awesome? How about making the sentences and phrases you type to stay alive have nothing to do with zombies, death or survival, at all? One of my favorite sentence series to type was “It’s hard to ride a bicycle uphill” [dodge zombie attack] “I have to push hard with one foot and then the other” [dodge zombie attack] “My kid brother has polio” [dodge zombie attack, start laughing, screw the next sentence up and die].

ISSUES

I don’t really have any issues with this game. It’s so old that it is what it is. It’s come, it’s gone and the only people who play it are people who think the same way about old games as many think about old movies. They’re classics.

[-] Overall [-]

If this were a new game, I’d rank it something terrible, I’m sure, but as this is a retro review and I’m playing something the likes which we don’t get the chance to play any more (novelty, I’m talking novelty, people!), I’ll give it a nine.

This game is really fun, at least to me. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who was even remotely interested. It has very helpful tutorials, various game modes, and even training and practice levels to help you with your typing speed and accuracy.

If you play this game, you will get better at typing and learn to not look at the keyboard. Also, if you’re in an office with the sound turned off, you’ll look like the busiest employee in the history of looking busy.

Zombies are a fun subject to create stories around and to place into existing stories to change their style. In this regard, zombies are no different than ninjas, pirates, the wild west or anything else of the like. They’re exciting because they are fantastic, something we will most likely never see like we do in movies, graphic novels and books, but their origins are tied to half-truths, extreme situations and our general ignorance of things scientific. All of which, makes the possibility of zombies seem more real, and, therefore, more intriguing.

The two best things that zombies do for people, I think, is scare them and allow them something that the world considers okay to beat with a bat until nothing put goo remains. In fact, that want to be scared and that want to release pure, uninhibited violence to lust-point is so strong that since we don’t know enough to say that zombies couldn’t exist, they can, and since we don’t know how zombies could be made, we thought of ways to make them.

Even so, zombie movies, in my mind, aren’t classified into a “zombie movie” category. Instead, they’re filed around inside of other genres, like action, horror, suspense, comedy, tragedy, and the like. If I had to put Zombieland into a category, it would probably be comedy, but it has so much more.

The two main characters of Zombieland make the movie, and the grand total of four human characters makes it cozy. Explanation is coming. In the post-apocalyptic anarchy that is a world completely covered with death, the remaining humans are obsessed with two things: staying alive and staying sane. Rarely, at this point in the chronology of a zombified Earth, will a human see another uninfected human, and if two do meet, they don’t want to stick together because at least one of them is certain to die, and neither wants any more emotional strain. This is how Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) and Columbus (Jessie Eisenberg) feel when they stumble upon one another, and why their names are simply destinations. This theme is reiterated and expanded upon when Tallahassee and Columbus meet Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). The sisters are focused on survival, which is clearly shown when they con Tallahassee & Columbus out of their vehicle and weapons, but they are also focused on sanity. The two sisters have always been together and will never split apart; they are each other’s hope and salvation. Eventually, however, the four learn to work together and each finds what they were missing or had lost from their lives, previously.

I won’t give away too much, but… the kind of writing that gives so much character definition is definitely OSCAR worthy, not only for it’s complexity, but for it’s ability and willingness to create a comic moment out of a dire & heartfelt situation. That’s the beauty of true comedy: it’s on another level; it’s so good that it can give all the insight to the human soul a Rembrandt can, but it also teaches you to laugh.

The story may have been lacking for some, but the narration of the lead character, Columbus, filled gaps where it would have been otherwise emotionally inappropriate for a character to speak. Without the narration, the movie would probably have been dragged out another twenty to thirty minutes with long pauses where the audience would stare at a Eisenberg’s face, wondering what he was thinking. The story didn’t lack character backgrounds, in fact, the audience knew enough of all four to feel connected with each, but, in all honesty, I feel that if it had any more, the movie would feel too rushed and forced, as so many other recent movies, do. The great part about the writing, however, isn’t about what’s in the movie: [*TIDBIT*] Reese and Wernick actually intended Zombieland to be a television show and this movie is actually just the first two episodes. So, there’s plenty more where this came from.

The graphic quality of this movie is high ranking, for sure, but not without its flaws. The feel of the colors and environments of every scene are very akin to anything you may remember from I Am Legend and the like. Almost always dark, and when there’s light, it’s just as frightening. So, I have to give major props to the editing and direction for maintaining the proper feel of a horror/suspense film throughout, and while I’m not going to cost the film points for things they don’t have much control over (like outfitting Wild Adventures, a working theme park, as a refined movie set), I am going to wag my finger at a few other things.

Make-up and costuming were pretty dammed great. I’d say 8 out of every 10 times I saw a zombie, I was at least partially disgusted by the gratuitous use of blood capsules and ooze dripping from undead mouths. The splatter effects they made were awesome, by the way. Not every zombie, however, looked as awesome and epic. Some simply looked like people in make-up, and whether those people are the center of the frame or not, that just won’t do.

CGI was another thing I could wave my finger at, in general. While the quality was definitely refined enough to put Zombieland into an imported car lot of motion pictures, it was not the most tricked out ride. I think the most obvious example of this is when three zombies chasing Columbus through Wild Adventures get smacked by a strangly pendulous carnival ride, as if it were a giant mace. They do seem to flail quite a bit like redeading undead creatures, but rag dolls and different camera angles probably would have looked better. I doubt it would have cost less, if that’s what you were thinking, as CGI is a bit cheaper, nowadays, than paying people to make dolls, operate machinery, and film inanimate objects.

There’s not really a whole lot more about Zombieland that I can write about without doing a thorough, completely spoil-laden synopsis. I laughed out loud, a lot (though Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs is still my number one comedy this year), I cried true tears of sorrow (if you’re a father, you’ll understand), and I was honestly scared to the point of a startled jump at least three times (fantastic feat; bravo). I recommend seeing this movie, but only if you understand and accept that it is, indeed, gory, full of lots of violence, suspense, heartbreak, romance, hope, love and zombies.