The Spirit of Halloween

Capcom's sentiments toward the undead are well documented, but in many of the company's Resident Evil games, zombies have been an occasional nuisance more than anything else. In Dead Rising, however, you'll be battling your way through a shopping mall filled with them. You're predicament in the game isn't dissimilar to that which George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead protagonists find themselves in, though in Capcom's offering you'll assume the role of a photojournalist who is every bit as intent on getting a good story as he is on survival.

Based on what we've played of Dead Rising thus far, it's not a game that will scare you per se, but it's one that will do a great job of just making you feel helpless and overwhelmed at times. The zombies that we've killed in various demo versions have started respawning the moment we turn our backs, and since there are very few places where the zombies can't get to you, the action doesn't let up for a second.

Much of your time in Dead Rising, then, will be spent killing zombies, which, after the first few hundred or so, might become tiresome and repetitive if it weren't for the many different ways to do it. At the start of the game, for example, you'll be armed only with a baseball bat, but as you explore the mall you'll be able to arm yourself with just about anything that you find. Chainsaws from the hardware store and guns stolen from zombie cops are among the more obvious examples. But there's a lot to be said for a game that lets you beat zombies over the head with a cash register or make a hole in one with some golf equipment from a sporting goods emporium.

So remember kids, the next time your hometown is invaded by zombies, the mall might not be the safest place to go, but you'll be guaranteed a good time there.

City of Villains (PC)

Just in time for Halloween, Cryptic Studios' upcoming massively multiplayer sequel will let you don a cape of a different color. The developer's previous game, City of Heroes, let you create a superhero character who could punch, kick, blast, fly over and run circles around evildoers on the clean, well-lit streets of Paragon City. The sequel, City of Villains, will let you play as a supervillain, trying to rise through the ranks of an organized cadre of criminals that inhabits a dingy and dangerous island as corrupt as the brutes that live there.

The sequel will not only introduce new superpowers and a new area to explore, but it will also have new character classes, such as the "mastermind" profession, which has the ability to summon armies of robots (or ninjas, if you prefer). It will also let you create a base of operations that you can decorate with office furniture, stately stonework, and a plasma cannon or two to defend the sequel's new power crystals--useful artifacts that provide bonuses to the team of players that controls them. In addition to offering enhanced missions and better graphics, City of Villains will have beefed-up player-versus-player battle options. If you think you're the baddest villain on the block, you'll be able to prove it in the new game's arenas. And if you happen to have, let's say, a difference of opinion with other players that own both City of Heroes and City of Villains, you'll even be able to get into some hero-versus-villain brawls. Interestingly enough, Cryptic Studios has decided to encourage players who already own City of Heroes to join in on City of Villains. The company is hoping to do this by getting rid of the sequel's monthly fees for those players who play and already pay for the original game. Arguably, there might not be a better time to be bad than on Halloween, but you'll be able to decide for yourself when the game ships on that day.

You have two threats to deal with in F.E.A.R. There's the very real army of cloned soldiers who are controlled psychically by Paxton Fettel, a telepath gone mad. The other threat is less tangible, but involves some shared bond between your character, Fettel, and a young girl named Alma who regularly appears to you in visions. As you sweep your way through a series of empty industrial complexes, taking on squad after squad of Fettel's drones, you'll see things out of the corner of your eye--a light will flicker, some boxes will fall off a shelf, maybe a door will slam shut.

Sometimes you'll turn a corner, and it's nothing. Sometimes you'll turn a corner, and you'll catch a glimpse of someone walking away, only to see that person disintegrate into ash. Sometimes you'll investigate a strange noise, only to find yourself face-to-face with a well-armed enemy operative. This constant uncertainty about what could possibly be around the next corner creates a built-in sense of dread in F.E.A.R., something that's made taut by a soundtrack filled with bone-chilling strings.

The visions you have are always blood-soaked and disturbing, but the best moments are those you don't see. For example, early on you come to a locked gate with a Special Forces team backing you up. You leave the scene to go unlock the gate, but by the time you come back, your team has been reduced to a pile of smoking skeletons. You don't know what happened, but you know it's not good.

Have you ever seen The Shining? It's certainly scary when Jack loses it and starts taking the axe to the woodwork, or when a gout of blood starts pouring out of the elevators. But F.E.A.R. is more like the twin sisters that appear at the end of the hallway, beckoning the boy Danny to come and play. You're not sure what you're seeing, but you know it shouldn't be there.

Stubbs the Zombie (Xbox, PC)

Halloween wouldn't be Halloween without zombies, because unlike your Draculas, your Frankenstein's monsters, and your Freddy Kreugers, they're real. Zombies get a raw deal in modern society. Our movies portray them as shambling monsters who will stop at nothing to satisfy their hunger for brains, and our video games mostly just encourage well-armed players to use them as target practice. That's the way it has always been, and your average zombie's lot in life (death?) never really looked like it was improving until the arrival of Stubbs the Zombie last week.

Stubbs isn't like other zombies, not only because he's a chain-smoker with a great personality, but also because he's the star of a game. In Stubbs the Zombie, our titular antihero affords us a rare opportunity to see the world through the eyes of a walking corpse, and it's a world full of prejudice and hatred. After spending an hour or two walking in the uncomfortably smelly shoes of Stubbs, you'd have to be some kind of monster not to sympathize with his plight. After all, only 26 years before the events of the game, Edward "Stubbs" Stubblefield was struggling to make a living as a traveling salesman. A career choice that resulted in him meeting an untimely demise after a sales pitch to a prospective customer armed with a shotgun went awry.

Wideload Games' Stubbs the Zombie is set in the fictional city of Punchbowl circa 1959. Punchbowl is a futuristic utopia of sorts, and the brainchild of a billionaire playboy industrialist named Andrew Monday. Punchbowl is a living, breathing, and highly stylized realization of what people living in the '50s thought cities might be like in the year 2000. The only problem is that the city was built atop the grave of Edward Stubblefield, who climbs out of his grave at the start of the game with a hunger that simply can't be satiated by the hotdog that he makes a grab for from six feet under in the intro movie.

What Stubbs craves is brains, fresh ones, and satisfying that craving is what you'll spend a lot of your time doing in the game. The people of Punchbowl don't want Stubbs to make a meal of their gray matter, of course, but the great thing is that they not only stop complaining once their brains have been eaten, but they also actually become zombies themselves. Stubbs "makes" friends wherever he goes, and if being a zombie is really this much fun then, for some of us, death can't come soon enough.

Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360, PS3)

Up until 2005, the Resident Evil series had become a bunch of, arguably antiquated, niche games. You either enjoyed the series' trademark combination of good graphics, laughable voice acting, awkward camera angles, and clunky control, or you didn't. That all changed with the groundbreaking Resident Evil 4, which introduced a free-roaming camera attached to an over-the-shoulder view, plus action, action, and more action in the form of battles against swift zombielike enemies that had to be dispatched skillfully, either with superior aim or the game's all-new context-sensitive actions. (Oh, and the game had pretty good voice acting, too.) This complete overhaul not only refreshed the game for fans of the series, but it also opened up Resident Evil for a whole new audience that had been put off by the previous games' well-known issues. But even with this new lease on life, Resident Evil 4 still stayed very true to its roots, featuring a mostly deliberate pace and appearances by some of the series' most well-known characters.

Fortunately for the many fans that Resident Evil 4 has rightfully garnered, Resident Evil 5 for the Xbox 360 and PS3 will also apparently feature this emphasis on action and skill, rather than stick to the fixed camera angles and clumsy control scheme of its forebears. Very little is known of the game, although Capcom producer Jun Takeuchi indicated in an interview some months ago that the team intends to create the same kind of action-packed gameplay for the next game that helped Resident Evil 4 reinvigorate the series. Yet we've seen very little of the game, outside of one video trailer that depicts a character who bears a striking resemblance to Chris Redfield (a character who appeared in previous games) being stalked by what appears to be a crowd of sprinting zombies. The trailer shows off the graphical muscle of the next generation of consoles, but the fact that Capcom seems to recognize the importance of Resident Evil 4's improved gameplay (and that the studio plans to include an enhanced version of this gameplay in the sequel) is probably the most exciting thing of all. We can't wait to see what Resident Evil 5 will have to offer when it's released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3...hopefully sometime next year.

You have two threats to deal with in F.E.A.R. There's the very real army of cloned soldiers who are controlled psychically by Paxton Fettle, a telepath gone mad. The other threat is less tangible, but involves some shared bond between your character, Paxton Fettle, and a young girl named Alma who regularly appears to you in visions. As you sweep your way through a series of empty industrial complexes, taking on squad after squad of Fettle's drones, you'll see things out of the corner of your eye--a light will flicker, some boxes will fall off a shelf, maybe a door will slam shut.

Sometimes you'll turn a corner, and it's nothing. Sometimes you'll turn a corner, and you'll catch a glimpse of someone walking away, only to see that person disintegrate into ash. Sometimes you'll investigate a strange noise, only to find yourself face-to-face with a well-armed enemy operative. This constant uncertainty about what could possibly be around the next corner creates a built-in sense of dread in F.E.A.R., something that's made taut by a soundtrack filled with bone-chilling strings.

The visions you have are always blood-soaked and disturbing, but the best moments are those you don't see. For example, early on you come to a locked gate with a Special Forces team backing you up. You leave the scene to go unlock the gate, but by the time you come back, your team has been reduced to a pile of smoking skeletons. You don't know what happened, but you know it's not good.

Have you ever seen The Shining? It's certainly scary when Jack loses it and starts taking the axe to the woodwork, or when a gout of blood starts pouring out of the elevators. But F.E.A.R. is more like the twin sisters that appear at the end of the hallway, beckoning the boy Danny to come and play. You're not sure what you're seeing, but you know it shouldn't be there.

Stubbs the Zombie (Xbox, PC)

Halloween wouldn't be Halloween without zombies, because unlike your Draculas, your Frankenstein's monsters, and your Freddy Kreugers, they're real. Zombies get a raw deal in modern society. Our movies portray them as shambling monsters who will stop at nothing to satisfy their hunger for brains, and our video games mostly just encourage well-armed players to use them as target practice. That's the way it has always been, and your average zombie's lot in life (death?) never really looked like it was improving until the arrival of Stubbs the Zombie last week.

Stubbs isn't like other zombies, not only because he's a chain-smoker with a great personality, but also because he's the star of a game. In Stubbs the Zombie, our titular antihero affords us a rare opportunity to see the world through the eyes of a walking corpse, and it's a world full of prejudice and hatred. After spending an hour or two walking in the uncomfortably smelly shoes of Stubbs, you'd have to be some kind of monster not to sympathize with his plight. After all, only 26 years before the events of the game, Edward "Stubbs" Stubblefield was struggling to make a living as a traveling salesman. A career choice that resulted in him meeting an untimely demise after a sales pitch to a prospective customer armed with a shotgun went awry.

Wideload Games' Stubbs the Zombie is set in the fictional city of Punchbowl circa 1959. Punchbowl is a futuristic utopia of sorts, and the brainchild of a billionaire playboy industrialist named Andrew Monday. Punchbowl is a living, breathing, and highly stylized realization of what people living in the '50s thought cities might be like in the year 2000. The only problem is that the city was built atop the grave of Edward Stubblefield, who climbs out of his grave at the start of the game with a hunger that simply can't be satiated by the hotdog that he makes a grab for from six feet under in the intro movie.

What Stubbs craves is brains, fresh ones, and satisfying that craving is what you'll spend a lot of your time doing in the game. The people of Punchbowl don't want Stubbs to make a meal of their gray matter, of course, but the great thing is that they not only stop complaining once their brains have been eaten, but they also actually become zombies themselves. Stubbs "makes" friends wherever he goes, and if being a zombie is really this much fun then, for some of us, death can't come soon enough.

Hellgate: London (PC)

The creators of the insanely addictive Diablo action role-playing series have left the nest and set out to start a new company, and a new project, Hellgate: London. This intriguing new game for the PC will feature tons of hack-and-slash action from a first-person perspective, similar to a first-person shooter. The game will take place in a near-future version of London, England, which has been overrun by a demonic invasion. Your character will be among the city's few surviving humans, and one of the few beings that can strike back against the demonic hordes.

Like you'd expect from a game with this kind of pedigree, Hellgate: London will attempt to get you hooked on hacking and slashing your way through huge armies of monsters while gaining experience points and levels, learning new skills, and picking up piles and piles of loot. However, Hellgate's developers have learned a thing or two from their Diablo days, and they plan to introduce a hack-and-slash system that is more streamlined but also more open-ended. There won't be any dead-end skill choices, since you'll be able to learn, tweak, improve, and change up your many, many combat and defensive skills on the fly. In the meantime, you'll be able to customize your weapons and armor, like an ancient holy sword you've recovered from the skeletal hands of a dead saint or a repurposed military rifle infused with demonic energy and different modifications. And like you'd expect from a game by the creators of Diablo, Hellgate: London will not only have a comprehensive single-player campaign, but it will also have online cooperative play for all the dungeon-hacking you'll be doing with your buddies. Unfortunately, Hellgate's developers haven't revealed an exact release date for the game and have only claimed that it will be "done when it's done." With any luck, we won't be waiting too long for this promising action RPG.

Fortunately for the many fans that Resident Evil 4 has rightfully garnered, Resident Evil 5 for the Xbox 360 and PS3 will also apparently feature this emphasis on action and skill, rather than stick to the fixed camera angles and clumsy control scheme of its forebears. Very little is known of the game, although Capcom producer Jun Takeuchi indicated in an interview some months ago that the team intends to create the same kind of action-packed gameplay for the next game that helped Resident Evil 4 reinvigorate the series. Yet we've seen very little of the game, outside of one video trailer that depicts a character who bears a striking resemblance to Chris Redfield (a character who appeared in previous games) being stalked by what appears to be a crowd of sprinting zombies. The trailer shows off the graphical muscle of the next generation of consoles, but the fact that Capcom seems to recognize the importance of Resident Evil 4's improved gameplay (and that the studio plans to include an enhanced version of this gameplay in the sequel) is probably the most exciting thing of all. We can't wait to see what Resident Evil 5 will have to offer when it's released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3...hopefully sometime next year.