Cinemassacre Visits Night of the Living Dead Cemetery
In the past few years, Cinemassacre has become a bit of magnet for all types of geeks – video game geeks, film geeks, and yes, even board game geeks. The site is the brainchild of James Rolfe who took his film making skills and love of video games to the internet. He created the hilarious personality – the Angry Video Game Nerd – and reviewed video games that have not been released for twenty years. Filled with f-bombs and lots of frustrated beer swills, James has managed to captivate millions of viewers, channeling the controller smashing rage of anyone who has tried to play a poorly designed video game.
While the Angry Video Game Nerd is definitely the most popular part of Cinemassacre, he also reviews movies, video games, and even visits famous movie landmarks. James is a pretty meticulous guy who finds a lot of interesting connections between things so his videos can be pretty interesting, and even educational if you don’t mind the colorful language.
Either io9 is becoming a premium source for zombie news, or I’m getting a little bit lazy. I’m thinking it’s a little of the latter but in any case, they’re reporting on upcoming film that brings a little holiday cheer into slaying the living dead. 
Thanks to Jamie for sending me these news items. It’s been awhile since I played Left 4 Dead 2 on the old XBox. I still enjoy the occasional zombie massacre, but somehow the mutations feature never really gripped. For those who haven’t played the game, the mutations feature basically adds a twist to the gameplay. One mutation had players constantly bleeding while another equipped players with just chainsaws. The latter sounds much cooler than execution. It was like playing the game with a circular saw running in your television. 
I gotta say, this is the best story I’ve read all week. After finishing it, I laughed like a lunatic. This is one of the stories if someone told you about it, you’d think you were getting a plate full of cow dung.
The other night I was playing a late night game of Fallout 3 when my friend, Jeff popped online and asked me if I had been playing Red Dead Redemption. I shook my head, noting that Grand Theft Auto 4 left a bad taste in my mouth and when I heard the game described as “Grand Theft Auto” on a horse, I had no interest whatsoever. To which he responded, “… but it’s gonna have zombies in it.”
Almost a year ago, Jay – the creator of Too Many Zombies, picked himself up an iPod Touch and upon playing with it, he found himself making zombies. Not one or two zombies. But lots of them. Somewhere along the line, the idea blossomed into a full website whereby he posted a zombie a day with accompanying story. 
Bad news from the zombie video game department. Dead Rising 2 has been delayed until the fall. There was no specific reason given, but I’m guessing it probably could use a little polish. God knows … sandbox games need a whole lot of loving from the Quality Assurance team as they must test every inconceivable action being performed by the player. I’m guessing if the development team had its way, they’d probably push it back another year, but money being money probably dictated the short one month delay. 
Last night’s matchup went down in a blaze of glory. Well, not much blaze and very little glory. To put it bluntly … it just went down. People overwhelmingly went with the AK-47. The siren call of the automatic machinegun was too sweet to most people’s ears. And while I think a machine gun would a pretty good weapon in the zombie wasteland, I will stand alongside Richard and take the flare gun.
This year has been an interesting year for sure in regards to the state of A World on Fire. By the start of the year, the site was going strong and by the time March swung around, I managed to complete the first draft of A World on Fire: Rage – the first book in a series about the rise of the dead. 
Back in the day, I used to love skateboarding games. When Tony Hawk hit the market, I was immediately hooked, spending many a Sunday evening in a virtual half pipe, pulling off some amazing tricks. As the years progressed, Tony and I went our separate ways and these days, the only virtual skateboarding I do is over the shoulder of some gamer at Walmart while waiting in line.
Here’s a matchup that on the surface looks to be an easy winner, but before you go ahead and cast your vote, take a moment to think about this one because when you do … I think you’ll see that it’s not so clear cut as it appears. The key thing to remember that in a post apocalyptic situation, a machine gun can be a magnet to your location. If you aren’t shooting and moving, you’re basically ringing the dinner bell for all the undead near you. While the flare gun doesn’t have great kill potential, it does have great distraction potential. When the power is out and the dead is wandering the dark streets like lost sheep, a nice bonfire can open a closed road and if the neighborhood gang just happens to be the target of that said bonfire, then all the better.
In our current age when films seem to be solely composed of reboots, remakes, and re-imaginings, it really should come to no surprise that the film Conan the Barbarian is being remade and set for release next year. Some might curse to the high heavens because the original Conan was a pretty good fantasy film. While the film didn’t so much capture the Conan’s character, it did manage to show the spirit of Robert Howard’s stories. The film was the break-out role for Arnold Schwarzenegger. In it, he did a good job playing the wandering barbarian through several adventures as he attempts to avenge the death of his people. 
I just stumbled across this article over io9 this morning about an upcoming film from Australia that takes a whole new twist on the zombie genre. First we had stumbling zombies. Then we had running zombies. And now, we have fire zombies.
It’s hard to believe that this contest has been in motion for the past six months. It hasn’t been for lack of people making up their minds about what to use in a zombie attack, but rather, the erratic posting schedule of this past year. I will detail more information about the overall changes to the site and future features (you might have noticed some of them already). But for now, let us focus cold steel cutting through rotting flesh.
Many thanks to Ben for sending this over. There’s probably a very good chance that if you are reading this blog post right now, then you have already seen Zombieland sometime in the last few months. The good news is that if you haven’t seen the movie, you can now view it online via. Netflix’s excellent streaming option. 