ZOMBIE FUNNIES

MADFINGER Games Raises The Bar Once Again With Dead Trigger

DEAD TRIGGER ($0.99) by MADFINGER Games, a.s. quite literally takes iOS gaming to the next level. Just as with their previous title, Shadowgun, MADFINGER Games blows away the field with incredibly gorgeous visuals and intense gameplay that keeps you glued to your screen all the way through.

Dead Trigger is a first-person zombie shooter similar to the Call of Duty: Zombies series. Like in Call of Duty: Zombies, zombies emerge from various corners and holes in the walls and shamble towards you at varying speeds. If you get too close, it’s likely that you will take a few hits. Lose all of your health and you’re dead.

Dead Trigger differentiates itself from COD: Zombies mainly with its elaborate storyline. You play as one of the few survivors of a zombie outbreak, surviving on his own in a large city. You meet up with a group of survivors, and from there you become somewhat of a guardian.

The main menu in Dead Trigger is a map of the city. From there you can access your inventory, the shop, all of the missions that are currently available, as well as a few other things.

As you may have inferred from above, Dead Trigger features mission-based gameplay. The various missions that you will encounter include retrieving precious cargo, protecting your new friends, and simply surviving to see another day. There are two types of missions available; missions that follow the main storyline, and random side missions.

Similar to that of a role-playing game, a ranking system has been implemented in Dead Trigger to facilitate the unlocking of new weapons and items. Completing missions earns you experience points to level up your character. You can track your ranking, as well as a ton of other stats (like total limbs shot off) in the Safe Haven.

One thing that might get players (or prospective buyers) on edge is the fact that Dead Trigger is a “paymium” title. While Dead Trigger costs $0.99, it still features in-app purchases for in-game currency. From my experiences so far, the IAPs haven’t seemed necessary at all, but it’s hard to tell if that will hold true as you get further into the game.

To clarify on the in-game currency situation, there are two currencies included, cash and “gold fingers.” Cash is earned by killing zombies and completing missions. On the other hand, gold fingers can only be earned by completing Tap Joy offers (signing up for various things) and watching video ads.

The currency implementation is not too bad, and so far I haven’t had any complaints. Dead Trigger also features a rocking shop. There are 14 guns, 14 items, and 13 character upgrades can be purchased using your in-game cash (or occasionally the gold fingers). The merchandise available ranges from Strikers and miniguns, to fully automatic sentry guns.

Controls are pretty standard for a shooter, with a floating stick on the left side for movement, and swiping on the right side for camera view. There are also buttons for shooting, tossing grenades, and reloading. The controls work well enough to avoid most complaints, but it would be nice if alternate set-ups were available.

Dead Trigger is one of the more intense shooters available in the App Store. The story alone should last you for quite a while, and there are also a ton of side missions to keep you busy as well. Don’t shy away because of the IAPs. Seriously, give this game a try and blast the limbs off of the undead.

~http://appadvice.com/

LATEST RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION TRAILER & POSTER ARE OUT!

Death From Above In GibsNGlory Zombie App

GibsNGlory ($0.99) by Thunder Game Works has you flinging zombies at British army soldiers. A huge, brute zombie poses as the launcher. He doesn’t have a name, but for the purpose of this article, we’ll call him “Chuck.”

The soldiers charge from the far right side of the screen.

You’ll need to stop them before they reach Chuck because they’ll start shooting the moment they can. He has some health he can lose, though it will cost you your stars. Ideally you’d complete the level with three stars. Zero health, zero stars.

Select the kind of zombie you’d like to throw from the menu below Chuck. He’ll dig into the ground and pull up a fresh corpse for you. Then you simply tap him and where you would like to fling the zombie. Watch as the zombies splatter into the troops, earning the game its “gibs” title.

Each zombie has different properties, all useful for stopping the soldiers. The hard hat zombie is your bread and butter. It will roll like a cannonball, toppling anyone or anything in its way. It’s especially useful for exploding fuel drums.

What’s interesting about this game is that you don’t have to play to unlock further levels: they’re all unlocked. It would be a good idea to start off from the beginning, but feel free to try the harder levels if you’re feeling bored.

In addition, a game editor exists for the iPad version, meaning you can either make your own levels or play other user-created ones. The game’s store also adds some variety. Cash in your stars to buy different types of zombies and other goodies.

Your game information is saved in Game Center, meaning you can hop on either your iPhone or iPad and keep your progress. All of your purchases are remembered as well.

This is an awesome game that’s sure to appeal to zombie fans, especially those who enjoyed the developer’s other title, Stenches: A Zombie Tale of Trenches.

The Zombies Have Stolen the Online Jackpot

Zombies is a new slot game from NetEnt that has 5 reels and 20 paylines. NetEnt is one of our favourite casino game developers, so we were excited to see their latest gem. Zombies takes place in an empty shopping mall. Fans of horror movies will love the theme. It’s as funny as it is scary.

The symbols of Zombies are a bloody chainsaw, a gas mask, a bloody brain (nice graphics!), a bloody ripped out eye-ball and a club and hammer (bloody as can be, of course). Match 3 scatter symbols anywhere on reels 2, 3 and 4 and you’ve won 5 free spins. For each zombie shot during free spins, a coin amount is awarded based on the bet level of the round which activated the free spins. During free spins, bet line wins are multiplied after each spin. The first spin has a multiplier of x1, second is x2, third is x3, fourth is x4 and the fifth receives a x10 multiplier.

There’s a bloody red symbol which is the wild of Zombies. The wild can appear on reels 1, 2, 4 and 5 and can substitute all symbols except for the scatter. Zombies even has a stacked wild, which can only appear on the third reel. It can appear as a single symbol, a stacked wild of 2, or a stacked wild of 3. The stacked wild does not appear during free spins.

And that’s not all! Zombies has a Random Wild Feature which can appear after any spin which has not activated free spins or the stacked wild feature. In the Random Wild Feature, up to 6 symbols from the round which activated the Random Wild can be changed into wild symbols.

We enjoyed playing Zombies. While it doesn’t have the bonus games that we enjoyed in Scarface, the free spins and wilds were just as cool. This new slot is as immersive and fun to play as any from the NetEnt catalog.

"YA GOTTA LEARN 'EM YOUNG!"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Fun Pub Comics offers NEW comic title: Lydia VS the Zombies!  

Fort Worth, TX – January 28th , 2012 – Fun Publications, Inc., licensee for Hasbro’s official Transformers and G.I. Joe Collectors’ Clubs, as well as the publisher of the convention comic titles “Transformers: Timelines” and “G.I. Joe VS Cobra,” announced today an exciting new entry in to the Zombie comic phenomenon… “Lydia VS The Zombies!” 

This all-new title goes where no Zombie tale has gone before… Pre-School!?! Read on for the synopsis: 
Tea Time. Play Dates. Hair Braiding. ZOMBIE APOCOLPYSE!  

The end of the world is just another day for LYDIA, a pint size toddler stuck in the land of the undead. This little angel isn’t facing the hordes of man-eating monsters alone though! Accompanying her on this adventure are her pet pug, Duke, and her imaginary friend - although he’s not really imaginary, just DEAD. Join LYDIA for the “scariest” adventure of the year!  

September 201232 pages, FC $2.95 

Finally, a Zombie tale for kids of ALL ages. From tiny tots to the adult reader, this is the zombie tale anyone can enjoy. Don’t worry though. There will still be plenty of “Braaaaiiinnnnsssss”!  

For more information on this and the other amazing titles currently available for solicitation through Diamond’s Previews, please visit http://www.fpcomics.com/  

About Fun Publications, Inc. For over 15 years, Fun Publications, Inc. has been a Hasbro licensee offering fans and collectors of pop culture memorabilia news, exclusive product and family events through different print offerings, websites, collector clubs and brand specific conventions such as GIJoeCon and BotCon. Located in Fort Worth Texas, Fun Publications reaches a large audience, serving the United States and many other countries such as Japan, Great Britain, Brazil, Australia and Canada. 

Zombies: Why Are We So Obsessed?

One of the worst movies ever made -- and not of the "good bad" type, such as Evil Dead 2, that masterpiece of B-picture campiness -- has proven to be a prescient meditation on one of the great conflicts of contemporary society. I mean, of course, Vince D'Amato's 2004 flick,Vampires vs. Zombies. Though actually quite light on warfare between the undead and heavy on lesbian sex, this movie points to our current obsession with blood-suckers and flesh-eaters as well as our need to establish which creature is ascendant in the zeitgeist. 

The popularity of pallidly lovelorn vampires, who also seem, in spite of their world-weariness, to work out, is epidemic. The recent premiere of True Blood's fifth season seduced 6.3 million viewers. Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries, the book series on which the show is based, has sold over 8 million copies, and its most recent title, Deadlocked, reached number two on the New York Times bestseller list just a few weeks ago. Stephanie Meyer's Twilight trilogy has been even more successful, selling about 120 million copies and spawning four films to date, which themselves have grossed over two billion dollars.

Although about as sexy as road kill, zombies are threatening to usurp the vampire. AMC's The Walking Dead has grown even more popular than True Blood, with its season two premiere reaching 7.3 million viewers and the finale, 9 million. The zombie films Resident Evil: Afterlife, released in 2010, andZombieland, from 2009, have each grossed over 100 million dollars. So great has been the enthusiasm for shuffling, groaning, glassy-eyed corpses that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) cheekily called their 2011 disaster readiness document "Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse." But after three separate cannibalistic murders occurred within days of one another and millions entered "zombie apocalypse" into their search engines, the CDC quickly turned earnest, stating that there was no evidence of such an Armageddon. 

The internet remains abuzz over the undead. Maybe our obsession with zombies is a reflection of our fear of a pandemic virus that will transform us into flesh-starved corpses. Or perhaps we are afraid of a global financial collapse that would result in cannibalistic hordes haunting burned-out cities. Or possibly portents of nuclear terrorism scare us into nightmares of ubiquitous death. The vampire's vogue might likewise reflect societal concerns, with True Blood exploring the fight for gay rights and Twilight brooding over gender politics. 

But zombies and vampires enthrall audiences for trans-historical reasons as well. They elicit enduring human desires -- for sexual arousal (think shirtless Bayou vampires), or for control over death (Milla Jovovich whacking zombies); they fill our craving for violent spectacle, present long before even the Roman Coliseum; and they are simply scary, and we like to be scared, as the thrill of the roller coaster ride daily demonstrates. 

There are more complicated reasons, though, for our fixations on fictionalized monsters, especially when we contend with real horrors. A Canadian porn actor posts a video of himself online in which he kills his lover with an icepick and then eats the dead flesh. A man in Miami, crazed on bath salts, devours the face of a homeless person before police shoot him dead. Another man, this time in Maryland, murders his roommate and consumes his brains. These events, unspeakably horrific, threaten our cherished notions of a meaningful, morally structured universe. How to make sense of them?

Fit them into a well-known narrative pattern. Say: these killings are zombie attacks. 
We know that this isn't true, but the idea calms our cognitive panic. The phony ghouls defend against the actual ones. The murderers suddenly appear slightly comical (zombies, with their goofy expressions and screwy motor skills, are quite funny) and their crimes vaguely meaningful (examples of gory matinee mayhem).

Make-believe fiends serve our psyches in other ways. Sometimes in the face of crisis, we mobilize, struggle to manage; other times, we lack gumption, give up, fall into the perverse pleasure of relinquishing agency -- our ability to make a choice and take responsibility for it. The world's going to hell, yes, and there's nothing to be done about it, but it's not my fault.

When we cast off the burdens of freedom, we find kinship in the monstrous, for what does it mean to be a monster, really, but to be possessed by an uncontrollable force? Zombies are driven by an urge to cannibalize. Vampires can't check their lust for blood. Werewolves, trolls, goblins, demons and imps, sinister robots and good old fashioned ghosts: all are essentially addicts unburdened of guilt. We can imagine the strange satisfaction of an existence devoid of accountability -- the joy of casting off neurotic humanity and turning untroubled machine.

To go beyond moral choosing -- this is inhuman, inhumane. It is also beyond the human, transcendent. This is another weird attraction of the monster. The creature breaks boundaries that constrain us and becomes a gruesome geographer of lands expansive and unknown. Monsters overcome the termini of death (zombies); time (vampires); space (ghosts) and stable identity (werewolves, other shape-shifters). In these ways, they become sublime, invitations to push beyond the limits locking us into this one, finite life. They are also sacred, if we recall that sacer, the word's root, means "accursed" as well as "holy." Monsters awaken the Cain within us all -- sinister, pernicious, immoral, to be sure, but also strong enough to challenge God himself and secure His saving mark.

The monster is a maniacal mirror that reflects what is best in us and worst. We require it to tell us who we are and what we can do. And its revelation of our secret and not-so-secret societal fears is only the spooky surface. There are deeper, darker apocalypses in its Gothic chambers. The deepest, perhaps most diabolical disclosure is this: The most essential battle, the one that keeps us loving and alive, is between the demons as integral to us as our hearts and the angels who require these imps to define their opposing generosities.

~http://www.huffingtonpost.com/