Grave Gamer News & Views — zombies

Telltale's The Walking Dead: Season Three Announced at SDCC

If you’re a fan of big budget superhero movies and giant monsters, this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, as expected, delivered. But it’s those unexpected surprises that turn out to be the best treats.

One such treat was the confirmation made by Telltale co-founder Kevin Bruner that, yes indeed, a third season of their heart-punching adventure game The Walking Dead is underway.

Even with Season Two just barely into its finale, the soon-to-be-released “No Going Back,” the series massive success has guaranteed a return to the studio’s comic-adapted apocalypse. As with any good confirmation, we have absolutely no details on Season Three – no characters, no story info, no date.

The project joins Telltale’s growing catalog of upcoming episodic games including Tales From the Borderlands, a joint undertaking along with Gearbox Software, and Game of Thrones, a title that draws inspiration from the best genre show in television history this side of Firefly.

Escape Dead Island Announced; A Tropical Adventure Game Spiced Up with Madness and the Undead

Publisher Deep SIlver is not about to let the zombie infested gravy train that is Dead Island ride away into the sunset without taking a bite…out of…zombie gravy… All right, I don’t have a degree in metaphors. Screw it.

What I’m saying is Deep Silver is making a shitload of Dead Islands. From dipping into the MOBA genre with Dead Island: Epidemic to barreling at next-gen with Dead Island 2, it’s a lttle eye-widening to hear that a third release is imminent, heading for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 this Fall. With this horde of the digital dead shuffling after our wallets, it’s a fortunate thing for Deep Silver that Escape Dead Island looks so promising.

Forgoing the Action-RPG setup of the original Dead Island (which was heavier on the action than the RPG), Escape is actually a third-person adventure game where you have to mix up stealth maneuvering and advantages in the environment to bust some undead skull.

More mindful of story in this single-player narrative, you’ll control Cliff Calo, an investigator sent this doomed chain of islands to figure out why the locals are bitier than usual. Cliff’s noticeable shortcoming as an intrepid photojournalist would have to be his loose grip on reality. Throughout the game, you’ll hallucinate outlandish sights that even reshape the environment – or outright kill you, thus pushing you through a “time loop” to before you went all Hunter S. Thompson.

The result makes Escape Dead Island seem like a combination of Far Cry 3’s dream sequences with a Darksiders-ish adventure game where your surroundings play into gameplay much more than just scenery. Sure, they might be flogging the zombie horse cranking out these Dead Island titles. But they at least show the same imagination and promise Escape does, I say ride that undead gravy train of horse flogging.

Escape to Dead Island in This Escape Dead Island Trailer!

Legendary Producing Dead Rising Movie for Crackle

Capcom’s carnage caked open-world zombie series is making the jump to the silver screen – just not the big one.

Legendary Pictures’ digital division is producing an adaptation of Dead Rising set to premiere on Crackle. After Crackle’s exclusivity run ends, the film will release via DVD, SVOD, TV, and VOD, available as a feature-length or broken up into episodic format (which… worries me, though I can’t quite figure out where this well of doubt finds water).

Working from a script by Tim Carter (who wrote 2012’s stupidly underrated Sleeping Dogs) and from the production company that put together the Mortal Kombat: Legacy web-series, the narrative follows four hapless mains navigating through a wide-scale zombie outbreak while searching for the focal point of infection.

Several ingredients from the games make their way into the story including a (worthless) vaccine meant to stave off infection, government conspiracy, and the media’s eye on the apocalypse. It’s uncertain if the series’ signature taste for madness – which runs anywhere between ridiculous DIY weapons of slaughter and main characters crowd-surfing zombies in speedos – will find its way into the adaptation. But, really, why the hell adapt Dead Rising if you’re going to zap the fun out of it?

No date is in place for the film just yet.

Dying Light Runs All the Way to February 2015

Developer Techland’s open-world, free-running survival horror, Dying Light, has suffered a delay, pushing the game’s release way the hell away to February 2015.

Having already given us a dose of zombie bashing action in Dead Island, Techland is diligent on expanding on that title’s concepts in Dying Light. Familiar to fans of that uneven but still fun game are a disaster-strewn open-world, a heavy focus on melee combat featuring DIY weaponry, and, of course, a shitload of the mortally-challenged coming at you.

However, Dying Light’s signature mechanic – the ability to seamlessly traverse your environment by scaling buildings, hopping obstacles, and other assorted parkour heroics – is exactly why Techland is taking extra time on the game’s brewing cycle.

“We believe the Natural Movement element of our game will change what you expect from the genre, and we don’t want to sacrifice any of its potential by releasing too early,” said the game’s staff on their official site. “This quality-focused thinking underlines all our development choices and we hope you share our belief that the gameplay must always come first.”

It’s probably no small feat the studio is planning to launch Dying Light on five different platforms between the current and last generations (oh, yes, friends; the current-gen is now last-gen and the next-gen is now current. Can you dig it?).

I think this one is truly, truly promising. I find myself more in support of delaying the game to get it right than I am impatient I won’t get to club some zombies with ridiculous goddamn weapons earlier. Dead Island had great ingredients, but the final, rushed dish left most with a rotten taste in their mouth. We’ll see if Techland perfected their recipe… *sigh* in 2015.

Dead Nation: Apocalypse Edition Spreads to PS4 in March

From Super Stardust to Resogun, it seems Sony exclusive developer Housemarque doesn’t know how to do wrong. Few studios are able to take such simple gameplay concepts and create massively addictive experiences out of them.

Case in point: Dead Nation, a top-down, twin-stick shooter that has you blasting apart waves of the undead either solo or with a wingman. Released when download-only titles were nowhere near even half as prolific as they are today, the quality behind Dead Nation kept it atop the PS3’s sales charts for a ragged chunk of time.

Like the festering corpses roaming the game’s decrepit cities, Dead Nation cannot be killed – enter Dead Nation: Apocalypse Edition, a remaster of the original game made specifically for the PlayStation 4. This resurrected edition features touched up graphics – in full on 1080p – tweaked controls adding a new quick weapon select, and comes packaged with The Road to Devastation expansion, previously only available as DLC, worked into the campaign.

It ain’t over till the fat lady shrieks. In addition to second screen implementation thanks to the PlayStation App, a new Challenge mode is being thrown in for expert zombie smashers, where you can dole out your best level runs to friends or play against an in-game avatar representing your buddies’ top hunts.

But the coolest new feature has to be Broadcast+. While streaming the game live, as you are want to do on PS4, viewers can actively vote on whether they want to positively or negatively impact your game. Maybe they throw you a bone and have extra ammo drops at your feet. But they’re way more likely to toss some shade your way and sic a horde of walkers on your ass. And it gets even funnier when they can activate “modifiers” like disabling your sprint button. Apparently in-game zombies fitted with viewers’ names can be shot at, so feel free to make frequent examples.

Dead Nation: Apocalypse Edition re-releases March 4th and will be $14.99 on the PS Store or absolutely free with PlayStation Plus.