Source: http://kotaku.com/
Valve was on hand at last night’s EA festivities to give attendees a chance to check out zombie survival shooter Left 4 Dead. In the game you play as one of four characters co-oping through a city ravaged with a plague of zombies, trying to shoot, melee and run your way from safe room to safe room.
The game starts off with your and three other players on a roof top behind a locked door. A nearby table is stocked with a selection of weapons, ammo and health packs. In the map we played, the first room had molotov cocktails, submachine guns, pistols and shotguns. Each player can equip a health pack, molotov cocktail, handgun and primary weapon: I went with the submachine gun.
Staying true to the zombie formula, your ammo is very limited, so survival isn’t as much about clearing a room as getting through it.
After stocking up we unlocked the door, made our way down a set of stairs and were immediately attacked by a dozen or so zombies. The zombies in the game are a nice mix of the ambling Dawn of the Dead variety and the liquid fast 28 Days Later breed. The dead tend to stand around, mill in corners or, at times, crouch in pockets of shadow. Initially when they spot you they seem slow, turning to track you, but most of them got fast once they lock on and either run at you or, on occasion, actually leap across a room at you.
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Source: http://blogs.pcworld.com/
When I first read about Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal reacting critically to what he calls “imagery that dovetails with classic racist imagery” in Capcom’s Resident Evil 5 trailer, I wasn’t sure what to think. When I saw the trailer for the first time myself last summer, I admit that part of me was a little shocked — and I’ll use that word, because it’s personally accurate — by at least some of the imagery. I take full responsibility for my reaction, of course. It’s not necessarily the one you had, or should have had. And while I think Croal has some very salient points, I do take issue with his inability to at least acknowledge his own prejudices in the interview. When you make blanket statements like “clearly no one black worked on this game” to drive your point, you sound less like a journalist and more like a reactionary, and that’s not where this dialogue, which is extremely important, should be occurring.
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Source: http://www.g4tv.com/
Remember Typing of the Dead? The House of the Dead-inspired typing tutor that ate Mavis Beacons’ lunch (and brains) because it had zombies? Typing of the Dead is why I can type over 24 words per minute, but only if I’m about to be eaten by a marauding corpse. Anyway, if you take that concept and apply it to teaching language, you get English of the Dead, a no-doubt Japanese only DS game featured in the latest issue of Eastern gaming bible Famitsu.
In the game, you slaughter zombies by translating Japanese into English. As the undead hordes approach, panels with Japanese text appear over them.You write the English with the stylus, and the zombies die, shouting out the English phrase you just entered.
I am praying–seriously, I’m on my knees right now before my altar to Baphomet–that the franchise expands into other languages. I can’t wait to brush up on my high school French by killing ghouls, if only for the fun of watching them scream “Je m’appelle Etienne!” before they expire.
Source: http://www.australianit.news.com.au/
Now, with the Wii Zapper gun accessory and Capcom’s Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, Nintendo is moving to add its unique gaming flavour to that time-honoured genre, the shoot ‘em up.
If you didn’t guess it from the name, the Wii Zapper is a hard-cased shell that houses the wiimote and nunchuck and turns them into a gun that can be used to point and shoot at the screen.
It can be held with one hand or two, depending on whether the nunchuck is locked into the attachment or held as normal.
Holding the Zapper in one hand is the more comfortable option, as it is quite small, unwieldy and awkward to handle.
Luckily, this is how it’s used in Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, and used well, as the nunchuck is your knife, and you find yourself wildly waving it around when you are swarmed by ravenous birds or covered with diseased leeches.
Because all the movement and progression is controlled by the game itself, all you have to worry about is aiming and shooting, which is good because the process of reloading and selecting can be a bit awkward and takes some getting used to.
The process of aiming is not as straightforward as just pointing the gun at the screen and firing. There is a bit of a technique to it, because you have to concentrate more on where the gun is in relation to the sensor bar, as opposed to the television.
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When you’re off killing zombies in Africa, you’re gonna have some backup. Resident Evil 5 will feature cooperative player for two players - a first for the survival horror series. 
