Posted By John Sears on September 14, 2010

It seems like, regardless of the widespread critical panning of Afterlife, the move to put Resident Evil’s Anti-Zombie carnage into 3D will continue unabated. This time it’s the home country that’s decided to take a crack at 3D mayhem against the Differently Animated:

The game company CAPCOM and the production company Sony Pictures Entertainment have announced on Tuesday that production has begun on Biohazard: Damnation, a sequel to the 3D computer-animated Biohazard: Degeneration (Resident Evil: Degeneration) feature film. The new film will retain the main character Leon S. Kennedy from the first film. It is slated to open in 2012 in theaters with stereoscopic 3D equpiment.

Anime News Network meanwhile claims that the game series sales have gone up to 44 million, from the 40 million figure that the ZRC had seen. This is disturbing but not surprising.

Apparently there is nothing Capcom will not stop at in order to bring its ravenous public more splattery violence against the Undead, even if they have to create the entire spectacle digitally.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Movies, Videogames

Posted By John Sears on September 13, 2010

Last week I saw the advertisement on the ZRC’s Xbox Dashboard for the new, Xbox-specific version of famed PopCap Games product Plants vs. Zombies and I knew I had to get in on the ground floor of this one; a new PC version is also out now for people to play.

What is Plants vs. Zombies? In essence, it’s a tower defense game, that is (for those who haven’t played one) a type of strategy game where you arrange defenses to fend off wave after wave of attackers and prevent them from reaching some critical location. In Plants vs. Zombies, unfortunately, these attackers are Zombies, and your job is to defeat them using some incredibly militarized plants.

There are pea plants that shoot their peas as projectiles; giant piranha plants ala Little Shop or Mario that devour Zombies whole; various suicidal exploding plants like Jalepenos or Cherry Bombs, and so on. Different levels place different demands on the player as you advance through a story mode where the appearance of the Undead is never explained, though they do attempt to conduct negotiations through handwritten notes, all of which the player naturally ignores.

What does it play like? Honestly, and I mentioned this on our Twitter feed, Plants vs. Zombies feels like a cartoonish version of trench warfare, a Western Front featuring hyper-aggressive botanical weapons. The Zombies have some personality but for the most part march slowly and inexorably toward doom or triumph without hesitation or enthusiasm, shoved into the breach as it were, not by their commanding officers but by a cruel and merciless game AI.

The excellent art and high level of polish make Plants vs. Zombies a very easy game to play, and a very seductive package for Living Supremacist dogma. This sophisticated design approach, coupled with an affordable price and now a truly multiplatform distribution, makes the game all the more a threat to Zombie Rights. Imagine this game creeping surreptitiously into homes across America, normally vigilant parents lulled into a false sense of security by the game’s low ERSB rating and the cartoony style, completely unaware the lessons of hate and discrimination being imparted to their offspring under cover of darkness (or perhaps just after school).

The Xbox version also comes with a variety of additional gameplay modes, including multiplayer, so that you can turn the Zombie struggle for survival and identity into an ‘amusing’ sort of party game. Rounding out an already ample package of Zombie-hate are minigames and a garden where you can grow plants you take off bodies of the fallen Zombies.

The ZRC cannot condemn this game enough, nor PopCap games for making it. Truly they should hang their heads in shame for peddling such a product to such a mass market, even as the Zombie Rights movement begins making its first major strides.

For shame.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Videogames

Posted By John Sears on September 13, 2010

So it seems that here in Madison the local IMAX theatre has decided to go with good taste over Zombie-bashing and is showing a 3D movie based on the famed repair of the Hubble telescope.

(Which as we all know was most recently broken by Mike Nelson in the MST3k movie, proving that he is a threat not just to Zombies but to Science)

Thus the ZRC will be seeing the film this week, but in the merely grotesque Digital 3D and not the super-excessively-terrible IMAX 3D. I apologize… for nothing really. Voluntary exposure of any kind to this movie is already an enormous sacrifice of brain cells!

A sacrifice the ZRC is willing to make on your behalf, of course.

Category: Zombie Media, ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Movies

Posted By John Sears on September 12, 2010

A long post so I’ll put it behind a cut.
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Posted By John Sears on September 12, 2010

There will be a larger post about the rally up on Sunday; suffice it to say the camera’s battery completely died and then we had some Clark Kent duties to perform around the ZRC compound today; we’re trying to green up the place a bit, neither in landscaping nor Zombie terms but energy-conservation wise, before the brutal Wisconsin winters. Basically we need to shore up the insulation a bit, put in some heavy curtains before the three months of blowing windy snow, etc.

So both the art director and I were a bit busy today doing errands. I do have a lot of pictures and even some video to share from Friday, however, and now that everything’s charged up I think we’re ready to go. Also coming soon is an in-depth review of Plants vs. Zombies, the Xbox Live edition, which features some new and very unkind Anti-Zombie minigames.

Until then, we are as always your dedicated Zombie Rights Campaigners.

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Posted By John Sears on September 9, 2010

Look what I just ordered a bunch of copies of at the printer.

This should help to open a few minds and raise some awareness of the harm that Resident Evil and its ilk are doing to our society as they fly across the Pacific on wings of hate.

(Ok, so they’re probably printed here in North America and shipped around by semis; allow me my poetic license.)

See you all at the big rally tomorrow!

Category: Zombie Media, ZRC News | 2 Comments »
Tags: Public Appearance, Social Justice, Videogames

Posted By John Sears on September 8, 2010

I partially did this just to get more familiar with taking video in preparation for our trip to Chicago in two days, but it’s also good for giving you a bit of a feel for the space and arrangement of a vendor room at a convention like Geek.kon, and a nice view of our booth and its location in relation to the door.

Video behind the cut to avoid cluttering up the main page, also it’s quite wide.
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Tags: Public Appearance

Posted By John Sears on September 8, 2010

I apologize one last time for the quality of these shots, and rest assured I have resolved the issues (I think) in time for our big RE: Afterlife rally this Friday.

No, the lights didn’t go out! This is what happens when funky fluorescent lights overwhelm a Canon Powershot’s automatic configurations.

Here’s a better shot, I believe this is one I took by overriding the camera and setting the ISO speed manually.

That’s about it for the photos; now, back to your regularly scheduled internet time wasting.

Category: Zombie Media, ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Music, Public Appearance

Posted By John Sears on September 7, 2010

The ZRC had the great pleasure of attending the Dr. Cancer and the SKAmbies concert on Sunday at Geek.kon, and as promised, here is a review of the show from the perspective of Zombie rights.

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Tags: Music, Public Appearance

Posted By John Sears on September 7, 2010

I apologize in advance for the motes of dust visible in some of these shots; the camera lens apparently was badly in need of cleaning.

Also odd in these photos is that my camera’s automatic configuration mode seems to have been driven slightly batty by the weird lighting in the Marriot (as were my eyes, actually). The flash went off constantly even in fairly bright rooms and it proved very hard to get some shots at all (more on that when I write up the SKAmbies thing later today).

Without further adieu, however, here are some of our best shots from Geek.kon 2010:

Here’s a view from our booth showing an enormous selection of anime plushies available at a nearby vendor. Plush toys are a big deal at anime cons, apparently; most vendors had at least a few. This wall was the most impressive at the convention however.

This is a good look at our booth once we had the banner set up. I think it captures the air of professionalism and approachability we strive for at ZRC public appearances, and Artistic and Technical Director Jenny Rowland, seen here, concurs.

More from the booth here; the movie playing on the laptop is AACTV2: Atomic Boogaloo, which the AAC folks were nice enough to allow us to make free copies of. We gave them away if people donated to Lynn Sage, whether by purchasing a shirt, poster, or just dropping some cash in the box. (A couple of copies also went to Dr. Cancer and the SKAmbies, for being such good role models. Well, the Zombies are. Dr. Cancer’s a mad scientist; they’re never good role models)

An additional photo of the booth, showing the wide variety of merch we have available. Well, HAD; the wristbands are now sold out, which is awesome really.

Steampunk was a big deal at this convention, and these people had the best costumes overall, I believe. Sorry again about the dust, visible here. Also, our normally red-eye proof camera again had a fit in the Vendor Hall. I think those overhead lights were fashioned by Satan.

An awesome Team Fortress 2 costume can be seen in this shot. Wow. That’s some dedication to detail.

It wouldn’t be an anime con without Pocky.

Some new signage we made at the convention.

A rare Zombie product seen at the show; however, it still manages to perpetrate the Zombies and Brains stereotyping we work so hard against.

Now this was a great White Mage costume, and as an added bonus I saw the young woman later attending the Zombie Ska show. An open-minded healer, even though White Mages are traditionally very hard on Zombies in the Final Fantasy universe.

You would not believe how popular Kingdom Hearts was at this convention. I honestly had no idea it was still kicking around to this degree. It was probably the most popular thing people cosplayed as this year.

Though for sheer-staying power, I guess you can’t beat Pokemon.

I wonder if they have Zombie Pokemon yet?

That’s it for me for now! Come back later today for a review of Zombies playing Ska, which is just cool by any standard.

Category: Zombie Media, ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Anime or Manga, Music, Public Appearance