Zombies are a dead subject. Pun intended. Recently, games have been inundated with the flesh eating living dead.  Shopping malls and casinos have been swarmed with them. Nazis have been turning into them.  Distant vault planets have had islands dedicated to them; even cowboys have had trouble with the living impaired, and don’t get me started on the over abundance of zombie infatuated iPhone games. The market is so flooded with them, that they’re even spilling over into TV land; The Walking Dead and Sex in the City are just two examples! As fun as they are to slice, dice and run over with lawnmowers, don’t you think it’s time for a change? For a new type of supernatural enemy to rise up, and steal the limelight from the moaning shamblers?

Ghosts
For years the Japanese have scared the living crap out of us Westerners with their ghost movies and yet Americans have failed to remake them correctly. Nothing is more scary than a Japanese child, crab crawling down a flight of stairs, or a girl climbing out of the TV.  Could this be the “monster” that could beat zombies off the ‘top monster’ list?

The Project Zero series, also known as the Fatal Frame series, were a set of shit-scary ghost games, where your only weapon was an antique camera, called The Camera Obscura. The setting was usually a haunted house, which your (female) character had been led to by the recent discovery of a loved one’s ghost.

While searching said house, you would find out that it has trapped a ton of ghosts after a sacrifice ritual failed, and the only way you’re going to survive is to grab the camera, run like hell, and attempt to lift the curse. It involved a lot of running, since ammo, also known as camera film, was scarce, and there was always one super ghost – usually the sacrifice victim, who was immune to the camera’s effect, stalking you. The gameplay was a lot like the pre-4 Resident Evil series, with a fixed camera and jittery controls but it was those that gave the game its horror. With the camera fixed in place, Tecmo could place background scares that you couldn’t miss, like a ghost appearing at a window, or a shadow moving just out of reach.

The soundtracks also helped with the scares, especially with surround sound. Whispers and unearthly moans would emanate from the darkness, floorboards would creak and doors would slam; all the while, a twinkly piano background would enhance the paranoia.

Luckily for zombies, ghost games are few and far between, and for them to be made correctly, they need a Japanese touch.  Ghosts are very hard to make the enemies in games, due to their intangibility – they can phase through walls and a locked door means nothing to them.  Since conventional weaponry cannot hurt them, let alone hit them, what could you use, short of a shotgun filled with rock salt?

Vampires
By vampires, I of course mean the vicious bloodsuckers who would rather rip your head off than run through a forest topless and sparkly. That is not a vampire, that’s a fairy with a tooth problem.

In the latter half of the 90’s, Silicon Knights and Crystal Dynamics released Blood Omen:The Legacy of Kain. It was a top-down action/adventure RPG, where you played as Kain, a murdered nobleman, bought back from the brink of death as a vampire to get revenge. Now before I continue with this article, you must know one thing: The Blood Omen series is my all time favourite set of games, even the low scoring Blood Omen 2 and Defiance.

Kain is a bastard.  And he has every right to be. When returning home one night, he finds a sword impaled through his chest. That has to smart. And when flailing in hell, he is offered a new life and revenge by the necromancer, Mortanius. Who wouldn’t be a bastard after all that? So he goes out and drains the life blood from his would be assassins, as a proper vampire should. He is then informed that the assassins were hired by the Circle of Nine, a group dedicated to the protection of Nosgoth, the world in which you are playing. Of course, being the blood sucker he is, he goes out for even more revenge, causes a new time line, and endangers his new race to extinction. Now if that happened in the Twishite series, I might actually consider reading the blurb on the back on the book, but luckily it didn’t!

Another notable vampire game was Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. A PC FPS/RPG, this game was based on the White Wolf dice rolling, table top RPG series of the same name. You played a newly sired vampire, bought involuntarily into a world of darkness and conspiracy. It utilised a level up system similar to the Fallout series, with your basic stats and abilities evolving every time you completed a task set by your vampire leaders. Even though you were a vampire, you had to be human about it, you couldn’t just run out into the street and lunge onto the first blonde virgin neck that you saw. Well you could, but you wouldn’t last very long. Everything had to be done without the mortals realising that vampires were pulling the strings in the government.

Luckily for zombies, vampires have already flooded the TV and movie markets. Unluckily for vampires, they’re all pansies!

Werewolves
Gaming werewolves were hard to research for this article. Not a lot of games have involved werewolves, short of throwing them in as a minions to Dracula, ala Castlevania. And again, with the Twicrap series now depicting them as hunky topless men, it’s even harder.

The best encounter I had with a werewolf was in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind expansion pack, Bloodmoon. In this expansion, your character could be bitten and be given the lycanthrope curse. When this happened, you had to suddenly be aware of your surroundings; if you were seen changing, you would be hunted. You also had to kill one human a night, lest your character went mad, this made players realise that playing as a werewolf really was a curse, and not a blessing as they had hoped. The game did, however, give you the choice of a cure, or to live with the curse.

Surprisingly, The Legend of Zelda:Twilight Princess is also classified as a werewolf game, although I would dispute it. Yes, Link turns into a wolf, but he’s not cursed with it -  it is part of the Twilight.  It’s not an affliction, it is a blessing. In the immortal words of my housemate, “He can do a lot of cool shit!”

Unluckily for werewolves, TV and movies have depicted them as mindless beasts, who will hunt anyone with no conviction or care.

Satan
The King of Lies would be an awesome bad guy, but luckily for zombies, he is immortal and wouldn’t be viable to be a beatable video game bad guy!

Last five articles by Michael

• Issue 15 - Part Deux
• Issue 14 - Where's Your Hookblade?
• Issue 13 - No Party Like A Borderlands Party
• Issue 12 - The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Kill
• Issue 11 - Because I Got Hi-Def!