Also, how do they get so many of them when time and again one normal guy (Shaun/Ash/the black guy from Dawn) kills dozens in not hundreds of them? Surely thats a poor turnover.

Also the original teaser trailer has crowbars clipping through the zombies head and very scripted looking tussles. So no hope from me I’m afraid.

This vid reminds me of a tech demo from a couple of years back which had shooting bits off of a chap’s head in lurid detail. Not SOF. I can’t for the life of me remember what it was for or if it came out, but it was quite a big deal at the time.

Though Brian Keene did write a couple of books that made ‘em dead scary, thanks to the notion that they were actually highly intelligent demonic entities inhabiting the human (and in that case, animal) corpses, possessing any memories and skills that their host had once possessed. This made ‘em able to execute complex plans, use weaponry, taunt you with the memories of your dead loved ones, and still swarm you with nearly unkillable numbers.

I will say that zombies do make for excellent videogames. The perfect fodder enemy.

It’s always struck me as odd that so few games have chosen to go down the hyper-gore dismemberment route of Soldier Of Fortune,

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that that’s probably because it’s (probably) a very resource-hungry process. Probably.

Let’s look at it this way; the engine has to work out where and how you strike the victim (what area, blunt or piercing, with how much force, at what angle to the surface of the body), then it has to append the deformation matrix to reflect that – convincingly reflect that, let’s not forget, which is no easy task – store that deformation matrix and apply it to the model every time it renders a frame (less memory intensive than storing a seperate model for each object, with a bit of clever data manipulation).

And of course, the engine needs to know what the body looks like on the inside. These guys appear to have solved that one by modelling the body in layers, but that means more memory per object and more art assets per object – art assets no one’s going to see half the time.

Above all else, it’d be a pain in the arse to code and the first thing up against the wall if the deadline was looming.

Moving on to zombies, I’m suprised fire isn’t used against them any more than it is. I mean, chainsaws are all good and well, but if you emptied the fuel tank on them and threw a match after it you could probably take out an entire group at once. It’s highly destructive, likes to spread and tends not to stop burning until it’s run out of things to burn.

I saw Dawn of the Dead when I was 7. Since then I have had Zombie dreams all my life, they used to scare the bejesus out of me but now, well a lifetime of dream zombie combat has made me an ‘Ash’ style undead fighting expert. In fact when in large packed crowds I look for Zombie Apocolypse escape routes.

I can confirm that Zombies are not rubbish but are in fact teh aces (reason being is that you know you could fight them off unless you are an idiot)

thank you for listening :)

I cannot wait. We need more zombies on PC. 2008 is going to be a good year for them, compared to previous years where there are zero zombies on PC. Anyone know what the hold-up is on Left4Dead?