Monkeyskull

Zombie Pizza iPhone game temporarily free

Chris Walters — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:19:50 +0000

If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch and want to check out the Zombie Pizza game, the publisher Appy Entertainment has dropped the price from $2 to free for a limited time.

I reviewed the game earlier this year, and I think it’s a fun casual game if you like pattern matchers like Frenzic. There’s already a free “lite” version available, but at least for today you can go ahead and grab the real thing without paying a dime.

iPhone app review: Zombie Pizza

Check out Zombie Pizza:

Full Version:

Lite Version:

Review: “Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet”

Elysse West — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:48:16 +0000

Based on an urban legend, “Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet” takes a page from the folklore, which can’t even decide where the legendary events took place.

The movie tries too hard to play homage to the classic horror of “Friday the 13th” or “My Bloody Valentine,” while also attempting to be “intelligent cinema” by pumping in too much information about a rare mental disorder. (No spoiler here, as they bring it up in the opening credits, but there have only been 250 documented cases of menstrual psychosis in the last 100 years.)

It’s the typical slasher flick set-up: a group of teens celebrating a local-tragedy-turned-holiday, partying in the house of the girl whose parents have conveniently left town. And the clichés start racking up from there, from a cleverly-yet-transparently disguised Ouija board to the moment where all modes of transportation and communication are cut off from our teen heroes. Yawn.

Let’s hit the low points, so that we can end on a higher note. And yes, there is one.

The plot is classic slasher horror, which is to say predictable. The special effects are laughable, if not downright questionable. And by the time the actual carnage begins, you’ve lost all concern for these alcohol driven hormone machines. Not that you had any to begin with.

Poor Samantha Facchi, cast in the title role, was apparently hired because of her ability to scream and her willingness to appear in almost every scene completely nude. She is, at least, consistent.

At the mid-point is Bill Moseley, best known for his role as Otis Driftwood in Rob Zombie’s “House of 1000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects”. Moseley serves as the required older character who not only provides the history, but also shows up at the perfect moment to postpone the ending. And what would a horror film be without the sage words of the guy that takes care of the graveyard?

Nick Dushku (brother of “Dollhouse’s” Eliza) provides an understated performance. The only problem is he’s lost among the gin-soaked horndogs around him and could easily be forgotten.

Okay. Now, the highlights…

I’m thinking. I’m thinking!

Ah! Here we go. The credits (both opening and ending) are pretty cool. In fact, if you can sit through the initial history lesson, the credits make up for it. Just be patient.

The other good thing: built-in drinking game. For every horror movie cliché — like the creepy little psycho girl, or the final twist that you see coming a mile away — take a shot. It’ll help you get through to the final credits.

Blood Night (DVD)
Blood Night (Streaming Video)

Review: “The Atrocity Archives” and “The Jennifer Morgue” by Charles Stross

Chris Walters — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 12:22:33 +0000

Here’s the easiest way to decide whether you’d enjoy the three novels, one novella, and three short stories that so far make up The Laundry, a horror/sf thriller series by Charles Stross. See how many of the following statements you agree with:

I enjoy the idea of Lovecraftian horrors.
I enjoy James Bond and/or other British spy series.
I’m a geek, or at least I appreciate geek humor and geek terminology.
I am familiar with and have contempt for the bureaucratic nonsense of large organizations. Specifically, I hate PowerPoints.
I watched Animaniacs in the 90s.
I like conspiracies.
I enjoy sci-fi, and/or I like the idea of string theory and multiverses.

If you agree with at least four of those statements, give the Laundry books a shot.

Okay, more details: the stories take place in the present day, in our world, but there’s a lot about our world that various governments keep hidden from average schmucks like you and me.

For one thing, Alan Turing–the famous (and real) cryptographer who cracked German codes in WWII and is the sort of the father of computer science–uncovered a final mathematical proof that just happens to allow access to other universes in our multiverse. Sometimes there are very hostile entities in those other universes, things that feed on information and that can take hold of a person’s body, eat his mind, and spread by contact to other people in milliseconds.

For another thing, some of what Lovecraft wrote was real. We share our planet with alien entities older than the Earth, but they keep to themselves for the most part so long as we follow the conditions of a secret treaty.

In addition, the cold war that gave rise to the modern spy genre and so many conspiracies of secret governments is still going on, but in an occult way in both senses of the word, hidden within goverment secret service organizations that are never directly mentioned in official documentation.

If a lot of this sounds silly, it frequently is, but the way Stross combines so many genres is impressive and highly entertaining. I didn’t realize I ever wanted to read a book combining mass human sacrifices, Hellboy-style Nazi occultists, Harry Palmer, hands of glory, a parallel universe where Germany won WWII, Kafka’s “Penal Colony” execution-by-torture machine, and demonic possession, but by the time I finished “The Atrocity Archives” I realized I did. “The Jennifer Morgue” is just as packed with bizarre elements, including Great Old Ones living in the Earth’s mantle, alien weapons, corporate espionage, Elizabeth Bathory, James Bond, voodoo, reanimated corpses, and international surveillance networks powered in part by sacrifical blood.

To me, the highest compliment I can give a book is that it corrupts my world view for a few days or weeks after I finish it. John Shirley did it with “Demons,” and Charles Stross does it with the Laundry books. I was actually creeped out several times by the revelations in both books, and after the second one I spent a week or two imagining conspiracies of evil, invisible forces all around me; I will certainly never be able to sit through a PowerPoint presentation again without feeling uneasy. In my view, anything that keeps me away from PowerPoint is a good investment.

Novels
“The Atrocity Archives”
“The Jennifer Morgue”
“The Fuller Memorandum” (July 2010)

Novellas
“The Concrete Jungle” (included with The Atrocity Archives)

Short Stories
“PimpF” (included with The Jennifer Morgue)
“Down on the Farm” (available for free from Tor.com)
“Overtime” (available for free from Tor.com)

iPhone app review: Zombie Smash!

Chris Walters — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 05:44:16 +0000

Great

Lots of surprise humor
Ragdoll physics for zombie kills
Looks great

Meh

Oh look another castle defense game
Requires extreme twitchiness in later levels

Castle defense games and zombie scenarios are both pretty tired concepts for the App Store, but despite that, Zombie Smash keeps me entertained. I think it’s a great go-to game when you want to kill a few minutes (and zombies) between more pressing activities.

For those who don’t know what a castle defense game is, it’s where things attack your castle in ever growing waves while you launch all sorts of weapons to drive them off. Like the tower defense genre, it’s highly suitable to the small screen of the iPhone and to a touch interface, which is why there are so many games in this style.

Zombie Smash is one of the better ones, and probably the best with a monster/zombie theme. The zombies are funny, the weapons are funny, and the little touches–like being able to take slo-mo photos of your final zombie kill in each wave–are introduced gradually, which keeps things interesting. Here are a couple of my favorite final kills so far:

I also appreciate the developer who continues to update a game or app, and Zombie Smash comes through in this respect as well. For Easter, there was an update that gave some zombies bunny ears, and covered the rocks in crude Easter egg patterns. Since any self-respecting zombie lover knows Easter is the holiday for rising from the dead, I found it particularly amusing.

C’mon, that’s funny.

If you’ve never tried a castle defense game, the one thing you should be aware of is it requires a lot of fast finger action, because every time an attacker comes on screen you have to flick it away; imagine doing that when 20 attackers appear at once. If you’re looking for thoughtful game play or if you think “casual” means “take your time,” you’re going to be frustrated.

For anyone else, this is an excellent castle defense title.

Check out Zombie Smash:

Full Version ($.99 as of 4 April 2010):

Jewelry for the fashionable zombie lover

Chris Walters — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:57:42 +0000

I don’t know much about accessorizing, but I know that frequently one puts rings and bracelets on one’s body to achieve that “put together” look. If you’re one of those people, and if you love zombies, you need to know about Undead Ed.

Ed makes rings and bracelets (among other creepy and usually silly things) out of polymer clay and found objects, and he sells them on his Etsy store for reasonable prices. Let’s face it–you’re not likely to find rotting flesh designs at local boutiques, and to my great surprise maggot-themed jewelry still hasn’t caught on at the big department stores.

The gorgeous and oversized Zombie Eye ring above has already sold, unfortunately, but there’s still a blue one available, as well as bracelets and other zombie-themed rings. If you’d rather have zombie dolls and objects instead of jewelry Ed’s got plenty of other options for you; I really like the miniature zombie-piggy bank.

Undead Ed’s Art [Etsy via Boingboing]

Taunt your family from the dead with a talking tombstone

Chris Walters — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 13:38:39 +0000

Video tombstones and talking tombstones have, in theory at least, been around for a while. Or wait, maybe I’m thinking of Futurama. At any rate here’s another talking tombstone product, this one from a company called Objects.

The RosettaStone Tablet is a $200 device about the size of a credit card that can be embedded in or stuck to grave markers. It stores data on RFID circuitry, then powers up when a compatible cell phone is within range and transmits the data to the phone’s recipient.

Here’s my question: if you use the device for from-the-grave sexting, is that considered necrophilia?

“Speak From the Dead Via Talking Tombstone” [Tom's Guide]

(Photo: alistairhamilton and ElvertBarnes)

Saudi Arabia sentences TV psychic to death

Chris Walters — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 14:16:03 +0000

The world doesn’t need more examples of how religion institutionalizes evil, but here’s one anyway. A religious court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced a man to be executed for practicing “black magic” because he hosted a TV show where he gave advice and made predictions. According to CNN,

The judges in Medina issued a statement expressing that [Ali Hussain] Sibat deserved to be executed for having continually practiced black magic on his show, adding that this sentence would deter others from practicing sorcery.

Sibat is actually Lebanese and lived in Beirut, but he was arrested by Saudi Arabian religious police when he was visiting their country in 2008, and he’s been their prisoner ever since.

This is why we can’t have nice things, people.

“Saudi Arabia ’sorcery’ death sentence upheld” [Amnesty.org]

What kind of monster are you?!?

Chris Walters — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:57:06 +0000

You know how you’ve got those weird impulses and unsavory desires that you keep pushed down under the surface? The ones you would never act on? We’d like to bring those out and give them some fresh air. By answering a few thought-provoking and incisive questions below, our Monstersona program will calculate your personality type and tell you exactly which creepy jackass you would be. You know, if you were creepy and a jackass. And killed teenagers for a living.

Just answer the ten questions that follow to the best of your admittedly limited abilities. Remember, there are no right or wrong answers, only immoral ones.

Victims of British serial killer speak in “The Drowning Girls”

Chris Walters — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:30:18 +0000

“The Drowning Girls” is a play by Beth Graham about three women killed between 1908 and 1914 by George Joseph Smith, a British serial killer who was eventually convicted of murder and hanged. A lifelong criminal, Smith married repeatedly (and simultaneously) and in at least three instances murdered his wives by drowning them in bathtubs.

The landlord of a boarding house where Smith and one of his victims lived first noticed how the woman’s death matched a story at another boarding house, and brought both stories to an inspector’s attention. A third suspiciously similar death was then discovered, and after some investigation the inspector realized that the husband in all three cases was the same man.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, the pathologist tasked with figuring out the murder technique was a sneaky bastard: what puzzled everyone was why none of the victims appeared to have fought back, but the pathologist discovered–and proved it worked on an unsuspecting volunteer–that if you grabbed the victim’s ankles and jerked them into the bath, the rush of water into the head would knock them unconscious almost immediately. (“He quickly pulled her out of the tub and it took him and a doctor over half an hour to revive her,” notes Wikipedia.)

Fittingly, the staging of “The Drowned Girls” is all about bathtubs and water, lots of it. One reviewer of the current production in Vancouver says of the water, “[It] becomes almost a fourth character. Combined with a stylish black-and-white tiled stage and clinical lighting, the sloshy proceedings are surreal, visceral and often disturbing.”

Here’s a clip of a couple of scenes from a production last November:

“The Drowning Girls’ Watery Graves” [Vancouver Observer]

iPhone app review: Zombieville

Chris Walters — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 04:11:05 +0000

Action packed!

Leveling up
Fun graphical style
AW YEAH I’M SHOOTING ZOMBIES

Meh

Too repetitive
You might ask yourself why you wasted so much time on it after a few hours

Sidelong shooters like Zombieville make me crazy, because they’re simultaneously highly addictive and boring as hell. In Zombieville, you’re a last man standing type (or last clown standing, or ninja, or a few other funny choices) who’s out to cleanse his town of zombies. You start at the left of a level and run across town killing everything that comes after you. Occasionally you pass by houses that you can enter, both to hide out temporarily from zombies and to find more ammo or money.

This is a lot of fun at first. The levels are short but filled with plenty of things to shoot, and you have to watch your ammo levels and decide when it’s better to use your weaker melee weapon versus when to shoot from a distance. As you slowly earn money, you get to spend it between levels to acquire more powerful weapons. And the zombies get faster and meaner, with new versions appearing as you move up the levels.

Unfortunately, that’s it. It’s more than enough for an hour or two, and then you realize that it’s not quite an RPG and it’s not quite a shooter, but a casual game that falls between the two. As much as I loved the look of it, and the visceral satisfaction of killing zombies, I reached a point where I just no longer felt the compulsion to try to level up anymore. It badly needs a few surprises to the levels–running the opposite direction, zombies hidden in houses, or different environments to explore.

To be fair, Zombieville isn’t alone in suffering from repetition in this way and I may have a more negative opinion of this type of game than others have; I think the majority of casual shooters on the App Store are just as shallow. For that reason, I think if you’re into this sort of game you should give it a try, because you might find it far more enjoyable than I did.

Check out Zombieville:

Full Version ($1.99):

Lite (Free) Version: