The 13 Greatest Zombies in Video Games

While we're making the rounds on the undead ladies, let's take a head on over to the lands of Azeroth, shall we?

Here we meet Slyvanus Windrunner.

Poor, poor, Sylvanus.

Way back in Warcraft 3, Sylvia here was just your standard high-elf ranger-captain. Nobly defending her homeland of Quel'Thalas from total D-bag Arthas and his undead army. An army trying to bring darkness to the source of power in Quel'Thalas, the Sunwell. Kind of like what happened in that movie . . . you know, the one where Bruce Campbell was trying to defend a magical book from an undead group, sort of organized like a militia or something?

Except since Bruce Campbell wasn't around, it fell to Sylvanus to defend her homeland without the help of a chainsaw or a boomstick. So Arthas, now an evil version of a former hero, kinda kicked everyone's ass and turned our stalwart elf-lady here into a wild-haired banshee dark version of herself . . . kind of like what happened to Embeth Davidtz- in that one flick.


Yeah kind of like when this happened. Now if only I could remember the name of the damn thing!
Help me out here. It was sort of like, "Battalion of the Night!"

So yeah she becomes his minion, but not forever, as she stays like, super pissed at Arthas the whole time. Eventually she breaks out of the control of ol' Arthy, stops being a ghostly banshee thing and gets a body (albeit a zombie one) and forms a little group called the forsaken, which if you've ever rolled an undead Horde character in WoW, was who you were working for.

So she's kind of a big deal in WoW, being a faction leader and all. She's also strangely alluring. At least for a corpse. Mostly because unlike the vast majority of undead characters in WoW, she apparently has all of her body parts, AND she's still an elf on top of that, so if you're into long ears, then things are going your way.

Plus I've seen the cosplay:


Is it necrophilia if they're just dressed as a corpse? Or am I just a complete and utter freak?

Oh wait, no, I'm definitely a freak.

OK, the attached video -totally NSFW. Seriously. It's also not safe for anyone who doesn't want to see huge saggy zombie-boobs. I don't know why you wouldn't, but hey, there's no accounting for taste in this world.

Still, it's hilarious, so if you can brave it, check it out, just don't say I didn't warn you.

So here's the thing: House of the Dead Overkill is probably the funniest game on the Wii. It's easily the best House of the Dead game, and it's also one of the best on-rails shooters you can play. But what pushes it over the top is Isaac Washington.

Isac Washington is what you would get if you took Black Dynamite and stuck him in Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror. Think insanely cheesy dialogue and cluster F-Bombs all over the place, while still remaining thoroughly badass. Than add in the sort of ridiculous violent imagery only a repressed fourteen year-old could conceive of. Then you might start to get a vague idea of what we're talking about here.

OK wow. That's overhyping it a bit (oh hyperbole!). Still, Isaac's a pretty funny guy.

But then there's "Mother", the game's final boss. Due to some completely ludicrous plot twists, she goes from looking like this:



Well, hellllooo there!

To This:



OH DEAR GOD WHY?!!

. . . so yeah, a gigantic erection destroying zombie "spawning" mega boss. While there have always been some awesome zombie bosses in gaming, they often turn into things that can no longer be classified as a "zombie" and usually mutate into something that seems ripped out of Akira.

Speaking of . . .

STAAAAARSSSS!

We couldn't leave Nemmy here out of the list now could we?

A huge hulking super-zombie, armed with a freaking ROCKET LAUNCHER, Nemesis here pursues Jill Valentine throughout the entirety of the aptly title Resident Evil 3: Nemesis.

But how important could he be, I mean really?

His name is part of the game's title. That's how important he is!



Except in Japan, where it was subtitled "Last Escape".
Which actually makes more sense come to think of it.

Now, the coolest part about Nemesis, in my humble opinion, was how he really put some tension back into Resident Evil. RE2 had definitely lost a bit of the fear the first game evoked, since you often seemed to have better access to bigger guns and it was a lot easier comparatively (mostly because you could see what you were doing more clearly).

But along comes this guy, looking like a public service announcement against steroid therapy, and boom! Fear back in the game!

Because you couldn't stop him.

Sure you can take him down from time to time. And each time you do more and more damage to his body. Shooting him down, blowing him up, electrocuting him. . . but he keeps getting back up and coming for more. If not with his over-compensating-for-something rocket launcher, then with his bull-rush uppercut that knocks you past 3 different camera angles.

Besides, he killed that sniveling dingle berry on the a*****e of every S.T.A.R.S. member: Brad Vickers:



That has to count for something right?

Also - notice at the end of the video how Jill says "Brad?" as if he have been alright after having Nemmy's hand-penis shoved through the back of his skull. Does a tube top immediately turn a person into an idiot?

Finally! I have an excuse to talk about Shadow Man!

Though no one seems to remember it these days, there was once a period in the long, long ago, a before-time, where Acclaim didn't always make utterly horrible games.

Turok, Extreme-G, Burnout, and The South Park FPS all proved, to greater and lesser degrees, that there was still hope amidst the piles of garbage that spewed from Acclaim's vaults.






Surely the stuff of nightmares.

But nothing Acclaim ever produced was better than Shadow Man.

(OK, maybe Extreme-G, that game was rad)

Shadow Man had a wacked out story. You played as an English Major from New Orleans named Michael LeRoi who of course didn't exactly find much success in life (so . . . an accurate portrayal of what a degree in English Lit is really worth).

Mike ends up getting in deep with the mob, and goes to his friendly neighborhood voodoo priestess for some spiritual help. She provides it, but - you know, let's just cut a long story short and get to it - he ends up becoming her zombi slave, and has a crazy powerful Voodoo mask embedded into his chest (which looks like it hurt), and also causes his eyes to glow something fierce.


The chest-mask-thing pretty much ruins his one remaining career opportunity as a male model.

The resulting game was pretty much a 3D Metroidvania affair as you explored the Deadside -where every undead minion you could think hung out- sort of like a super effed-up Halloween Town. It wasn't perfect by any means- the combat and camera weren't as top notch as they could have been, but it had a ton of good ideas in it, not the least of which was it's non-linear gameplay model.

To be fair, I'm not sure if Mike ever actually died in his origin story. I think he was more of a traditional Haitian-style zombi before he got the whole mask-graft thing going on. But since the more alive zombies pre-date the later fully dead ones, I'm going to grant it to him.

Still, I do suppose we need a "Judas" on our Easter-Zombie list, and Mike's "not actually dead yet" status is a betrayal of sorts soooo -where are my pieces of silver dammit?

Ah here we go - Voodoo Zombie AND Undead for sure! Awesome.

Does LeChuck really even need an introduction? I mean seriously, the guy is one of the best villains in all of adventure games!

So originally a ghost-pirate, LeChuck got hisself zombified for the sequel, and decided that he just wanted to torture ol' Guybrush as much as he could get away with. Considering Guybrush apparently spent the entirety of the time between Monkey Island 1 and 2 just bragging at how awesome he was, I'd say a few zaps from the Voodoo doll were in order.

Though, as with the first game, you don't really spend a heck of a lot of time with LeChuck till the end, when he does make his entrance, it's pretty damn big - he ties Guybrush to a deathtrap that would have most James Bond villains blush with convolution-envy!

Though I won't spoil too much here, let's just say that when Guybrush eventually escapes, LeChuck decides that enough is enough and just straight up begins assaulting Threepwood constantly with his little magic doll.


And yes, he's more than happy to do this forever unless you stop him.

When you eventually figure out how to put a halt this magical assault (heh . . . rhyming), be prepared for one of the craziest videogame plot twist/reveals in the history OF gaming.

One SO crazy in fact, that when Lucasarts decided to try and forge ahead with further sequels, they pretty much decided to try and pretend it never happened. Which . . . just blows really. I (and about a million others) would love to have known where Gilbert and gang were going with it.


But on the plus side, he got a beard made of fire in the next game. Even trade?
I'll let you decide.