Zombies and video games have always been a close knit couple taking after the other successful and hugely overdone pairing, zombies and movies. From seminal classics like Resident Evil and House of the Dead to low budget fare like Zombie Shooter, gamers have been killing zombies for years. When it was announced that Valve, the hugely successful developer behind Half-Life and Team Fortress, was doing its own take on the zombie blending genre - Left 4 Dead, the gaming community was both shocked and thrilled at the prospect of a genre title from the AAA developer.

Lets not forget - Valve has had plenty of experience with zombie killing considering that half of the enemies you faced in the Half-Life series were zombified scientists and soldiers, thanks to the dreaded head crabs. Now that the object of our anticipation is in our hands, how smooth is the final blend?

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This year’s PlayStation Experience wrapped up on November 23 in Ansal Plaza, New Delhi. GI was there for all three – starting off in Mumbai, and then at Bangalore’s Kormangala Indoor Stadium. The mercury has been dropping in the city and I decided that the best way to spend a Sunday would be go to and damage some heavy hardware.

For those of you not familiar with Ansal Plaza, it’s a large coliseum-shaped mall in South Delhi, and in the centre, Sony had erected a large bunker. With about a 100 install points covering PS2s, PS3s and PSPs, and a LOT of fancy Sony Bravias, this was a sweet setup. The first thing that hits you is the noise – the kids running amok, the announcer screaming with faux enthusiasm and a constant background noise mix of music, gunfire and sports crowd cheering. The second thing is the vivid colour scheme – completely orange. The setup overall was very nice; enough space to walk around, sit, enjoy the games, and large TV screens hanging from the ceiling showcasing what the players were playing.

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Living in today’s world amidst the threat of economic crisis, depleting oil reserves, terrorism, global warming and the possibility of a worldwide catastrophe that could change the entire world as we know it, it’s hard not to imagine what would it would be like if something truly bad were to happen to our little planet. I’m sure pretty much all of us (especially being gamers) have imagined what it would be like to survive a nuclear holocaust or a zombie apocalypse or an economic meltdown. Fallout 3 lets you experience what it would be like to live in a world totally ravaged by nuclear war.

The year is 2277, 200 years after a global nuclear war has devastated the entire world. Only a few survivors remain scattered across the globe along with others who have spent their entire lives underground in “Vaults”, large nuclear shelters with all the basic needs for human survival, safe from the harmful radiation and dangers of the outside world.

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A few of us paid a visit to the Indian Gaming Summit 2008 exhibition at Nehru Centre in Mumbai on Sunday. We were completely oblivious to the existence of this event up until Saturday, so we didn’t quite know what to expect.

We’ll have a complete round up of the expo a little later, but here’s something that caught our eye at the Zapak stall. A game titled ‘Zombie Shooter’ priced at Rs 49 has characters from Valve’s Left 4 Dead on the cover. And the copyright infringement extravaganza didn’t end there. The background poster in the stall also had characters from Left 4 Dead on it.

Now anyone who has bought pirated games off the street would know that the people that sell them don’t pay much attention to details such as cover art. But this is Zapak, part of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, and surely they should have enough common sense not to blatantly steal intellectual property from other games. Obviously they don’t.

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A couple of weeks ago, we got the opportunity to visit Milestone and spend some quality time with the latest entry in Capcom’s survival horror series - Resident Evil. The build we played was the same one that was presented at this year’s Tokyo Game Show. The demo featured two short levels and also gave us the first glimpse into the newly introduced co-op mode.

As you may know, one of the biggest changes in Resident Evil 5 is the inclusion of co-op. For the first time in the Resident Evil series (Outbreak doesn’t count), you can play through the campaign co-operatively. The second character introduced is Sheva. The campaign can be played either online, split-screen or via system link. In case you don’t have anyone to play with, the game will take control of the second character. The friendly AI that controls Sheva does a wonderful job; she’ll constantly heal you, provide you with different items (ammo included) and most importantly, she can hold her own when surrounded by enemies.

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