When you’re one of the living dead, whether the closest holiday is Halloween or Christmas really makes little difference – as our community team found out a couple weeks ago, it’s all about the Braaaiiiiiinnnns.

Don’t worry, it’s completely organic.

SEGA was on the move and off to talk about The House of the Dead: Overkill at both 1UP and IGN, and what better way to do so than with your own Zombies to greet the press? I got to tag along and take some pictures from our outing, which you’ll spot posted all around this blog – and even more located here on our flickr page.

1UP was first off on the list, and we arrived with Mike Schmitt (Brand Manager, House of the Dead: OverKill) for an interview on the 1UP Show Podcast. While the Zombies were admittedly not the most eloquent of speakers, you can still hear their grunts and groans – and the full interview – here at the 1UP website!

No Zombie Press Tour is complete without said Zombies harassing the local office workers – so of course, we had to let the Zombies roam free among the 1UP building for just a few minutes on their quest for human flesh.

Before heading to our next stop, it was time for some lunch. Running around San Francisco with two of the undead is pretty sweet, and we got some awesome looks as we walked down the street and into the restaurant. Even Zombies need to eat…

After lunch it was off to IGN, where the Zombies got to play The House of the Dead: Overkill themselves!  For some reason, the entire concept of shooting zombies seemed to enrage our pair of bloodied friends – though nothing was worse than the moment they realized they were out of lives.

During their IGN interview, the Zombies opened up and explained to the world what it is that truly makes them sad in life. After singing kumbaya and holding hands under a giant rainbow – well, that may or may not have actually happened – the zombies drowned their sorrows by feasting on human body parts, which I suppose is what most zombies also tired of the not-so-afterlife tend to do.

After a surprise attack on the unsuspecting IGN cameraman, the Zombies roamed the offices once more, and then finally found their way to an Ultracade, which is essentially an arcade machine with more oldschool games than you could ever beat in a year, unless you have too much free time, happen to be a zombie, or are a mix of the two.

The day came to an end and our Zombies left in search of their next meal. But keep your eyes out (not literally): when The House of the Dead is around, you never know when some real life zombies might just show up again…

For some special behind the scenes pictures – where our zombies discover a photocopier, a soda machine, a blackberry, and more – check out our full House of the Dead: Overkill – Zombie Day Flickr set!

Happy Holidays, Zombie fans!

A special Mad World Holiday Trailer has just gone live in time for the weekend – if you’re old enough to view it, check it out here and let us know what you think!

Wii owners – what are your thoughts on the increase in mature titles on the Wii – games like Mad World, The House of the Dead: Overkill and The Conduit?

Mamluks are the 3D Land Unit this month, and Russia is this week’s Faction Feature. Read more about them below, and go to the Empire: Total War site for full descriptions.

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If 1980s Sega has a quintessence, it might just be Fantasy Zone. Released in arcades in 1985 and ported to the Master System in 1987, this is easily one of the most whimsically designed and oddest-looking games I’ve ever played.  While the gameplay is basically that of any scrolling shooter, there’s something else at work here; a mad-scientist aesthetic sheathed in surreal pastel artwork.

The game’s hero, Opa-Opa, was Sega’s official mascot up until Sonic’s debut, and the game itself is distinctively Sega: S_T_H, one of our player moderators for PSU, related the following anecdote to me: “During my first year in college, I had been playing the Fantasy Zone remake when a friend came over. Without any background he posed the question… ‘This is a Sega game isn’t it?’”

As soon as you start the first level, you are attacked by what appears to be a wave of carnivorous DNA molecules, while an overhead enemy that looks like a pink UFO with fairy wings and awkward yellow teeth gives birth to a steady stream of blue globules who try to eat you:

The gameplay is a little different than most standard side-scrolling shooters, in that you aren’t compelled to only move from left to right, and the screen isn’t automatically scrolling & pushing you along. The aforementioned pink UFOs are actually enemy bases (which look different each round), and the goal of each level is to destroy a certain number of these, which will then summon the bizarre stage bosses. Advanced gameplay involves a lot of backtracking & looping around enemies as you learn their patterns; circling back to blast enemies you missed & collecting more coins, which can then be used at “shops” that appear once per level on the game screen, where you purchase upgrades for your ships’ weapons & engines.

Did I mention the stage bosses? They’re even more ominous for the way they appear against a flat background, and they look like the sort of spectral geometries you see in the middle of intense fever dreams or after eating the mushrooms you found growing under the kitchen sink:

My determinedly low-tech screen shots may not do the game’s look & feel proper justice, so check out a full play-through of the game here.

It’s not that Fantasy Zone is the only surreal game ever made, of course. Not by a long shot. Early console games, with limited graphical capabilities, often had inexplicable enemies or items, the result of a designer doing what they could with the technology they had available, and there are justly famous games out there with ample supplies of weird whimsy, and even weirder gameplay. What I like about Fantasy Zone is that it fits the aesthetic that made 1980s Sega games so much fun—gameplay designed around core arcade concepts, but with decidedly curveball touches that come from creative programming and truly distinctive artwork & music.

Fantasy Zone makes me think about how ingrained the language of video games is for anyone who’s grown up playing them—it’s hard to imagine what this game would look like to someone without any gaming experience; this is a completely surreal game, but with core game ideas (power ups, bad guys, your own ship) that we recognize innately. There is something hard-coded into gamer DNA that recognizes floating green eyeballs as “bad” and coins as “good”.

There’s actually a neat layer of strategy to the game, because the items you buy in the shop are useable for either a limited time or until you lose a life. You can buy them back, but each time you do they go up in price, meaning you have to decide carefully how to portion out your armada throughout the game.

After defeating the last stage boss, you fight, in quick procession, all of the game’s bosses in a row, followed by the “final boss”, the leader of the forces invading the Fantasy Zone, who turns out to be—wait for it—the long lost father of the player! Oh no! Before dying, Opa-Opa’s enormous father sheds a single tear. I kid you not:

I should confess that scrolling shooter games have never been my forte, and I’m by no means a connoisseur of the genre. Astro Warrior was probably the first Sega game I ever played and remains a favorite, and like any red-blooded American male who ate at pizza parlors, I fed a small ransom of quarters to 1942 and its ilk, but that was two decades ago.

Fantasy Zone is by no means an excessively challenging game, but it is definitely a fun game, and laid a lot of groundwork for the odder titles in the genre. When I watch something like one of the “bullet curtain” offshoots of the shooter genre, I cannot fathom the twitch-gameplay skills required to master it. It literally makes my wrists hurt just watching videos of the Touhou series.

And yet, there’s something about these games: they call upon your survival instinct and hone it to a sharp point, and there isn’t what one would call character development in them, but in turn the scrolling-shooter games always seem to have some of the most surreal and impressionistic artwork of any game genre. Because the games are predicated upon that most basic of gaming tenets—don’t run into the bad guys—the games are, in a way, entirely about style and artwork—survival is the method used the navigate the scenery.

For this reason, scrolling shooters tend to have some of the most vividly interesting looks of any genre of game. Another Sega game, for the 32X—Kolibri—comes to mind here (and this game may definitely be suitable for a future installment of this blog): it’s easy enough to see the connection between the vivid colors of Kolibri and the dreamlike stages of Fantasy Zone.

The action in these shooters is usually intense enough that you don’t exactly have time to enjoy the artwork. The longer I played Fantasy Zone the less I was thinking about the bright, brilliant graphics and the more I was obsessing over the increasingly homicidal patterns of the various in-game enemies.

However, the graphics will be there well after you finish playing: if you’ve ever played Fantasy Zone, or any intense shooter of this type, you get to see a full replay of all the graphics as soon as you close your eyes to try to go to sleep at night – and in some cases, for years afterwards.

Final note: Thanks to my new position as a PSU GM, I haven’t had near the time to update this as I would like. Things are calming down somewhat, & I would like to make more posts, more regularly. It will sadly (for me, at least) be time to soon leave behind the Master System, and to move on to the indomitable decade of the 1990s. There are also some great blog projects planned for a retrospective on the beloved Dreamcast in future posts. Stay tuned!

Wii owners looking for a change of pace from cliche happy unicorns and fluffy bunnies, rejoice – our Mad World Microsite is now live, and you can check it out here.

(The game itself is pretty graphic, so you will need to verify your age to check out the site.)

Take a look around Jack’s world and explore – one of the coolest things about this site, in my opinion, are the hidden extras just waiting to be clicked… think you can find them all?

We’ll have more news on the Wii exclusive Mad World very soon, so keep your eyes on the SEGA blogs!

This is a quick heads up to anyone who missed the news earlier in the week and were wondering, “what happened to the SEGA forums (and select websites)”?  Well… the city of San Francisco has scheduled a power outage right on our block to occur on Saturday 12/6 and ending on Sunday 12/7.  The power outage means we’ve had to start moving our sites offline to prepare for the full shutdown on Saturday.

Fear not!  The sites will all be back up and running on 12/8, so long as we don’t hit any major complications along the way.  So do spread the word to your friends, and drop by and say hello if you are looking to scratch that posting itch!

Today, PlaySEGA was officially announced by way of a press release, which will soon be spreading to all media sites across the web.  If you read the blog, you are likely aware of the games, the rings, avatars & escapes, and other major features.  If you haven’t yet heard, then head over to the site and read the full press release to learn more.

In addition to the launch announcement, a few of the classic SEGA games to appear on PlaySEGA were also revealed.  Games like Columns™, Puyo Pop™, Chu Chu Rocket™, Sonic The Hedgehog™ and Super Monkey Ball Tip n’ Tilt™ are on their way and we even have a few more that we can’t yet discuss!  Speaking as a hardcore SEGA fan, the addition of these classics is certainly exciting news.  I’m such a die hard Chu-Chu fan, I can’t wait to get my hands on it, even though I know it’ll be the end of work productivity.

We’re also really interested in what our fans are thinking about the site, the recent news, and the upcoming classics to be available.  If you’ve got something on your mind, let us know and add a comment below or head to our forums and chat with our SEGA community!

Recently, Sega of America confirmed a US arrival of the pre-order bonus also going on in Europe – the (also-M-rated) Limited Edition House of the Dead Graphic Comic, which is a prequel to the OVERKILL storyline and gives you a closer look at Agent G’s first partner, the hard boiled detective Washington. Anyone who pre-orders the game in either the US or UK will get their hands on this special comic, so if you’re a house of the dead fan (or a member of the undead), it’s definitely something to add to your collection.

We’ve got even more House of the Dead: OVERKILL news headed your way soon – including a special behind the scenes look at what happens when two zombies from HotD visit 1UP and IGN. Laughs, gore, and braiiiiins ensue -  we’ll have it here on the SEGA Blog!