Our celebration of the the PS3 classic, Burn Zombie Burn Month, continues with the powerful, ginger-haired, dome-skulled, science-experiment-that-should-never-have-been, Super Zombie!

These hulking menaces can sometimes be blessings in disguise. They’re far from discriminate and will gleefully rid the arena of other zombies as well as hapless players. This can come in especially handy when weapons are low and the area is teeming with melee-adverse noxious or exploder zombies. Still, don’t goof around too much because sooner or later they will have your number.

These damn, deathly apes clomp around the arena gorilla-style. Their basic ground-pound attack isn’t hard to understand and has the expected area of effect… um, effect. Leave one to its own devices, however, and you’ll be treated to something special: flaming napalm farts. Yes, flaming napalm farts. Deadly, deadly flaming napalm farts.

Considering that you may not want to use the surprisingly effective tactic of attacking them with mechanized melee weapons, like the chainsaw or lawnmower, from behind. If not, you can also blow them up with TNT, which is effective but does have certain explodey risks as well.

Burn Zombie Burn was released digitally on the PS3 in March, 2009 (and later on the PC). It’s a simple game: you can a collection of wacky weapons against an even wackier collection of zombies massing in a never-ending horde.  It’s the kind of game that would likely only be released on phones or tablets today (and suffer horribly from the lack of a controller).

It’s also one of the few games that we continually return to again and again. The mechanics are simple but strategic. Burning zombies get you more points but are also more dangerous: do you play it safe or go for it? The experience is varied enough to maintain interest but not so complicated that you need to relearn it every time you pick it up.

So, we here at MoreBrains.com are declaring February “Burn Zombie Month!” and will be celebrating four of our favorite zombies from this gem of a game.

First up, to get the little bastard out of the way, is the Rusher. They’re tough, fast and annoying. When they see you from across the arena they lower they’re helmeted heads and beeline for your squishy, fragile form. There’s really not much to say about them except, “Screw you, Rusher. Screw you!”

(1) Spammer’s web site (2) Spammer (3) Spamware (4) Infected computers (5) Virus or trojan (6) Mail servers (7) Users (8) Web traffic (From Wikipedia.)

Computer zombies are created, in short, when a website tells somebody to “Click here now or a kitten will die! You’ve just gotta! Do it!” and they do. The computer hums for a while and from then on is slow as frozen lard. Then they – all of them, mind you – call me and say “my computer is acting funny and things are coming up on the TV-part. Do you think it’s my memory box?”

Once a computer becomes a zombie it joins a vast horde of others called a BotNet such as the 3.5 million plus rampaging monster created by the Zeus trojan horse virus. These botnets can be leveraged to send “free” spam mail, launch denial-of-service attacks against popular websites , push illegal adware, plunder user data or work to crack passwords or encryption. They slow down the infected computers and dominate their available bandwidth making them groaning, stumbling, mindless slaves to chaos and anarchy.

While you can kill them with a shotgun blast to the CPU as you might expect, a better, if not nearly as awesome, method is to practice safe computing habits and keep your protection software up-to-date.

Considering the timing, on a whim, I entered “MLK Zombie” into my friendly, neighborhood search engine and the Internet did not disappoint me! Of the limited, but considering the topic, surprisingly large, selection this was my favorite.

Executed by artist Grayson Castro, this is “Zombie Laureates Earn Their Prize” (see it enbiggered on his Flickr Stream).

I won’t comment on the politics implied. Or the racial overtones. Or on the decisions of Nobel committee. I’ll simply thank the Internet for always being there us.

Half-Life 2 is a game full of willies-inducing moments. Some of the very best are courtesy of the fine fellow pictured, the poison zombie. They were introduced in the mother of all creep-fests, chapter 6, “We Don’t Go To Ravenholm…“. Few games, before or since, have been able to produce the sheer level of dread embodied by this sequence.

Poison zombies shuffled slowly around, preferring dark, closed spaces. Disgustingly, they played host to a small cadre of poison headcrabs that left them hunched and awkward. These passengers would, at any provocation, leap at the player en masse. The poison was non-fatal compromised the player severely, making this one of the most insidiously dangerous enemies in the game.

There were plenty of insta-deaths in Half-Life 2. Explosions, crushing traps and drive-by smearing from ant-lion soldiers. The poison zombie, however, drew out your death over many adrenaline filled seconds. Bloated and slow-moving the zombie was the personification of understatement.

Encounters were met with furious backpedaling followed quickly by the tell-tale flash that indicated that you’d been bit. A frantic few seconds that felt like minutes followed as you desperately attempted to stay alive until you could recover. Making matters worse, this was also the toughest zombie you’d face. It shrugged off carnage that would put anything else down for good all while moving toward you in inexorable slow-motion.

Here’s to you, poison zombie. Here’s to you!

[Apologies for skipping last week. Holidays, family and unexpected surgery will sometimes put a crimp in the best laid plans.]

We’ve featured a few zombies from the 1968 classic ”Night of the Living Dead“ before but this may be our favorite. She’s a little girl, and that’s just plain creepy but, more importantly, she gets rid of Harry. Harry, you see, was a royal pain in the ass.

Sure, you may find it odd that we’re celebrating the fact that a young girl was bitten, zombified and ended up eating her dad. But then you probably don’t realize how much of a pain in the ass Harry was.

I’ve written pretty extensively several times about “The Last of Us”. You might say that I kinda liked it.

The game presents an apocalyptic scenario in which an aggressive , behavior altering strain of Cordyceps fungi (which is a real thing: read about it if you’d rather not sleep tonight) wipes out most of humanity.

When first infected, people become mindless, violent, rampaging terrors that will tear apart anybody they meet. After years of infection, when the fungus has blossomed forth from the center of the victims brain (again, a real thing) and destroyed their sight they become clickers.

Clickers are ambush hunters. Hiding in corners while using their ears and echo location to jump out and make you crap your pants. Then they kill you. Horribly. With teeth. To add to the creepiness they’re almost always presented as female and still wearing the tattered remains of what was likely a very smart ensemble. They’re also amazing strong and, at least for short bursts, fast.

Clickers are the kind of critter than crawls into your brain while you’re playing the game and then decide to come out and play while you’re sleeping. So while you’re opening presents this Christmas (or going to be movies or getting Chinese food or whatever you like to do) why not spend a moment to give thanks that Cordyceps (which is still a totally real thing), so far at least, has stuck with insect and arthropods.

In our continuing celebration of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary – and yet another vigorous stretching of our definition of “zombie” – we bring you back – forward? – to the time when zombies from the core of the TARDIS made quite a nuisance of themselves.

Introduced in episode 11 of series Seven, these crackly, crumbly, cantankerous, creepy cryptids were said to be physical shadows of a rather nasty possible future for our heroes; one that saw them simultaneously liquefied and burned to a crisp (and sometimes, as pictured, melted together). These unfortunate ghosts snuck in through a leak in space-time to moan, shamble, be generally unpleasant and get handsy with our heroes.

Luckily, as is often the case when you have a time machine around, a clever way was found to not only get rid of the unwelcome guests but to also ensure that anybody that had previously been turned to critter kibble was just fine, now. Or then. Or later. Or whatever. Time travel is hard.