Australia’s Classification Board is tough on video game violence, so it wasn’t a surprise that House of the Dead Overkill: Extended Cut didn’t get rated on its first try. After an appeal to the board, Sega announced the game now has an MA15+ rating with warnings for “Strong Horror Violence, and Strong Coarse Language.” The latest game in Sega’s horror series first appeared on the Nintendo Wii, but is coming to the PS3 with Move controls added. In addition to motion control, Extended Cut adds a Hardcore Mode that rewards players for headshots. There’s also an “Extra Mutants” mode with more monsters to kill.

I’ve spent the past week crying blood from my own eyes. The only thing more enjoyable than doing this has been telling people about it. Most think I’ve finally lost my mind. The rest know I own a Wii, and immediately want to know if House of the Dead: Overkill really is “…the hardcore you’ve been waiting for.”

The answer to that is yes. House of the Dead: Overkill is a new title in the series, built from the ground up for the Wii system. The graphics are a huge improvement over the previously released House of the Dead 2 and 3 Return, which was little more than a port of the old arcade games. Tremendous attention was paid to the look and feel of the game, which pays homage to the grindhouse movies recently repopularized by Quentin Tarantino. This design carries all the way through the game, where each chapter is presented as its own mini-movie. Even the menu option screens keep up the illusion, which makes for a fun, tight experience.

Wii gamers who find themselves defending the system as a legitimate platform for hardcore gamers have been given some new ammunition (of course, they may want to save that ammunition for the zombies). Sega has announced The House of Dead: Overkill will be coming to the Wii early 2009. The game is being developed by Headstrong Games (formerly Kuju of Battalion Wars 1 and 2) and is being built from the ground up specifically for the Wii platform.

Using the Wii remote (as opposed to the light-gun approach of the The House of the Dead 2 and 3 Return port), the game will be presented in a pulp action-style design. This is made quite clear in the trailer which was instantly one of the best game trailers I have ever seen. Click through to check it out…

Let me tell you a little thing about zombies. They’re evil, undead, unstoppable and they really like brains. If there’s anything videogames have taught us over the years, it’s that zombies are not your friends, and any sane person will have a zombie apocalypse survival plan handy in the event that the dead walk the earth.

The most obvious place to gather incriminating evidence is the Resident Evil series, built around the foundation that zombies are the product of evil, corporate-greed induced scientific irresponsibility (the T-virus, manufactured by the Umbrella corporation). But zombies have been an (evil!) part of the videogame landscape long before RE landed in the US, bad dialogue intact, in 1996. The Castlevania and Doom series each had their share of zombie enemies through the years, Beast Buster was a 1989 arcade game set in a city overrun with the undead, the entire House of the Dead series (which hit the scene around the same time as Resident Evil) has always been about…

More often than not when you hear about the films House of the Dead, Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark or In the Name of the King, there is a background of insulting murmurs of complete and utter contempt. They, and other absolutely horrid game-based movies, are either produced, written or directed by Uwe Boll.

Even though the majority of people can – and most likely will – argue that he is the worst thing to happen to game-based films, it’s a wonder why people still go to see his movies.

The trouble with Uwe Boll is that he wants respect but he’s going about it the wrong way…

It’s time for yet another edition of lame game movie nights, wherein our intrepid columnist takes in a double feature of videogame films and lives to tell the experience. This time, we’re diving right in to a subgenre of a subgenre – the horror videogame movie. Since the games that these films are based off of are much more terrifying than their film counterparts, we were in for a real “treat” this week when we survived Doom and House of the Dead.

I began the night with Doom (2005) a dumb but competent horror-action flick. The film is loosely based on the famous early FPS, and involves a bunch of burly space Marines (led by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) that are tasked with exploring and protecting the few civilians left on an extraterrestrial archeological dig. Of course, there are monsters running around dark corridors, and plenty of fan-service shots (mimicking the FPS view), so the plot stays true to the franchise.