There’s a new zombie killing game in town, Dead Island, and it can be rough going, especially if you’ve never fought zombies before. Here are some tips for a guy who’s popped more than his share of rotting heads:

Surely you didn’t think a game these days would be released without a plan for future downloadable content? In Dead Island‘s case, its Bloodbath Arena DLC was made known to the public before the final game’s release. Bloodbath Arena was offered as a pre-order incentive for Dead Island. If you didn’t take advantage of the deal back then, it’ll cost you $10 to participate in the festivities sometime this month.

Some games start controversies without trying, others openly seek to raise someone’s ire. StarvingEyes Viral Advergaming has created Tea Party Zombies Must Die, a shooter starring undead versions of political figures including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Bill O’ Reilly.

Game designer Jason Oda has done political satire in games before. His 2008 offering Kung Fu Election was a fighting game including presidential hopefuls such as John McCain and Hilary Clinton. In 2004, Bushgame.com pitted ’80s TV characters against Bush administration officials.

Many, many PlayStation Network account holders decided to choose Dead Nation as one of their free games in the PSN Welcome Back program. Dead Nation took the all-too popular zombie gimmick in gaming and altered it slightly by playing as a twin-stick shooter. It’s a really fun game and we figured support for Dead Nation had ceased. We were wrong.

Dead Island has some problems. As many reviewers have pointed out, Dead Island contains a lot of bugs on the console versions that don’t really break the game, but hinder the experience enough to be noticeable. The Steam version of Dead Island is even worse. In many ways, the game is just not finished. Whenever a simple keyboard button press triggers odds things such as a third-person view and a camera that roams all over the island, you’ve got an unfinished product.

Dead Island releases tomorrow (September 6, 2011). The reviews from many outlets have gone up today and the overall reception is somewhere in the middle. The general consensus is that there is fun to be had in Dead Island, but it doesn’t live up to the emotional trailer that got everyone’s attention. There are also a lot of bugs and glitches. Deep Silver was fully aware of Dead Island’s problems when the discs were printed. As a result, a patch will be released Tuesday that fixes 37 known issues.

Cheers of joy were certainly mixed with groans of “brains!” when the Judge’s Choice Ennie awards were given out at Gen Con 2011. A Judge’s Choice award is given when the judges can’t agree on a top product, forcing each judge to give an individual award to his personal favorite among the hundreds of submissions. In this case Judge Wil Upchurch (of influential Star Wars: The Role Playing Game fame) gave his award to Outbreak: Undead, the very first product by start up company Hunters Books and Apparel.

If playing Trenched got you in the mood for some console tower defense games, you may want to keep a lookout for a little game called Dead Block. Dead Block will be released for XBLA on July 6 before making the journey over to PSN on July 20. Dead Block will appeal to some players due to the fact that it has zombies. Others may be drawn in by the tower defense gameplay style and its somewhat comical approach to the potential end of mankind.