

In my defence, that wasn't my intention - I looked up Nathan's announcement post on TTOD:O so I could link to it in this piece, then was floored by his outpouring of enthusiasm for the original Overkill. I read another critic's take on the game, and thus my own was compromised. I had a diatribe all written, a torrent of invective about Overkill's clumsy, failed satire of grindhouse movies, how its up-to-eleven objectification of its female characters isn't excused by having its tongue jammed so forcefully into its cheek that you can practically count its papillae, how in any case grindhouse mockery/adulation is so 2007 and how if you are going to rely on satire, it needs to be smarter than featuring obese zombie strippers and a black character who employs the word 'motherfucker' in every single sentence. (I'm not being entirely honest there, actually. This was my first experience of Overkill, and I'm afraid I couldn't find a single thing to like about it. The Typing Of The Dead: Overkill is its sequel, and also a similar modification of 2009 Wii on-rails shooter The House Of The Dead: Overkill, which used grindhouse movies rather than Resident Evil-esque survival horror as its basis. It was and is the greatest concept for a videogame ever - that delectably weird disconnect between diligently rote-typing oridinary but unpredictable words and the extreme violence of zombie massacre. I didn't enjoy this shock sequel to The Typing of the Dead, a 2000 (on PC) reworking of arcade and console on-rails shooter The House of the Dead 2, in which you killed zombies by correctly typing on-screen words at them reallyreallyreally quickly instead of waving around a plastic lightgun. By which I don't mean "two hundred quid on a new graphics card every couple of years."

Sometimes, there's a price to be paid for being a PC gamer.
