Zombie knights? Set in medieval England? That premise has great potential in the same way as combining pirates and ninjas and dinosaurs. Undead Knights largely lives up to the promise.

In this hybrid of a hack-and-slash adventure, real-time strategy, and role-playing game, you play the bad guys, in a sense. Romulus and Remus are brothers, Sylvia the king’s daughter who was to marry Remus, and they have all come back from the dead to enact revenge for the annihilation of the Blood family by order of the king.

You can play as either of the three, but the fighting styles don’t really differ, and you’ll not only have to fight the English soldiers, but you’ll also need to turn them into zombie soldiers to fight by your side.

And it can be tricky trying to balance killing enemies with transforming them. Your zombie soldiers are nothing more than glorified fodder, and you’ll use them to overpower tougher enemies, break down barriers blocking your path, and to form zombie bridges when necessary.

See what I mean? It’s the epitome of excellent.

The controls are simple. Two buttons are used for weapon attacks, another is used to evade attacks, and another picks up the body closest to you for zombie making or throwing, depending on whom you pick up.

But Undead Knights is repetitive, in terms of combat and the environments you’ll be fighting in. A little more attention to making the game more varied, a little more polish, could have gone a long way to make this a must-have, not just a game loaded with potential.

Undead Knights (Tecmo; PSP; rated mature)

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

While many games claim to fill the need for a quick five-minute gaming hit when you need it, TouchMaster 3 actually does.

It’s a simple collection of 20 games that fall into five different categories: word games (Wild Words has you building a crossword by arranging letters on a grid), puzzle games (Tetris- and Bejeweled-like games), action games (in Electro Maze you guide a ball through a maze, avoiding touching the electrified walls), strategy games (Counterweight has you trying to balance two scales to match a number), and card games (most of which involve building poker hands).

All of the games are easy to play — although some will take some time to master — and because the DS will automatically pause your game when you close it up, you can stop and start at any time, even if you’re killing at the Chef Memory game.

TouchMaster 3 (Warner Bros.; DS; rated everyone)

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

Two of my articles have recently been published at bchydro.com.

The first is a round-up of tech gifts with a power conservation theme. Read: Get a charge out of these technology gifts.

The second is a look at how LED-backlit flat screen televisions can help your monthly electricity bill. Read: Fit and slim LED-backlit TVs a bright idea.

“Trigger Happy” this week is a nice, long feature – it didn’t make the cover of the Straight, sadly – on serious games, a genre of video games “where the purpose behind its existence is to create some impact other than entertainment as a priority”.

It benefits from interviews with Ian Bogost, Diane Gromala, Terry Lavender, and Ben Sawyer.

After you infect the first farmer, who passes you on to the rest of the farm’s inhabitants, you spread quickly. Everyone—students, medical staff, labourers, office workers—is a target. A truck driver transports you to a warehouse in another town. Tourists take you back to their cities.

I wrote a longer review of L4D2 than the Straight had space for, so here’s the longer piece for posterity.

The conceit of Left 4 Dead 2 hasn’t changed: up to four players take on the roles of survivors of a zombie apocalypse in a game presented like it was a Romero film. But this sequel, which was released on Nov. 17, improves on the first game in almost every way. And while it might be built on the same technology as the first game, the fact that this was developed in only a year – the first game launched on Nov. 18, 2008 – is astounding.

The new stars are Coach, a high school football coach, the mechanic Ellis, Nick, a professional gambler, and Rochelle, a TV news producer. They travel from the empty streets of Savannah, Georgia, to the frantic chaos of New Orleans, fighting zombies through five “campaigns” and in a variety of locations including a shopping mall, swampland, a carnival, and a cemetery. There is a greater range of lighting, too, as much of this game takes place during dusk.

At Valve’s studio in Bellevue, Wash., Chet Faliszek, the game’s writer, told the Straight that the intent was “to tell the story not just of their journey, but of how the world reacts to the infection” that has turned humanity into vicious creatures. “Left 4 Dead 2 is what happens when the infection happens outside your window,” Faliszek said, “when you weren’t expecting anything to happen.”

The narrative is subtle. Faliszek said he didn’t want to “bog players down with details.” But CEDA, the Civilian Emergency Defense Agency, a mix of CDC and FEMA, is omnipresent and ominous.

Players can now wield a primary and secondary weapon, and melee combat has been introduced, so you can use cricket bats, chain saws, katana, and even electric guitars when in close. During a gaming session, level designer Kim Swift told the Straight that the new wound system includes dismemberment, so be ready to lop off arms, legs, and heads. “There are now 40 different ways to kill zombies,” explained Swift.

New items include a defibrillator, which regenerates a dead player, adrenaline injections, which give a temporary boost to health and increases a character’s speed, vials of boomer bile, which when broken attract infected, and a laser sight attachment for guns.

New special infected creatures include spitters, which project acid, jockeys, which climb on the shoulders of players, and chargers, which tackle and pummel players. And each campaign has an uncommon common infected that isn’t quite as dangerous as a Witch or a Tank, but is more difficult than the average zombie. In the game’s first campaign, for example, are infected that wear Hazmat suits and which are impervious to fire.

There’s also a new versus mode, which pits humans against zombies. Scavenge is a faster and more compact competitive game. The objective is to collect gas tanks to fill a generator. A game, which lasts between 15 and 30 minutes, includes three rounds in which you play as humans or infected, then switch sides with your opponents. The team that gets the most gas into the generator wins.

Playing Left 4 Dead 2 gets you up close and personal with all manner of horrors, but rarely gives you a chance to breathe. Make sure you’re playing with friends you can rely on, because without them, there’s no hope.

Left 4 Dead 2 (Valve; PC, Xbox 360; rated mature)