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                       Stubbs the Zombie declared BAD ZOMBIE for eating people

    People love attacking videogames. I'm sorry, let me correct that. Uninformed lawyers love attacking videogames. Its an easy target, everyone has them, and as surprising as this may sound developers don't go to law school so they have a hard time defending themselves. It never fails, every time that a developer does something cool people get pissed off.

The Case:

    Most recently, the game Stubbs the Zombie : Rebel Without a Pulse has come under fire by National Institute on Media and the Family*, not for the horrible pun in its title, but because it treats Zombies like they eat people. Please use the pause between this paragraph and the next to scream "DUH".

    According to (the) NIMF, Stubbs and games like it are "...something we've never seen before." Apparently Resident Evil was a Communist-controlled mass hallucination, along with other survival horror games and Fluoride. But to be fair practically everything has been done in games to some extent. Meaning that unless the game includes a neon blue rabbit/cyborg fighting an army of waffles in the middle of a highway in downtown Tokyo while ninjas in Carebear pajamas recite the Gettysburg address to a council of carpet salesmen selected by Santa Claus himself, then you can't claim that its something that we've never seen before. Trust me. We've seen it all.

    If you take the time to go to their website www.mediafamily.com and search for Stubbs you'll get a nice little review just a bit longer than the warning label on a pack of cigarettes that reads (in part): "Players play as a zombie who comes back to life seeking revenge... Players cut skulls of humans to ingest their brains..."

    Ignoring that the review resembles a bad lick of dialogue translated by a Japanese hobo, there's a particular line that bothers me. "Players cut skulls of humans to ingest their brains..." When did that happen? I've beat the game twice in both single and Co-Op modes, and I've never cut anyone's skull. Nibbled maybe, gobbled possibly, and ingested most definitely, but never cut. It must be from a bonus stage where Stubbs runs around with scissors trying to give out free haircuts.

On the Count of Skull-Cutting: Not Guilty

    Also, the review has a guide at the bottom that sets different colors for different levels of offense: Red, Yellow, and Green. Red being extremely bad, Yellow meaning that there were "some instances of material in this category", and Green meaning don't buy this game, its so boring that even Media Family couldn't find anything offensive in it. Two of the categories marked with yellow were Nudity and sex. Again, we have to put aside that there wasn't any Nudity to rate in this game, so it would be easier to divide twelve by zero, and try to bend the laws of the universe to make sense out of a rating of yellow. I don't see why Advocacy groups everywhere wouldn't be jumping on Zombie sex as a good idea. I mean really, after seeing two decayed corpses getting it on would you desire sex with anyone ever again? Just thinking about it can make you celibate for a week or more. This also raises a few biological questions about fetid organs and blood pressure that I won't get into here. Which can only lead us to one conclusion: That (a) NIMF has created a Hot Coffee mod for Stubbs and is refusing to share it. That's not very Christian-like.

    One of the biggest complaints as lodged by the title of MSNBC's article on Stubbs the Zombie was that the game promoted cannibalism and that children would imitate it. No really. Stop laughing. I couldn't make this stuff up, I'm not that smart. Lets tackle these one at a time.

    You can't declare that Stubbs promotes cannibalism and then turn around and call him a zombie. First of all, it's in the job description that zombies eat brains. Not Mocha Lattes, not Spaghetti, not even Campbell's soup in a can. Brains. Besides that, cannibalism is described as a creature that eats its own kind. Zombies are not humans. They only resemble humans, just like Predator, the Mona Lisa, and Michael Jackson. If anything that resembles a human were to be considered as a human, then biting the heads off of gingerbread men is a class A felony. Which means that there's going to be a lot of grandmas doing some time.

    To the second count, I'm not arguing that a 3-7 year old should be playing a brain-eating simulator, or even that they could play the game with any degree of deftness. I'm arguing that we really have more important things to worry about than 7 year-olds with eight teeth biting each other's heads. I'm not getting worked up over something that happens every day at Kindergarten recess. Mr. President please forget Iran's nuclear program, this pre-teen cranium biting and attempted head-rolling has to stop.**

On the Counts of Cannibalism and Child Warping: Not Guilty

    Of course, the purpose is to protect children from "realistic" brain eating violence. How you would gauge whether a particular brand of zombie violence is more realistic than another is beyond me. Unless someone is secretly hiding Zombies in their basement, I don't know how they're even determining what a Zombie eating a human even looks like. I personally have never seen a zombie eat a human, met someone who has been eaten by a zombie, heard a rumor of someone getting eaten by a zombie, seen documentary footage of a zombie eating someone, or read about zombies eating people in the paper. How does anyone know what a realistic depiction of zombie eating behavior would look like? That's right, nobody does. Suck it Mr. Thompson.

    How about instead of bitching about violent games release a game that highlights no violence. Where the objective is to plant fruit, dig up fossils, and pick up litter. They already have a game like that; its called Animal Crossing and it's fucking boring.

Final Verdict:

    Stubbs is by far the best Futuristic-50s-Zombie-Horror-Comedy-Xbox game ever, and most certainly doesn't make anyone think that they're a zombie. If you disagree I'll eat your brains.

*As an acronym is NIMF. That sounds like a group I'd like to get behind.

**If you really think that you can remove your head, roll it down the road and make it explode, please try. Then have your parents email an avi or mpeg version of the videotape to cj@cjdaweasel.com.

 

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