And as long as your weird ass has brains, zombies will always have the need to purge the world of you by eating them. It's an interesting dichotomy.

I'm the same way. I tend to really game with MMO's (now, finally, getting into WoW), and use my single player games to kill time. I don't really do much on my gamecube anymore. I've always been a PC junkie, and the GC is the only console I own. I'll occasionally load up SSX Tricky, Rogue Leader, or pwn some zombies on Time Splitters 2 for some variety, but they just can't replace my keyboard and mouse.

We all loathe the undead:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2000/02/04

Together DS and I have been working our way through RE4. It has its intense moments, but on the whole, it's not as outright scary as Fatal Frame or the GC Resident Evil was. But then again, it doesn't pretend to be. It's a vehicle for busting Ganado heads, and what it does, it does very, very well.

Anyway, I think what you're describing isn't so odd a phenomenon. I have my own go-to games like that, though, the ones where I'll start to get the jitters if it's been too long since I last played them. I think we all do.

I have a pretty loose opinion of what is undead. For me it is anything that should already be dead but still walks. This includes the Granados with their uncleaned decaying flesh and souless slave bodies. This also includes Frankenstein, Berine Lomax, and, until recently, the Pope. To me they are all a kind of zombie and have to be put down.

The time frame you are refering to for me is something like 5 days.

Bernie Lomax was not a zombie. He was a defiled corpse. If you impale a body on a pike so it's unnaturally propped up, does that make it a zombie? I think what we need to ask ourselves is this...

Would Bruce Campbell waste his time with this?

If the answer is no, it is obviously not a zombie.
If the answer is yes, it may be a zombie. But it might also be a giant spider, witch, etc.

It's not the creatures that are scary in Resident Evil, although the Crimson Heads certainly do frighten the crap out of me. It's the way the game is designed, stylistically. I can think of no better example than a certain darkened hallway in a crucial segment of the Spencer Mansion. The hallway itself is deserted, and the furniture is dusty and broken; the only light comes from the moonlight spilling in from the bay windows (which you cannot see) onto the peeling wallpaper. In the course of the game, you pass this hallway many times without incident. And then, one time, as you're walking through, there is a shadow of a zombie that appears in the moonlight, knocking against the window pane.

Here's the crucial part: he doesn't jump through the window. He just sits there, taunting you, knocking against the window, saying, "Here I am, little flesh bag, waiting just for you." You wait, and he doesn't jump through. You creep closer, and still he waits. You manage to get through the entire hallway, bracing yourself for an attack that never comes, and even as you exit the hallway, you can still see his silhouette banging his fists against the window.

The next time you come by the hallway, he may still be there. He may not be. Throughout the rest of the game, you continue to travel this hallway, and sometimes he shows up, sometimes he doesn't. Eventually, you come to realise that he's one of the zombies you don't really have to worry about, that you can file him away as decoration, or at the very least, as relatively harmless. Therefore, you are completely unprepared for that one time when he actually DOES hurl himself through the window, hungry for a midnight snack on your brains.

That's what I mean by scary: an atmosphere deliberately designed to maximize your tension and take advantage of your assumptions. RE1 was brilliant in that regard. When you enter a room in RE4, it's not a matter of "if" you'll be killing zombies, but "how many". In the GC RE1, however, you never know if there will be a zombie behind this door, around this corner, across this hall. You never know if you'll have enough typewriter reels to save your game, or enough ammo to get you through the boss, or enough healing herbs to make it to the next section. I loved it.

I've never understood the insane praise RE4 gets. Sure, it's a good game but I got bored of playing it half way through (improvements over the previous installments in the series or not).

Only to find a series of clockwork parts and sand.

I went to Gamestop yesterday and returned Tales of Symphonia and just for the hell of it picked up Hunter the Reckoning for 5 dollars.

Apparently I had a fever, and the only prescription was, more zombie killing. That game is pretty fantastic for being damn near a launch title. Danjo and I played that co-op for about 4 or 5 hours last night.

Oh poor Kat and DS. Are you to working through that game or have you finished it yet? If you are still making your way through it just wait. Most of the enemies in that game are just a giant fleshy bag to hold all of your bullets but they can't hold a candle to the few things in that game that need to die because they freak the living @#$% out of me. Even now it still gets my heart rate up to hear that music, and that wheezing.

The first regenerators or. . .

I think the difference may be that at some point some people decide they aren't going to be frightened of the unknown. For me it was a night I was tasked with taking the trashcan to the end of the driveway -- a particularly frightening driveway at the time. With only the introspective abilities of a young boy I found only one solution: What would Batman do? No matter the age, the solution is obvious. Batman would take the trash out and handle any situations as they arose. He's not about to miss trash day because of obstacles that haven't even shown their face yet.

So with unknown obstacles discarded, the only remaining source of fear is an obstacle that is clearly defined yet does not appear managable.

RE4 is all about handling situations. Zombies? Managable. Crazy dog-tentacle things? Managable. Giant lake salamander? Managable. But then there's a couple of times where the situation just refuses to be handled. I look to my inner Batman but he's all, "Sorry man. That sh*t's crazy. You're on your own with this one."

Wow. I don't know how I feel about a central portion of my psyche being made into a shirt. Might need the Raptor Bandit shirt, though.

That's a really good way of putting it. One major difference, then, between RE1 and RE4 is that RE4 assures the player that, yes, you can handle this situation, and this one, and this one, as an ultimate ploy to catch you off your guard later. RE1 never makes that assurance.

Again, don't get me wrong, I very much like RE4. I'm only arguing that in my opinion, RE1 is scarier. DS and I have thoroughly enjoyed going through RE4; last night, we encountered a knife fight with a certain character that was, I thought, one of the better cutscenes in the game. Nevermind that it made little sense. It was still pretty cool, dammit!

I had forgotten about that third source of horror, bad dialogue.

"You may be able to prolong your life, but it's not like you can escape your inevitable death, is it?"