Infected (PSP)

The setting: A snowy evening in New York City, mere moments before the annual lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. Just seconds after the tree is lit in a brilliant display of holiday cheer, the audience is overrun by a teeming mass of flesh-craving zombies who delightedly tear into the citizens of NYC with vicious efficiency. The headline, as read by the airhead newscaster in Infected's opening sequence: "Worst shopping season ever? Find out at 11..."

Now that's funny. In fact, while it could be argued that ripping through NYC with guns blazing as you're relentlessly chased down by a mass of gory fiends is scary, it's not why Majesco's upcoming third-person shooter, Infected, made our Halloween list this year. In fact, Infected really isn't even that scary. But it is damn funny. In fact, it's so funny, it's scary.

Most of Infected's trademark black humor comes through in the various cutscenes between missions, where, as the game's hero Officer Stevens, you converse with a serious scientist who will offer you crucial mission clues, and a dim-witted city commissioner who seems more interested in exit polls than exiting the infested city alive. While we don't want to spoil things by giving away crucial scenes, we'll just say this: Keep your ears peeled for the scene in which the commissioner's office receives a visit from a busload of "special" students on a field trip. If you're anything like us, you'll want to puke your guts up from laughter. And if puking your guts up isn't what Halloween is all about, then we don't know what is...

Doom III (PC, Xbox)

Doom III garnered quite a bit of acclaim when it hit PCs a year and a half ago. If you had a system capable of running it with all the bells and whistles, then you were treated to arguably the most graphically stunning game ever to be released on any platform. The Union Aerospace Corporation's Mars facility was filled with dark corridors and rusty airlocks, and the game's real-time shadowing brought the gritty industrial theme to life, as your muzzle flash would light up your foes just enough for you to see them and their shadows on the (usually blood-splattered) wall behind them.

Of course, graphical impressiveness wouldn't serve for much if the gameplay wasn't good. Although Doom III got mixed reviews, it definitely served up more than a few jump-in-your-seat moments. This was mostly due to the fact that the game relied on the cheapest form of scare tactics, with numerous enemies that would pop out of secret closets in the walls, or teleport in behind you and attack from behind. While this certainly did result in a few moments of sheer terror, for many people it also gave off a slight air of ridiculousness. Our personal favorite moment came after being accosted by an imp that had popped out of a secret hatch in a wall. We entered the hatch to pick up some armor, only to be slashed at by another imp that was hidden in another secret hatch inside the already thoroughly hidden hatch we had just entered.

As ridiculous or cheap as Doom III's scares might have been, though, they were still usually pretty effective, especially if you played the game in a dark room with a good sound system or headphones on. When you watch a horror movie, you can often be 100 percent sure that the alien/serial killer/animated corpse might be about to pop out of hiding and attack the hero or heroine, but you can still be startled when it occurs. Spread out that feeling across a 10-hour game, and you have a pretty good summation of what Doom III is all about.

Condemned: Criminal Origins (Xbox 360)

There's no Halloween candy or bobbing for apples in Monolith's upcoming horror action game, Condemned: Criminal Origins for the Xbox 360, but there are plenty of lead pipes and plenty of other guys' skulls (we'll let you do the math on that one). This upcoming action game will put you in the role of an investigator who is out to track down vicious serial killers by using forensic equipment to follow their trail and brute force to neutralize them once you've hunted them down. Even though you'll play as an FBI agent, it seems that Uncle Sam couldn't supply you with that Kevlar body armor and belt-fed heavy machine gun you might have been hoping for, considering that your goal is to pursue a bunch of murderous psychopaths. Then again, you've been framed for murder, so the Department of Justice isn't exactly falling over itself to send backup for you.

Your resources (and bullets) will be very limited, so you'll need grab whatever you can to use as a weapon to defend yourself against all those crazed killers, like a torn-off locker door, the almighty board with a nail in it, or your fists when all else fails. The game will feature a highly streamlined, easy-to-use first-person combat system that will require you to think on your feet as you deflect oncoming blows and try to give better than you get. From what we've seen so far, the combat will be brutal (if you're off your game, you may end up getting strangled by a homicidal maniac, from a first-person perspective, no less), and it will have a solid, meaty feel to it. This definitely won't be a game for small children or for the faint of heart...but it should have plenty to offer fans of visceral action and creepy horror. Condemned will also be a highly atmospheric game that will make use of ambient sound (and lack thereof) and careful use of lighting and shadow to put you on edge. Fans of intense horror and action-packed combat should keep an eye out for Condemned later this year.

Suffering: Ties That Bind (PS2, Xbox, PC)

Baltimore. No offense to Ravens fans, but few things are as scary and creepy as the streets of Baltimore. Well, at least, that's what Midway's The Suffering: Ties That Bind would have you believe. The world of The Suffering packs these Baltimore streets with the worst kind of scum. And, no, we're not still talking about Ravens fans. We're talking about monsters. Are they undead? Maybe. Are they evil? Most definitely. The creepy creatures that patrol the city streets might have been mostly recycled from last year's game, but that doesn't mean that they aren't totally freaky.

Creepy-looking freaks with knives and swords for arms. A large spider creature with guns where his arms should be. A reincarnated smack junkie that flings dirty needles at you. And as if that weren't enough, the game lets you turn into a monster of your own, allowing for monster-on-monster action. Who is the baddest monster of them all? Well, considering that you've got a much longer health meter than most of the monsters, you're usually the baddest.

The Suffering also tries to go for spooks with a constant stream of hallucinations. Torque, the main character, is a troubled, troubled man. So he's constantly seeing things that aren't there and breaking out into full-on hallucinatory sequences that showcase the many points where his life simply went offtrack. From the loss of his wife to the death of his sons, the guy gets to relive a lot of pretty bad days. And, of course, these sequences pop onto the screen with little or no warning. This might make you jump...if it didn't happen so frequently.

Baltimore. It might be just a hop, skip, and a jump away from our nation's capital, but that still doesn't make it the sort of place where you'd want to go trick-or-treating. Well, given the crime rate in DC, you probably wouldn't want to go out in search of free candy there, either, but hey, now we're the ones going offtrack.

F.E.A.R. (PC)

You don't always need the criminally insane, hell-spawned demons, or the shambling undead for a good scare. Sometimes all you need is some heavy atmosphere and a disquieting 8-year-old girl. Monolith's F.E.A.R. banks on the notion that the most frightening things are those you don't understand and those things that are just out of sight, and the dividends this philosophy pays are truly unsettling.

You have two threats to deal with in F.E.A.R. There's the very real army of cloned soldiers who are controlled psychically by Paxton Fettel, a telepath gone mad. The other threat is less tangible, but involves some shared bond between your character, Fettel, and a young girl named Alma who regularly appears to you in visions. As you sweep your way through a series of empty industrial complexes, taking on squad after squad of Fettel's drones, you'll see things out of the corner of your eye--a light will flicker, some boxes will fall off a shelf, maybe a door will slam shut.

Sometimes you'll turn a corner, and it's nothing. Sometimes you'll turn a corner, and you'll catch a glimpse of someone walking away, only to see that person disintegrate into ash. Sometimes you'll investigate a strange noise, only to find yourself face-to-face with a well-armed enemy operative. This constant uncertainty about what could possibly be around the next corner creates a built-in sense of dread in F.E.A.R., something that's made taut by a soundtrack filled with bone-chilling strings.

The visions you have are always blood-soaked and disturbing, but the best moments are those you don't see. For example, early on you come to a locked gate with a Special Forces team backing you up. You leave the scene to go unlock the gate, but by the time you come back, your team has been reduced to a pile of smoking skeletons. You don't know what happened, but you know it's not good.

Have you ever seen The Shining? It's certainly scary when Jack loses it and starts taking the axe to the woodwork, or when a gout of blood starts pouring out of the elevators. But F.E.A.R. is more like the twin sisters that appear at the end of the hallway, beckoning the boy Danny to come and play. You're not sure what you're seeing, but you know it shouldn't be there.

Stubbs the Zombie (Xbox, PC)

Halloween wouldn't be Halloween without zombies, because unlike your Draculas, your Frankenstein's monsters, and your Freddy Kreugers, they're real. Zombies get a raw deal in modern society. Our movies portray them as shambling monsters who will stop at nothing to satisfy their hunger for brains, and our video games mostly just encourage well-armed players to use them as target practice. That's the way it has always been, and your average zombie's lot in life (death?) never really looked like it was improving until the arrival of Stubbs the Zombie last week.

Stubbs isn't like other zombies, not only because he's a chain-smoker with a great personality, but also because he's the star of a game. In Stubbs the Zombie, our titular antihero affords us a rare opportunity to see the world through the eyes of a walking corpse, and it's a world full of prejudice and hatred. After spending an hour or two walking in the uncomfortably smelly shoes of Stubbs, you'd have to be some kind of monster not to sympathize with his plight. After all, only 26 years before the events of the game, Edward "Stubbs" Stubblefield was struggling to make a living as a traveling salesman. A career choice that resulted in him meeting an untimely demise after a sales pitch to a prospective customer armed with a shotgun went awry.

Wideload Games' Stubbs the Zombie is set in the fictional city of Punchbowl circa 1959. Punchbowl is a futuristic utopia of sorts, and the brainchild of a billionaire playboy industrialist named Andrew Monday. Punchbowl is a living, breathing, and highly stylized realization of what people living in the '50s thought cities might be like in the year 2000. The only problem is that the city was built atop the grave of Edward Stubblefield, who climbs out of his grave at the start of the game with a hunger that simply can't be satiated by the hotdog that he makes a grab for from six feet under in the intro movie.

What Stubbs craves is brains, fresh ones, and satisfying that craving is what you'll spend a lot of your time doing in the game. The people of Punchbowl don't want Stubbs to make a meal of their gray matter, of course, but the great thing is that they not only stop complaining once their brains have been eaten, but they also actually become zombies themselves. Stubbs "makes" friends wherever he goes, and if being a zombie is really this much fun then, for some of us, death can't come soon enough.

Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360, PS3)

Up until 2005, the Resident Evil series had become a bunch of, arguably antiquated, niche games. You either enjoyed the series' trademark combination of good graphics, laughable voice acting, awkward camera angles, and clunky control, or you didn't. That all changed with the groundbreaking Resident Evil 4, which introduced a free-roaming camera attached to an over-the-shoulder view, plus action, action, and more action in the form of battles against swift zombielike enemies that had to be dispatched skillfully, either with superior aim or the game's all-new context-sensitive actions. (Oh, and the game had pretty good voice acting, too.) This complete overhaul not only refreshed the game for fans of the series, but it also opened up Resident Evil for a whole new audience that had been put off by the previous games' well-known issues. But even with this new lease on life, Resident Evil 4 still stayed very true to its roots, featuring a mostly deliberate pace and appearances by some of the series' most well-known characters.

Fortunately for the many fans that Resident Evil 4 has rightfully garnered, Resident Evil 5 for the Xbox 360 and PS3 will also apparently feature this emphasis on action and skill, rather than stick to the fixed camera angles and clumsy control scheme of its forebears. Very little is known of the game, although Capcom producer Jun Takeuchi indicated in an interview some months ago that the team intends to create the same kind of action-packed gameplay for the next game that helped Resident Evil 4 reinvigorate the series. Yet we've seen very little of the game, outside of one video trailer that depicts a character who bears a striking resemblance to Chris Redfield (a character who appeared in previous games) being stalked by what appears to be a crowd of sprinting zombies. The trailer shows off the graphical muscle of the next generation of consoles, but the fact that Capcom seems to recognize the importance of Resident Evil 4's improved gameplay (and that the studio plans to include an enhanced version of this gameplay in the sequel) is probably the most exciting thing of all. We can't wait to see what Resident Evil 5 will have to offer when it's released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3...hopefully sometime next year.