Walking Dead Game Departs From Zombie Clichés Telltale Games A scene from The Walking Dead, the video game adaptation of the popular comic book turned even more popular AMC television series. Zombies are the new Nazis, at least when it comes to video games. The handoff couldn't have been more straightforward. In World at War, the 2008 iteration of the wildly popular Call of Duty series, the game designers, perhaps sensing that players were tiring of the pleasures of killing the soldiers of the Third Reich, introduced a new mode: Nazi zombies. Shooting already dead members of Hitler's army proved even more satisfying than doing the same to (digitally) living but historical Germans. Out with World War II, in with World War Z. The lineage isn't quite that simple, of course. Zombies have a long history in games, including seminal titles like Resident Evil (1996) and Wolfenstein 3D (1992), widely regarded as the original first-person shooter, which itself was about fighting some kind of undead/Nazi hybrid. And apocalyptic fiction has become unavoidable in post-Sept. 11 America, no matter the medium. The zombie subgenre is nearly as popular in novels and films as it is in video games. What's distinct about the video game strain of the infection is that "zombies" and "Nazis" are usually interchangeable concepts. Each is presented as a dehumanized enemy that won't make players feel guilty for all the exultant violence they inflict. The zombie apocalypse neatly removes thorny questions of morality and makes the action about as fraught as gobbling the ghosts in Pac-Man or blasting the descending aliens in Space Invaders. Even a game like last fall's Tea Party Zombies Must Die, in which the (presumably liberal) player is asked to lay waste joyfully to the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, depends on this understanding. By turning conservative personalities into zombies, and thus making it not only acceptable but also acceptably exciting to shoot them, "the game scripts its violence into morally excusable self-defense," as Peter Freeman wrote recently in a thought-provoking essay on games in Crisis, the Roman Catholic journal. Given the new dawn for the dead, it's unsurprising that "The Walking Dead," the popular comic book turned even more popular AMC television series, has now been given its own video game adaptation. What's unexpected and welcome about this new treatment of Robert Kirkman's fiction is how different it is from the other entries in gaming's New Zombie Wave. The Walking Dead's zombies aren't just soulless. They're soulful, too - killing one actually means something. A New Day, the first installment in a planned five-episode series, takes two to three hours to play and can be downloaded for $4.99 on computers, PlayStations and Xboxes. The next four episodes are expected to be released at a rate of about one every month. Like a George Romero movie, zombie games typically have Dead in the title: in addition to Walking, they are Rising, they are Left 4, they are on an Island. Unlike a George Romero movie, the games usually place little to no emphasis on the lives of any of the zombies before they were turned - no sense that these nauseating creatures were once our neighbors, our friends, our husbands, wives and children. Instead the zombies are merely a kind of puzzle crossed with a physical challenge: an exhilarating, creepy and sometimes hilarious obstacle devoid of anything a theatergoer would understand as drama. These types of games are, on the other hand, filled with much that an athlete would recognize as such - they are perched on the inflection point between sports and art. In contrast, The Walking Dead goes for a less kinetic, more story-driven approach, one in which there's as much watching as there is playing. The game is pretty to look at - in essence, a colorized version of Mr. Kirkman's comic books - and the interactive elements are frequently limited to choosing lines from a menu of dialogue; walking in very small, constrained spaces; and examining a handful of items in the environment. The first episode is in some ways a "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead" - now there's a video game franchise waiting to be born - in which lesser characters from the comics are given lives outside the original work. But Lee Everett, the protagonist controlled by the player, has been created just for the game. He is an African-American professor at the University of Georgia who, in the opening moments, is being taken to prison for murdering a man who was having an affair with his wife. The police car hits a zombie on a highway out of Atlanta, and Everett escapes. The zombie apocalypse is, for him, a kind of liberation. Despite this promising setup, there are times when the narrative emphasis feels like a mistake. The middle scenes - a respite at a farmhouse, Everett's arrival at a fortified pharmacy in Macon, Ga. - drag, and "press X to kill zombie" is often the level of interactivity presented. But what zombies! Taking an ax to the reanimated corpse of a character's brother in the streets of Macon, or deciding whether to give a gun to a woman who was bitten and now wants to kill herself before she is reborn - these moments have more sadness and subtlety in them than other games muster in 40 hours. The creatures in The Walking Dead are designed to be killed by your hand, but - for once - you're not quite meant to have fun doing it.