11. Dead Rising

Dead Rising puts you in the place of a journalist investigating the military’s quarantine of a Colorado town. Dropped into a mall, you find it swarming with zombies. The game allows you to do anything you want over a course of 72 hours. Technically, you could just kill as many zombies as you want and return to the helicopter when it comes to pick you up in three days. However, the game also has an interesting story about how the zombie uprising came to be, and encourages you to rescue survivors, dig into the story for the sake of journalism, and fall in love. The game provided every zombie gamer with his or her dream of playing what is basically a Dawn of the Dead-esque story. It was the reason I bought the 360 in the first place, and is still fun to play today. Wield any weapon you want. Use frying pans, novelty bear heads, and guns to attack zombies and rescue survivors.

10. Stubbs the Zombie

Though not perfect by any means, Stubbs the Zombie is one of the most fun games I’ve ever played. You take on the role of Stubbs, an traveling salesman who is murdered by the father of his girlfriend, Maggie Monday, and his body is dumped in the woods. The city of Punchbowl, Pennsylvania is built over his grave by Maggie’s son, Andrew Monday, and the activity stirs Stubbs to life. Once awakened, he is determined to take over the city that was built over his grave and to reunite himself with Maggie. No other game lets you play a zombie like Stubbs. He smokes a cigarette, yells “Brains!” and can command a horde of other zombies, because, as you go through Stubbs’ different levels, all those people you kill rise up to join your cause. Stubbs is funny, engaging, and is an imaginative twist on the zombie genre.

9. World War Z

Written by Max Brooks, the son of legendary director Mel Brooks, World War Z is a collection of stories gathered from interviews conducted by Mr. Brooks for the United Nations after humanity repelled and defeated a zombie apocalypse. The narrative swings around the world, telling stories such as The Battle of Yonkers, in which, early in the apocalypse, the U.S. Army tried to funnel zombies into a chokepoint just outside of New York City and were overrun by the sheer numbers of zombies. The stories are extremely diverse, funny, and often quite serious. They address real-world issues and paint a stunning portrait of a worldwide war against zombies. World War Z is highly detailed, entertaining and is the most ambitious zombie book ever written.

8. 28 Days Later

28 Days Later begins in a hospital. Jim, a British man in his twenties, awakes, hooked up to machines, from a 28-day coma. The hospital, he finds, is empty. Phones hang off their hooks, cots and stretchers and clothing lie strewn. The streets of London are empty. Cars have been crashed and newspapers speak of a horrible infection coursing through the country. As night falls, Jim enters a church to find that the piles of dead aren’t all dead. 28 Days Later is not technically a zombie film, director Danny Boyle asked reviewers not to use the “zed word” as the movie is about an infectious disease like rabies, not undead people rising from the grave. Eventually, Jim allies himself with several survivors who chase down a radio signal coming from the military near Manchester. But all is not as it seems. 28 Days Later is terrifying, thought provoking, and brilliantly acted and shot.

7. Left4Dead (series)

The Left4Dead series of games is developed by Valve, the creators of Half-Life and Team Fortress. It follows two different groups of survivors who must fend off zombies as they try to escape from the cities where the infection first arose. The game is optimized for multiplayer use, and offers many different modes. The most important are campaign, in which you and three other survivors must try to stick together and work together in order to survive against an onslaught of zombies as you move across cities and the countryside. Versus mode allows players to take on the roles of survivors and special zombies who have abilities such as spitting highly-toxic acid, leaping on survivors from afar, and charging at them, pummeling with brute strength. Versus mode asks survivors to simply make it to a checkpoint while the goal of the special zombies is to stop them. Addictive, highly replayable, and featuring the brilliant AI Director, which analyzes player strengths to create tension by throwing waves of zombies at the players and then suddenly creating long moments of silence without attacks.