House of the Dead: Overkill set the bar high for on-rail shooters for the Wii, bringing a linear game to life with solid gameplay and over-the-top humor.  Will Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles make a suitable rival?  I met up with Capcom’s Matt Delgran to find out.
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There are a decent variety of shooters, but I distilled them down to four essential types.  First-person shooters (FPS) like Sega’s upcoming The Conduit, on-rails shooters like House Of The Dead Overkill, Shoot ‘em ups (SHMUPS) like Gradius ReBirth, or scrollers like Metal Slug 7.

Vote and then tell us which game is your favorite shooter in comments!

Wowee!  What a week for new releases!  I can’t say much more than look at this list:

DS
My DoItAll
Retro Game Challenge

Wii
Deadly Creatures
NASCAR Kart Racing
Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers
The House of the Dead: Overkill

Not so much a question of what are you getting, but what have you been waiting to get this week?

Two nurses, their white scrubs dripping with blood, operate on a decimated body in the distance.

As you approach, an exaggerated voice breaks the silence.

“Your symptoms: cold sweats. Irregular heartbeat. Anxiety,” says the voice. “The diagnosis: bleeding horror that cuts like a scalpel to the heart. There is only one cure.”

“A white-hot bullet to the brain.”

So begins the early demo build of House of the Dead: Overkill, SEGA’s latest masterpiece of the macabre. IGN went hands-on with the game this week and posted a set of promising impressions.

It’s clear that this is still very much a work in progress. The characters animate a little stiffly and some of the camera transitions seem a little unrefined. But the zombie designs look fantastic. Not only are they gruesome, but they sport decidedly crisp skinning. The game runs in 480p/16:9 modes with a fluidity that hovers around 30 frames per second, and you’d have to be as cold and dead as the zombies you blow holes through to ignore the ridiculously over-baked, hammy comedic elements, which work very well within this universe.

Overkill is a new entry in the House of the Dead series. Developed exclusively for Wii developed by Headstrong Games, part of Battalion Wars developer Kuju Entertainment, it has a Q1 2009 release date.