Here’s one for you: What has three Academy Award nominees, buckets of pus, blood, guts, marrow, tissue, puke and bile, self-referential CGI bullet points, young stars discovered by Greg Mottola, a very original and thankfully less-than-serious take on post-apocalyptic films, endlessly quotable and profane dialogue, obscure (and hilarious) film references, the best celebrity cameo of the year (and possibly film history) and a title in common with the cheesiest nonexistent horror theme park ever? Battlefield Earth 2, directed by Quentin Tarantino? No. The answer is: Zombieland.

Left 4 Dead was Valve's big shooter title last fall. It's a cooperative 4-player shooter with a survival/horror theme. It introduced procedural monster and item spawning through an AI called the "Director", and also added true multi-threading support to the ever evolving Source engine. The gameplay is fun and intense, though at release time, there wasn't much content. I pre-ordered Left 4 Dead on Steam for $45 and burned out on it in about a week. However, Valve is now back with 2 new versus campaigns and a new game mode with 16 maps in this free downloadable content pack. The new mode pits your team against an infinite stream of monsters, with the goal of surviving for as long as possible. It's probably the most intense mode yet.

You can't make a story like this up. In fact, you really can't introduce it. So here it is: "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", a novel scheduled for release in June 2009.

While there is scant information on the novel, author (or is it co-author?) Seth Grahame-Smith estimates that 85 percent of the book is the original Jane Austen text of "Pride and Prejudice", with the other 15 percent being the zombie storyline. This text-hybrid turns the five Bennet sisters into zombie slayers and Mr. Darcy as a ninja expert, as they attempt to vanquish the zombies that have risen up in their village as the result of a plague.