Bored at work? Make your own Grindhouse-style House of the Dead: Overkill poster!
While the verdict‘s still out on whether or not The House of the Dead: Overkill will surpass The Typing of the Dead as the high point of Sega’s series of zombie shooting gallery games, there’s at least one thing the game looks to be getting right: the retro-horror Grindhouse art style, with all its giant bloody typefaces, over-the-top badass protagonists and “grainy” film filters. Of course some of the most iconic images that use that aesthetic are the posters, and now you can try your hand at your very own with this Overkill poster designer that Sega has so conveniently created for us.
It’s actually a pretty full-featured program that’s not unlike a mini-Photoshop. You get a choice of backgrounds which you can then slather with different designs, pictures of zombies, characters, vehicles and more. After that you can slap on a logo or some taglines like “Warning! This is adult content!” and then type in the names of your actors and director to go in the credits at the bottom (my movie stars JC Denton and was directed by Woofus T. Dog). Finally, you can tweak filters to make the poster look all beat up and dirty or mess around with the contrast. You also get a few basic tools for making different images bigger or smaller, and you can arrange layers on top or below each other to make different effects.
In my poster I used the same “zombies marching” picture but made them three different sizes and then stacked them on top of each other from smallest to biggest to give the impression of some perspective with the zombies coming at you. I put the title on top and the two main characters on either side, and then I kept the background basically blank to make it all simple but bold. I had two huge blood splashes in the back to give it some color, but thought it made it all too flashy. Anyway, that was fifteen minutes of my day totally not wasted.
Check out it out here. You might want to turn your sound off because it tends to play annoying sound clips whenever you click anything. Let’s see what posters you guys can whip up, you artless scoundrels.
[Via VideoGamer]
