The New York Times' resident game writer Seth Schiesel kicks off his review of Resident Evil 5 with a lengthy discourse on the racism controversy, invoking the one truism about zombies everyone keeps forgetting.
Seth brings the whole Resident Evil racism debate to a close by reminding us that anyone can become a zombie, and zombies have to be destroyed. I put forth that we take this notion a bit further, with a horde of multi-cultural zombies recording a special rendition of "We Are The World", before being mowed down by chain gun fire.
So Resident Evil 5 exposes the perhaps uncomfortable truth that blacks and Arabs can become zombies too, just like anyone else. Blacks and Arabs do not have a secret anti-zombie gene. And just like all the thousands of white, Asian and Hispanic zombies that have been dispatched in innumerable other games before them, the African zombies must also be destroyed, or at least neutralized.
I loaded up my copy of Resident Evil 5 this morning after reading this, and discovered that yes - neutralizing the zombies works much better than trying to hug them back to health.
There's No Time to Rest Until the Last Zombie in Africa Is Toast [The New York Times]