Videogamers love zombies. Zombies are ideal for guilt-free slaughter. You can kill a hundred of these guys, popping their skulls like bloated ticks, and no one will mind. After all, it's not like you're killing anyone, since they're already dead. Plus, zombies aren't the least bit cute, so they rarely get any sympathy. You mom or wife can come in the room where you're killing a thousand zombies and she'll go, "That's nice, dear".

In fact, zombies are a great way to subvert the German government. When the notoriously violent Carmageddon was released in 1997, the German ratings board was uncomfortable with a game about moving down pedestrians with Death Race 2000-style cars. They refused to certify it, meaning it couldn't be published in the country. So the developers just colored the blood green and said, "Ta-da! Look, they're zombies!" The ratings board fell for it and Germans were able to play Carmageddon.

And what better time than Halloween eve for a look back at zombies in videogaming?

After the jump are the ten best zombie games of all time.

10. Zombies Ate My Neighbors
Although this game was a wide ranging monster mash-up, zombies got lead billing in this Lucasarts game from 15 years ago. The title said it all, although the tense was a little off. Ideally, you would protect your neighbors so that the title never came to pass.

9. Alone in the Dark
This was the very first survival horror game. You were locked in a house with moaning shuffling zombies and not nearly enough bullets to take them all out. Although the scale was a bit off, it was a classic stab at what made zombies scary: there are just too many of them!

8. Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse
This was the first games to take the side of the zombies by letting you play as a zombie. I didn't play it. In fact, I'm pretty sure no one did. But it's still a great concept, which goes a long way in the zombie genre.

7. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows
In this game, New York City is overrun by the parasitic alien being responsible for Spider-Man's black suit and the villain Venom. The citizen are turned into gibbering psychotic masses. SHIELD moves in with helicopters to patrol the streets and APCs to set up mobile rescue stations. If it weren't for Spider-Man giving the proceedings a comic book angle, this would be the definitive open-world zombie city simulator.

6. Half-Life
Are people with headcrabs latched onto their skulls technically zombies? I say 'yes', since they walk just zombies. In fact, the moan of the headcrab afflicted is an iconic zombie sound effect for videogamers. And as the old saying goes, "If it walks like a zombie, and if it talks like a zombie..." But to seal the deal, just stroll through Ravenholme in Half-Life 2. That's the videogame version of a zombie horror movie.

5. Halo
Okay, now it gets a little trickier. What about people afflicted by the Flood? They can still use guns. Are they zombies? The correct answer is, "Of course". What was cool about Halo zombies was how the game started out pitting you against aliens. Pretty straightforward. And then when you least expect it, zombies! Because that's how zombies get you. You let your guard down and there they are.

4. Resident Evil
In 1996's Resident Evil, zombies were ready for their close up. You remember the famous scene in which you approached someone hunched over a dead body, only to have that person turn around and reveal himself as a zombie eating a dead body. From then on, zombies were on the scene in all their gory brain-eating glory.

3. Saints Row 2
You probably didn't expect this one. But if you go to any TV in Stillwater, you can boot up Zombie Uprising, which is one of the best contemporary zombie slaughterfests you can play. Make careful use of the available weapons to stay alive as long as you can. Keep your fellow survivors alive, if only to distract the zombie swarms from coming after you.

2. They Hunger
This wasn't technically its own game, but it was one of the best portrayals of zombies in all of videogaming. Neil Manke's mods for Half-Life 1 were drenched in zombie-loving atmosphere, from the slow build up and dread to the inevitable moment you'd die because you picked the wrong time to reload. Zombies have a way of being able to take advantage of that exact moment.

1. Dead Rising
This remains the definitive zombie game, presenting them as ravenous inexorable hordes instead of shuffling clusters. It got everything right about who zombies are (Zombies are everyone! Zombies are you and me, but dead!), how they operate (enormous packs of hungry mindless beasts), how they should be killed (every which way!), and where they live (in a mall, duh). No game understands zombies better than Dead Rising.