This is some good stuff.ĭamn, did it piss me off, though. Need I say more? Zombies has all the audiovisual flair you’d expect out of these folks, from its ghoulishly expressive pixel art to its theremin-infused score, which sounds like a dozen campy monster flicks at once. On top of that, it comes to us by way of LucasArts, a legendary studio that was in peak form back in the early ’90s. It’s a work by horror fans, for horror fans and its lengthy quest packs in hours of pick-up-and-play thrills for one or two players. It should be clear by now that there’s much to recommend Zombies Ate My Neighbors. You’ve gotta love those movie-accurate details. Hurling silverware at werewolves can dispatch them in one hit and cold-based attacks can kill the otherwise invincible blobs. On the plus side, many of the weirder weapons do have nifty situational uses against specific enemies. Trying to whip out your bazooka while a pack of giant ants is chasing you down? Hope you don’t accidentally tap that button an extra time in your haste and scroll right past it. Ignoring the dross would be easy if you weren’t limited to cycling through your inventory one-way in real time. You can wield over a dozen weapons, for example, which range from effectively useless (footballs) to absolutely vital (the bazooka). Most of the complexity comes from managing your massive inventory. Controls are dead simple, with eight-way movement/shooting and not much else. You have the overhead perspective, the multiplayer component (you and a friend can play at once), the labyrinthine layouts that often have you seeking out keys, potions, and such on your way to an exit door, the constant stream of tenacious foes, etc. In this instance, they’ll stay dead until you can meet the sizable score threshold required to earn a “bonus victim.” Trying to tackle any of the already brutal later stages with only one or two squishy neighbors left between you and the end of your run can get quite tense.Īpart from this neighbor rescue dynamic, the action here broadly resembles an evolution of Atari’s Gauntlet. They are stationary and completely helpless, after all. In practice, you’re almost certain to lose a few along the way. If all the neighbors bite the dust, it’s an instant game over. You begin the game with the goal of saving ten neighbors scattered around the opening level before the monsters slaughter them. The emphasis is firmly on the gameplay as you struggle to survive 48 stages of this madness (plus hidden bonus areas) while simultaneously preventing too many of your witless neighbors from becoming monster chow. Tongue, Zombies isn’t exactly what you’d call a plot-driven experience. Seeing the mushroom men from Matango pop up sure warmed my morbid little heart.ĭespite a throwaway blurb in the manual about how all these baddies are supposed to be working for the final boss, one Dr. What a concept! A couple of these selections are real deep cuts, too. There are killer dolls, pod people, chainsaw slashers, and, of course, an endless supply of good old Romero style cannibal zombies. ![]() Keen-eyed horror junkies will spot the giant ants from 1954’s Them!, the slimy star of 1958’s The Blob, invading aliens traced from Topps’ 1962 Mars Attacks trading cards, and even then contemporary terrors such as humongous burrowing worms modeled on the ones in 1990’s Tremors. Unlike in Castlevania, however, that’s merely the beginning. The game’s suburban teen heroes, Zeke and Julie, have to contend with the usual vampires, mummies, and Frankenstein monsters of 1930s Universal fame. ![]() Published by Konami for the Super Nintendo and Genesis in 1993, Zombies crams nearly sixty years of cinematic horror iconography into one intense run-and-gun escapade. LucasArts’ Zombies Ate My Neighbors should do nicely. ![]() Well, if I have to let another spooky season pass, it’s going to be with a monster mash of truly epic proportions. Egad! Is it the 31st already? Seems like only yesterday I was lighting up my jack-‘o-lantern at precisely 12:00 AM on October 1st.
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