Called "Monsters Among Us," it's one of very few opportunities to see George Lucas and an Indy-clad Steve Purcell rendered as 16-bit sprites that life's likely to throw on your lap. (The two games were in production side-by-side and in fact the B-movie-adulating Zombies fits fairly comfortably in the Maniac Mansion universe.) The in-joke themed bonus levels even include one that takes place inside the LucasArts offices themselves, where the developers are available for chatting. The password system can also be used to reach a few bonus levels, including one with a Day of the Tentacle theme. The bountiful cheat passwords, on the other hand, find a whole lot of use. Although playing for survival rather than heroism is tempting, the game doesn't mess around when it comes to the player's resource management responsibilities you have no chance of getting through the later levels without wisely stocking up on items and bonus points early on, which makes the password system fairly useless for returning anywhere but the first handful of stages. Levels are completed by walking through an exit door that appears when all of the neighbors are gone, either by your rescuing them or failing to. There's a level of exploration, but there's not a whole lot of time to take a breath. The game is a "3/4" top-down shoot 'em up where your time is spent frantically shooting enemies and collecting stuff. Simple and addictive, there's a classic arcade feel to the mayhem, with the accessibility of the controls keeping you hooked despite the harsh and exponentially increasing difficulty. The cemetery is teeming with zombies, of course, but so are some less expected places.īut it's the gameplay where Zombies truly excels. Even putting aside the solid gameplay, Zombies succeeds at being pretty amusing strictly from a presentation standpoint. There's even a level where the game makes all of the zombies look exactly like you and your partner (if you're playing co-op, which you should be) in an attempt to psyche you out. The enemies cover a similarly wacky spectrum, from classically depicted zombies to lightning fast, axe-wielding midgets, chainsaw-wheeling psychos, carnivorous plant life, werewolves, mummies, mutated blobs, three hundred foot babies, and more. The diverse array of items range from standard fare like first aid kits, keys used to unlock doors (though a bazooka will work just fine as a substitute), silverware, inflatable clowns, the infamously devastating Pandora's Box, and potions that temporarily turn you into a beefy, invincible purple monster. The humor extends to the arsenal of weapons and items at your disposal, from the default water gun (filled with holy water, of course) to soda pop, bazookas, and weedeaters. If the title didn't clarify the tone of the whole production, this is all executed in a fun, tongue-in-cheek send-up of B-grade scifi movies with a charming cartoonish style. One hundred percent of the sexes are accounted for by the character selection screen. Throughout locations ranging from suburban neighborhoods to shopping centers, Egyptian pyramids and haunted castles, the player's job is to navigate around the maze-like settings and nab as many hapless civilians as they can before the risen dead do while wasting the copious monsters and collecting ammo and other useful items. This apocalyptic scenario is faced head-on by a pair of trendy and well-armed teenagers named Zeke and Julie, who cheerfully embrace their volunteer roles as eradicators. Published by Konami and developed by LucasArts, Zombies Ate My Neighbors hurtles you into a world overrun by the undead, an infestation possibly extra-terrestrial in cause. One of these lesser known originals was the console gem Zombies Ate My Neighbors, whose recent addition to Nintendo's Virtual Console library on the Wii has granted it a much deserved second life a decade and a half after its original release. From the early Star Wars releases, such as TIE Fighter, to the occasional non-SCUMM original title, just about everything that came out of LEC in the early 90s was high caliber. I'm not just talking about our beloved graphic adventures, mind you. The golden days of LucasArts were categorized by the variety and consistent quality of its games.
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