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Monday 14 January, 2008
It was a game that destroyed barriers, inspired generations and touched the hearts of maybe a thousand people tops. I’m talking about Zombies Ate My Neighbors: a game for SEGA Genesis that would seem impossible to beat to the untrained eye, but one who spends a few hours playing will realize that it is indeed impossible to beat.
This game is mostly enjoyable for a few levels. The soundtrack is haunting, jazzy, and all around awesome. It is probably the biggest redeeming quality of the game.
The player is given two options of character. Zeke is a cool kid with spiked hair, 3-D glasses, and a skull on his shirt (Whoah! Cool!) and Julie is a rather lame looking girl in a loud pink jacket. Honestly, if the zombie apocalypse were real and I had to choose between being one of those two clowns or being a zombie the undead option would become much more appealing. Their initial tacky appearance becomes less of an issue when playing the game since they are compressed into granulated blocks of color viewed from a high angle as they roam through the various levels saving seemingly clueless people. I should also mention that there are merely 48 levels and each player is given a whopping three lives with absolutely no way to gain more lives. The player is expected to make do with sparse items and medical kits. The controls can be difficult to manage while playing the game. If one wants to change a weapon they must press two of the three buttons at once. The status and inventory of each character is displayed in a window which takes up the right vertical fourth of the screen in an annoyingly small font. Trying to look back and forth between the status bar and the game play is distracting and usually costs health points and lives.
The perpetually respawning monsters which Zeke and Julie battle become exponentially harder. Jumping werewolves, chainsaw wielding maniacs, and red alien plants reminiscent of the creeping vines in War of the Worlds are almost impossible to kill. The first boss is a giant baby that moves so fast it is nothing short of unfair.
Zeke and Julie instantaneously travel from suburban neighborhoods to pyramids to factories in a desperate hope to save tourists, babies, and explorers whose lives are sometimes taken right before they would have been saved. The player intermittently receives cheat codes to return to the game at a later time. Cheating seems to be the only way to beat this game. The interesting aspect of saving people is that the player who saves more people gets bonus points. In this sense the game is both cooperative and counter operative at the same time which adds a competitive dynamic to multiplayer. Often times the two characters will go to separate ends of the map only to find themselves trapped by an invisible border that confines them to the same scale the entire game.
The futility of fighting against zombies may be somewhat symbolic of this game’s impossible game play. There is no escape from being overwhelmed in a real zombie apocalypse. The only way to buy some time would be to cheat so you have a better chance of living longer, but even then it is inevitable that you will be destroyed by a crowd of never ending zombies.
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