The horror. The horror! And the cliches. The cliches!

Before they were attached permanently and seemingly irreversibly to the Star Wars franchise - and nothing else - Lucasfilm/LucasArts were one of the greatest game developers of all time. Let's just go back over a few greatest hits here, for example: The Dig - a breathtakingly well written and fascinating piece of science fiction; the Monkey Island games (particularly the first two, less so the later ones, but they're still better than most); Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle - all of which are amazingly funny and clever adventures; Outlaws, a great FPS set in the wild west (a surprisingly underused setting for such games); and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe among other excellent flight sims.


LucasArts continued to make wonderful Star Wars games after they got the license (the X-Wing series, Dark Forces and Jedi Knight, and - for me, at least, Rebellion) but eventually it became almost a weight around their necks, and the creativity, the humour and the storytelling that the company was so well known for got drowned out by the almost-guaranteed money that Star Wars games generated.


While LucasArts were perhaps best known for their work on PC compatibles and the Amiga, when they were at the height of their powers in 1994, they issued a relatively low-key console release: published by Konami on Super NES and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, came Zombies Ate My Neighbours. While the official title in this country and many others is simply Zombies!, I much prefer the original name, as it captures such a vital part of what the game is about: B-movie cliches.


Zombies is not a deep game. It's a Gauntlet-esque overhead title, best played with a friend, in which you run around suburban America killing zombies, werewolves, possessed dolls, vampires and everything else you possibly ever saw in a horror film. Meanwhile, you're trying to rescue all the neighbours, an assortment of people from cheerleaders to teachers to safari hunters. The environment is interactive: you can swim, jump on trampolines,unlock doors or - if sufficiently armed, blow up walls instead using a bazooka. Speaking of being armed, your weaponry ranges from your default water-gun weapon up through soda-can grenades, ice-creams that go off like catherine wheels and even a potion that turns your avatar into a b-movie monster themselves.

Everything in this game, from your avatars to the neighbours to the monsters, is filled with character. The male character, Zeke, wears 3d-glasses while Julie prefers a baseball cap, something that renders them still identifiable when they're in their monster forms. The sprites are huge (especially compared to games that preceded Zombies in this genre) and packed with detail. The whole thing is so lovingly made and, indeed, such a love-letter to the genre it's lampooning. Just when you think they've trotted out all the cliches, they find another one, and it's fantastic.

There is little between the MD and SNES versions, but I would plump for the Sega version - I prefer the music and the radar is always on screen. The SNES version is full screen but you have to pull up the radar and it bothered me a little. That said, the extra screen space is nice when you're in two player mode, so...really, I don't know which I prefer. Both are excellent, and the SNES version is available now on Wii VC, so definitely give it a go. If your idea of a good time is blowing away Zombies with friends, then I don't think this game has ever really been bettered.

A tale of nerds in love....

Those of you old enough to remember the Atari Lynx may remember one of its better titles - the launch game, Chip's Challenge. Developed by Chuck Sommerville while he was at Epyx (the people who originally created the Lynx), the game was designed to be a challenging, pick-it-up-and-never-put-it-down puzzler. Rather than being about falling blocks or shuffling tiles, Chip is an evolution of the maze game - and overhead run around, dodging and manipulating monsters, switches and tools to ensure victory, allowing Chip to make it through Melinda the Marvel's science clubhouse and win her heart (as far as stories about self-proclaimed nerds go, it's still more believable than The Big Bang Theory).

The game was launched on the Lynx and, despite not being the most technically impressive release on that console (which was capable of great things: several superb arcade conversions can be found on it) it remained one of the system's pillars. Epyx went on to convert it to several 8-bit computers (the Commodore 64 version is quite good) and Microsoft licensed it themselves for conversion to DOS and, most famously, Microsoft Windows, where it became a part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack.

This is where I first encountered it, when our 286 was upgraded to Windows 3.0 and boy did I love it. I was about 6 and not very good at it, it's got to be said, but as I grew older the game revealed more and more of its secrets to me (and the internet came along and then I could find out all the passwords). The Microsoft conversion is not well liked by Somerville himself, as the enemies move solidly from tile-to-tile, whereas previously they were somewhat more smoothly animated. This, occasionally, made it hard to tell which way they were going. I couldn't have cared less at the time, I thought the game was absolutely fantastic.

Sommerville set about creating a sequel in the early 1990s, but it was knocked on the head by copyright disputes (especially after Epyx went bankrupt, a piece of business trickery by Atari that makes one wonder at the decency of human beings - well, at least human beings in multi-million dollar businesses). It languished, finished but unreleasable. Sommerville released Chuck's Challenge 3d, a lovely little spiritual sequel, and fundamentally similar games like The Land of Um made appearances, but nothing really scratched that Chip's Challenge itch, especially as the original has been out of print since the Windows 95 era.

Until now, as Chip's Challenge has not only been released on Steam, but also the long awaited sequel, and a level editor. The sequel is fundamentally more of the same, but with new assets and stacks of new levels. The level editor supplants a long unofficial one based on the Microsoft version. The new version is closer, aesthetically, to the Lynx original than the Windows port, which may or may not thrill you (I personally preferred the Windows version's look, but I suspect that's largely because it's what I grew up with). The game certainly isn't ugly, at any rate, and is now accompanied by jaunty piano music which never quite grates - or it hasn't yet. I've only just started playing.

The glory of Chip's Challenge is that, as much as you can sink hours into solving its puzzles, it's also something you can have a quick blast on on a coffee break, flicking to and from it as a nice little diversion. A GOG release wouldn't go astray (Steam is nice on my home PC but I would like a DRM-free version for my laptop), but all up, Chip's Challenge is a blast from the past that still feels as fun, refreshing, and simultaneously familiar-but-unique as ever it did.