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.