kartooner

Out of all the Super Nin­tendo games cre­ated, one game comes to mind that com­bined zany humor and unique game­play: Zom­bies Ate My Neigh­bors (ZAMN).

Devel­oped by Lucasarts, Zom­bies Ate My Neigh­bors was cre­ated exclu­sively for the Sega Gen­e­sis and Super Nin­tendo. ZAMN fea­tured top-down iso­met­ric, two-player coöper­a­tive game­play, car­toon graph­ics and hilar­i­ous inter­ac­tions between the player and the enemy mon­sters. In this case, the slew of mon­sters included the clas­sic 50’s shlock movie mon­sters; Wolf­men, Zom­bies, Crea­ture from the Black Lagoon, Childs Play Chucky-esque dolls and giant 40-foot babies. Who couldn’t love this kind of mate­r­ial? I surely can’t think of any­one, wait, okay, maybe one per­son but still.

The sto­ry­line, not one of ZAMN’s strong points, was akin to the plot­lines in vin­tage 40’s and 50’s mon­ster movies. In this case, your objec­tive was to save your neigh­bors (among them; tourists, a teacher who graded you with an F– and the friendly neigh­bor­hood dog) from the mon­sters. To com­plete a level you basi­cally had to save at least one of these neigh­bors (or all of them prefer­ably) and a por­tal would mag­i­cally appear allow­ing you to progress to the next level. In order to accom­plish this feat you were equipped with an arse­nal of weapons includ­ing Holy Water-filled squirt guns, explod­ing soda, bazookas, and other items. My weapon of choice was a potion that would trans­form your char­ac­ter into a pur­ple mon­ster hell-bent on destruction.

I can remem­ber wast­ing hours with my brother as we teamed up to save the goofy neigh­bors. The lev­els would get pro­gres­sively more dif­fi­cult and we would end up in shout­ing matches over who wasn’t putting in enough effort. Ulti­mately, it would be resolved and we’d keep trying.

When ZAMN 2 came out, shortly after the first one, we were still engrossed in the sequel, although not as much as our first encounter with ZAMN. Which goes to show you that sequels are never as good as their orig­i­nals, much like the atro­cious Beast­mas­ter 2 sequel.