REVIEW: ZOMBIES ate my neighbours 1993 SNES
	By: Lucas Arts, Konami Type: Shoot 'em up Players: 1-2 Difficulty: Hard

The concept is simple: mix Smash TV with Castlevania and add a dash of XTC. The result is a huge top-down view shooter that pokes fun at cheapo horror movies and is very enjoyable to play.
     When Boringtown is suddenly overrun by a swarm of B-movie monsters, two youngsters decide to go into battle against the infernal hordes armed with their super-turbo-kamehameha water squirt guns and stop the nasties from gobbing up all the hapless "neighbours". The BBC must have been wailing in despair when they realised the wasted potential of their "Neighbours".
      In each level, there are ten hapless victims, who just stand around and wait for the monsters to attack them instead of legging it (they're all stoned on cocaine?). Your task is to reach these victims and save them, achieved simply by touching them, as if you were picking up a power-up (realism is flung right out of the window, but then again, it's a game), before the baddies locate and devour them. Once this task is accomplished, an exit appears out of thin air and you can bugger off to the next level. You must save at least one victim on each level. Should the monsters manage to eat every one of them, it's curtains for you.

That's quite a task in itself, but fighting the monsters will also take up a lot of your time. There are loads of them, and they get seriously nasty later on. From your common-or-garden zombies, werewolves and axe-wielding maniacs (not Jerzy) to more exotic beasties such as giant ants, slime blobs, walking mushrooms and even giant babies, they're all in there. Almost every single kind of movie monster you care to think of has joined the chaos and is hell-bent on getting it's hands on you. Ooh, just imagine the possibilities. None of it takes itself seriously, though, and instead of being scary, the game is full of hokey gags. Just to prove you that having nasty monsters around doesn't mean you can't have fun.
      It's not just all mindless shooting, though. There's a slight strategy element in there in the form of keys that need to be collected, bazooka ammo that needs to be used very wisely (it kills monsters, but more importantly, it can blast away certain walls and doors), and some monsters that are more vulnerable to some weapons than others. There are loads of oddball weapons for you to collect, ranging from lawnmowers to magic amulets (cycling through all of them until you find the one you want to use can be quite a pain sometimes).
     The best bit has to be the two-player simultaneous mode, though, which greatly increases the game's long-term fun. And when there's so much good stuff, it's easy to forgive the few niggles, such as a slightly iffy control system, a little lack of variety between the levels and some of the later levels being a bit unfair, really. Graphics and presentation are a little bland as well, but it's not too bad, and there are some very good sound effects (the werewolves' scream when they die is one of the greatest comical moments in videogame history).
     Zombies is a good, solid blaster with an original and very funny concept behind it that makes it a little more special than other shooters. After all, a game that give you the opportunity to kill forty-feet babies with exploding soda cans can't be bad. - Toasty 88%

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