Zombies Ate My Neighbo(u)rs

NeighboUrs, thank you very much.

It's hard to take a horror concept seriously when you've a back history of campy, cheesy, badly-made movies that don't really play on people's fears but instead, simply become risible with the low budget special effects, the poor acting and the god-awful monster suit some poor sod has to wear. So what course of action can one take with such things? Quite simple, lampoon the whole thing, make fun of it and create a parody of the whole situation. That is exactly what Zombies Ate My Neighbours is all about. Take the old clichés of the film industry, throw them all together into a game and you'll come up with basically this, an interesting take on the top-down, 8-way shooter from Konami.

Chilling out by the pool, don't expect this to be safe later on.

Take your two kooky kids (or one nut job and likely his hot sister/unlikely friend, still playing on the bad B-Movies situations here) who realise there's monsters invading their place. Armed with the trusty water pistol, they're going to take on the monsters, the zombies, the werewolves, the blobs, plants, clones, hockey-mask-wearing-chainsaw guys, demonic dolls, giant ants, Martians, mad scientists, Frankenstein's Monsters and Dracula just to name a FEW of the creatures you'll find in this.

The variety and difference in levels is huge, but keeps the game fresh.

Your main objective, is to find all the innocents in the level and then exit through the magic exit (it just appears where you are...) without all of your innocents dying off. If you lose them all, game over right there and then regardless of the lives you have left. On some levels you're GOING to lose people and just hope you're not starting with just one person. In other levels you'd better be REAL quick on the task before some change into monsters and others are outright killed by the zombie you can see walking towards them while you're on the other side of a wall. A touch of unfairness in there but you CAN win some people back if you get sufficient scores during the levels. So a little bit of balance there.

Silverware for a one hit kill, nearly every monster has a weakness.

There's a LOT going on in this game. For a start, there's plenty of levels, plenty of items and plenty of weapons. Though in some ways there's TOO many. Aside from SOME of the monsters I named at the top and some more I just recalled, Mushroom people, Fish men, there's a lot of items to be found and used ranging from keys (more about that in a moment), inflatable clowns (decoys), Pandora's Box (the Big Weapon of the game, does a LOT of damage but rare), health packs, potions to turn you into an invincible monster, or a ghost, or random ones that can turn you into a zombie and kill the other player and innocents. Weapons range from water pistol, to soda can (grenade effectively), bazooka (great for blowing down walls), weed-whacker, tomatoes, plates, cutlery (silver... great for werewolves), ice-lollies, fire extinguishers (freezes some enemies, kills fire ones), bubble guns (great against ants) and many more including secret bonus ones.

It's the Blob! Where's Steve McQueen when you need him?

Therein, lies a problem... You've only one way to navigate through each list, with one button for each list taking you to the next weapon and not going backwards until you reach the end and come back to the start. So if you go past the weapon or item you're looking for, tough shit, you're going back through that list again. Not so great when you've rampaging monsters running after you, or, god forbid, need a health pack as you're on the last sliver of health.

Yes he made those holes, yes he killed the innocent, yes he's hard to kill.

Those aspects, as well as the unfairness of losing innocents to monster attacks you either can't see or they turn into monsters (nice going Konami, that's a half-foot floppy dickmove to the face...) some of the maps have wonderful little things called doors. These doors require either a key, being a monster to punch it (and damaged walls) down, or a bazooka to blow it apart. Unless it's a skull door, in which you either have a skull key or you're not getting in. Some skull keys can be found in hideaways, some in secret places (need a bazooka and knowledge of it BEING there) and some are on bosses. Such as the giant baby... Moves fast, flattens you and gives you NO chance to move once hit until you're standing up again, so it can railroad you to death it wanted. It also flattens innocents which then fucks your game up.

Either for fights like this or getting through lots of walls, monster potions are helpful.

The levels themselves however are bright, varied and intriguing. There's a few running themes in the levels, you've your backyard suburbia, malls, factories, hedge mazes (with those hockey guys... you either know what I'm talking about or you'll learn quickly to fear them), swamps, football fields, pyramids, castles (usually with vampires and/or Frankenstein's monster, or worse, a BIG boss), with some levels set in the daytime, some in the night-time. The music accompanying the levels ranges from the chirpy upbeat numbers that bounce jauntily along, to the sombre and ploddingly paced themes that would accompany a long hard slog ahead, to the downright fear inducing which usually goes along with any level that's got Hockey Mask guys. And then there's the giant baby music, which just sounds hilarious and would be were it not for the fact you've a giant baby with which to contend.

I'm the one in the far bottom-left.... maybe...

It's a long game, it's a hard game and in many places it becomes unfair and unwinnable. But if you're lucky, and you're careful, you can get through this but good luck trying to get to the real bosses and even more luck to you if you're heading for the secret bonus levels. Grab some codes off the internet or add in some Action Replay stuff and you'll still find this a tough one to crack. But still worth a good long look if only for the references and overall fun this game initially gives you before it ramps up the difficulty until it's leaning over you and coming down like a tonne of bricks.

Things games should not do.

In a recent review, I might have touched upon the idea of games companies doing certain things in certain ways that might make games a little more appealing to the consumer/gamer of today. Or more specifically, where I believe games companies are falling down and, whether rightly or wrongly, doing things that show them up to be lazy or giving the player the feeling that things were rushed before finalising the game and kicking it out the door to die in the cold.


End of game Gauntlets:

Setting: You've played the game, got to the final levels and discovered the dark secret of Person X, you've saved the nearest and dearest, you've fought your way past insurmountable odds towards the inevitable showdown between yourself, the plucky protagonist and the asshat, the evil antagonist, only for them to run off and you're instead facing a horde of enemies. Most of which you've killed already in some fasion.

It feels cheap. So much potential in having a satisfactory big bust up with the final boss and instead you get to fight an army of low level shitheads that you can easily one-shot or insta-kill thanks to either your high level of capability, massively over powered weapons or common-place experience through playing the game to this point and having a fine understanding of the intricacies of the games control system.

Admittedly, sometimes it's hard to shoehorn in a decent boss fight. Most games will take the "giant boss" option instead where something demonic rises up, or a robot suit, or something that gives the final boss a boost to make them worthy of being a final boss. But more on that later.

The biggest grievance is not that there's a gauntlet at the end of the game, but that it IS the end of the game. Nothing wrong with having a mad dash where the last person throws every single remaining grunt and solider at you THEN having themselves stand up and fight you personally. But having the grunts taken down and there being no final payoff other than a cutscene, robs the player of that final great satisfaction and epic beat-down the final boss deserves in a game. Particularly more so in games where there's such conflict built up in the story telling.

Would Star Wars been as impressive if instead of fighting Darth Vader, Darth Maul, The Emperor etc in a one on one epic fight, they just threw a few hundred troopers and robots at you and then either run off or killed themselves? No, of course it wouldn't have.


'Not quite the ending' games:

Setting: You've run the gauntlet (maybe killed the boss - see above), you've placed the magical item in its rightful place, you've hit the power switch and diverted power from the over class to the underdogs, righted the wrongs and emerged triumphant atop the still-charred remnants of your enemies bodies and now you're here to watch and recieve, closure. That last cut scene where you see the fruits of your labors, the pay off after so much hard work and the end to all the strife and struggling those you have fought for, have suffered. Except you're left with an ambiguous little scene that shows that something has happened, but not exactly what and in such little detail that the game COULD be continued or not... For Fuck's Sake.

There's little more annoying than not getting the full story, especially in a video game. If the game designer is FULLY AWARE of the intention of making a game, they can at least put in "Continued in Generic Game #2" or such at the end, but there's a growing number of games being made where the ending is not absolute, there is nothing ultimate about the final scene and there's that idea another game could be made to continue the ending of the story. Usually by this point, nobody will give a ripe shit about it.

Game's makers seem to be in a limbo where a large number of games WON'T end the story as they could milk it for more, and leave it in a state of near-finish so that we could get more out of it. Though just as equally we could have a different storyline in the same universe/world, or a prequel or dare I say it... a DLC add-on (Asuma's Wrath might get away with that one as they allegedly ran out of space on the disc to include the final few chapters... not sure which side of the anger I sit there).

Ending a game completely in plot, stops games makers from being able to milk an up-coming franchise for what it could be worth and instead force closure (or not at all, an even bigger crime to be made there) so that people will know it's the end and that's IT. Publishers likely won't want that so there's the chance of milking it further if the game becomes an unexpected success. For players it will mean games will end and everything tied up neatly and that once a game has ended something NEW will have to come out instead of "Captain BuggerBollocks 6: We thought up a few more shitty plotlines" is forced to be spewed out of whatever orifice the devil is jackhammering at that point.

Various sequels did it well, games that were made that were not so much a continuation of the original story but more a side-line to the original. Prototype managed it by having it as both of these things, a continuation and a different main character to the original. While games like Grand Theft Auto have the name as only the thing that links the similar concepts and games like Final Fantasy are only tied together by the fact they're made under the same company heading and very few have any actual sequels or set in the same universe at all. (Except there's chocobos and Cid... usually). Which takes this point so far in the other extreme that the games could be NAMED properly and would still be effective as stand alone games. The Silent Hill games set around the eponymous town but with different stories happening at different times, all of which can reference each other but remain firm as stand alone stories and the end of the game being the end of THAT story, are another good example of how to do sequels without bullshit endings.


Excessive DLC downloads:

Setting: The game is there, you've paid £40, $60 or however much you normally pay for the price of a game and then left to take it home, slap it into the console (or install it) and then play the game. All is fine however until you realise that there's possibly something missing, so you head over to the game's DLC section or whichever market place there is for the game and realise that the character you've been playing as, could look better in 1 of 47 different outfits and get ups. Now you realise your character WOULD look better dressed up as a cowboy (in a space age game) or a disco diva (in Hell fighting minions... sounds good actually).

It's more common place in beat-em-up games to have this odd abundance of clothing outfits for the all the characters. Particularly the women, particularly the young women, and wearing less clothing than a porn star mid-coitus. Seriously, I've seen naked people with more clothing than some of the outfits in these games. In some DLC sets, the entire cast gets an alternative costume but in the extreme cases, you can buy hundreds of outfits for one character at a time.

Looking at the DoA5 set, I'm going with the assumption that you'll have purchased the game for around $40, as a rough middle-ground figure. And for further assumptions, only to include sets of DLC i.e. A 3 in 1 pack rather than buying 3 packs if all 3 are found in the 3 in 1 pack. So pack 1 is free for now, pack 2 is $12.99 as is pack 3, so another $12.99, swimwear pack as an optional $12.99 depending upon whether you have the collectors edition, costume pack 4 at $7.99, pack 5 at $12.99, $7.99 for the pack 6 christmas set, another $7.99 for a 2nd xmas pack making pack 7, $12.99 for the swimwear set and bonus level (level is free anyway), $4.99 for pack 9, a cheerleader set for $8.99, hotties set for another $12.99 which makes up the 10th named pack. Now... bit of maths... $144.86... add on the total for the game in the first place, $185 roughly.

Some people will argue, pointlessly, "You don't HAVE to have it" which begs the questions, Why would it be there in the first place then? Why couldn't it have been included with the game in the first place, particularly if it's ALREADY on the disc and just being unlocked/accessed and more importantly, why not have something worthwhile on the DLC than just a remapping of textures and a few model changes, when nothing fundamental changes as a result of the installation?

I could understand if there was insufficient room on the disc, or the content being provided was of significant change to the game, such as a map-pack (which can get quite large with some of the more detailed ones out there) or a new High Def texture pack for EVERYTHING, but this is a cheap and shitty attempt to milk money by making people flash cash for flashing flesh back at the player.

Yes, I've turned every player that purchases this, into a punter at a strip bar.