Zombies Ate My Neighbors is an SNES (and Genesis) game made by LucasArts (Lucasfilm). It's a combination maze and run-and-gun game with a self-parodying, classic horror film theme. You control a Bart Simpson wannabe in 3D glasses named Zeke or a girl in a purple jacket and red hat and shorts named Julie. Better yet: play with two players and get maximum enjoyment out of simultaneous play. Each of the game's more than 50 levels is a maze filled with monsters and ten neighbors to rescue. The neighbors are caricatures, like a cheerleader, guy barbecuing, guy floating in an inner tube, dog, girl on a trampoline, and tourists. As soon as a neighbor is on screen, if a monster touches it, they scream and turn into a ghost. If you touch them first, you save them and earn points. Once one dies, they're gone for the rest of the game. As a result, you'll have fewer and fewer to rescue as you progress. However, every time you earn 40,000 points, one neighbor is restored. If the las...

BurgerTime is another classic arcade game that already looked dated when it hit the NES in 1987. I played BurgerTime on a PC a few times when I was a kid, and it seemed primitive even then. Still, it's fun in a challenging kind of way. In BurgerTime you control a tiny chef named Peter Pepper, who is constructing hamburgers that dwarf him, all the while avoiding anthropomorphic food adversaries. They have very creative names: Mr. Egg, Mr. Pickle, and Mr. Hot Dog—whose small size suggests he's actually a cocktail wiener. Peter doesn't cook the burgers; he only assembles them by causing the buns, patty, and lettuce to fall into place. The components are vertically aligned, but on different levels. When he walks across one, it falls down one platform, which also crushes any enemies below it. If an enemy is on  the falling item at the time, it falls an additional platform and destroys the enemy. This is such a great advantage that it forms the most critical element of strategy....

Being an RPG fan, I tried hard to like The Tower of Druaga. A hit in Japanese arcades, it flopped in the U.S. and thus never got an NES version of the Famicom port. I can understand why: playing this game is an exercise in repetitive frustration.  The Tower of Druaga is what you get when you turn Pac-Man into an RPG dungeon-crawler. There are sixty mazes through which you must navigate the mythical hero Gilgamesh while slaying or avoiding enemies. Each stage has a locked exit and a key. Gil can kill enemies with his sword by holding A, but when doing so he puts to one side his shield, which normally protects his front from the projectiles of Magicians and Ghosts. Unlike later RPGs, there are no experience or hit points, so it's a steady stream of one-hit kills. I can only imagine how many 100-yen coins this game devoured. As with  Mappy and Dig Dug , the switch to a horizontal aspect ratio required the Famicom port of The Tower of Druaga to decrease the height of the levels. ...

Now here's a famous one! I played Dig Dug in an arcade in the 2000's, and I'm sure there are still more than a few out there, bringing in the occasional quarter. You can even pick up a modern Dig Dug + Dig Dug II "counter-cade" (arcade machine that sits on your counter) for about $150! Dig Dug debuted in 1982, and Japan got a Famicom port in 1985. Like other early Namco games (save Pac-Man ), it was passed over in the States in favor of its sequel. In hindsight, this was a mistake, as Dig Dug is far more popular. The Famicom cartridge Dig Dug's charm comes from its quirkiness. You control a little guy who digs rapidly through the ground, searching for fire-breathing dragons (called Fygars) and goggle-wearing Pookas to inflate with a pump until they pop like balloons! You can also undermine rocks so that they fall onto enemies (or yourself, if you're not quick!). There are twelve similar levels, which loop continuously. The world record was set by Donald H...

Clu Clu Land is a strange game I had never heard of until I played NES Remix . It's a maze game (kind of like Pac-Man) in which you control Bubbles, a fast-moving blowfish with hands, who can change directions only by grabbing poles and swinging around them. Moving Bubbles is counter-intuitive. You can't just push ← to go left or ↑ to go up; instead you have to press and hold the absolute direction you want to turn in, not her  left or right like turning a car. As long as you hold the button, she extends a hand in that direction and will grab the next pole. When she does so, she swings in that direction. For example, if you're moving upward, you could press ← to grab a pole to the left of her (regardless of whether she's moving upward or downward at the time), then quickly release it to make a 90 degree counter-clockwise turn. To make a u-turn, keep holding the direction until she's passed the 90-degree mark, then release. Describing this in words is about as confu...