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...

Star Fox was a breakthrough on the Super Nintendo because it was a true 3D spaceship shooter. Every object was made of a few polygons, but it didn't matter: in just over a decade we had gone from Space Invaders to this! The breakthrough that allowed 3D on a video-game console was the Super FX chip, advertised prominently on the Star Fox box. The chip wasn't made by Nintendo but by Argonaut Games (now defunct). Some people say the game hasn't held up well because the 3D is so primitive. The enemy are flying patterns of polygons more than anything resembling a proper ship, and the frame rate is very low. It doesn't bother me, but it does look primitive compared even to Star Fox 64 , which came out four years later. Star Fox is a space-shooting game in which you control an anthropomorphic fox named . . . Fox. He and his three wingmen fly Arwings (an obvious ripoff of the X-wings from Star Wars ). The wingmen are Falco Lombardi (a blue bird), Slippy Toad, and Peppy Hare. Th...

Contra exemplifies the classic run-and-gun genre of video games. The NES port improves upon Konami's 1986 arcade game. It usually appears near the top of "best of NES" lists. I may be one of the few people who, despite owning an NES, never played Contra or either of its two sequels . I discovered Contra only after playing these sequels on the NES and SNES Classic. Truth be told, run-and-gun isn't my favorite genre, in part because I don't often play with a second player. Where Contra shines is in its simultaneous two-player action. Even Ikari Warriors , the NES version of which is bad, received plaudits merely for offering simultaneous two-player at a time when that was rare on home consoles. Contra blows that game out of the proverbial water. In Contra you control Bill (and Lance, if a second player joins). In the arcade and Famicom versions, the setting is an alien planet in the 27th century, but the NES port was rebranded to take place in the present (1980...

Sky Kid is a 1985 horizontal shoot-'em-up arcade game. Created by Namco, it was ported to the NES in 1987 by Sunsoft (who would soon turn the arcade game Wonder Boy into Adventure Island ). The NES version faithfully reproduces the World War I dogfighting of the original. In Sky Kid you are a World War I flying ace named Baron. A second player (Max) can join for simultaneous play—watch out for friendly fire! Sky Kid distinguishes itself from other shooters in several respects. For starters, the sreen scrolls (automatically) from left to right. When you press ↑ or ↓, your biplane pitches up or down at a 45-degree angle rather than unrealistically shifting up or down. If you fire your machine gun (press A) while changing altitude, the bullets shoot diagonally in the direction the plane is facing. Pressing B causes the plane to do a vertical loop. This is a crucial move. While looping, the plane passes harmlessly through bullets and enemy craft. However, you still must be mindful of t...

Stinger is the sequel to TwinBee , an early vertical shooter from Konami that was not released in the U.S. (until 2011). While the original TwinBee began life as an arcade game, this and several other TwinBee sequels were Famicom and Super Famicom games only. In Japan, Stinger was called Burning TwinBee: The Rescue of Dr. Cinnamon! I don't know what "Stinger" is supposed to mean. The main difference between TwinBee and Stinger is that the first, third, and seventh stages of the sequel are horizontal rather than vertical (no doubt due to the success of Gradius ). Like TwinBee, Stinger uses a strange power-up system: shooting clouds causes bells to appear. If you juggle these bells by shooting them, they change color every five bounces, with each color offering a different effect. On the vertical stages, you shoot bells with your normal attack (press B). On the horizontal stages, you use the A button to launch a heart-shaped projectile upward. This is used both to release a...

Twenty-five years ago today, Star Fox 64 was released in America. It surpassed its SNES predecessor, Star Fox , in every way. Star Fox 64 is an on-rails shooter. "On rails" means that your ship always moves forward along a pre-determined path, like a roller coaster. Within this path you can move around on the screen using the d-pad. You can speed up briefly by holding ←C or slow down with ↓C (the N64 controller has a C button in each orthogonal direction). Speeding up uses a boost meter, which needs a few seconds to refresh before you can boost again. The main gameplay element is shooting enemy ships with your laser (press A). Holding the button down for a second charges the laser. Charging has the added advantage of locking onto an enemy and doing splash damage to those next to it. The game records how many ships you destroy on each level and uses the total to create an arcade-style ranking, where you input your name for eternal glory (my best score so far is an unimpressive...

Thirty years ago Konami published Contra III for the SNES, a sequel to the wildly popular Contra and Super C on the NES. Unlike those games, Contra III is not based on an arcade game but was made specially for the Super NES. The Contra series is considered the pinnacle of the run-and-gun genre. Especially because of the high volume of alien enemies, the games are best enjoyed with two players. Interestingly, Contra III lets you choose between full-screen and split-screen, the latter letting the players separate. As with almost every SNES sequel, Contra III basically recreates the original NES game with 16-bit technology, audio, and visuals. Not having played it before, I was surprised to discover that it contains only six levels, two less than the NES games! That's disappointing. In all the classic Contra games, the first player controls Bill and the second Lance, who seek vengeance for a devastating attack in the year 2636 by an alien enemy called the Red Falcon. Actually, there...

Earth Defense Force is an SNES port of the 1991 arcade game of the same name. The title screen places a small "Super" before the title, but the box and cartridge just call it Earth Defense Force, same as the arcade version. I've never played the original, but apparently it has less weapons, a two-player option (sadly lacking here), and some different levels. Earth Defense Force differs from your typical side-scrolling shooter in that you choose your weapon and speed without having to pick up items. The ship, the XA-1, has three different speeds you can toggle between by pressing X (though I always use the highest speed). Before each stage, you select one of eight weapons. You can choose whichever you think is the most fun or useful. Two of the weapons stand out as superior: Homing and the Search Laser. Homing homes in on the enemy (duh). Search Laser achieves the same effect because with it your satellite ships automatically turn toward the enemy. You see, the XA-1 carrie...

Ikari Warriors on the NES is a port of the 1986 arcade game by SNK. It's a run-and-gun vertical shooter based on the movie Rambo II. However, SNK never acquired the licensing rights, so they renamed it Fury—not a bad title, but then it was changed to Ikari Warriors in English translation. What made Ikari Warriors popular was its use of two rotary joysticks, which allowed the player to control both the direction in which the hero walks and, separately, the direction in which he shoots his machine gun. However, NES controllers have only a d-pad, so the game's best feature could not be transferred. Even worse, in a case of excessive fidelity, the characters still rotate as they move, even though you can no longer control this rotation independently from movement direction. As a result, turning around to face enemies coming from different directions is slow. The original game had agile characters who could strafe, but the NES versions can't even turn around effectively! They wa...