Zombies Ate My Neighbors and Ghoul Patrol

The 1990s were such a fascinating era to grow up in. Clarissa explained it all on TV, Dolly was cloned, dinosaurs were everywhere in media and horror movies were going through a general evolution, from generic popcorn shlock to more elaborate, philosophical and most importantly productions that were more subtle in their horror - and thus, LucasArts decided to instead make a co-op top-down shooter that pays tribute to horror movies from the 1950s to the 80s. Only to have it become a commercial failure, hastily reworking another game into a sequel before ultimately giving up on the brand, with it being left with nothing but a cult following - until LucasArts, now owned by Disney, saw fit to re-release the game and its sequel in the wake of the video game collections that have been gaining traction at the time, giving us a somewhat flawed but nonetheless enjoyable package of games.

Both games follow the same basic concept: the world has been invaded by a bunch of monsters, and it's up to you, either on your own or with a friend, to save all the inhabitants of the world before they're killed by monsters - naturally, them getting gobbled up by zombies is a very real possibility. Zombies just dumps you directly into the game with no exposition beyond the (actually pretty funny and self-aware) level title cards, but basically, the evil Doctor Tongue has unleashed an army of horror movie monsters to take over the world, so it's up to teenagers Zeke and Julie to save the day. Ghoul Patrol, meanwhile, has an actual opening cinematic, but the story is nothing to write home about: Zeke and Julie are visiting a museum exhibition covering demons and ghosts, where they find a floating book that, upon reading, ends up releasing the mighty demon lord who, once again, wants to take over the world, with the duo vowing to stop him - so yeah, it's basically a kid-friendly version of Evil Dead. However, the addition of cinematics and dialogue does go a long way to make the world feel a bit more developed, especially with the text being full of 90s slang, such as Zeke calling the expo "rad", it's just such a lovely - and unintentional - time capsule to a long-gone era.

Gameplay-wise, both titles are top-down shooters that boast a large selection of weapons and maze-like level designs. Your objective is pretty constant: rescue all neighbors before the monsters get to them. Once you have picked up every neighbor, you can advance to the next stage. If a neighbor gets killed, the total number of neighbors for the future levels will be cut down. While this may sound like an advantage, it really isn't outside of speedrunning, because for every 10.000 points you collect, you can bring back a lost neighbor, at the cost of gaining an extra life, which are otherwise extremely rare and, for the first game in particular, absolutely necessary.

The different weapons you can find and use are the heart and soul of the game, and your only protection against the various zombies and other paranormal entities. In Zombies you start with a water gun (which somehow instantly vaporizes zombies) while Ghoul Patrol gives you a crossbow. You find more weapons and ammo as you go along, from throwing kitchen plates at enemies, a cross that shines a protective barrier around you, a lawnmower to cut down alien kudzu all the way to the mighty bazooka that can blast through certain walls, allowing you to take shortcuts, particularly important to reach neighbors before the monsters do. Naturally, some weapons are more effective than others, with ammo being the main limiting factor - early on, there's plenty of it, but the more you progress, the more scarce it becomes, forcing you to strategize as opposed to zerg-rushing your enemies, whose threat level naturally goes up as the game goes along. Zombies are slow, shambling creatures that are only dangerous in numbers but die instantly when hit. However, this is later rounded out by little dwarves that attack you and are hard to hit, sentient alien flowers that can sicc their offspring at you and taint the ground you walk on, werewolves, slime monsters, alien clones of yourself all the way up to a barely-altered Jason Vorhees clone who can cut down walls like your bazooka can, is fast and can take a ton of hits, making him a formidable threat, and probably the biggest obstacle in the game.

Zombies in particular is known for its brutal overall design. The stages are large and labyrinthine, item pickups and enemy spawns are partially randomized, which sometimes gives you less than a second to react before one of your neighbors gets killed, or can leave you dry of weapons - many doors are locked, and while keys are mostly interchangeable, they sometimes just won't spawn, often locking you out of exploring certain parts of the level. The enemies also constantly respawn and charge at you with everything they've got, with no part of any level being anything close to save, so you more or less need to be on the move at all times. There is an optional radar you can use to pinpoint the vague locations of neighbors in your proximity, but an actual map that has landmarks on it would've probably helped deal with the often confusing layouts, not to mention there being a plethora of hidden pathways that you just have to find by walking into, some required to find all neighbors too! 

The boss battles are also basically just regular stages with exactly one number hidden behind a special gate that can only be opened with a boss key. Bosses are basically giant versions of regular enemies with huge health pools, and evading them while getting hits in is a lot tougher than it seems, requiring a good amount of dexterity and remembering patterns. In addition to the weapons you can find, there are also various power ups, such as medikits that restore health or potions that can transform you into various things - either a ghost form that can walk through walls and over water, or an all-powerful beast that can punch through walls - the latter being an especially efficient boss killer if nothing else, although naturally the effect only lasts a limited time and the outcome of one potion in particular is random, even being able to harm you. Should you die along the way, you will respawn then and there as long as you've got extra lives left. If your lives run out, it's Game Over and back to the title screen.

The game does issue you passwords after certain levels, but these are more or less useless, or at least they straight up what is supposed to be a helping measure into absolute masochist mode: the passwords are not personalized, so you will always begin with a very limited selection of items and weapons, which is especially punishing when loading a late game password, as pickups become less and less frequent as you go on. I read a comment by a YouTube user who managed to beat the game this way, and it was... interesting, as they essentially just let most neighbors die to reduce the headcount for future levels and just ran away from everything. Doesn't that sound like the definition of fun to you? Either way, this collection added a suspend save feature, meaning you can quit playing and resume your progress later, which is much more forgiving than the original - because for what it is, Zombies is actually quite long, clocking in at a total 48 stages that all last anywhere between three to ten minutes. At the very least, beyond neighbors potentially being eaten, there is no "hard" time limit, so you needn't worry about that.

Ghoul Patrol thankfully eases up on the relentless difficulty. For one, your default weapon has unlimited ammo, meaning you can no longer be completely defenseless and unable to defeat bosses. Secondly, while enemy placement is still haphazard, it's a lot more telegraphed and forgiving, and thanks to the larger sprites, most enemies actually also have bigger hitboxes. Even the bosses have more predictable patterns and don't take nearly as many hits and also do not spawn with cronies. Which doesn't meant the game is easy per se - just a lot more forgiving and less unfaire than its predecessor. Neighbor casualties are much rarer in this one, as enemies spawn farther away. The radar system no longer exists, instead the neighbors will announce themselves by speech balloons coming from their general direction. Which system you prefer is strictly up to you. It's also a whole lot shorter than Zombies, clocking it at about just two hours, but the short length works in its favor, as it makes it much more fun to try to 100% complete without neighbor casualties. Sadly, unlike Zombies, the game features no secret levels whatsoever - while the stages are large and offer a lot to see, the lack of any truly hidden secrets is a bit disappointing.

Graphics-wise, both games are decent, but Ghoul Patrol definitely takes the crown here. Featuring large, richly detailed and shaded spritework and some spectacular enemy designs, it's a very pleasing visual experience, especially the character animations and varied neighbor designs. Meanwhile, Zombies features much simpler pixel art, with flat colors and only basic shading on the environments. That doesn't mean it looks bad by any means - it just as many cool animations and details as its successor does, in fact, and the environments do stand out, it's just that Ghoul Patrol simply looks better than the other, something that even detractors probably can't deny.

Both games also handle world design differently; in Zombies there are various level themes (suburbs, castle, mall, wasteland, etc.) which are all interspersed at random with no real coherence going on - not that an arcade-like game truly needs it. Meanwhile, Ghoul Patrol's worlds all follow a singular visual theme - the first world is a city at night, then some feudal Japan/East Asian mishmash, an H.R. Giger-esque hell dimension and so on. Its shorter runtime means that none of these level themes overstay their welcome, whereas Zombies does get a bit repetitive. This also means that the victims in Ghoul Patrol are thematically appropriate for where you find them, whereas Zombies draws from a rather limited pool of people to rescue - there's no explanation why a baby is walking around unsupervised within an ancient pyramid, for instance. This also means that Zombies may be the only game on this planet where you can let a baby get killed by a chainsaw-wielding maniac. Let that one sink in and realize the game is rated PG13/PEGI 12.

The soundtrack is a matter of preference - both games have their standouts and stinkers, and I'd say it's a solid tie between both in terms of soundtrack. Oddly, the main menu uses only tracks from Ghoul Patrol and nothing from Zombies, which feels a bit odd as that title otherwise seemed to receive priority, but it is what it is. Sound effects are where Zombies does better - they sound much higher quality and fitting than the ones in Ghoul Patrol, which does re-use a few sounds but mostly does its own thing, but it's hardly noteworthy overall - I just going on long tangents about sound design.

Unfortunately, as far as the actual remastering and extra goodies go, this collection is no M2 production. The games have received almost no additional features that are common with these, such as rewind, save states or anything else that would've helped to ease up the punishing difficulty of Zombies. Instead, all that was added to both games was a suspend save feature - basically, you can stop playing and resume your progress, but the save file is deleted upon loading instead of being a permanent save file, making this feature feel particularly useless. In fact, some stuff is outright missing: the code to enter the hidden Day of Tentacle level from the title screen no longer works, which means you can only get to it by randomly obtaining a bazooka or a monster potion in level one and grab the powerup that lets you get there, thereby also robbing you off the opportunity to visit it twice, which is otherwise an immense help for stocking up early on. There are also no customizable screen borders, no resolution or filtering options, no audio enhancements, no nothing. Finally, and this mostly affects returning players who went from SNES to Switch: the control scheme was altered slightly, which can cause muscle memory issues, but you do get used to it eventually, but there's also, expectedly, no option to revert to the original controls.

While the SNES version is generally regarded superior, the collection also missed out on including the Mega Drive/Genesis port of the first game, which some players do prefer, especially for the soundtrack and it using the additional screen estate to show the radar at all times. In the end, all the extras you get are a bunch of sprite gifs from each game, high quality scans of the box arts and (parts of) the manual, as well as a developer interview, which does go into some development fun facts but still ultimately feels like an afterthought. So while the games contained therein are all fine and dandy, the overall collection feels weak and barebones, if only for failing to make Zombies more accessible. At the very least Ghoul Patrol finally gets equal billing to its sister game.

As far as version differences go, there really aren't any. The keyboard controls for the PC version were... a bit weird at first, but you get used to them eventually and it does offer controller support. Beyond that, all versions are the same, which makes sense insofar that it's basically a glorified (and feature-stripped) emulator running both games. The Switch version has the advantage of being portable if you feel like blasting some zombies on your next train ride.

Ultimately both games are still well worth playing today, either for nostalgia reasons or to explore that weird time capsule to the 90s - both in terms of its setting and general game design philosophies. If you can deal with the collection being somewhat lacking, you get two solid games for a good price, plus it goes on sale on digital storefronts often. That said, we are at...

65% - good games, lame collection

Pros:

• Two fun co-op games for less than what one cost back then
• Great tongue-in-cheek horror references

Cons:

• Brutal difficulty of Zombies can be off-putting
• Lacks almost any common convenience features usually present in these collections
• Lame bonus content

Interesting fact about Ghoul Patrol: it was never actually meant to be a sequel or at all related to Zombies. It was in development around the same time and used the same as Zombies. However, for brand name recognition (despite it not even being that much of a seller in the first place), LucasArts asked the small Malaysian studio who worked on it to turn it into a successor. Whatever vision the game originally had was never disclosed, but another game running on the same engine, Herc's Adventures, was eventually released for PS1 and Saturn, which was a more straightforward beat 'em up against a fantasy Greek background. Interesting for sure.