Every 40,000 points, you get a neighbor back, but if you lose them all, the game is over, even if you have lives remaining. You start with 10 neighbors (or “victims”), and if you lose any, you start the next level with fewer, not unlike Missile Command’s bases. Once you find the last one, an exit door opens in front of you and you can move on. Your objective is not necessarily to kill the monsters, some of which spawn infinitely, but to rescue the neighbors.
It’s a run-and-gun style game, viewed from a top-down perspective. So this was my chance to put that right, though even with decades more gaming experience, it remained quite a challenge. I’m not sure I even saw the second half of the game. I loved exploring the different levels, looking for secrets and uncovering hidden bonus objectives (You can destroy the UFO? Awesome!), but I don’t think I ever came close to finishing it.
Even though I wasn’t a big horror fan, the idea of blending together all these different monster movie tropes in an over-the-top cartoony way appealed to me. Zombies Ate My Neighbors was one of the handful of SNES games I owned as a kid in the 90s, and I thought it was awesome.
