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Zombie Nation review

Game: Zombie Nation
Platform: NES
Genre: Scrolling Shooter
Developer: KAZe
AKA: Abarenbou Tengu (JP)

Reader review by Dominic

January 11, 2008

When I saw the cover art for Zombie Nation, I initially thought, "Whoa, this game looks awesome! I can't wait to kill all these zombies! I don't really know what that giant head is laughing about in the background, but whatever, this game has to be good!" I soon discovered that the giant head on the cover was laughing at me. Not only laughing, but cackling. Cackling because his crappy old game sold again(I bought it used). His plan to lure me in by means of box art worked and now he gets to live another day. Zombie Nation is a cruel joke filled with repetitive game play, poor translation, and will definitely leave you thinking, "WTF?"

When you start Zombie Nation, Namabuki gets overly excited and makes this weird face as he flies around his shitty house. "Hooray!" he thinks, "Another chance to spread joy to gamers!" Oh Namabuki, if you only knew the agony you cause.

In Zombie Nation you do not take up the role of some bad-ass guy with a bunch of guns ready to kill a nation of zombies. No, instead you are Namabuki, a giant floating head who lives in a spooky house. In 1999, what seemed to be a meteorite crashed in Nevada. It later turned out to be Darc Seed, some evil guy. He then turned the entire U.S. into zombies and brought the Statue of Liberty to life to do his dirty work(The Statue of Liberty coming to life? Hmm, that sounds so familiar...). He also took control of the legendary samurai sword, Shura. When Namabuki heard about this he got pissed off and flew himself to the U.S. to whoop some ass. I can't really imagine how a reclusive giant head actually heard about this going on. Maybe he gets the newspaper or something...

You can choose one of four national landmarks to float around. The famous cities of the northeast, the oil rig located around Texas, the deserts of the left side of the map or the...marvelous caves of the north? I guess they didn't have a better place to put that level. Anyway, choose a level and begin floating around. You're armed with eyeballs and what I hope is vomit. This may sound cool on paper but believe me, it isn't. You then start destroying buildings and whatever else comes in your path. This is fun for about a minute then it gets old. That is the extent of the game besides a few boss battles that aren't even worth writing about. Your status bar which displays your life randomly disappears when you continue. I don't know why this is, maybe the game wants to punish you for dying. The only amusement this game has left to offer is when Namabuki dies. Not only is it satisfying to watch this lame character's demise, but he tilts his head back and emits this sound that is the equivalent of a very old bear yelling into a glass. He also spouts something in Japanese in a word bubble. I'd like to blame that on the game's poor translation but I assume the translators thought, "Well the character is from Japan." So in a sense it works. The programmers probably didn't feel like changing the sprite anyway.

The only other thing worth mentioning about this game is it's strange connection to Ghostbusters 2. The Statue of Liberty coming to life isn't that peculiar alone, but then they make Namabuki look like Vigo. They should have changed the title to, Ghostbusters 3: Vigo's Revenge. The game would have at least made some sort of sense that way.

If there ever was a reason to play Zombie Nation it would be to witness the truely bizare nature of the game. Other than that, by all means, stay away from this one. You'll just be sorely dissapointed within the first minute.

Rating: 2/10

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