We played Zombie Raid (1995, American Sammy) co-operatively. This meant that I hit shoot on the gamepad while my partner in crime aimed using the mouse, which was an excellent division of boredom. In Zombie Raid, you play as Edward Windsor, Miserable Detective. The animation above should help explain the plot. To summarize: zombies are slicing farmers in the junk, and Edward is called in to help, just prior to the second half of his scheduled double-mastectomy.

ZR is a rail-shooter. It's exactly like House Of The Dead, but with less animations and voice acting. Or something. Basically, HOTD is shitty and this game is worse. The main highlight of the game happens halfway through when you encounter Maggot Dude. He doesn't fight. He just festers! You have to shoot the maggots of him, and each maggot takes a shotgun blast to kill. Remarkable.

Over the course of the game you collect three colored gems. At the end, you are required to choose them in the right sequence to defeat the final boss. There are six possibilities and when we played, it took us three tries to get the right order. If you choose wrong, the game ends and you get impaled in a spike pit. This is genius. It means that even if you can beat the game handily, you'll play through it as many as six more times so you can "really" beat it. We can only imagine how much money this game could pull in. We died several times on our play-through, even though we had the equivalent of a full-automatic shotgun. Say 50 cents a life, ten lives per playthrough, 3 or 4 playthroughs - you're looking at $20 from a single dedicated player!

Meat Bacon Apple. That is the name of the lead programmer on Zombie Raid.


What sort of name is that? (Other than delicious.) We're pretty sure that Meat-san added several other made-up sounding names to the credits just so people would make less of a deal over his name. Yoshi Suzuki and Pat O'Brien? Those can't be real names.

We'll close with portraits of the developers from the end credits. Bonus points if you can identify the monster that inspired each of them.