Ghoul Patrol

Zombies Ate My Neighbors on ice

I remember a few years ago, I was reading up on Zombies Ate My Neighbors, presumably to try to figure out why Europe had a problem with chainsaws but not with axes, when I discovered that the game had a sequel that had somehow escaped my attention through several years of Nintendo Power. I slapped my hands to my cheeks and held my mouth open in a rictus of abject horror, by which I mean pleasant surprise. What an unexpected treat this was! A followup of one of my favorite Super Nintendo games, which was a competent if crushingly difficult top-down action shooter and one of the best co-op games of Super Nintendo era.

Boy was my face red when its sequel turned out to be Ghoul Patrol.

Now, Ghoul Patrol isn't really a bad game. The best way to describe it, if you've played its prequel, is to picture playing Zombies Ate My Neighbors, but with almost every aspect of it made slightly less playable and slightly less comfortable. I mentioned this before in my Rockin' Kats review, but again I feel it bears mentioning I'm fully aware that I have a good twenty years of built up nostalgia that could be obscuring my view of ZAMN. That said, the overall takeaway from Ghoul Patrol is a feeling of disappointment rather than outright disgust.

Zeke has grown into a proud trucker like his father before him may or may not have been.

Let's start out by talking about some of the better aspects of the game. First and foremost, the game is graphically very nice looking. Animations are generally smooth, the monsters and victims are well designed, and the overall color palette hits a good, creepy sweet spot. I can't exactly tell what's going on with it. It's like the background is very, very slightly desaturated to give the feeling that the sky is cloudy and gray at all times. This helps the sprites and miscellaneous doodads pop out from the backgrounds. It's very subtle, and looking at the screenshot above, you may wonder what the hell I'm talking about because it is a very colorful game, but if you play it, you'll kind of see what I mean. The backgrounds of the stages feel slightly old and faded, and this lends to the game's spooky atmosphere.

And spooky is the best word for it. If you've played ZAMN, you know what I mean. It's monster-themed goofiness, though Ghoul Patrol definitely tones down the tongue-in-cheek factor from its predecessor. Gone are the B-Movie taglines preceding each level, instead replaced by some simple wipe-style bumpers. This, with the aforementioned subdued color scheme, replacement of Universal Horror monsters with monsters in general, and replacement of random household items with various fantasy guns all contribute to a game that's definitely more serious in tone than Zombies.

This is a picture of me, moments after sliding into a bottomless grave.

That's in no way to suggest that the game's gone full dark-and-brooding. It absolutely hasn't. The music, while not as upbeat and catchy as ZAMN, is horrifying on the level of "Spooky Scary Skeletons." The character and enemy sprites maintain a cartoony style, which is especially apparent in the faces of the victims you're supposed to be saving. Just like in ZAMN, victims have a weird tendency to make their wackiest face seconds before they're brutally murdered, vaporizing into a ghost and hitting you with an incongruously chilling death sound. But I hyperbolize.

The gameplay follows the same general formula as its predecessor (And by proxy, the game it lifted that formula from: Alien Syndrome). You walk around a maze-like level trying to not get killed by enemies while you save a number of hapless victims. If all the victims get killed, it's a game over. It's a simple formula, but a good one (and one that works especially well in a co-op setting).

Every few levels, the game switches level and enemy themes. This shot is from the pastiche of Eastern Asian countries that makes up the game's second levels.

Now, in  Zombies, you were able to navigate your way to the victims by hitting R or L to pull up a simple radar which showed little blips guiding you roughly to where your rescuees were hiding. The radar didn't show the layout of the level, so the game was still able to retain its frantic, small-scale maze exploration aspect. Ghoul Patrol replaces the radar with word bubbles that come flying at the character, showing the direction you need to go (in general) to reach the next victim. It's strictly as the crow flies, of course, so you'll still need to actually navigate the level's maze to physically reach the victim. It should be noted that while the ZAMN radar showed every victim within the radar's range, this new word bubble system will only point out the victim which is closest to you at the time of the word bubble's firing. While initially this change frustrated me to no end, I eventually got used to it. I don't mean to imply that the system wasn't still an obnoxious step back, just that it became endurable.

The real, biggest issue with the game is its controls. How a game handles momentum in its player characters is incredibly important, and even more so in a top-down action shooter like Ghoul Patrol. Unfortunately, your character takes a second to get up to walking speed, then glides a little bit before coming to a complete stop after releasing the d-pad. Essentially, the entire game plays as if you're in an ice level or a level where you're piloting a hovercraft or something. You can hold the Y button to run, which after a few seconds of running at a comfortable clip has your character suddenly explode into unsafe, supersonic territory. This, coupled with Zeke's inertia and the lack of friction in Ghoul Patrol's world legitimately made me feel more like I was controlling a vehicle rather than a person. I actually started to navigate the game better the part of my brain that activates when I play F-Zero took over.

Once again, the game is not bad in the scheme of all games, and I actually would recommend it, especially to fans of Zombies Ate My Neighbors. It definitely has a cool aesthetic, and I could see myself getting over some of the qualms I had with the controls and interface with time. For those who haven't played ZAMN ad nauseum, however, I'd recommend you ignore Ghoul Patrol and play that instead.