暴れん坊天狗 & ZOMBIE NATION Reviews

Before I begin, I need to say that this recommendation has a very big “if” attached to it. Some people have had problems getting the game to work properly, with some not even having the game boot up. Even the Steam Deck apparently has a lot of problems playing it. I got lucky, and the game runs with little issue for me on my laptop, but give this a test run before two weeks pass. If it works, great! If it doesn’t work, ask for a refund and buy the Switch version instead, which is guaranteed to work by virtue of being a console game. Onto the game itself, [i]Zombie Nation[/i] is a highly expensive NES shoot 'em up where you play as a giant zombie head that blows up buildings and helicopters by spitting and launching his eyes at them. Yeah, it was the 90s. It’s a technical showpiece for the system, with detailed sprites and a complex soundtrack that makes use of a few sound samples. It’s not the best shooter on the system; your head has some inertia, especially when playing Hard difficulty, and it’s way too easy to have your health drain by flying into a [i]*checks notes*[/i] "magnetic ray", but the absurdity of it all makes it worth a look. Aside from the aforementioned technical hurdle, this port is pretty good. It is a bit lacking on options: you can only freely change keyboard controls, with gamepads only getting a “rotate” option which puts NES B and A on Xbox X and A, respectively. There is no option to use scanlines, and the screen is always displayed in the 8:7 NES aspect ratio rather than the 4:3 TV aspect ratio. You also can’t increase the sprite limit to remove the flickering. Thankfully, there doesn’t seem to be any shimmering (I am playing on a 1080p screen) on both “Original” and “Full” screen options, which makes me think there’s a sharp bilinear filter to prevent uneven pixels. Most importantly, the game plays as it should with okay performance and seemingly low input latency from what I detected. You can play the US release or the Japanese release, renamed [i]Abarenbo Tengu[/i] since the zombie head you play as is replaced with a giant Tengu mask. You also get the ability to read the original manuals, with all Nintendo references surprisingly included, and if you beat the game once, you unlock a sound test, a few cheats (these were in the original, but required you to reset the system an absurd number of times), and a museum mode with a handful of promotional materials. All in all, this is a respectable rerelease of an interesting and bizarrely hilarious shoot ‘em up. 12 dollars might be a bit much given the lack of screen and control options, but on sale it’s worth looking into out of sheer curiosity. Again, though, test the game to see if it works, and refund it ASAP if it doesn’t (or you can skip the risk and buy the Switch version instead).