Alphabest: Mega Drive – Z

Alphabest: Mega Drive – Z

It is with sadness, and joy, actually mostly just joy. Solely joy. It is with the utmost amount of joy that I bring to you the final Mega Drive Alphabest installment. Yay!

Apart from numerically named games. Crap.

Z

Like some of the more recent letters of the alphabet, Z isn’t exactly overflowing with games, regardless of quality. However, it’s definitely an improvement on Y. In fact, the only truly awful Z title for the Mega Drive is Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel, which suffers from Anthropomorphic Animal Platformer Disorder in much the same way Bubsy the Sodding Bobcat and Aero the Goddamn Acrobat do.

Zool, also a platformer (only this time starring, uh, a comma?) is much better, but doesn’t feel at home as well as it did on the Amiga or Archimedies. Something about controlling it with a pad just feels off – perhaps it’s the speed of the game and the unusual physics.

Others not making the final cut, but certainly not terrible, are a clutch of other games. Zoop is a fun puzzle game which would have been great for a tenner or so but a full £40-odd quid, when it wasn’t nearly approaching Puyo Puyo or Tetris was a bit much. Zoom! is also a puzzle game, only more arcadey and not unlike Painter or Crush Roller with a 3D perspective. It’s a very early Mega Drive game and it shows, but it’s actually rather good and quite addictive.

Zero Tolerance is a brave attempt at a first person shootmans for the Mega Drive. It’s technically incredible considering what it is trying to do, but suffers badly due to the console really not being up to the task – it’s blocky, the main game screen is in a tiny window, the draw distance is barely past your nose and the graphics are very plain. It plays OK, but seems like more of a proof of concept than a proper game.

Which leaves us with these, actually rather decent, three:

zany golfZany Golf is an excellent crazy golf game by Electronic Arts. You may perhaps expect it to use the engine for the already decent PGA series, but instead it’s isometric. Some varied holes, from the “normal” crazy golf sort to some impractical on a real-life course (such as the pinball and Breakout style ones) make it a lot of fun, and it’s only let down a little by being a bit jerky and slow, although this doesn’t really affect the gameplay.

zombiesZombies, known as Zombies Ate My Neighbours (without the “u”, shudder) in other regions, is an excellent comedy horror B-movie themed co-op arcade game not a million miles away from something like Gauntlet. A massive range of silly weapons (water pistols and ice lollies, for example) and enemies right out of the films (zombies, evil dolls, giant babies) make for a memorable and unique game. Unfortunately, the SNES version is a little better simply because of the extra joypad buttons, which help greatly with weapon selection.

zero wingZero Wing is, as everyone knows has the most hilariously bad dialogue ever. So bad that it became a viral internet meme before viral internet memes were even a thing. Remember All Your Base? That was Zero Wing. Terrible localisation aside, Zero Wing is also an excellent side scrolling shoot ’em up with all the stuff I like in such games – great power ups and massive bizarre bosses. And your ship looks like Thunderbird 4. Sort of.

And the Alphabest?

As good as the other two are, and despite it not being the best version of the game, the winner here – by a long way – has to be Zombies. It’s genuinely funny, from the characters (both those you save and those you defeat) to the weapons, the locations, the music and the level titles (many of which are a play on words of horror film names). It’s a shame the SNES works just a little better thanks to a more suited controller, but Zombies is still excellent.

And that’s that. There can’t be many games that begin with a number (and this is supposed to be Alphabest after all) so see that episode as a brucie bonus.

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