8-bit NES flashback: Zombie Nation [I Heart Games]

Not many people remember Zombie Nation for the NES and if they do, they probably didn’t play it, but just remember “that fucked up game with the flying samurai head”. Yeah that one. Generally, it wasn’t well received and didn’t really get good reviews, but in my opinion, it was a great game.

Games from the NES era were hit or miss. Some have really good gameplay and you can pick them up 20 years later and they’re still fun. Some were decent for the time but then when you pick them up later, they’re more boring and frustrating than a trip to your wheelchair-bound 90 year old aunt’s house.

There were some quirks in Zombie Nation– like the fact that most of the levels were hard as hell and the boss fights were dog easy and the game as a whole doesn’t make any god damn sense, but I’m a big fan of Gradius-like games where you just flying through the level shooting the millions of tiny glowing objects that are coming at you at high speed, and I like things that are unusual, so for me, just the fact that Zombie Nation existed was enough.

The backstory goes something like: some really evil guy named Darc Seed turns everyone into the US into zombies using some sort of magnetic ray somehow and he steals an ancient samurai sword, which really pisses off this dead samurai, who takes his disembodied head to America to get his damn sword back. Only you never see or kill a single zombie. You just destroy random aliens and bad guys and the Statue of Liberty and the Grand Canyon. Yes, really.

So there’s no zombies, but there is a nation, so they could have called the game Giant Orange Floating Undead Samurai Head Nation, but that’s not as catchy as just throwing the word “zombie” in the title and being done with it.

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