YMMV / Zombies Ate My Neighbors

• Demonic Spiders:
  • The vampires. They've got HP for days, and once encountered, if you choose not to fight, they will gladly chase you through the level until you either win it or die. Have fun with a few later levels which make you deal with more than one. Your only chance against them is to spam the inflatable clown decoys, if you stockpiled any.
  • The fishmen combine everything awful about Werewolves with the ability to jump in and out of the water at will. They're just as fast as you are in the water, which is bad enough, but they can also spawn instantly in areas where they can do so, and these areas tend to be way, WAY too close to victims, ESPECIALLY the innertube guys, who are basically already dead if you're still on dry land and the fishmen aren't.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Monster Potion, which grants a few minutes of Nigh-invulnerability, and also has punches that can destroy ALL but a few bosses very quickly and that can break through walls and doors. The only drawbacks are, you cannot while transformed open Skull Doors, swim, or use trampolines, so it's possible to put certain neighbors at risk if used too flippantly.
  • Password "BCDF" is the most useful password you can use; it takes you to an obscure bonus level based off of Day of the Tentacle, where you can find a lot of goodies and an extra life. If that wasn't bad enough, if you have bazooka ammo left over, you can go there again! And losing no victims in either runthrough pretty much means that you can max your lives before the fifth level.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The football players push you around, which becomes irritating when you're trying to save cheerleaders. In Level 47, many of them spawn at once when you're trying to take down the last Snakeoid. Doesn't help that defeating it requires you to stay put.
  • The Martians very annoying enemies to deal with. They move very fast in pairs, and take turns to incapacite you for a few seconds over and over with their Bubble Guns. This can get your neighbors killed if you're unable to move in time to rescue them from another attacking monster.
• Goddamned Boss: The giant babies and Dr. Tongue's spider form all move WAY faster than their considerable sizes would suggest, making it easy for them to constantly dodge out of your fire and straight into you whenever they darn well please. At least Dr. Tongue doesn't stomp you flat in the process and leave you open to a follow-up!
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • It is possible to kill Chainsaw Maniacs in one hit with a Bazooka/Clown Doll combo; said Maniacs are tougher than the Sand Worm boss.
  • The Fire Extinguisher can freeze enemies for quite long durations with enough spamming. And since enemies get a defense debuff while they're frozen, it's just as handy for making anything vulnerable to it die painfully and helplessly. Why yes, this DOES include the Chainsaw Maniacs!
  • If you stand still after taking the Monster Potion, it doesn't wear off and you're invincible forever, so long as you don't move. While this sounds impractical, its brilliant for using against certain bosses and snakeoids.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Zombies Ate My Neighbors has received a lot of criticism for its brutal and sometimes downright cheap gameplay. It gets especially bad in the second half of the game where it adores throwing damaging and fast enemies at you on top of building maps in such a way that it is almost impossible to complete a level without losing at least one neighbor, unless the RNG is kind and you know EXACTLY how to deal with particularly at-risk neighbors. Using a password to return where you left off is also not a good option since it will dump you in with your weakest weaponry, forcing you to either return instead to an earlier level so you can build up your arsenal just to stand a chance, or to just forego passwords altogether and just beat the 49-level marathon from start to finish. Though it does remain divisive, Ghoul Patrol has earned itself fans over the years thanks to toning down its predecessor's extreme difficulty.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • The game has fast, tough, and mean enemies, many of which respawn infinitely. Add a few Scrappy Mechanics, and a password system that resets your item and weapons, and the zombies probably will eat your Neighbors.
  • One of the ROM hacks of the game takes this up to eleven and decided you need between 1-3 tourist couples that each turn into a pair of werewolves 15 seconds after the start of the level in most of the levels. Have fun with those speed shoes.
• No Casualties Run: Saving all the victims on every level. This is Harder Than Hard, as it requires in-depth knowledge of every neighbor and monster position on all 49 levels to successfully pull off. You must have the right item on standby, such as a ghost potion. What makes this painful is not just that some neighbors transform into werewolves if you're not fast enough, counting as a death, but some neighbors are surrounded by monsters as soon as you find them, leaving you with precious seconds to save them. What's especially brutal is on some levels you need to exploit the limited enemy sprite loadout, to avoid a monster spawning next to a victim.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The Genesis release was coded from the SNES version, and it shows. The graphics, music and sound effects had to be reconverted to fit the software capabilities of the Genesis. Oh, and the Genesis version doesn't have the secret flamethrower.
  • The 2021 Compilation Re-release was criticized for being a barebones port, with no ability adjust screen options or controls. Worse, the default controls for both games were changed for no good reason, leading to cases of Damn You, Muscle Memory! for players of the original.
• Quirky Work: This may be the only game in which you kill zombies with water guns and find Bazookas in cupboards.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • You have to cycle through your stock of weaponry in real time, and you can't cycle backwards.
  • Playing with three-button controllers on the Genesis version^note Three-button controllers only have A, B and C on the right side of the pad. Six-button controllers have X, Y and Z above A, B and C. To cycle though your weapons, you have to hold A while pressing B. To cycle though your items, you have to hold B while pressing C. In a sense, you have to use weapons or items to go through your inventory.
  • While it seems like a good idea to let your neighbors die on purpose, don't. Every time you get to 40,000 points, you should get an extra life, but if you lost any neighbors, it will replace a single neighbor instead. So, for every victim that dies, it makes it much harder for you to earn extra lives, and it doesn't get easier to earn those 40,000 points or keep all ten neighbors alive as you go.
  • Tourist-werewolves, seemingly put there specifically to punish players that are doing too well. In certain levels, tourists will turn into werewolves after a certain amount of time has passed, different for each level, and if they transform it counts as a victim death (as well as forcing you to deal with two higher-end enemies who can jump around and wreak havoc on the other neighbors). The real kicker is they don't even ease you into it. They first show up in level 7, with a time limit of about 10 seconds, and you have the potential to lose THREE victims if you miss all 3 before the time limit is up. One level has FOUR of them, even if the time limit is generous enough. The majority of the time you have BARELY enough time to collect them all even if you've looked at a map and know exactly where they are. The worst offender is a level in which you have EIGHT SECONDS to collect 2 tourists, impossible without the speed shoes. And there's a third all the way in the far opposite corner of the map that is 100% impossible to get to before the time is up. The only way to avoid losing them is to exploit sprite limits, as though the tourists count as one victim, when they transform they become 2 werewolves, so you'd have to bait a bunch of enemies into following you before getting too close. And you also have to take into account that when the game came out there weren't online maps and guides, which only makes this mechanic even more of a jerk move. The Genesis version on the other hand is much more forgiving on this aspect.

• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Footballs. Their main purpose is for the "Pass Completion" bonus on two levels. And even so, it's hard to throw them at the football players because they just won't stand still while YOU have to dodge aliens and Snakeoids. They just take up space for the rest of the game.
  • Tomatoes are mainly used as a hard counter to the Martians. The catch is that the lobbed range and slow rate of fire make it hard to hit the comparatively speedy Martians, and those Martians are so weak that they die in one hit to just about anything, including your MUCH faster-firing water gun.
• Spiritual Successor: A game named Demons Ate My Neighbors (or DAMN), where you have to exorcise possessed people, is being worked on.
• That One Boss:
  • The Giant Baby. It moves entirely too fast for something so big. It's even faster than you are with Sprint Shoes. It also moves in a very erratic pattern that is impossible to predict, and will flatten you if you come anywhere close to it. On top of that, it fires milk at you from a distance and takes a lot of damage before it finally goes down, and it's often found in areas where it can take out a LOT of victims. Outside of using a monster potion (or several, as the baby never wants to stay in one place long enough for you to actually hit it), there's no easy way to deal with it. And no, you can't just ignore it, because defeating it turns it into a normal baby and typically drops a skeleton key to the area housing the stage's final victim, meaning you have to kill the damn thing to finish any level you see it in.
  • Have fun battling Dr. Tongue's spider form. A huge target that is capable of moving very quickly, spitting web all over the place that slows your character down, spawning little spiders to attack you... Unlike every other monster, he has no weapon that will quickly kill him, and the most effective weapon is only found once, is very hard to find, and isn't even present in the Genesis version. To make matters worse, he's fought twice, and after the second time, he transforms into another form.

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