Reviews

Following on from Ant Attack, Zombie Zombie was Sandy White's second game for the Spectrum. It uses the same graphical style as Ant Attack, exchanging insect enemies for the undead.

Unfortunately, the game is just a bit too simple for its own good. The zombies just shuffle around the city aimlessly until they see you and burst into a frenzy. You've got poison gas that you can blow at them to keep them at bay, but the aim is to creep up behind them, touch them and get them to follow you, and fall from a great height to their destruction. Although you get more and more zombies to do this to, it's the sort of thing that once you've done once you're not going to get a kick out of a second time and it gets dull very quickly.

The graphics are essentially similar to those of the earlier game. In an attempt to add some colour, your character, the zombies and the blocks are different colours although this effect doesn't work too well with the inevitable clash. You can also rebuild the city using a helicopter, although it lacks the ability to create the tunnels and ledges that characterized Ant Attack, so don't expect to turn out any architectural masterpieces.

There's also some nice two channel beeper music and you could even hook up to a MIDI keyboard for an improved version if your electronics skills were up to making an interface.

On the whole though, Zombie Zombie is an interesting oddity; a series of improvements to Ant Attack that don't really add up to much. It's as though, having perfected the Softsolid system, Sandy White just couldn't figure out a game for it. Still, it was only a short while until Ultimate popped up with Knight Lore that really moved the genre on.

Another game that was recommended to me for my blog, but it's one I feel I may be trying out about 30 years too late...

From Sandy White, the creator of the Speccy classic Ant Attack, this game also uses his famous SoftSolid3D isometric graphics. It sees you in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, and gives you a helicopter which can drop blocks to create new terrain, and a gun which fires a sort of zombie deterrent to keep back any flesh-eaters that start rushing towards you as you traverse the landscape...

Unfortunately, I found the game to be rather boring. All you do is wander around a rather empty set of walls, with the occasional neon-green zombie turning red and charging towards you, almost inevitably killing you instantly as you try to work out the old isometric control system! And the helicopter is also very confusing to begin with, as pressing fire either drops a block or makes you exit it, meaning you can leave it parked in some very difficult to reach places.

I can see how back in the day, being able to create new landscape with the helicopter could be fun...and the graphics would still have been pretty revolutionary...and having zombies rush at you suddenly was probably terrifying! But as I said at the start, I think I maybe arrived at the Zombie Zombie party a little too late to fully appreciate it, and just ended up finding it all a bit frustrating and pointless....

Great fan of Ant Attack here; so I gave it Max rate back in the day.However you don't get same results nor same fun with this second part.

One of the most important points of this not very successfully updated version would have been the creative possibilities, but for some reason it was not greatly implemented with the helicopter
Overall an interesting curious follow up to an historic creation

Indeed, Sandy White re used old code for the game behind this simple name.


Another interesting fact was that he didn't know about assemblers programs, so he assembled manually

I like it. IT'S not that bad. It's only that it brings few news with respect to its father software (AntAttack) Nonetheless it would have been better with a little attention to detail...
After all, the core of the software was already designed and successfully put into good use and worldwide tested

In fact, I was thinking about possible enhancements and/or extensions to Ant Attack... until this came along ... in fact I remember it as a crude attempt to follow the same scheme. 
The old charm of Ant Attack is irreplaceable.

The sequel to Spectrum classic Ant Attack, which use the same 3D engine -Softsolid- was coded with some interesting improvements: more colours, a cute helicopter to fly and add bricks, and the most relevant: zombies instead of ants (zombie apocalypse rocks!).

However, the boy/girl and the helicopter are really hard to control and the way to kill zombies become repetitive and dull.

So the aforementioned improvements aren't enough to reach the playability and fun of its antecessor.