Zombie Wars

Year 1996, five in the afternoon, Sound Blaster humming, aliens swarming across the monitor. I haven't forgotten that — not because Zombie Wars was anything particularly exceptional, but because back then, it didn't take much.

Zombie Wars from Gee Whiz! Entertainment is an action shooter for MS-DOS where you play as humanity defending Earth from an alien invasion. The story details are thin — this isn't a game where you'd expect Shakespeare — but the basic premise works: they came, they want us, you won't let them. You don't need to know anything more to hit Start.

Gameplay is straightforward. You shoot, dodge, survive. Controls respond the way they used to back then — usable, but without modern comfort. Enemies come in waves, the pace ramps up, and the game pushes you forward without unnecessary pauses. That's both its greatest strength and greatest weakness: it starts this fast, it gets old this fast if you're not a genre fan. The depth of the game systems is as shallow as a puddle after a summer rain.

What Zombie Wars represents is an entire era of cheaper shareware and boxed titles that filled store shelves when you'd pay more for a big-name game than was reasonable. Gee Whiz! wasn't Blizzard or id Software — it was a studio that delivered solid action at an acceptable price, and nobody expected more from it. Today the game has aged exactly as you'd expect: the graphics belong to its year, the sound is functional, and if you didn't play it back then, it probably won't surprise you much now.

Who will dig it today? Mainly people who want to refresh their memory, or younger players curious about what action looked like when a 3D accelerator was still a luxury. You can fire it up in a browser in two minutes and have your fill after twenty more — or you'll get hooked and play through the whole afternoon. Both are legitimate. Zombie Wars isn't a genre gem, but an honest period artifact that delivers exactly what it promised on the box.