Download Zombies Ate My Neighbors: Bloody Disgusting Edition ROM Hack

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

You'll need three things:

1. An accurate, headerless ROM of the US SNES release of Zombies Ate My Neighbors (MD5: 23C2AF7897D9384C4791189B68C142EB)

2. The patch file (Zombies Ate My Neighbors [BLOODY DISGUSTING EDITION].ips)

3. An IPS patch utility such as Lunar IPS or Floating IPS (https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1040/)

To install in Floating IPS, simply run the utility (on Windows this is flips.exe) and select Apply Patch. The tool will ask you to first select your patch file (the .ips), then the ROM file to modify, then finally ask where you'd like to save your patched ROM file and what you'd like to call it. The name is entirely up to you, it won't affect the game as long as you use an appropriate file extension e.g. ".sfc", ".smc" or ".bin". To play, simply load up your new ROM in the emulator of your choice and enjoy!


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About ZOMBIES ATE MY NEIGHBOURS: BLOODY DISGUSTING EDITION

I grew up as a SEGA kid, not owning a Nintendo console until I got an N64 in my mid-to-late teens. I was also utterly obsessed with terrible horror films, so naturally, one of my favourite games growing up was LucasArts' Zombies Ate My Neighbours, or rather just Zombies as I knew it since it was censored in Europe. In addition to the softened title, they also removed some chainsaw-wielding Jason Voorhees lookalikes and replaced them with axe-wielding lumberjacks. Also, being PAL, it's 50Hz rather than 60Hz which is far from ideal. On top of that, the Mega Drive / Genesis version was hobbled by technical issues compared to the SNES release: the lack of transparencies on the SEGA hardware meant that what were once HUD overlays on SNES became a big ugly sidebar on Mega Drive / Genesis, which caused the rest of the frame to be squished horizontally so everybody looked like they'd been run over by a steamroller and anything that should've been square was a tall rectangle. I didn't know any of this at the time because I'd never even seen a SNES, but I did notice that the music was pretty crappy sounding compared to most of my other games and it irritated me a bit.

Having said all that, the Mega Drive got one thing right: blood was blood. Nintendo chose to censor blood by having it palette swapped from red to green in Europe, and from red to purple/violet in the US. Apart from this, the SNES version of the game is essentially the definitive release.

With this hack, I wanted to do one thing and one thing only: uncensor the purple blood of the Game Over screen in the US SNES version of Zombies Ate My Neighbors to closer match the Mega Drive version of Zombies that I played so much as a kid.

There exists an earlier version of this hack by DackR, who changed the blood from purple to red by directly editing the colour palette used by the blood drip sprites. The problem with this is that the palette is not exclusive to the blood sprites and is used by other things, including the big purple monster that the player character can transform into after drinking a potion. As a result, editing the palette itself changes the monster from purple to red as well as the blood on the Game Over screen. Although this does look extremely cool, it represents a significant change to the original product that goes beyond simply removing console-specific censorship. It's perhaps most distracting when playing as the girl character because she wears a red cap that stays on when she turns into the monster, which I find hilarious because of how much it stands out and looks ridiculous. Looking at this in DackR's original hack, the red cap doesn't stand out anywhere near as much against the red monster as it does against the original purple. Taking a different approach with this new edit means that the monster (and anything else that might use the same palette) remains untouched and true to source. Also, in terms of personal taste, DackR's hack utilised a darker and more realistic red palette, which looks fantastic in my opinion but is very different from the red/blood colours used elsewhere in the game on both SNES and Mega Drive / Genesis. The fact that this new version uses the original SNES game's palette means it exactly matches other blood colours in the game and also matches fairly closely with the Mega Drive / Genesis palette that this hack is modelled after.

I did this by leaving the palette unedited but instead editing the blood drip sprites themselves to use different colours in the palette. This means that the colours still differ slightly from the Genesis version because there are no colours in the palette (or any other palette in the SNES release) that exactly match the Genesis palette. However, because they use the original SNES palette, they *do* exactly match the aesthetic of the rest of the SNES game, including other sprites that have blood and/or bloody looking raw flesh bits somewhere on them (several enemies). It's much less realistic than DackR's version (which in my opinion looks *better*), but the gaudier hues from the existing SNES palette more closely match the Genesis colours I'm trying to invoke and arguably better suit the over-the-top B-movie tone that the game is going for.

This relatively straightforward hack would not have been possible without the much earlier work done by DackR (particularly with figuring out that most of the blood is on a background later that's getting its colours forcibly overridden in CGRAM continuously) and Reddit users Anachren and Piranhaplant1, who helped me out when I was going round in circles due to mistakenly thinking that I couldn't reallocate the colours in yy-chr. Thanks for steering me straight again, guys!