The winner of last weeks VS was battle toads. This week Ive decided to put Zombie Nation and Gun Nac up against each other. Both are obscure, odd ball shooters. Lets see what you think.

Gun Nac is rarer overall, but Zombie Nation seems to fetch a lot more money. I'll vote for the latter.

Zombie Nation's plot is pretty basic; an alien has sent some mangnetic rays to earth to turn the entire USA into an army of Zombies, and will aid him in his quest for world domination. Gun Nac on the other hand is just weird, as random inanimate devices come to life and start attacking, and in the Japanese version, it's up to a witch to stop them by creating a space shuttle. Gotta give ZN some credit, though, as they likely meant the original definition of "Zombie", that is, someone who is under a spell, but Gun Nac wins.

Zombie Nation can pull off some impressive graphics, as a matter of fact. The lightning bolts in stage 2 are just gorgeous looking, and there seems to be a lot of detail in some sprites, so it wins this vote. Gun Nac is much deeper as a game, since it allows you to have a variety of 7 weapons with around 5 bombs at your disposal, not to mention the ability to essentially turn this into the NES' version of Touhou, and not suffer slowdown. Gun Nac wins for gameplay. Finally, Gun Nac has the better music, as most all of the songs have some sort of structure to them. Zombie Nation's music just seems incredibly random, but was likely made that way on purpose. Not to mention Zombie Nation also does some neat tricks with the sample channel, such as playing some kick drums filled with basslines.  However, ZN edges out by having some nice and crunchy explosion sound effects.

RAREZ!

I have found (3) Gun Nac's but never even seen a Zombie Nation in the wild or at a game store.

Except in rarity, Gun Nac wins hands down in my book... then again, its one of my favorite games so...

I agree, Zombie Nation appears to be more rare than Gun Nac from personal experience and trying to acquire them.

I haven't had much experience with Gun Nac other than online play, but it seems asthough I called it pretty dead on with everyone else.

I find it kind of odd that Zombie would pull much ahead in any of these five. Maybe the first, but really how rare is that vs Gun Nac? We know Zombies is having a perceived rareness run on it like it's Earthbound or something right now.

I think at least from the audio, visuals, and play mechanics Gun Nac wins it hands down. I've always kind of respected that awesome config.sys labeled options screen with all the crazy choices in there including developer toys where you can have lag but no flicker, or flicker and jacked up game speeds.

I have never seen a Gun Nac in the wild, wish I would though. I found my ZN at a game store for 5 bucks (!). Still one of my best NES finds. I have beaten ZN, and the plot for that game is beyond strange, with a floating head of the samurai as the main character being at the forefront of the oddities. But other than that, I would say, from the gameplay footage I've seen, Gun Nac is actually an enjoyable game, where I found ZN to be very average, if not below average, as far as gameplay goes.

I would not say that Gun Nac wins hands down for audio and play mechanics. Both games are excellent obscure shooters for the console, and both have their qualities in respect, while being very differently oriented shooters. I think players will come down to subjective appreciation in order to choose between which is better on any ground for visuals, audio and play mechanics. Personally, I played both games and I prefer music and game mechanics of Zombie Nation, while choosing Gun Nac for best visuals.

I guess I could see that, but agree totally on the visuals. I think it really is the best looking/visually outgoing shooter the system has for our market. They knew what they were doing and did it so much you could choose to have better visuals or lack of slowdown moments which really was a nice touch.

I agree, technically, Gun Nac is a total success regarding the visuals aspect. Only a few famicom only releases match it and maybe besten it on this particular point.

Gun Nac is a Compile shooter, what else is there to say? Just no comparison in terms of the quality of the game here for me.

In my experience ZN is more rare. I've come across 2 Gun Nac's in the wild, but never a ZN.