Not see zombies

It seems all Nova's brother ever plays are first-person shooters. The NES can handle shooters, but not first-person ones. Even FaceBall had to wait for the Game Boy and Super NES, which have more video memory bandwidth than the NES.

So I decided to make something a little more like Smash TV. It turns out the original Doom handles more like a first-person version of Robotron 2084, the predecessor of Smash TV, than like a modern FPS. Smash TV has an official NES port, but it's sort of half-assed, and I want to add the ability to move through rooms of the studio freely.

The premise
Care for a zombie movie? Christians aren't supposed to associate with portrayals of corpses reanimated by demons, despite the story of Ezekiel's zombie army. And even without the religious implications, reanimating dead flesh the way it is presented in typical zombie movies makes no sense. But articles in Cracked mention scientific ways to set up the same conflict as a ghoul story without raising so many red flags to people of faith. These include parasitic toxoplasmosis (which also causes animal hoarding ), neurotoxins (will Hombon be the next Umbrella?), Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (also called "mad cow"), brain stem restoration, nanobots, and meningococcemia. And it wouldn't be any harder for the infection to spread through tainted meat than when horse meat ended up in supermarkets and restaurants in the first quarter of 2013.

On the other hand: The OUYA game Don't Eat Soap opens with a button-mashing minigame about keeping the soap from sliding toward the protagonist. It's roughly equivalent to "Test Your Might" from Mortal Kombat, the Psycho Mantis torture scene from Metal Gear Solid, or the rapid A pressing minigames from Mario Party series. After the player inevitably loses, the game throws a switch and turns into a Bubble Bobble clone as the protagonist attempts to spit out the soap. Likewise, a zombie shooter that parodies zombie shooters could stop spawning targets after a couple levels, instead demonstrating reasons why a zombie outbreak would fail. For example, zombies would get eaten by maggots or hungry canines.

Control
Modern console games use more buttons on controllers than necessary. Many can be slimmed down to one joystick and one button, as John Scott Tynes did when proposing a mod to let a first-person shooter be played with an Atari 2600 controller. I'm not going quite that far, but I worked with Nova's brother to come up with this control scheme:
 * Control Pad: move in that direction while facing the same direction
 * Double tap direction: Turn toward that direction then move
 * A: fire
 * B: tap to reload; multiple tap to switch weapons; hold while near an item to pick it up
 * B+Control Pad: Turn slowly while standing still (cf. crouch, iron sights)

Weapons
Weapons analogous to the standard FPS guns or Smash TV guns are planned.

Some weapons appear in fixed places on the map. Others come from crates, which act like the ? blocks in the Mario Kart series. There are a few fixed points for the crate to appear in. After giving out five weapons, it gives out an animatronic stuffed toy as a consolation prize, falls apart, and another crate appears elsewhere. The stuffed toy moves just enough to attract zombies, like a Teddy Ruxpin or Tickle Me Elmo toy, and it's intended as a decoy to attract enemies while the player picks them off or seeks the next crate. (Another zombie shooter makes the teddy bear useless and fading but offers a separate cymbal-banging monkey decoy. It might be more interesting to combine them.)