No-budget brilliance or just plain shite?
By Werewolf2000AD
Right, Zombie Zone then. Italian publishers budget PAL conversion of Japanese publishers budget game about a bikini-wearing samurai cowgirl. What could go wrong, eh?
Disc in drive, turn on. 50/60Hz selection option. On a ten quid budget title? Good start. Warning screen: “This game contains violent and grotesque scenes.” Yes, that’s what you have my ten quid for. Right, title screen, press start. Story Mode. Oh, well-modelled main character. Move left stick back and forth – Ah, spent some time on the jiggly bits, did we? Sensible use of limited resources there. OK, first level. In graveyard surrounded by zombies. Simple hack-and-slash game play with satisfyingly meaty swipes of dirty great big sword taking heads off, removing limbs and knocking corpses across the screen.
One of the game's quieter moments.
Lots of blood. LOTS of blood. You know how some physically violent games have some sort of “bloodshed” meter measuring the spilled claret? This game has two, simultaneously. Your sword accumulates blood rapidly with every successful blow. This must be shaken off with an occasional tap of the L1 button, as the more gunked up it gets the less effective it is, until it starts getting stuck inside the zombies, prompting frantic mashing of the ‘kick’ button to get the cowgirl to rather comically prop her foot up on the zombie and pull the blade free. The cowgirl herself gets splattered too, becoming more and more visibly soaked in the red stuff until she staggers around dripping gore and barely able to stand up. Filling this ‘blood bath’ meter to the top triggers a standard ‘berserk’ mode – Blurry throbbing red graphics, enormous strength, depleting health bar, you know the drill.
"Bugger, OMO'll never shift this."
Right, basics covered. Out of graveyard onto city streets. Some zombies on fire now, for no apparent reason. Wander streets killing zombies to find key to area with level boss. Zombies not very bright. Danger through sheer numbers, and persistence – Still kicking at you even when reduced to disembodied pair of legs. Make way to level boss. Great big obscenely fat lump in bondage gear with huge cleaver – You know, the sort of character who tends to get called something like ‘Butcher’. Carve him up. Level over, assign experience points – Yes, experience points, really – move on to level 2. Now in hospital on loan from Silent Hill games fighting scalpel throwing zombie nurses.
Got the gist of story mode. Back to main menu, what else? Survival Mode, standard ‘fight endless waves of enemies until you die’ thing present and correct. What’s ‘Quest’? Hmm, screen of gold plaques – Ah, I see, this is a list of tasks to be fulfilled in the Story Mode to unlock bonuses, right? So, tasks are… not revealed until completed, so I have to guess from vague titles (‘A Bizarre Woman’, ‘Crazy Libido’) or stumble on them by accident. Arse biscuits! And you were doing so well! You really were! Why do developers do this? Well, I know why big developers do it – Those strategy guides aren’t going to sell themselves. (That’s right SquareEnix; someone really was going to dodge 200 lightning bolts in a row just to see if anything would happen.)
“Does my ancestral blade that thirsts for the souls of the undead look
big in this?"
So is Zombie Zone, objectively, a good game? No. Do I enjoy playing it? Yes. Do I regret spending a tenner on it? No. Why, when there are many better games available even for the same price? I’m not sure. Why sometimes watch Attack of the Killer Tomatoes when there are so many better films? Maybe it is just curiosity, a desire to investigate the cracks in the gaming landscape between the big names. Maybe it’s those odd moments that tell you the people responsible did care what they were doing, as much as they could. Maybe it’s that Zombie Zone, like the splatter films it invokes, operates under a trash aesthetic where normal critical rules don’t apply.
Or maybe it’s just that Dante and Leon Kennedy wouldn’t look like that in a bikini and a cowboy hat.
December 2005
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