Last Week's Games: The Elder Scrolls: Area, Super Castlevania IV, Fire Pro Wrestling World

Now that I've seen this, I've got Medusa and Hemlock
by Cradle of Filth buzzing around my head...

This week I’ve been playing a bit of The Elder Scrolls: Arena. This was the first Elder Scrolls game released in 1994; I’ve had a dalliance with some of the Elder Scrolls games that have been released since then but have never seen one through to the end. While a lot of the ideas that ended up in the later games were there from the beginning, the interface shows its age! I’ve had a reasonably good time having a go with the different character races and classes, which is easier to do in Arena than it was in Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim because the first dungeon (in which you start as a prisoner, so it’s good to see the Elder Scrolls series started as it meant to go on) can kill you quite quickly if you’re not careful! I got to know the area very well; where all the loot drops and enemies were, as I explored it multiple times with different characters. I eventually settled on a Wood Elf mage; I’m aware that the stats of a Wood Elf don’t necessarily support the Mage class, but I found that it had enough physical power to outlast a lot of the other classes I’d been playing. I guess this is one of the areas where video games differ from table top RPGs; when there’s only one player character, you must be able to handle more than the situations your class would normally deal with! I eventually managed to get to the end of the dungeon but then emerged into the town in the middle of the night and got killed by the enemies hanging around the town; often before I even knew they were there! Thank goodness I thought to save the game. It was also amusing to see that the Khajit were originally human in appearance, rather than the feline appearance they later acquired. 

Tricky though this bit is, it's nothing
compared to the next bit...

I also tried Super Castlevania IV on my WiiU again. I played the level where some of the old music from the previous games had been remixed for the 4^th iteration of the game – including a track that was involved in one of Jim Sterling’s “F**Konami News” gags, so that raised a smile from me! That level has some very tough platforming segments, so I didn’t get very far, but my three-year-old daughter noticed what I was doing and wanted a go. I set her off on the first level; she hasn’t quite got the dexterity to handle platforming yet, but she was having a fine time making Simon Belmont walk up and down the stairs on the first screen! She enjoyed the results of whipping the skeletons too, though she hadn’t got the reaction times to do it quickly, so I often ended up doing it. But it’s all good; at this point she just enjoys doing things with her Daddy!

Alright mate, put it down; you'll get DQ'd!

Finally, I had a go with a game I’ve left far too long without trying: Fire Pro Wrestling World. It’s been a while since I had a wrestling game to play with, and the WWE series that started with Smackdown has, if I understand the commentary on it correctly, disappeared into its own bottom trying to make the best and most comprehensive creation mode while forgetting to make the gameplay itself any good. Fire Pro Wrestling, free from the shackles of having to use licensed wrestlers or keep up with constantly-evolving graphics engines, has certainly put a lot of thought into the gameplay. The controls are more of a timing-based system than WWE’s button-mashing, and you have to balance light and strong attacks, or you will very easily be countered. I’m currentlyplaying through the mission mode, where you have to achieve a certain condition by the end of the match (not always a win!) This is a great way for me to get used to the different wrestlers in the game, and to learn the mechanics. I even streamed some of it earlier today and put on a rather embarrassing show, but the one person watching it sat through most of it so I’m not complaining! I’ve really enjoyed Fire Pro Wrestling World so far, and I hope I’ll continue to do so!

Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein 3D, Beneath a Steel Sky, Super Castlevania IV, Torchlight, Horus Heresy: Legions

I’ve been playing quite a few games this week, many of which I’ve never played before; let’s hope I’ve got the space to write about them all:

As with the later Doom, the chaingun eats up
a lot of ammo...

The first one was Wolfenstein 3D on my laptop. This one is often regarded as the Grandfather of first-person shooters, and while it might have been the first game that kicked off a huge part of what mainstream video games eventually became, it hasn’t aged particularly well. You run through the halls and rooms of a grey castle, shooting Nazis and collecting treasure. It works, and it is fun. The level design has a certain “Dungeons and Dragons” sensibility to it, and it’s challenging enough on the right level. But when all the levels look the same with very little variety in what you’re doing, it’s hard to think of a part of the game I’ve played that I would classify as “memorable.”

Robert Foster and Joey.

I’ve also been playing Beneath a Steel Sky. This was a game that I got for free on my GOG account, for some reason, and had never touched it in that time. From the occasional coverage from Jim Sterling, I knew that it was a Point and Click adventure, but unsure as to whether I had the patience, I didn’t bother with it for the longest time. But I’m playing it now, and it’s a pretty good adventure; it was developed by Revolution who also did Broken Sword, so it was interesting to see the contextual mouse system being developed, even if it was in its infancy back then. It’s pretty good, amusing in the right places, but it has the same problem that most games of its time had – if you can’t work out the puzzle, the whole game grinds to a halt. This has happened to me at least once, where I had to use a guide to figure out what to do next, only to find I had to talk to a character I had no practical reason to talk to at that point. Nonetheless, I hope I get to the end of it!

Hands up who remembers THAT music...

On the WiiU, I’ve been playing Super Castlevania IV. This is a game I played a while ago, as my mate Matt had it on the Super Nintendo; it’s arguably as good as the Castlevania series ever achieved and certainly an entertaining game after all this time. A nice variety of enemies, tricky platforming sections, and bosses that you should never be able to beat makes for a fun time, marred only slightly by some cheap deaths and odd checkpoint placement. It works especially well with the WiiU’s internal saving system, and I’m enjoying playing through it again, if only to give myself some ideas on what I might develop in my own DnD campaigns in future!

Spiders. It had to be spiders, didn't it?

I also played Torchlight on the Xbox 360. This was a free download with Games with Gold, and while I’d already bought it on the PC I thought the Xbox would be a more convenient platform to give it a go. It’s a dungeon-basher, with a lot of things to loot, an interesting “Pet” mechanic and a linear and standard storyline. It’s been fun so far, but it hasn’t got the depth of many of the RPGs I play, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing much more than getting through to the end of the game. I’ll stick at it for a bit, but I don’t know, I might have wanted a bit more than this. Still, I didn’t pay for this version of it, so I guess it’s OK!

Custodes. A pain in the bum to run or fight.

Finally, I’ve been playing The Horus Heresy: Legions on my phone. It took me a while to get back in to it, but I got there in the end! I’ve joined a new lodge as well – emperors Finest. The reason for this was that my previous lodge, the Emperor’s Daggers, was full of dead accounts. I’d love to be able to win some points for the team in the events, but the Adeptus Custodes cards are very fiddly and I’m not sure yet how I can use them effectively.

Let’s see what next week brings, and whether I can finish some of these games!

Last Week's Games: Early August

Hi, it’s been a while since my last regular blog, so I thought I’d do an update for you with the games I’ve been playing over the last few weeks. This isn’t me ‘resuming normal service’ in the usual way; things are still very up in the air at the moment and I can’t give a timetable to a weekly blog for another couple of weeks at least, but I can give you an idea of what’s been happening. 

Mack the Knife. Also known as Stabby McGee.
Thanks Kirsty!

I’ve cheated a bit with playing new games over the last few weeks, as most of them were on the Capcom Arcade Classics Collection Volume 2. This was a disc I bought for the Playstation 2, I think I was still at University at the time so it would have been anything up to twelve years ago. I bought it mainly on the strength of the original Street Fighter which was featured on the disc, and didn’t touch any of the other games on there. That was a shame, as Street Fighter is arguably one of the weakest games on there,[1] and I missed out on some gems! A lot of them were old late 80s/early 90s arcade games, where the arcades where at their peak of featuring scrolling beat-em-ups you were never going to be able to beat without spending at least £10 on continues, but I’ve had a lot of fun with them. Kirsty and I got through Captain Commando, and there’ll be a Backlog Beatdown on that one soon!

Well that's a bit presumptuous. I don't remember being friends
with Susan and Brian. I'm sure they're very nice people.

Elsewhere I’ve been playing 8 Ball Pool on my Kindle Fire. This is a top-down pool game that is played against various people around the world, including at least two people I know! I’m doing reasonably well with it, I win about two thirds of my games, although I’d suggest that at least half of those are to do with the connection going on the other side of the match! Once you get past the novelty of playing pool on your tablet, it’s an unlock-fest really, and one that is not shy about advertising its micro transactions, but as long as you keep your wallet under control it’s possible to have a good time with games like this!

Also I’ve been trying to get through the original Castlevania on the WiiU. As anybody who has played this game will tell you, after a deceptively easy first level, the game becomes brutally difficult, and the only way I’m making any progress is to scum-save each part of the levels and hope for the best when I get to the boss. Thankfully, the structure of the WiiU allows you to do this, or I wouldn’t have a chance. I’ve always really enjoyed the Castlevania games, but apart from beating Super Castlevania IV in 1997, I’ve never beaten another one. Might be time to play through some more!

I haven’t had much time for hobby gaming over the summer holidays for various different reasons, but I’ve continued to run Pathfinder’s Rise of the Runelords for Dave, Victor, Morgan and some of their friends. I’ve also started to run Dungeons and Dragons again at the Black Country Role Playing Society, where I’m running the Misty Fortunes and Absent Hearts path from the D&D Adventurer’s League. I had a starting line-up of players worryingly similar to the Falcon’s Hollow saga I ran years ago, but I should have some new players join up next week.

I should go to the Nashkel Mines next...

Perhaps as added inspiration I started a new campaign on Baldur’s Gate as a Sorcerer. I’ve played through probably the first third of the game many times, and have never been able to see it through quite until the end, however this time is different because I allowed Khalid and Jaheira, and certain other party members to be killed off and will recruit new party members as I’m going along. I almost never do this as canonically they both survive until the end of the game, but I thought I’d see how I get along with the core line-up!

---

[1] Yes, I know it paved the way for the massive gaming entity that the Street Fighter Franchise eventually became, but the first game in the series just wasn’t there yet.

Last Week's Games: Atari Anthology, New Super Mario Bros U, Theme Hospital

I started this week by playing the Atari Anthology on the PlayStation 2. This is a compilation of 85 games that were a mixture of the Atari 2600 console and Arcade games, and with my borderline OCD method of decision-making, I tried some of them in alphabetical order. I had a go on a 2600 years ago which my friend Richard inherited off his Dad, and even with my age in single digits, I knew that games had come on a long way since then. Most people who collect and play these games now do so because they have some nostalgic investment in it; I don’t have this but it’s an interesting concept nevertheless. The games showcased by this compilation “Started a Revolution,” and from what I understand about the 2600, it needed this shortlist! Many of the games released for it weren’t very good, and contributed to the over-saturation of the market that cause it to crash in the 1980s. Video games were in their infancy at that point, and a lot of what makes them fun for me – an end goal, an engaging plot, a challenging process and a satisfying resolution – just wasn’t there.

I like how the art for the early video
 games looked significantly better than
 the actual game...

Due to the limitations of the hardware, and that the entire concept of video games was still in development, the better games concentrated on their playability. I had a lot of fun with 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, a game played over a 4x4x4 cube. There is definite strategy involved, but if you mirror the computer’s moves, you’ll reach a draw. It took a while to beat but I managed it in the end.

Air and Sea Battle was reminiscent of early shooters, in which you play a gun turret shooting planes and helicopters out of the sky. Set up correctly, you have two minutes to score more points than the gun on the opposite side. As a single-player experience it’s over quite quickly; I’d imagine it would be better with two players, but most things are!

When I needed a few moments to wind down, I had a go with New Super Mario Bros U on the WiiU. I find that, with such wide gaps between playing this game, I forget about some of the newer techniques and power-ups and have to remember what they do before I can use them in any meaningful way. But it’s a nice fun game that I don’t have to think too hard about, which is exactly what I need at eleven o’clock at night!

Last Friday I beat Theme Hospital. I’ll put out a Backlog Beatdown review next Friday, but developing the points I made last week: The Epidemics and the Earthquakes are difficult to deal with, need to be included. In the later levels, there comes a point where everything needed to beat the level is basically done, and all you’re doing is waiting for the money to roll in so you can progress to the next one. The Epidemics, which gamble some money and reputation on being able to cure a certain number of patients in a certain time and none of them going outside, and Earthquakes, which damage your machines, appear at random and add some challenge to the game when everything is done. It’s a harsh way to extend the game, but they needed to exist.

Oh dear, that doesn't look too good...

Also the last level was deceptively simple to beat. I’d researched all the cures, built all the rooms and trained all my doctors to be as efficient as possible. While the criteria for beating the level is quite high, I was waiting for a curveball I didn’t think was going to come. It arrived right at the end: Most of the levels end on the next quarter of a year. With the last one, it only ends at the end of the year – and you have to maintain the standards until then. It took me longer than it should have to clear it, as just before the year ended, an earthquake that destroyed a few of my machines, a couple of doctors working on them – and my reputation. It took a long time to pull it back, but I did, and finished the game I originally bought in 1998!

Last Week's Games: Super Mario Bros, Castlevania, Cluckles Adventure and Spelunky

Haven't got to this bit, funnily enough...

After beating L.A. Noire, I felt the need to do my thing where I beat a heavy game, then play a couple of light ones. For this, I dug out my WiiU and play Super Mario Bros again, and Castlevania. Both are challenging platformers, and both are very hard to beat if you don’t know what you’re doing; with Super Mario I got stuck on World 7 where there is some very precise timing required, and with Castlevania, I couldn’t even make it past the third level. I had a saved game somewhere around the fourth, but it requires bang-on precision with the platforming and attacks, and more often than not I fall foul of the knockback that plagues the earlier games. How anybody managed to beat this I don’t know! Then again, the game is from a very different generation, where it was usual for people to not have all that many games (I have several hundred now) and the challenge of the games they did have was added to by ferocious difficulty, and a lives system that forces you to go back to the start of the level after every few deaths; in Super Mario it ends the game altogether! I’m not all that far away from the same thing happening on New Super Mario Bros U, which I also had a quick go at.

Probably shouldn't jump on that snail...

Contrast this with Cluckles’ Adventure. Aesthetically, it’s designed to look and play like one of those older games, but the comparisons end there. There is no lives system; you can replay a level as many times as you want. The 100+ levels are a lot shorter; even the longest one I’ve come across takes about a minute and a half. There are power-ups that help you (so far I’ve only come across a shield that will allow you to take an extra hit,) but none that you’re supposed to have in order to get through a level. No boss battles either, that I’ve seen! It’s just you and a small number of core gameplay mechanics vs some very competently designed levels.

Old classics were great at the time, but things move on.

For example, 30-something levels in to the game, one of the stages telegraphs a secret room by putting a large square boulder on the ground that doesn’t impede you in any way, but is deactivated by a switch at the bottom of the level. Once you return to the area, the boulder is gone, but if you jump straight down rather than clinging to the walls, you fall on to a spike trap, die and return to the start of the level. Now if that were at the end of a level you’d spent ten minutes on, or you had limited lives, it would probably feel quite cheap. But since the only penalty for this is about 40 seconds from your life, it puts you in a position to say “Yeah, OK, you got me. Well played. I’ll know for next time.” I’m not saying the new games are better than the old classics, or the other way around – more that they are indicative of the generation in which they were developed.

A gamer's game, to be sure!

I also had a go at Spelunky. I’ve had this game on my Xbox 360 for a while, and I pick it up every now and then. This is a bit of a weird one because I can never usually play it for very long. It’s a rogue-lite, and the obvious comparison is to Rogue Legacy that I have on my laptop. It’s a similar sort of thing; go around a 2D procedurally-generated dungeon in to find a lot of treasure, defeat the enemies and progress through the game. Where I find Spelunky lets itself down is that there’s nothing you can do with the treasure in-between runs. With Rogue Legacy, the gold you earned could be used to upgrade your character or equipment. With Spelunky, you can buy new equipment as you’re going along, but other than that there’s nothing else to do with the treasure and you lose it all in between runs. It’s good to pick up and play for a few minutes but the brutally hard progression system makes it difficult to remain engaged for long. 
 
 

Last Week's Games: Sacred Citadel, Super Mario Bros

We’re in to one of the busiest times of the year for me; I’m a music teacher and the end of any term is always fraught with many more things I need to do in addition to whatever foetid standards pass for normal. That combined with the significant changes in my personal and musical life over the last few years means that once again, I’ve not found much time to play many games. Life gets in the way! But, also, life finds a way, as shown to us by the Jurassic Park franchise. And amongst the many, many videos I watched of other people talking about video games, I did indeed manage to play one or two of them.

I thought I had another picture for this...

I continued with my game of Sacred: Citadel, managing to get past the part I was stuck on that was halfway through the second act. I’m progressing through the game at a steady pace, and I’m still enjoying it. But I have to wonder what in the world I’m supposed to be doing about the score challenges. If you’re issued a score challenge, you need to get through the level you’re set having scored 6,666 points. Considering that I don’t think I’ve ever done that even when I’m not doing a challenge, and that I can’t find a way to increase your score other than boost your combat multipliers, I find myself wondering how I’m supposed to do it. Am I supposed to pick a less-damaging weapon so that I can increase my number of attacks? I’m aware that there are probably videos on Youtube that would answer my questions, but I haven’t looked for any yet. The game’s enjoyable enough and I’ll probably keep playing it when I’ve got an hour to spare, but if I find myself with more time in the weekend (I might, you never know!) I might try a heavier game.

That was it until yesterday morning when I decided on a whim to put my WiiU on and have a go at Super Mario Bros. I downloaded the original NES version of the game not long after I bought the system, and I play it every now and. It’s a game that I hardly need to introduce; it’s one of the finest platforming games ever designed. It’s balanced, fun and challenging in all the right places. While other games in the series were more fleshed-out, with different themes being applied to different worlds and demonstrably better with the introduction of new mechanics, the core of what Super Mario is started with this game. I focus on collecting as many coins as possible to get extra lives – a standard mechanic of the time – and I tend to get up to the seventh world before they run out.

Apparently those blocks are supposed to be
the people of the Mushroom Kingdom that
Bowser and the Koopas changed into blocks
with magic. Let that horror sink in.

I’ve actually beaten the game before, ages ago, when I had it on the Super Nintendo as part of the Mario All-Stars compilation, but there was a crucial difference in that version of the game: you could save your progress. You could start from any of the previously-visited worlds and you didn’t have to do the entire game in one sitting. That, I’m pretty sure, is why I haven’t beaten this version it yet – after the time it takes me to get to the sixth or seventh world, I start to lose concentration, and make costly mistakes.

And yes, I know that the structure of the WiiU allows you to save game states and you therefore don’t have to get through the entire game in one sitting on this console either. I don’t mind doing that on Castlevania, which is a ferociously difficult game due to its design, or Mega Man X that is a large game that I wouldn’t expect to be able to beat in one go. With Super Mario Bros, it’s a short enough game that I think I ought to be able to get through the whole thing in one sitting, and the challenges it presents aren’t unfair; I die due to my own mistakes that I should be able to correct if I keep trying. That’s the level at which Super Mario Bros challenges me, and that’s how I am aiming to beat it.

Last Weeks Games: Painting Word Bears, Building Project Pandora and Beating ZombiU.

This week’s was interesting. I beat ZombiU, and while I will talk about that later, much of what I want to say about it was covered in my Backlog Beatdown review. So for this week, I’ll be talking a bit more about my hobby projects:

Had a fine old time
painting this one!

The first and most important thing to examine is the Warhammer 40K Start Collecting! Chaos Space Marine boxed set that I finally finished on Sunday. I bought it back in April/May, and having finished painting the Chaos Space Marine Terminator Lord, I’ve now painted everything in the box. I’m not a very fast painter; it can be months between painting sessions, however over the last few weeks I’ve managed to find some time to go in to Warlords 'n' Wizards in Netherton and spend an hour or so painting. Doing little bits and pieces at a time when it’s convenient yields many more results than painting on those few hours I have to very deliberately set aside when I’m at home! Who knew?

This is my fifth Chaos Space Marine army – I love Chaos in 40K – and for this one I used the Word Bearers colour scheme. My mate Dave started a collection of Ultramarines at about the same time, so I painted them up as their sworn enemies, hence the Terminator Lord having an Ultramarine helmet on display and – from the advice from Steve from Warlords – the head of a Tyranid of Hive Fleet Behemoth. Dave’s taken a break from war games for a while, so I won’t be playing against him any time soon, but I’ve now got some Word Bearers to show for it. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of doing a force full of religious nut-jobs, so I ran with the Word Bearers legion and I hope to add to them in the future.

The whole boxed set was a joy to paint.

I’d like to give a shout out to the videos I used as a guide to painting the miniatures; I’m not a strong intuitive painter, and having a guide is pretty much the only way I learn. So thanks to The War Gamer for the vast majority of the help I received with the painting, and to Warhammer TV for the fiddly but crucial parts.

Elsewhere, I opened my Project Pandora: Grim Cargo boxed set and built all the Corporation models. I bought this game a couple of months ago. If you don’t know, it’s a dungeon crawler set in futuristic space, published by Mantic Games. It’s concerned with the battle between the Veer-min, rat-like creatures stealing secret cargo, and the Corporation soldiers defending it. I haven’t played the game yet since the models require some assembly, and unfortunately there’s no assembly guide included in the game. The Corporation models weren’t exactly challenging to build, but it was fiddly when it came to attaching the arms. The fit of some of my models suggests a certain set of guns are supposed to fit a certain set of left arms, however the game gives no indication of what arm goes with what guns, and the parts look identical. So some of my corporation guys look very odd indeed! Also, the models are plastic resin rather than full plastic, and required the use of super glue rather than the usual poly-cement.

Yeah. It got me.

Now, ZombiU… Some of my previous blogs may have given the impression that I wasn’t enjoying the game, but I actually had a decent time with it once the story got going. There were several parts where I got careless and rushed into an area full of zombies, woefully under-prepared, and one or two well-paced jump scares that managed to startle me. Very few times when I’m playing games these days do I find myself thinking: “Yeah, you got me. Well played.” ZombiU managed it, so well done! As I mentioned in my review, I beat the game but got the bad ending, as I didn’t manage to reach the helicopter before dying, but I checked the good ending on Youtube and it’s not much better, so I doubt I’ll be rushing through the game again in order to get it. I might play the Survivor mode at some point though.

Backlog Beatdown: Killing Zombies with ZombiU

ZombiU is a game I’ve had for a while, played for a bit and never got past the first few parts. I came back to it a couple of weeks ago and after having some difficulty getting started, I managed to beat it last Thursday with an unexpected day off work. Let’s see how it worked out:

ZombiU was one of the WiiU’s launch titles. First person Survival Horror games are nothing new, and ZombiU doesn’t do anything different with the theme. The notable differences are: It’s set in London, it makes use of the WiiU controller, and there are Rogue-like elements.

They'll drive you batty...

The London setting works; it is familiar to me as I am from the UK, but only in an aesthetic sense as I don’t live anywhere near London and even if I did, I don’t know enough about the interiors of Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London (two of the game’s key locations) to make a comparison. Neither, I suspect, do the developers, who appear to recognise London and its people as overblown caricatures, and presumably have never been inside Buckingham Palace either, as from what I understand about the place you don’t just ‘go in.’

The WiiU touch pad contributes to certain aspects of the game, like aiming some of the heavier guns, adding and removing barricades, and inventory management. The latter is where it helps the most; you can add and remove items from your inventory with tablet-like functionality, and it can be used as extra buttons to select your weapons and equipment in real-time, rather than having to pause the game.

The Rogue-like elements come in to play when your character dies. You respawn as a different character, with limited weapons and equipped with whatever you stored at your safe house. The game itself doesn’t change; nothing you killed during your previous run will respawn, except that your previous character is now a Zombie. You need to kill them to reach the equipment that they had; if your new character dies before you manage this, that equipment is gone forever and late in the game, that’s a nasty business indeed.

The game took a while to get going but I enjoyed it once it did. You’re guided by a disembodied northern voice called “The Prepper,” through the speaker on the WiiU controller. He initially teaches you the skills you need to survive. Later in the game you find yourself at odds with him as other people turn up and give you things to do, as Prepper seems to think there is no point in trying to escape the city; he tells you that your only chance is to survive. But, as is often the case, things are never as they seem...

So this turned out to be a thing.
Not a nice moment of the game!

The game is challenging, thrilling and scary in the right places. There’s just the right amount of “panic” moments where you find yourself unexpectedly surrounded by zombies, and some well-paced jump-scares. There’s some optional world-building documents to collect, but you’re not obliged to read them to progress. The campaign rewards a careful, methodical approach to progression, and punishes over-confident hubris. The controls can be fiddly, but I believe it better represents the ‘everyman’ survivors you’re playing. However some of the dialogue requires some suspension of disbelief to accommodate the different survivors. For example, there is a section where you fetch an item for a doctor. You’ll probably have died several times by the time you return– but he talks as though he recognises you and makes no mention you being a different person!

I beat the game, but there’s a post-credits sequence that determines the ending. To get the better ending you need to escape the city via helicopter, but as you make your way there, you’re surrounded by zombies that respawn for the only time in the game. I didn’t beat this; I didn’t have enough firepower left to deal with the zombies effectively, and I’d forgotten which way I was supposed to go and ran in to fire. There is a Survivor mode – where you have to beat the entire game with one survivor – and some multiplayer modes. I haven’t looked at these yet, but they’re there if I need them!