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!

Last Week's Games: ZombiU and Greyhawk

Because of my usual problems with time allowance, this blog will be more of a review of ZombiU. I started it last week and, continuing on this week, I’m finding it tough to play – sadly not for the right reasons.

I’ve been spoiled over the last ten years or so by Autosave, where I expect a game to save itself every so often so that I don’t have to do the last half an hour again if I lose during the game. ZombiU works differently to this. When your survivor dies, you carry on from the same point in the progress of the game with a different survivor; functionally identical but a different person. The problem is that the game doesn’t save when this happens. To save the game you have to sleep in the safe house. I didn’t know this, and lost all the progress I’d made on Monday through forgetting to save the game.

A cricket bat. Could it be more British? Good for conserving
 ammo but it takes a lot of hits to drop a Zombie...

“No problem,” thought I, “I wasn’t doing very well, let’s start again.” I got to the point early on in the game where you have to go to the supermarket and hack the security camera junction boxes. I died a number of times – usually as I’d managed to traverse to a different area. When I’d finally finished what I was supposed to be doing, I headed back to the safe house, to find that the game had glitched and hadn’t registered that I’d made it to the supermarket. This was a requirement to end the mission, and because it hadn’t registered, the game would never progress beyond that point. I could have started again, but I was tired and went to bed instead.

The game itself plays OK. The handling’s a bit off but I’m choosing to believe that it better represents the relative skill of the ‘everyman’ survivors you’re controlling. The best – and simultaneously the worst – bits are where there were more zombies in the area than you were expecting, or you trigger a trap, and you have to make a quick blind decision as to where to go next. You can barely see, you’re panicking and the chances that you’ll get it right are slim indeed. You’ll probably die at these points, and it can feel quite cheap. On the other hand if I was caught up in a Zombie Apocalypse that’s probably what would happen to me!

The WiiU game pad works better in some situations than others. It’s good for inventory management; touch screens are ideal for those situations. I also liked it’s utilisation for things like opening sewer drains, or setting and removing barricades; that’s representative of at least some of the physical effort required by your character to do those things. It reminded me of Resident Evil: Deadly Silence for the Nintendo DS, essentially the first Resident Evil game that included some added bits of touch screen functionality.

Less welcome are those times where you have to use it to aim the heavy machine gun near the safe house; you have to aim in first person using the gyro and the screen on the pad. Those guns should be a challenge to use. But you hold the pad flat to play the game, and hold it up to your face in order to aim on the screen with the full range of movement. The trouble is if the aiming begins while your pad’s still flat, you’ll hold it up and will be looking straight at the floor. Even though I later found that you could use the right analogue stick to correct this, it disrupts the flow of the game!

ZombiU’s OK, but that’s all. I might not through to the end before moving on!

I expect Simeon looks a bit like this...

At the Roleplaying group we’ve changed games for this rotation; we’re continuing a Dungeons and Dragons: Greyhawk campaign started a while back. It’s not a deliberately funny setting, but I’m playing a half-elf fighter called Simeon D’sai who has a Wisdom score of 6 with a -2 modifier. This has created very fun situations where my character is easily fooled, both in the adventure and my colleagues who take advantage of it! It’s been fun so far, and it should continue to be.

Last Week's Games: X-Wing, Ticket to Ride, Castlevania, ZombiU

This week I played a surprising number of games…

The first one was Star Wars: X-Wing. I’m playing through the main campaign mode and I’m about two thirds of the way through the first episode; I’m enjoying it so far. I like how there’s always a specific objective you need to work within the game parameters to achieve; there are escort missions, combat missions, missions with specific targets to destroy, rescue missions and everything in between. You might be forgiven for thinking that’s standard, but the game doesn’t hold your hand. You get a briefing, and then you get dropped into the mission – after that, you’re on your own. You get some support in the form of wingmen and updates from your computer, but you need to work out how you’re going to tackle the mission; the game doesn’t tell you and your wingmen won’t win it for you. Quite often, you’ll work it out through trial and error – but that’s a positive thing; it puts some necessary thought into the process of beating a level.

Also, there’s a risk of you getting captured or killed in the game. Again, you might think this an obvious point, but let me explain: If your ship gets destroyed when you’re on a campaign mission, one of three things will happen. If you auto-eject, you’ll either be rescued by the Rebels or captured by the Empire. If you can’t eject because of bad luck or a systems malfunction, you die. If either of the latter two happen, your character can be revived, but he loses his rank and experience and is demoted to Flight Officer, the second lowest rank.

In this edition of the game this doesn’t make much difference, but in previous editions, this could potentially have an effect on your wingmen. You could have several pilots on file, and before you launched a mission you’d have the opportunity to deploy these pilots into the ships that would be flying with you – the higher their rank, the more competently they would fly. You’d run the risk of them dying but you’d also have a wing of pilots you’d created and nurtured yourself. They even had pictures! This was removed from the Windows version of the game I’m playing, presumably to streamline the experience, but it also removed the potential for some X-COM-like storytelling in there in addition to the main campaign.

Great game.

I also spent some time in Warlords 'n' Wizards, a new hobby shop in Netherton, and managed to have a game of Ticket to Ride with one of the lads there. Most people who play this know what a great game it is. I won the game, but with Ticket to Ride, the time between playing the game for the first time and understanding what you have to do is quite short, and the guy I was playing picked it up very quickly, so he had a lot of fun as well. That’s the mark of good game design, in my opinion! I might talk about it more in depth on a slow week, but it’s a very well-designed game that everybody should play at least once.

Hard game!

I dug out the WiiU and played a couple of games on that as well. The first was the original Castlevania, and I’d forgotten how brutally hard that game was. I’m going to have to exploit the WiiU’s infrastructure to scum-save the game, because there’s no way I’m going to finish it any other way. Some might say I’m not getting the true experience if I play it with an option to save, but these old games were designed in a time where the length of the game was extended by its difficulty. I’m having fun with Castlevania – but I’m not looking to get bogged down.

The other one was ZombiU. This was an interesting take on the Zombie game genre, because it functions like a Rogue-lite: you take a survivor up until the point where you die, and then when you take over as another survivor, you have the opportunity to fight your previous character – now a Zombie – and pick up your old equipment. I’ll talk a bit more about it next week! 

Last Week's Games: X-Wing and Final Fantasy II

This week I’ve found myself short of spare time, so I didn’t play many games. But I get to talk more at length about the games I did play, so here they are: 

The main game I played was Star Wars: X Wing. I talked about this last week, but I’ve been getting really in to it again because of how the game plays. It is a space flight simulator; there’s all sorts of different controls and buttons and you have to use most of them at some point in order to succeed. It’s challenging for a number of reasons, the main one being the power distribution system, but it’s not insurmountable and is still a lot of fun.

I'm pretty sure this is the edition
of X-Wing I am playing...

I beat the A-Wing proving ground: a track where you have to fly through gates and shoot targets, some of which shoot back. The track is the same layout no matter what ship you’re in. There are eight levels you have to beat in order to gain the reward for it; a flight badge. You have a limited amount of time to beat it, which gets progressively smaller as you beat the levels. If you miss a gate, you incur a penalty of 15 seconds; for some of the middle levels, that’s disastrous. Also, the targets shoot more aggressively in the later levels, and in the last one, they even shoot you from behind – but if you shoot them, you gain 2 extra seconds to complete the level. There are certain stages that are all but impossible to beat without this.

The challenges in the proving ground are more or less substantial depending on what ship you are flying. The middle tier levels have the tightest time and usually present a significant challenge, but less so with the A-Wing as it moves fast enough for time to be less of a consideration. It doesn’t do such a good job at boosting its shields though, and for that reason, the later levels with the more aggressive targets were more challenging. If your systems start to shut down then you’re in trouble; if your guns are taken out then you can’t fire back, if your shields are knocked out you’ll be destroyed in seconds, and if your flight control or engine goes then you lose a lot of time getting them repaired. Despite all this it was a surprising amount of fun addressing the different challenges each level presents, knowing that there is way to beat it if you can only get it right.

I also enjoyed the A-Wing historical missions; they’re less challenging and a relaxing change of pace. Here’s where a lot of the genius of the game design comes in to play: The missions rarely take more than a few minutes to beat, and you can play through them quite quickly, but there is a reward for each one. It’s a graphic of a badge on a display uniform; not much in itself, but because the game shows you a tangible reward for doing these training missions, you have the incentive to beat them all.

I started the main campaign mode as well. More on that next week!

These hornets are a threat at the beginning.
Not for long...

I also progressed with Final Fantasy II. I love the Final Fantasy games but rarely see one through to the end; the first game is the only one where I’ve managed it so far. I’m having a lot of fun with it, and I’ve arrived at the point where I’m heading for Mysidia Tower. I’m playing it on my Gameboy Advance, although I find that the game is best enjoyed when I have my phone to hand. I don’t know whether it’s a design error in this edition of the game, but whatever command is supposed to display the world map isn’t working! I’ve had to call up an image of the world map come up on more than one occasion so I can see where I’m supposed to go. The game itself isn’t all that challenging, although I am aware that the difficulty level was re-balanced for the GBA editions.

So, what’s next? More of the same, or will I try a different game? Will I even have time? We’ll see…

Last Week's Games: Streets of Rage 2, Vectorman 2, Bioshock Infinite, Star Wars: X Wing and Final Fantasy II

I’ve picked up and played quite a few games over the course of this week. Let’s see what they all are: 

Some cosmetic differences to the
characters in the game, funnily enough...

First game I had a go with was my favourite game of all time, Streets of Rage 2. I’ve waxed lyrical about this game many times before, and I still get it out every now and then because I’ve only got one thing left to do with it now: try to beat the game on the hardest difficulty without cheating. I tend to use Max for my play through, which might seem like an odd decision because of his speed, or lack thereof. However, at 20,000, 50,000, and every 100,000 points thereafter, you get an extra life, and this happens far more quickly with Max than with the other characters because you score more points for his high-impact grapple moves, and I can make up for his lack of manoeuvrability with his sliding tackle. I can therefore rack up a huge amount of extra lives in the early game, which generally keeps me going until the 6^th – or if I’m very lucky, the 7^th stage.

I didn’t manage it this time; I fell down on the one part I always manage to mess up on – the elevator on the 7^th stage, where there’s a huge ‘minor boss’ rush section and barely any room to move. Max isn’t great at manoeuvring and against the high-speed ninjas, it’s a struggle. It tanks most of my lives, with barely any left for stage 8 if I’m fortunate enough to get there. On this occasion I did, and I got as far as the boss rush in the elevator and finally died to Z.Kusano. Next time…

The other game I had a go with on the same disc is Vectorman 2. I’m after the achievement points for this one, and to get them I simply have to get to Scene 11. The problem with this is that the game is boss-hard and I can’t get past scene 5. It’s a throwback to old-school gaming where you have to study a level to find all the secret areas and power-ups. I wish I could wrap this up a little more quickly but this game was designed at a time where the longevity of the game could be increased by its difficulty!

That's the bit I've just done, if you're wondering...

I played Bioshock Infinite as well; I’m slowly going through it. For me, with the Bioshock games, the story takes a long time to get going. I’ve played all of them up to this one (not the DLC though,) and found myself having a standard experience for the first few hours of the game, before the story and the stakes ramp up in the second half. I’ll keep going at it; one of the better qualities of the game is that it is divided in to sections that you can play through for roughly an hour or so at a time – it’s not necessary to sit down and beat the whole thing in one go.

I played Star Wars: X Wing on my laptop as well. I had this game in several iterations in my youth, and enjoyed it immensely at the time. It harks back to an era of flight simulators where potentially any key on the keyboard does something, and while the control schemes can feel a little contrived sometimes, it’s probably closer to the experience of being a fighter pilot than an arcade shooter! I’m trying to get through all the Y-Wing training and historical missions; while the latter are easy enough, the proving ground was very tricky, as the lack of speed meant I needed to be on it with my targeting!

I continued the game of Civ IV I mentioned last week but I found I was getting stuck in a rut, so I don’t know how long I’ll keep that.

Finally, when I was necessarily restricted to a handheld, I was playing Final Fantasy II on my old Gamebody Advance. I tend to play this one very small bit at a time, in this case the rescue of Princess Hilda from the Palamecia Coliseum.

Am I going to play as many games next week? We shall see…

Last Week's Games: Civ 4, Eberron and Shinobi 3

I thought I’d start trying to do a regular blog on the games I’ve been playing in the week. I normally only do it when I’ve beaten one, but in many cases that takes ages and I rarely play a game to completion these days. That significantly reduced the output of blogs, and while I don’t intend to write so much that it becomes more work than fun, I thought I’d make an effort to describe the games I’ve been playing in what little of my free time remains available to me!

Haven't quite achieved this level of grandeur yet...

First up, earlier on in the week I had a go at Civilization IV on my laptop. I bought it as it was at the top of the list of Rock Paper Shotgun’s 50 Greatest Strategy Games. Now, 4x strategy games haven’t always agreed with me; I find the lack of personal involvement in what I’m doing takes my head out of the story of the game somewhat. But I have recently been enjoying turn-based games a lot more and this certainly gives me the time and space to think about what I’m doing. I’m playing as the Americans at the moment and I’ve put an hour or so into the game on the second-to-bottom difficulty. I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I hope I continue to do so; it’s an enjoyable enough game and arguably the best in the series (not that I’d know, having not played another Civilization game since the first. There was a version on the Nintendo DS at some point that I finished in a single evening but I’m not sure that counts!) 

In the Roleplaying group we continued the Dungeons and Dragons Eberron campaign in which I’m playing a Halfling Monk called Corrin. I’ve never played a Monk before and it’s an odd experience; they’re great at combat and rubbish at everything else. That takes me out of the game on those occasions where we’re not in combat, but at the same time I really like being good at it! Combining the multi-attack damage output of the monk with the mobility of the Halfing means that I can very easily set up flanking moves (yes, they are a thing in 5e!) and potentially inflict the most damage of the party so far!

The adventure our GM is running, Murder in the Dark, was clearly designed as an introductory adventure to the Eberron setting and I’m not sure I’m enjoying the way it’s designed. Without wishing to spoil, it was quite obviously written for certain aspects of the adventure to work out in a certain way, and it does grate somewhat when you were always going to lose the macguffin item in order to advance the plot – I can see why it has to be done, but it doesn’t feel very organic! But then again, it’s on the players and the GM to make a good roleplaying experience and I have been enjoying the game, on the whole. I just wish it wasn’t at the end of a full and very long day at work; then I wouldn’t be so tired while I was doing it!

This bit is cool. I want one of those boards!

Also I had a go on Shinobi III on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection on the Xbox360. This is a game I owned during the time I owned a Megadrive, so I’ve been playing it for a long time indeed, and I still find it enjoyable even to this very day. I’m not quite as good at it now as I was back then – I can no longer beat the game on the hardest difficulty – but I can take a certain amount of pride in knowing how to do all the special attacks. The dive kick, for example, makes the game a lot easier to play, as does knowing the functionality of the Ninjitsu techniques. I got to the fifth stage this time, but got frustrated when I died due to falling down a hole – a silly mistake, and one I knew would cost me later on – so I gave up and went for a shower.

I might have a bit more time next week, so we’ll see what that brings. See you soon!

Backlog Beatdown: Double Dragon. No single dragon nonsense.

Double Dragon Trilogy was a game I bought months ago from GOG having had an email from them promoting the game. I remembered enjoying it when I played it on my mate Adam’s NES years ago, bought it on a whim and it’s taken me until now to give it a go. I dug my old controller out, booted up the game, remembered how hard it was and hoped that this time I’d be able to beat it. You should be aware that these notes refer to this updated version of the game.

The premise of the game is that you’re one of a pair of twins, Billy and Jimmy Lee, and you’re on a quest to fight through a street gang called the Black Warriors to save Billy’s girlfriend, Marian. The game is one of the earlier efforts of what later became known as the Brawler genre, with your character able to move around the floor section of the screen, kicking, punching and special-moving your way through the levels and the enemies. The game was originally released in 1987 and the genre was very popular in the arcades at the time, but is it still any good today?

That’s a loaded question if you’re asking me, because I will always compare a game like this to the standards of Streets of Rage 2, which is the best game of all time and everyone should play it. But as a game released roughly five years before that, Double Dragon does OK. It’s a standard brawler with some new features (for the time) and satisfying game mechanics, let down at the end by a horribly cheap final level, (we’ll get to that.) You have a button to punch, a button to kick and one to jump as well. You can also to a jump kick, but I got through the game without doing this because Billy kept kicking backwards. I didn’t find out until later that you’re supposed to press the punch button to make him kick forwards!

Batter him...

The enemies usually go down after one or two attack combos, and there are some colourful characters and bosses to liven things up. Double Dragon was also the first game of its kind to allow the use of weapons, which added an extra layer of depth as you have to balance range, speed and timing. The whip, for example, was a fast weapon but didn’t have a lot of range, whereas the baseball bat was slower but had more reach. Both required good timing. The knife was a throwing weapon, which would one-shot kill most of the lower-level enemies and help a lot with a boss. You could also throw boulders, boxes and barrels.

Aside from being able to select the difficulty (I went with easy; games like this often require you to know them inside out to be able to handle the harder difficulties,) the Trilogy version comes with two modes – Arcade and Story. It took me a couple of goes to work out the difference: In Arcade mode you play through the game, you have three lives and can continue when you’ve lost them all. In Story mode, you can select any of the game’s four levels once unlocked, starting the game with four lives and no continues. I beat the game on Arcade mode. I did try the story mode but found it very difficult, and here’s why:

Remember that horribly cheap final level a couple of paragraphs ago? This purports to be the gang’s hideout in some kind of temple. The first half of the level is trapped with sliding blocks and spear statues that drain a lot of your energy, and with the blocks in particular there seems to be nothing you can do about it. They appear in a random pattern as soon as you get close to them, and will kill you after two hits. There’s no skill involved with this, just luck, and you’ll lose a lot of your lives navigating it. Then there is the game’s final boss, Willy, whose weapon is a gun that will one-shot kill you the moment it hits you and will never be dropped. It is possible to beat him, but without the option to continue the game once you’ve lost your lives, it presents a far greater challenge than is fun.

Once you’ve beaten the game, Billy rescues his girlfriend and the credits roll. Apparently if you play in multiplayer mode you then have to fight Jimmy for her affections, but as I played this game on my laptop, I doubt I’ll ever see this! All in all, it’s not a bad little game, I had some fun with it, despite the last level. Give it a go – but don’t spend any substantial amount of money on it!