Subject: Zombieville from Psygnosis... what the hell? Date: 1998/07/16 Message-ID: <6olfce$6oe$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 372061664 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Thu Jul 16 18:05:01 1998 GMT Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows 95) I've just bought a Psygnosis game "Zombieville". I haven't heard about it before, and even though the box had an infantile drawing, designed by some brain damaged character, on it, I decided to take a look. The story and the screenshots seemed tempting, promising a haunted house/city story - something along the lines of AITD series, The Legacy, or Resident Evil. Well, I decided to give it a try... WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP!!! Writing everything about it would take too much time and space, so I'll try to be brief: - The game is so difficult it's ridiculous. It seems as if the makers were afraid to allow the player to see the rest of their "genius", so they decided to kill him in the very beginning. - You don't have any items at the beginning, so you can't even try to cheat with a mem tracer/editor, etc. ;) - The baddies reappear at every scene randomly after you kill them. Is that supposed to be an adventure, or a dumb shoot'em up? - The controls are quite possibly the worst controls ever created. You can control the guy via keyboard/joy/pad, but can only shoot and use object with a mouse. And you can't reconfigure it. - The items seem to be distributed RANDOMLY. A zombie you kill in the first two minutes may e.g. have a door pass, but you may also very well run around for an hour, shooting the zombies, and hoping that one of them is carrying the pass. - I don't even want to write about the "pseudo 3D environment" - that Psygnosis seems to be proud of, instead of hiding it, as they should do - or the fact that it's a DOS game; jeez. - LBNL, you control a fat old jerk, and he's WEARING RED PANTS. And, most importantly: - The game is bugged as hell. If you press "run", the baddies suddenly start moving 10x faster than normally, you can lock your character in certain places, the controls often react in a weird way (press "go", and you start turning right...). I took a look at the game's files and saw "Alpha 1.4" in some of them... - ...which brings me to the last point: apparently, this _IS_ an alpha version, not even a beta. Psygnosis is going to pieces: they were probably going to release this game in the future, but now need any quick buck to save themselves from bankruptcy, and release unfinished projects. This explains the bugs, the general idiocy of the game makers, the "alphas", and the lack of any campaign or any mention about the game at Psygnosis web site. The game even hardly exists on any other sites on the 'Net: it's seems as if it appeared out of nowhere, but instead of going into the sewers, where its place is, it went to the shops (The "nowhere" in this case apparently stands for Psygnosis...). I certainly hope Psygnosis is going to collapse: their games were always awful, but this is the worst thing I've ever seen. It's not surprising that the game developers are not listed anywhere: I wouldn't sign my name under such junk either. Even the case of the infamous "Frontier II", a few years ago, can't be compared to "Zombieville". And if the game is an amateurish attempt at an allegory - "Yes, Psygnosis may die, but it will come back from beyond the grave!" - then forget it, boys - you never will. Rest in pieces, Psygnosis, and, by all means, go on releasing crap like "Zombieville" - it will only make your fall come sooner. P.S. One good thing about it - the opening MIDI theme is nice. Also, the story may be interesting after all. If only I had a chance to check it fully... but I won't waste my time trying to make a game out of... excrement; Psygnosis should have done that instead of putting it in a box.