THE Crazy Ambulance Game

When I initially posted about THE Zombie VS Ambulance, I knew in the back of my mind that it was only a matter of time before I purchased the game. This kind of thing is like crack-cocaine to me: it’s horror-themed and it looks absolutely awful, a deadly combination that feeds my insatiable appetite for horror games gone wrong. So in a particularly masochistic move, I imported THE Zombie VS Ambulance from Japan and started playing it.

THE Zombie VS Ambulance is not a good game. However, it’s not nearly as bad as you might think. There’s actually some risk and reward involved in the game design, and while the graphics are not pretty, the game delivers on it’s basic drive-over-zombies-in-an-ambulance premise. The game actually starts out really boring, because the default ambulance is extremely slow and usually can’t kill zombies in a single hit. This sucks particularly hard because you can only get Hospital Health Points back by killing a number of zombies within a short period of time, so if you have to stop and reverse to actually kill the putrified cop you just sideswiped, your chances of getting a combo are zilch. Fortunately, about 30 minutes into the game you can unlock the second ambulance, which is a lot faster and consequently a lot more fun.

As you drive around running over zombies, you have three basic goals that you need to strategize for:

  • Maintaining Hospital Health Points. The hospital health slowly decreases over time, and the only way you can get it to increase is to run over lots of zombies in succession to get combos. My current high combo is 90 zombies.
  • Find engineers and the crazy mayor dude. You need to save people, but the more engineers you save the faster you can upgrade your ambulance. Upgrading your ambulance is awesome, because you can install giant blades onto the front of your car and attack rocket boosters to the back. I don’t know who the crazy mayor dude is (I don’t think he’s really a mayor, I just made that up), but when you find three of him a new section opens up. The rest of the people are pretty worthless, though collecting cops and military people makes the hospital health points go down slower.
  • Figure out the fastest route back to the hospital. After you get out of the main area and into the surrounding sections (which all have a theme, like city, or forest, or desert), it actually becomes difficult to get people you’ve picked up back to the hospital before they turn into zombies. It becomes imperative to figure out what the fastest route to the hospital is from anywhere in the main city. It’s also important to know when you are on a long road, because you only have a limited number of boosts and it sucks to boost into a wall, and the draw distance only allows you to see about 15 feet ahead of your vehicle.

Basically, THE Zombie VS Ambulance is like an extravagant mini game. The mechanics are too simple to really compare with modern games, but on the other hand they’ve put far too much time into the design (especially the upgrade system) for this to be a regular GTA-style mini game. It’s not a terrible game, but it is extremely simple and repetitive. I am actually fairly surprised that this game isn’t a steaming pile, but I can’t really say it’s extraordinary in any way either. Shallow as it may be, it’s still a bit more fun than many of the other games listed on this site.

Game Donation!!

Thanks very much to forums member ijm000 for his generous donation of Necronomicon: The Dawning of Darkness. This is a game that I know absolutely nothing about, but based on the box and ijm000’s review, it is probably an excellent match for the forums. Thanks ijm000!

Also, I’m still alive, but I’m heading out on vacation for a week, so updates may be a bit slow. Changes are coming to the site though.

April the First

In other, possibly facetious news:

  • I’m almost finished with THE Zombie Vs. Ambulance. A review is forthcoming.
  • I’ve decided to include THE Oneechanbara in the Quest, because upon review of the game it seems to fit perfectly with my goals for this project.
  • Dino Crisis 3 (but not 1 and 2) has been added to the Quest.
  • A three-year old article I wrote on Seikima II has proved contentious.

Alright then.

Update: Now that April Fools is over, I’ve archived the fake front page.

GDC Report

I just got back from a tiring week at GDC. Actually it was quite a bit of fun, but standing around all day for three days straight can make the soles of your feet hurt a lot.

This year I didn’t really get to any sessions that are related to this site. I really wanted to see the talk about building fear in the player in Darkwatch (the slides are available), but I had other business obligations. I also missed a talk on cinematic game design by Richard Rouse, the brains behind The Suffering series, because it was also at the same time (slides).

I did see several technical talks, including a pretty interesting one about the AI in F.E.A.R, but the content wasn’t about the game itself. Most of the rest of the talks I went to were development related (tool chain, engineering, AI, game design). They were mostly pretty good this year… I only got stuck in one or two yawners.

I should mention that the Nintendo keynote was really quite uplifting (the message: Nintendo knows what they are doing, and they’re doing the right thing), and Will Wright’s game design keynote was extremely interesting and hilarious (the message: astrobiology is cool, spore will rule, Wright thinks about 2000 things at once). The PS3 keynote was quite depressing: they showed some graphics demos and that was about it. PS1 games on PSP sounds cool, and God of War 2 looked cool, but otherwise there was nothing to be learned.

Don’t Look Now

This evening I watched Don’t Look Now, a horror flick starring a young Donald Sutherland circa 1973. The story centers around an American couple living in Venice who have recently lost their daughter. It’s hard to describe exactly the events that unfold in this film, but the tension level is pretty high throughout the whole thing and the ending is seriously insane. What I really liked about the movie, however, is that it is able to build suspense without showing you anything at all. The director, Nicolas Roeg, plants an idea in your mind and lets your imagination run rampant, but he’s careful to give absolutely nothing away until the very end of the film. If you were to look at this film out of context, it would seem like nothing is really happening. But coupled with Roeg’s excellent cinematography of highly creepy Venice alleyways and a pretty excellent orchestral score, Don’t Look Now kept me on the edge of my seat. This is high-calibre horror: the film is so well structured that nothing but the mere suggestion of deceit is necessary to build suspense. I throughly enjoyed it.

Stay Away

Producer #1: Ok, we need a movie to fill our release schedule out in March 2004.

Producer #2: Hmm, we should target teens… how about a horror movie!?

Producer #1: Sounds good. We should be able to throw one of those together in six months. But we need a hook… how about a demonic web site that kills you if you go to it?! That’s edgy, and kids like edgy. Plus they use the web!

Producer #2: Hmm, yeah, but we’re already remaking Pulse during that time, and it’s got web sites in it. And we sort of lost money with Feardotcom.

Producer #1: Oh, yeah, I don’t know what happened there. What else to kids like these days?

Producer #2: VIDEO GAMES!! All the kids play ’em. They are addicted, it’s the new heroin for kids.

Producer #1: Video games? You mean like Space Invaders?

Producer #2: Yeah, but now they are more advanced and very violent. Some even have nudity!!

Producer #1: Ok, that sounds perfect. It’ll be a double whammy: a horror film with teens about teens playing video games, which teens love. They won’t be able to resist! We’ll make money hand over fist!

Producer #2: Ok, so just so we’re clear, they play a video game and then get killed, right?

Producer #1: Right. Get a writer on that. Also, we need at least one shower scene.

Producer #2: I’m on it.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, try watching the Stay Alive trailer, or, if you can stomach it, check out the first scene. I guess I am glad that games are becoming more visible to general society, but it’s fairly painful to watch Hollywood make such blatant asses of themselves while trying to make movies for gamers.

Michigan

 So I finished Michigan last night, and I’ve posted a review today. I really don’t have anything good to say about this game, except that it was amusing in the same way seeing somebody walk into a pole can be amusing.

Scratches

If you have a PC and are into point-and-click horror games, you might enjoy Scratches, which just came out. GameRankings doesn’t have much to say about the game yet (77% but only 5 reviewers checking in), but the screenshots look pretty neat.

Cinma D’Horreur

Wow, an update after several weeks of radio silence. Sorry everybody, work has been increasingly demanding lately. Also, I’ve been playing through Michigan, which has not proven very post-worthy.

Anyway, I thought I’d tell you guys about some horror movies I watched recently.

  • Pulse (Kairo) finally came out in the US. I guess they are remaking this movie, but I have no idea why–its themes of isolation and loneliness are so amazingly Japanese that I can’t see the movie translating to white, American, English-speaking actors well at all. Anyway, like everything from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Charisma, Doppelganger), I can easily and without hesitation recommend this film. Be warned that the movie is sort of social commentary wrapped in a horror context, and the narrative is convoluted to say the least.
  • Session 9 is an American horror film that somebody recommended to me because of its

    Silent Hill-like atmosphere. I checked it out and was pleasantly surprised to find it a mature, subtle, psychological horror movie in the vein of The Shining. It’s not nearly as competent as Kubrick’s seminal film, but it hits a lot of the right notes and is very careful not to spoil the horror with too much information. The ending sort of misses a beat here or there, but generally I think it’s one of the best American-made horror movies that has come out in a long time.

  • Testuo II: Body Hammer and A Snake of June are both weirdo films by weirdo director Shinya Tsukamoto. Tsukamoto’s claim to fame is the original Tetsuo the Iron Man (and also he was the ultra-buff old guy in Ichi the Killer), but unfortunately Tetsuo 2 isn’t as good. Actually, it’s incredibly similar to the first movie, but the story is a little more clear and it’s in color. I rather enjoyed Snake of June, though it isn’t really horror: it’s about a stalker forcing a woman to act upon some of her fantasies that are too racy for her husband, and the film only contains one giant animatronic penis scene, which is a record low for Tsukamoto.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve had the chance to see lately. What have you guys been watching?