Bad adventure games know no boundaries, and their slimy
tentacles have been known to spread their putrid stench across the civilized world.
Such is the case with our newest inductee into the Dungeon of Shame.

Zombieville
by Psygnosis has not been and, if there is a God, will not be released in the
United States. This game first attracted my attention when I noticed posts on
the newsgroups vociferously attacking this new release. Upon closer inspection,
I noticed that the posts were all from European countries. Unable to acquire the
game myself, I then started to e-mail some of the newsgroup posters.

As
luck would have it, I had the good fortune to be answered by a fellow from Poland,
Jaromir Król, who agreed to do this review of Zombieville for Just Adventure.
Jaromir is a respected reviewer of adventure games in his country, and we are
proud to present his contribution. This review presents what are two firsts for
the Dungeon of Shame–this is the first “new release” to be instantly
entered into the Dungeon, and it is the first entry to be reviewed by someone
other than me.

So sit back and enjoy(?) and, after having sufficient
time to recover our facilities, we will return with another journey to everyone’s
favorite Dungeon.

This Is What Happened

I
saw Zombieville on a lower shelf in a game shop. I haven’t heard about
it before, which was the reason why it intrigued me. The box had an infantile,
lame drawing on it, but the story and the screenshots seemed tempting. They promised
a nice, haunted house story–something along the lines of Alone in the Dark,
The Legacy, or Resident Evil. Something came over me, and I decided
to give it a try. Now I can say that it teaches me not to trust me feelings, but
only the reasoning … sorry, Obi Wan Kenobi, you were wrong.

According
to the text on the box, you play in a “pseudo 3D environment”–yes,
Psygnosis seems to be proud of it, instead of hiding this fact in an era of Quake
and Unreal 3D engines. Zombieville is a DOS game, which says
something about its age. But if you think that being a DOS game means that Zombieville
loads faster and crashes less frequently than a Win95 application, you are
wrong … this game is an exception. As a matter of fact, it’s an exception in
almost everything. And this is no praise.

It Starts

The intro
seemed interesting enough. A military base in an old “cursed” city has
apparently been running illegal experiments, and, as usual, they goofed. Now there
are zombies and all other sorts of nasty creatures running all over the place,
and it is the player’s duty to stop them.

I start the game. The “hero”
doesn’t look promising–an aging, balding man with a beer belly. For reasons unknown,
he is wearing red jeans. Not exactly your typical action hero. But I cannot check
his looks any longer–the zombies appear and approach me. I instantly begin to
hate the game controls–they 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 cannot reconfigure it.

Anyway, the zombies are too
close, so, just like the manual says, I hold Ctrl and run, in hope to get to the
base without the need to fight the creatures.

What …? What’s this …?
As I start running, the zombie sprites begin to move about 10 times faster than
normally. They literally fly through the screen and have my character in their
clutches in less than one second. Amazingly, their animation is still as slow
as usual. As Mr Black dies, spurting ridiculously large amounts of pixelated blood
around, I begin to wonder if what I have just witnessed is a bug.

Random,
Random Everywhere

I’m starting the game again. This time I use the gun–hooray!
The zombies are dead! Well, all right, they were dead already, but now they are
dead for good. But wait … the zombies reappear. Randomly. At random times. Sometimes
they spill something that looks like confetti all over the place. Sometimes they
don’t spill–they just kill. Randomly. Randomness seems to be the favorite attitude
of the game makers. Soon I discover that some vital objects that you must collect
in order to progress in the game are also distributed randomly. A zombie I shot
in the first minute had a door pass on him. Having collected it, I got my character
killed; next time I had to run around for 20 minutes, shooting about 30 zombies
until one of them dropped the pass. Actually, it was quite interesting; later
on, I found the pass on a skeleton, and then again on a zombie, but this time
in a different location.

The game is so difficult it’s ridiculous. At that
moment I start to suspect that its makers were afraid to allow the player to see
the rest of their “genius,” so they decided to kill him in the very
beginning. I would use one of my good ol’ cheatin’ tools to get more objects and
make the game easier, but I don’t have any items at the beginning, so I can’t
even try. Damn.

Suddenly I recognize the music in this stage–a very nice
MIDI tune, but somehow familiar. It sounds almost exactly like the main theme
from an ’80s horror flick, Return of the Living Dead. Coincidence? Or perhaps
plagiarism?

Did You Miss Me?

Perhaps you have just thought,
“At least there are no deadly bugs in this game.” My thoughts exactly
… or at least they were, until I entered the army base. Bugs can be really annoying,
but until they are so dangerous that they prevent you from completing the game,
you can live with them. Zombieville has never crashed yet, nor has it caused
any serious problems …

… However, I have just started it. Inside the
base, I decide to check the time I spent in this game. The manual says that the
timer can be invoked by pressing “T,” which is what I do. And then …

“ERROR: file M_4.HNM not found …”

Hmm. Either
the guys at Psygnosis have a different understanding of the word “timer”
than I do, or the game crashed because one of its files is missing from the CD.
Apparently, I will have to avoid using the timer, then. All right. Having restarted
the game, I continue, meeting two soldiers with whom I am supposed to have a conversation.
Very well, then … chit-chat, chit-chat, I choose an answer …

“ERROR: file T3.DAT not found …”

That was rather
unexpected. I run the game again, choosing different lines in the conversation.
Success! The characters open a door, letting me in. I try to talk to them again,
to see if they have any more info. At this moment I am transported to the door
again, and have exactly the same conversation as before. Wait a minute! This time
when I press “T,” the timer appears and there is no crash! I won’t investigate
it, though, since the door is now open! I hear “All right, Sergeant, open
the door,” and then a sound of door being opened. Considering the amount
of bugs I have found so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if the door actually locked
itself, or if the game crashed again. It doesn’t happen! But I still feel I should
exit the game and replay this fragment, just in case. I press “Esc”
to invoke the main menu … and am suddenly returned to DOS, this time with no
explanation of the crash whatsoever.

Alpha, Beta, Gamma

At
this moment I had enough and decided to take a closer look at the game’s insides
and also contact Psygnosis. Looking at the contents of the game files, I found
a short text “Alpha 1.4.” Things seem clear now … an alpha version
of an application is a pre-beta release, or, in other words, a version that has
not even entered the stage of testing for bugs and other errors yet. Apparently,
Zombieville is an alpha project that someone at Psygnosis released as a
full game. Unbelievable? Indeed, Watson … but when you have eliminated the impossible,
what remains, however unbelievable, is true.

At that moment, I remembered
another peculiar thing about the game–I have never seen any ad promoting it,
or, for that matter, any mention about it.

“It Don’t Be Me Child,
Sor!”

A look at the Psygnosis web site reveals yet another mystery–Zombieville
gets no mention there. It’s not among released products, it’s not in the project
section–it does not exist. The parents disown their child. Gee, I wonder why?
And why is there literally no mention of Zombieville makers in the game
or in the manual? Only Psygnosis can answer that … but if I learned that my
company wants to release my product whose testing I have not even started yet,
and which I suspect to be still bugged, I would not sign my name under it, either.

Psygnosis
and Psychosis

After all the “adventures” that I had with their
game, I have e-mailed Psygnosis about Zombieville and the problems with
it, but they ignored the letter. I was actually expecting that–after all, just
releasing Zombieville was an obvious act of ignoring the customers. Psygnosis
should remember one thing, though–companies are dependent on their customers,
and if they go on ignoring them, the least they should is a heavy loss of profits.
Customers can choose their favorite company, and they vote with their money, after
all.

Final Grade: F