Sega Saturn / Enemy Zero

I was cleaning up in my basement and I came across my old Sega Saturn System in a box. While I have become a bit of a Sony whore over the last decade, Sega always had a special place in my heart. While I couldn’t afford a Saturn when the came out, (a mere $399 in 1995 when I was studying biz stuff in City 17 and generally being very poor). The business issues involved with the launch and overall management of the Saturn are worthy of a HBS case review, and as a result of these problems, I could afford Saturn in early 1998, when refurbished units could be had for around $80. Now that I think about this, this was actually the first video game system I bought myself (my family had Odyssey 2 and later an Intellivision system when I was growing up). However, I must admit that it has not aged very well in many regards, although the quality of gameplay on some Yu Suzuki’s Saturn games such as Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua Cop have remained strong even though the graphics are really primitive by modern standards. While the Saturn might have only had .01% of the horsepower of modern hardware, it still managed to make 3D animations work reasonably well, albeit fairly blocky and often with just simply horrible pop-ups.

I also enjoyed reconnecting with Last Bronx which would later, tangentially, play a rather important part of my life. And in the course of researching the links in this post, I found out they are reworking a clone of either the Saturn or arcade version for the PS2 to come out for the Japan market in June 2006.

While the video game industry was smaller and less developed back in the mid 90’s, I found myself thinking it must have been just much easier to experiment back then. Looking at the end credits of the games of this era, you can see that often only 20-30 people worked on a game. Nowadays, game end credits are like movie credits…they just go for miles. I started thinking about this when I plopped in Enemy Zero in my Saturn. Made by a rather eccentric Japanese developer, WARP (who also made D and D2), it was a game that was many different things but most notably it required you to shoot invisible monsters. And when I say invisible, I mean, completely invisible-no maps, radar, or anything. You had a sound detector (not unlike the motion tracker used in the film Alien) that would change pitch depending on how close and where the monster was in relation to you. You are stuck in a mystery on a space ship with invisible monsters trying to eat you…and the gun you have to kill them requires holding a button down for 3-4 seconds to charge up and then after the 5 second, it loses its prime and you have to start charging the gun again. So you have to listen carefully and then time your aiming and shooting very carefully. As a result, you die....alot. From a game design aspect, all of this sounds cool, although the actual playability of Enemy Zero leaves a lot to be desired...You have to wonder when the game’s key marketing highlight on the front of the box is that it has the voice acting of a lead singer of band Luscious Jackson for the main character, Larua Lewis. As it turns out, all you hear her says for the 45 minutes or so, is “Unnnnhhh?, as you go through the fully pre-rendered (and as fast as grass growing) walk around the ship without any of the necessary keys or weapons and try to interact with things to be only told you don’t have the right thing to use that specific room/item/thing as of yet and Laura just looks at almost every thing with a face of total confusion...not unlike the gamer's face for the first 45 minutes until you find one of the necessary items.

So while I don’t think it is a good game (actually, I rather dislike most aspects of it, and I have given up trying to finish it multiple times), I do admire that it was made and they made the attempt to do something different. It really does instill a excellent sense of atmosphere and fear when you know the monster is bearing down on you but you don’t know where it is or the best way of escape. The use of sound, including a klaxon in the last second before you are killed, is really effective. Compared to today’s “that sure blow’d up purty” view of quality (see Black), it is a nice (if highly flawed) change of pace. And I’m apparently not the only one…Enemy Zero often sells for $30-40 used on Ebay, which is pretty high for a 10 year old game on a long dead system.

As a part of the opening, the game actually has a semi-mission statement in slight J English quickly scroll up on the right side of the screen. WARP used the same character, Laura, in three of their games, which was a bit of a stretch since Enemy Zero takes in the far future in outer space and D, Laura's first game, took place in present time L.A. and D2 took place in the present day Canadian wilderness.

ENEMY ZERO
WILL
BECOME
A MORE
MOVIE-ORIENTED
TITLE,
WITH
LAURA
AS AN ACTRESS.
THE MAIN
STAGE
OF
THE WORK
WILL
BE
THE SPACE
ITSELF.
BUT
ENEMY ZERO
WILL
HAVE
AN ASPECT
OF
AMUSEMENT
AS
A GAME
AS
WELL,
A LESS
WEIGHT.
ONE
OF
THE CONCEPTUAL
SUBJECTS
OF
THE WORK
WILL
BE
"DIGITAL SADNESS"
MULTIMEDIA,
AS
DIGITAL
MEDIA,
HAS
EPHEMERAL
FACTORS
AND
RISKS.
THROUGH
SHOWING
ENEMY ZERO,
I
WOULD
LIKE
TO
MAKE
IT
CLEAR
THAT
THERE
ARE
SUCH
CONTINGENCY
RISKS
IN
THE DIGITAL
WORLD
OF
THE MODERN
TIMES.