Johnny Upgrade

Upgrades are a staple of most video games. Makes sense, too - your character should be rewarded with expanded powers as he or she plows through increasingly difficult areas. But what if you could do almost nothing WITHOUT upgrades? What, indeed, if purchasing upgrades was necessary for your hero to perform the most rudimentary tasks?

Welcome to Johnny Upgrade.

Concept

Johnny Upgrade is a superhero. Some evil boss thing has invaded his world, and he needs to drive it, and its fiendish minions, away. Problem is, Johnny Upgrade begins his life UTTERLY INCAPABLE of doing anything. He can't walk, he can't jump, he can't take more than one hit, hell, he can't live longer than roughly three seconds before exploding. Tough life, has Johnny Upgrade.

What's a lad to do in this situation? Duh. Upgrade. The game is based upon the premise that, every time Johnny dies, the player is taken to a shop screen for upgrading Johnny's abilities. Gather enough coins on each play-through and Johnny will ultimately be able to double jump, take five hits worth of damage, dash at incredible speeds and use a blaster to zap his foes.

This, of course, means that you have to die. A lot.

Controls

Johnny steers via the arrow keys or ADW. Eventually the Space bar will allow Johnny to fire his gun. Nice and easy, and Johnny is extremely responsive to player input. You shouldn't have any difficulty with cheap deaths... once you've upgraded Johnny, that is.

Graphics

Immediately after I began playing, Johnny Upgrade reminded me of an old SNES game called Captain Novolin. Upon FURTHER investigation, they don't look the same at all, aside from a slight similarity between the two title characters. I do not think Johnny Upgrade is diabetic, though that could explain his exploding fits.

All that is a ROUNDABOUT WAY OF SAYING that Johnny Upgrade looks like an SNES game. A really good SNES game. The visuals were great. It's a shame they're the same each time you play through, but, oh well.

Sound

Not much to say here. You get a small handful tunes, none of which are terribly memorable. I liked the boss song best, which is best suited to a sinister discotheque. Sound effects beyond the music are the usual range of explosions and hearty grunts.

Challenge Rating

Johnny Upgrade should take anywhere between ten and twenty minutes to complete. There's only one level, and once you've upgraded Johnny to action star status not even the boss is terribly challenging. I would like to see this concept expanded upon in some fashion, because this game seems more like a solid base for something greater than a true stand-alone title.

Conclusion?

Johnny Upgrade is a fun, playable platformer that you'll likely shred and forget within the span of half an hour. Worth playing, but not likely to make a massive impression on anybody.

PLAY JOHNNY UPGRADE

Pirateers

Pirates are one of those reliable elements that will, without fail, draw attention to a product. The roguish mystique that lies behind the whole pirate thing pretty much ensures an audience. That doesn't ensure that the product itself will be worth playing, however.

Pirateers skirts the edges of good quality and bad. It's not horrible, but it sure ain't fantastic.

Concept

Pirates are well-known for their unslakable greed, and the same can be said of the scurvy dogs in Pirateers. They want loot, and they want a lot of it. In these seas there's one prize that's sought above all others: a fabled Eye, split into five pieces, which is said to give its user unlimited riches.

Or something.

The story sounds like it should be promising. It's not, really. The Eye pieces just provide a laborious route to the last boss. Gathering them is no different than any other quest in Pirateers, nor even more difficult. Even if the plot was of interest, it's so riddled with spelling mistakes and time-worn cliches that the fun is sucked out of the experience. Blech.

Anyway. Plot aside, Pirateers is an RPG-esque shooter. You captain a ship of pirates, you steer it about and steal booty, you gather bounties, you blow up other ships. Huzzah.

Controls

Ugh. Pirateers is a damned slow game, and the controls are the mastermind behind the lull. I understand that sailing ships were neither swift nor spry by modern standards, but this is a video game. These ships don't HAVE to act realistically - but they do. Every battle is reduced to a slow, laborious circle around the enemy ships, firing whenever the cannons are primed. Hell, to make things even easier you can stop your boat in front of the other ship and just fire while they flail uselessly against your hull.

I'll be fair. The controls aren't glitchy or horribly problematic. The programming's fine. They're just SO DANG SLOW.

Graphics

Pirateers looks... okay. For a bird's eye view-type shooter, you get what you'd expect: shots of ships patrolling the water. Shrug? Not much to say. Nothing fantastically or offensive about most of the game.

My problem, then? The mugshots. The horribly disproportionate avatars. I guess the artist was trying to be stylistic, but, no. They're just ugly. And weird. And... not... done.

Sound

Pirates of the Caribbean Lite, that's Pirateers. A scant selection of songs, none of them the least bit memorable. Sound effects are equally negligible. Unimpressive audio overall.

Challenge Rating

Pirateers starts off a little too difficult than it should. You can upgrade your ship to boost its speed, reload time and overall cannon power, among other things, but you need money to do that - and your ship is a piece of crap at first. Expect to flounder in poverty for a few days until you can figure out how to properly aim your ship.

After that? Easy. The ships are generally the same throughout, and even though you'll face a few new attack methods none of them are surprising or difficult to overcome. Circle, circle, circle.

... and then you hit the last boss. And it's WAY too hard, because a) your ship can't even come close to reacting quickly enough, and b) nothing you've fought up to that point even REMOTELY prepares you for what it can do. Dodging through waves of enemy fire with your slow-ass vessel? Bullshit, I say!

Conclusion?

Pirateers is not a very good game. The amount of time it takes to play is nowhere near equal to the amount of fun it provides, which is not much. There's so much dull repetition that I'd be surprised if many people last out the full experience. If you DO plan on playing, at least visit the Armor Games website, as you'll gain access to a slightly faster ship. Better than the bucket you'd receive anywhere else.

PLAY PIRATEERS

Pestilence Z

I've been waiting, for a long time, for a good zombie-based RPG to come out. Zombie games are typically shooters or survival horror deals - for obvious reasons - and the genre could use some branching.

As far as I can remember, Pestilence Z is the first zombie RPG I've ever played. (Feel free to argue that if you've read the archives. I honestly can't remember.) First GOOD one? Ehhh... that's debatable. Pestilence Z ain't bad, but it could use some work.

Concept

Pestilence Z is like any zombie movie. You're a survivor in the midst of a zombie outbreak. Time to   escape your home and fight your way through massive mobs of the undead. There's a bit of a plot involved, mainly in getting to the home of a doctor who may be linked to the outbreak (read: probably), but for the most part it's an out-and-out survival-fest.

One with surprisingly high numbers of zombie fatalities. Run away? Meh. You're a one-man-woman-whatever wrecking machine.

As the screencap above hints, you can choose to be one of three people: a sexy nurse, a high school jock, or an army vet. (I, naturally, chose the nurse.) Each has different starting stats, skill progressions and specialties, and each appears differently in cut scenes. Consequently, each play through IS a fair bit different from the last, though the main goal is, as always, to blow the shite out of zombies.

And how do you do that? Via turn-based, strategic combat. The game is laid out in a series of grids, allowing you to move only a few spaces each turn before the zombies get to move. Once you get caught in battle with zombies (which can be done from a distance or at close range), you duke it out in long- or short-ranged combat with a variety of weapons. As is typical with RPGs, new weapons are scattered all over the place, and skills earned while leveling make killing zombies a little easier.

Yep. Pestilence Z is a bonafide zombie RPG. One that could use some spell checking, true, but a zombie RPG nevertheless.

Controls

As far as I can tell, you can't play Pestilence Z without a mouse. There are tons of menus, and you have to click on the map to make your character move. That said, many of the in- and out of-combat actions have hot keys that greatly speed up game play. Entire battles can be waged without touching the mouse.  Be careful using these keys, as it's easy to accidentally hit the wrong one. 

The primary issue as far as control is concerned lays in the turn-based nature of Pestilence Z. When you're on the map, it's a very slow game. Your character can only move two squares at a time when there are zombies about, which means there's a hell of a walk from one side of the screen to the next. This isn't so bad when the zombies ALSO move towards you, but there always seems to be one or two on each screen who refuse to budge. Either you hoof it to them or you tolerate a long, annoying search when looking for items in boxes or shelves or whatnot.

Graphics

It's hard to classify Pestilence Z's visuals, because they're both 'good' and 'meh' at the same time. Everything is clean and identifiable, there's a lot of variety in the surrounding environments, and the artwork is many steps above other browser-based games. I give extra points to the menu symbols, which are all easy to identify thanks to efficiently-drawn symbols.

And the meh? Again, it's a matter of speed. Everything looks and feels sluggish. There's no sense of urgency in this zombie apocalypse. The zombies never feel alive, which is an odd thing to say about the undead. Even your survivor seems detached from the whole scenario. I know RPGs can be slow, but this... this needs a few jolts of excitement.

Also? More variety. Seeing the same six or seven zombies over and over and over is so damn blech.

Sound

Pestilence Z is, by far, weakest in the sound department. There's a tiny handful of subdued songs, none of which real capture the flavour of the end of the world, and almost no sound effects. No groans, no fleshy thumps of a bat, no crazed screams... the best you'll ever get is the rat-a-tat-tat of a gun. The outbreak is devoid of menace without sound.

Challenge Rating

Because it has four different difficulty levels, Pestilence Z's challenge rating can fluctuate. I played it on Normal and it was fairly easy, with lots of findable weapons, med kits, ammunition and armour. That doubtless changes on more fiendish play-throughs, granting the game more replay value. Expect to take at least a couple hours for each complete circuit of the game.

Problem is, most run-of-the-mill RPG players probably won't replay Pestilence Z. The combat system is way too tedious and repetitive to maintain much interest, regardless of a different character choice. Movement alone will keep me from touching Pestilence Z again, or at least not for a long time - and if I DO replay it, I'll focus all of my efforts on head shots and one-hit-kills. They speed up the game significantly.

Oh, and one major problem for an RPG: though Pestilence Z allows for game saving, once you refresh the screen the save game disappears. No saving in cache. Thumbs down.

Conclusion?

This game doesn't knock the zombie genre out of the ballpark, nor does it grant much innovation to RPGs in general. Hell, it didn't even seem that strategic to me, despite the grid system. Pestilence Z IS still a decent game, however, and level-grinding fanatics will probably enjoy the pace.    
 
PLAY PESTILENCE Z