Welly welly well, its time for the fourth part to our exclusive play through of Resident Evil 5; The Beginners Guide series! Read the rest of this entry »

Lookit, we came through!

We really DID finish Resi 5, and recorded most of it, and heres the PROOF!

Part three of our Beginners Guide to Resident Evil #5 series of videos; essentially we endeavored to experience and critique the game live at a frontier review capacity; these videos are the result.

Enjoy the antics & poor footage quality of this newest installment, which consists mainly of the two of us shouting at each other and shrieking wildly as we fumble our way through Mission #3 on Veteran difficulty, much the same way a questionably experienced young lad would fumble his way through bra clasps and condom wrappers during those early life encounters of intimacy.

Parts 4 & 5 are also complete and will appear on this site very shortly. Over the course of the play-through we recorded across two separate digital televisions, with different cameras & capture techniques, taking this into consideration I can assure you that the video footage quality will improve beyond this installment, and perhaps it might also get worse in some areas also.

Not an oldskool uudder? Perhaps you might like to watch the earlier parts in the series first:

Episode #1

Episode #2

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally done enough work on Zafehouse 2′s second combat prototype to post a couple of screenshots.

As I mentioned in a previous update, the original combat implementation was ground into a fine, code-tasting dust and packed away, replaced by an infinitely deeper (and juicier) solution that uses firing arcs.

Entering into combat hasn’t changed – you still click on the event in the event window – and the representation of the room is similar too. The difference is that zombies are no longer shown as one large group, they’re now broken up into individual flesh-eating nasties. Weapons have also evolved, the far/close/melee profiles exchanged for variable firing arcs and shot modes. For example, the shotgun has a wide firing arc and shoots pellets in a spread, but it can only fire once per turn and has a short range. A submachine gun on the other hand has a medium firing arc and range, but you can shoot up to six bullets at one or multiple targets. Keep in mind that each bullet fired in the same turn reduces the accuracy of the shot that follows it.

Hit the jump for an additional screenshot which show projectiles in flight. Yes, I said projectiles.

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Zafehouse has its second user-made modification, thanks to flap on the game’s official forums.

Based on the v1.82 source code released recently, Zafehouse Infection amps up a number of features of the game, while adding a few new things for you (and I suppose, the undead) to sink your teeth into.

Version 1.0 is already up and available for play, and includes the following changes:

- Infection is now contagious, but there is a small chance to heal it.

- Weapons can be loaded automatically, and when giving a range weapon to someone, is it automatically loaded with one box.

- Barricades higher than heavy block survivors movement

- It is possible to weaken barricades to recover some supplies

- Survivors fighting alongside family members [survivors with the same surname] get an attack and defense bonus

- A survivor can only be cured once per hour.

If you’d like to help flap out, or just give his version a whirl, head over to the progress log on the forums, or check out the list of planned changes and ideas.

Zafehouse Infection V1.00 – Fan edition – Progress Log [Zafehouse forums]

If you take a gander at Zafehouse 2′s media section at the official Zafehouse website, you’ll notice a bunch of fresh screens from the latest build of the game. Combined, the shots demonstrate combat, the day/night cycle, trade window, furniture destruction and a heap of UI updates over the first gameplay video.

All the thumbnails can be clicked for larger versions, if squinting isn’t your thing, and I can assure you they want to be clicked. By you. Right now.

Zafehouse 2 – Media [Zafehouse]

I don’t have anything super huge to divulge this update, but I can say that, after many requests, I’ve added outside movement to Zafehouse 2. This means instead of taking a turn to move from one edge of the map to the other, it’s looking closer to five or six turns, as you dodge between buildings and the inevitable (and darn hungry) undead.

Currently, you can only move to entrances and zombie “hotspots”, as I didn’t really see the need to position survivors outside in the middle of nowhere. If someone can give me a really (really) good reason why it should be any different, I’ll think about it.

Implementing outside movement required me to confront my fear of A* pathfinding and, while it was a tortuous and many times frustrating endeavour, my work paid off.

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The first official release under our new Survival Horror 101 category. We hope this will become the first of many videos in which uudders takes a gander at the obscure, the dated, the absurd and hopefully the decently downright terrifying thriller game titles out there from across the years. For today though you’re looking at Psycho Killer; a largely unknown CD32 title released in a forgotten time by a forgotten developer, this one could have easily remained forgotten too…

Music credits: “What You Want” and “Decay” – Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

This isn’t a video. But there will be something video-like in this spot (or close to it) this Friday.

I’ve been working on a pet project, Zafehouse 2. It’s the sequel to Zafehouse, a free zombie survival simulator I coded in seven days during my stint at Kotaku AU. It was moderately successfully, and then indie games site Rock, Paper, Shotgun got a hold of it and an even larger audience got a taste of Zafehouse’s flavour of lo-fi, undead fun.

The popularity was great enough to prompt development of a sequel. After a false start, Zafehouse 2 became properly tangible, and even playable. There are screenshots, even, and like, news!

The goal this week is to post a video of combat on Playwrite, my other blog, and here. Hopefully I can introduce a couple new people to the awesomeness that is Zafehouse.

Our frontier review of Resident Evil 5 continues with a (this time slightly longer) jaunt through the first few areas of the game, where it doesn’t take long before the locals make it clear they don’t take too kindly to stranger round here…