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

This fourth installment really explores the fascinatingly bad quality of video we were using when we first started recording these Resi5 play though sessions. We’ve attempted to clean it up as best as we can though we do advise you look away periodically so as to give your eyes a rest from the sheer hodge podge of it all.

Parts five and six are booted, suited and ready to be um… commuted? So stick around.

Also coming soon to the video section will be our newest installment to the Indiana Pones series of clips, this time we play through the finalists and winners of the Independent Gaming Source Adult / Educational Game Competition

… it was an experience of bemusement and mental damage to film, so please do tune back in soon for the finished video.

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

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.

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]

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.

I also took the opportunity to give the underlying graphics engine (which isn’t so much an engine as it is one of those tiny electric motors you get in a toy racecar) a boost. The game now supports double-buffering of the pixel kind, which has improved drawing performance by a metric arseload. Scrolling around the map is now smooth as buttery silk, even considering the sledgehammer-like approach I have to 2D visuals (read: amping the crud out of GDI+)

It’s time now in Zafehouse 2’s development for me to work on the meat and potatoes… or the “actual game” as it’s called in some parts. Which means details should get juicer, and the gameplay videos tastier as time goes on.

Again, thanks for bearing with me. There are moments when I wish I had whole days (weeks even) to commit to the title, instead of the couple of hours a night I have now. I’m not at the point yet where I’m willing to sacrifice my social life.

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…

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…