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Kenji Eno's WARP and the D legacy
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Enemy Zero (エネミー ゼロ) - Saturn, Windows (1996) |
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Japanese Saturn Cover |
European PlayStation Cover |
American PC Cover |
Of the titles examined here, Enemy Zero is probably the most conceptually interesting in terms of mechanics, even if it's the most difficult and bordering on unplayable. Actually difficult is the wrong word, and it's important to emphasise that criticism for it isn't simply because of the difficulty, rather the way reloading and movement have been made intentionally slow, which makes E0's learning process frustrating. The basic premise is ripped straight out of Ridley Scott's Alien, with blonde protagonist Laura waking from cryosleep on the spaceship Aki (which resembles a human heart) on its return voyage to Earth, and all hell breaking loose due to alien nasties on board. Rather than a single xenomorph there are several, and the catch is they're entirely invisible to human eyes. Laura is suffering from amnesia but manages to arm herself and dispatch a few aliens, while attempting to re-unite with the crew, who are being picked off one by one. E0 follows the original D, containing adventure sections based around static CG locations, where Laura can interact with and pick up items. These are generally slow and poorly rendered, but are the only place where you can save, meet characters or recharge guns. You also have semi-regular access to the ship's computers to make video phonecalls, disengage various locks, and look up background information.
A big departure from D are the free-roaming polygonal environments you can explore, which is also where combat takes place. Since enemies can't be seen, Laura has a radar device in her ear, which makes a variable noise depending on the direction of an enemy and its proximity. If an enemy is in front of the player the noise is high pitched, while at the sides and behind it is lower, with the frequency of beeps increasing as you get closer. There's a tutorial explaining how it works, though using only audio to gauge an enemy's position isn't as cleverly implemented as it could have been. When you think an enemy is directly in front of you, and within range of your gun, you need to hold down the fire button to charge it and then release. Enemies die in a single shot, but it's extremely easy to miss by a small margin, or overcharge the gun in which case it resets to zero. In both cases you're likely to die since the alien will be right in front of you. These areas have slick controls and resemble your typical FPS, though any excitement regarding this is short lived since the sections are rather bland. There's no interactivity apart from fighting the invisible enemies, and besides a couple of wide open cargo spaces they consist solely of identical (and I mean absolutely identical) corridors and air ducts. The game's general flow is exploration of the static CG scenes for items such as key cards, followed by a tough slog through a confusing maze of corridors to reach the next CG section before an enemy finds you. Weapons are available but on several occasions are lost, and furthermore can only hold a couple of charges before needing replenishing at a utility room. Miss an enemy too many times and you'll be scrambling back in retreat. Saving is done via a voice recorder with limited battery power. On easy it has a charge of 99, and on normal 64. Using it to save depletes it by 3 units, allowing a maximum of 33 saves on easy and 21 on normal. Characters
The story follows a fairly predictable course. First ship's driver Parker is killed over videophone, and then Laura discovers the ship's doctor Mercus is dead. Laura then joins up with Kimberly before an event that apparently leaves Kimberly also dead. Laura then meets George who is programming a special key card, and then David. Soon after David is found half-dead and it's discovered he's an android - profoundly affecting Laura. The two share a moment where David confesses his eternal love for her. She hacks into George's computer to discover the truth behind the ship's mission, after which she's infected with an alien parasite during a rather disturbing tentacle fellatio scene (which would re-appear in the Japanese D2 on DC). When she visits the medical room to scan herself, Laura makes the shocking discovery that she too is an android. It turns out the ship was ordered to capture the aliens, referred to as ‘the enemy', in order to sell as biological weapons - just like in the film Alien. Computer engineer George is implicated in the cover up and not long after is killed by an alien. Laura carries on, determined to escape, and re-unites with Kimberly who it turns out didn't die. After cutting Laura's neck with a knife to remove the parasite (which resembles some kind of perverse glow-in-the-dark bratwurst), Kimberly returns to Parker's room to commit suicide alongside her husband. With the ship's emergency self-destruct activated, Laura heads for the escape shuttle guided over the intercom by the voice of David, who has been uploaded into the ship's computer.
With the story not quite as disgusting as the original D's, and nowhere near as sexually disturbing or plain weird as the subsequent D2, E0's allure lies in its unusual mechanics. Namely the combat with invisible enemies, and the limited save functionality. Any reviewer from the era who criticised E0's save system as being anything other than absolutely genius, is inherently wrong. They are wrong in the same way that describing the world as flat is wrong. Games which tackle the philosophical design riddle of save implementation in unusual ways usually prove interesting: Resident Evil's limited save ribbons, Steal Battalion's save file deletion and Demon's Souls instant saving are all fantastic ways of keeping players on their toes. Likewise with E0, the concept of starting with a non-replenishable amount of saves is an excellent way to generate terror, force resource management, and generally lend proceedings an atmosphere of guerrilla warfare. Games today spoil players with not only an infinite amount of saves, but in many cases the ability to save anywhere plus regular checkpoints, thereby castrating any semblance of challenge, tension, or even basic design. In practice in E0 you actually have more save chances (21) than you need, since the game can be completed in about 3 hours. If you can survive for 8 minutes at a time, you'll do fine. Equally if not more impressive, at least from a conceptual point of view, is E0's continuous attempt to do interesting things with sound, such as when fighting or being guided by surviving crew members. Unfortunately the poor implementation during combat renders it almost unplayable. For a start there is no stereo sound for the radar, and instead of hearing it in a single ear the pitch of the beeping changes depending on the direction of a creature. Which makes sense in the context of the game, where Laura has a single earpiece in one ear - but in practice it makes things more difficult than they need to be. Additionally, if there's more than one enemy nearby it becomes impossible to disentangle the sounds. Though the beeping becomes faster the closer you get, it's extremely difficult to judge when to fire, further complicated by the long charge times needed for guns and their limited ammo. Success requires absolutely perfect timing, which many will likely find impossible today.
The continuous string of Game Overs wouldn't be so problematic if restarting was quick and painless, but it forces you to return to the title screen, go through the arduous task of watching the LOAD FMV clip, and then you're forced to listen to an audio track where Laura explains the story, again. In fact, absolutely no FMV can ever be skipped, which is infuriating especially given how slowly they play out. Three deaths in a row and you could waste 20 minutes trying to progress through a relatively short section of game. This ultimately kills any tension. The first time you have to run from the telltale beeping of an invisible enemy it'll probably be one of the most terrifying experiences in survival horror gaming, up there with the best that System Shock and Dead Space can offer. After the second, third and twelfth time redoing that same section, the effect kind of wears off. Even if the combat doesn't prematurely cull your playing, the levels themselves aren't much to look at and getting lost is guaranteed. We've not used many screens of the polygonal sections, since any given spot in a particular area looks much the same as the next, with variety only occurring between areas. For those Eno-loving masochists who must complete E0, here is a series of maps and a guide taken from Dextremes, which prove handy. Eno was actually questioned on the high difficulty of E0 by 1UP, and his response likened it to a curry fan enjoying some spice: It's a difficult game, but that's the good part of Enemy Zero. You know, when you eat curry, it's spicy. That's why it's curry. That's why it's good. So it's the same with Enemy Zero. The whole experience that you gain from playing a difficult game is valuable. If I had a chance to make it all over again, I would probably make it the same way, because that's the feeling I wanted to deliver. I have no regrets about Enemy Zero, and the difficulty is what Enemy Zero is. That's the important part of the game. As it stands, Enemy Zero is a charming relic from an experimental era; bordering on unplayable by today's standards, but fascinating to ponder. As games continue to implement save-anywhere mechanics, infinite ammunition (such as in the recent remake of AvP with the default pistol), and recharging health, it's doubtful we'll ever see anything quite like Enemy Zero again. Which is tragic, because you could create something truly astounding with the concepts here.
The game was originally developed first for the Sega Saturn and released internationally. It was later ported by Sega to Windows PCs. The PC version should be regarded as definitive as it runs in a higher resolution and has improved textures - there's also supposed to be a greater variety of enemies. There's no mouse support, but it does recognise USB controllers such as the Sega Saturn USB pad. An interesting bit of trivia is that Fumito Ueda of Team Ico is credited on E0. As explained by Eno: At the very beginning, he didn't pass the application process at WARP. But I still remember the work that he submitted; it was about a dog running in the rain. His technology as an animator, as a CG artist, wasn't that great, but his ideas and his concepts really struck me, so even though he originally wasn't on the hiring list, I handpicked him because I saw his potential. People ask me a lot about Ueda, but he didn't stay at Warp for long. It's not like I groomed him or anything. Around the time of Enemy Zero's release there was a detailed interview in GameFAN magazine, which contains some fascinating insight into the game, the unreleased D2 on M2, Kenji Eno's history, and WARP itself. It also answers the question of why Laura doesn't have any nipples in the E0 CG scenes.
No nipples, so the staff can keep concentrated Enemy Zero OST The soundtrack was composed by British musician Michael Nyman, who did the soundtrack for films such as The Piano. As Kenji Eno explained to 1UP: I like Michael Nyman a lot, and I like his soundtracks, so I was thinking that it would be awesome if I could get him to do the music. I think the juxtaposition of the game's aesthetic and his music makes it a perfect match. I wanted to get him really bad. And then, there was a big earthquake in Kobe, Japan in 1995, and Michael Nyman was donating pianos to schools in the city. When this earthquake happened, he said that he wanted to check out how the pianos that he donated were doing, so he came to Japan. When I found out that he was in Japan, I invited him back to my hotel room and tried to convince him, for six hours, to come work with me. So, at the end, Michael was like, ‘OK, I'll do it, I'll do it. Just let me go back to my room.' We didn't work out terms or conditions; he just said that he would do it. And that's the way I convinced him. The OST disc contains 14 tracks from the game. |
A corridor...
Parker's headless corpse
Dr Mercus' finger unlocks the DNA door
Kim and Laura set out together
They're not so invisible when they die
Parker's last video call
Mysterious footage from the intro
Polygon objects can't be interacted with
An alien breaks open a door
Damaged boyfriend
Another corridor
Laura's origins revealed
A bloody floppy
An alien impregnation
George is hiding something
Deep within the ship
Maps can be found on the computer
David and Laura
More corridors
Enemy Zero OST Cover |
Version Comparison
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Windows |
Saturn |
Additional Screenshots
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D2 - M2 (unreleased) |
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D2 (M2) |
D2 (M2) |
D2 (M2) |
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Prior to D2 on the Dreamcast, WARP was working on a very different game with the same title for Panasonic's unreleased M2 console. As Eno described it: When I found out about this new hardware called M2 - it was very powerful - I was thinking that I would finally have a chance to make a complete real-time 3D action game, an action game that has the characters battle with swords. So I was about 50 percent finished with development - my programmer had completed the battle engine, and I was expanding the maps and all that - and then the hardware got cancelled. Information about the game is fractured, and several websites which once covered it in detail are now dead, making original source citation almost impossible. What we have left are poorly copied quotes and conjecture. Unseen64 still has an entry on it though, with many images and video links to Youtube. Further information was revealed by Eno in an old GameFAN interview. As Eno explained: D2 will be released on the M2, not on other platforms. Maybe on PC, but no other consoles. It's basically all real-time polygons. To tell you the truth, however, we decided to start from scratch last month. The M2 specs will be better than the current one, so this was our last chance to change things. Also, if we continued developing what we were working on, by the time we were done the game wouldn't be current for today. We didn't want to release something like Resident Evil or Alone in the Dark. We wanted to release a real-time polygon adventure game that felt like the old PC game, Into the Sudden Shadow.
The Impaler King Eno also revealed the back-story to GameFAN: Basically, the story begins about a year after D. Laura's on a plane somewhere and she's pregnant... Hmm... Actually, the story starts before this, during the Middle Ages. There was a feudal lord in Transylvania who desperately wanted a child to take over his country. He believed in the local superstitions that said that you could have child by sacrificing people by impaling them on stakes. The local people began to call him the Impaler King. Of course this was nothing but superstition, and he had no child. When his wife died, he became so desperate that he learned black magic and summoned the devil. He begged the devil to give him a child, that he would sacrifice his own life for one. The devil agreed and left Transylvania. The scene will change to the one I was telling you about before, the plane in 1997. The devil appears, surrounds the plane, and tries to crash it. Then he kidnaps Laura's baby. You can tell the baby disappears, because Laura's stomach becomes hollow. I think Laura dies in the plane too... The scene changes back to the Middle Ages and the crying of the baby fades in... That's the opening story. The main character of the game is Laura's child. When the child grows up, the devil returns to Transylvania to come calling for the Impaler King's life, and destroys the castle. The child then takes off for the adventure to kill the devil. Clearly the game was an ambitious title, and the screenshots and videos showing it in motion, with decent lighting effects, are quite impressive. Irrespective of whether the code still remains or not, we're unlikely ever to have the opportunity to play what was created. Visit Unseen64 for links to Youtube videos.
For once WARP would have used the same Laura twice |
D2 (M2)
D2 (M2)
D2 (M2)
D2 (M2)
D2 (M2) |
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