Thanks to ray casting, an early form of graphics processing that allowed the rendering of a 2D map as a pseudo-3D environment, Zero Tolerance, a true First-Person Shooter, arrived on Sega’s Mega Drive in 1994.
What makes Zero Tolerance Collection significant — particularly for fans of the original — is its boast of additional items of lore: an unreleased sequel, Zero Tolerance Underground, and the prototype title Beyond Zero Tolerance. As it happens, Zero Tolerance Underground is falsely advertised, and not a true sequel at all. Its nine stages (as opposed to the original game’s 40) were actually designed as bonus extras for a Mega CD port of Zero Tolerance that never saw the light of day. Beyond Zero Tolerance, the unfinished prototype meant as a true sequel, would be of greater appeal if it hadn’t already been legally released on the internet as freeware.
Zero Tolerance is a sci-fi-themed FPS that sees a team of five marines enter the Planet Defense Corporation’s facility to rid it of invading soldiers and alien species. Each of your squad has a range of abilities, some with better marksmanship, others skilled in explosives and tracking. When one marine dies outright, they’re gone for good, leading to some strategy in how you attempt to complete the game. In our estimation, saving the characters with firearm skills for the hordes toward the end is probably a bright move, although you could just as well strategically plant mines in the middle of the throng.
The action is letterboxed to a third of the display, but remains quite playable even in handheld mode; while new screen filters do their best to sharpen or smooth the heavily pixellated imagery, with varying success. The CRT option eschews traditional RGB scan lines for a curved display that mimics ancient RF connections: noise interference, wavy lines, and muted colours. It’s stylish nostalgia over substance, but we kind of dig it.
For its time, Zero Tolerance’s detail was impressive. The aim is simple: travel from floor to floor and wipe out everything that moves. There are no keycards or objects to collect outside of abundant health packs and ammunition, but you do need to strategise a route around the grid, clearing out rooms sequentially and using the pause screen’s map overview as your guide. The remaining enemy count is visible on the HUD, helping you hunt down leftovers, as well as equipment slots and a useful mini-tracker that displays incoming enemies.
Interestingly, you don’t have to clear out each floor if you don’t want to, but neglecting your duties denies you a password that allows you return to your point of progress. This is slightly softened by the new quick save feature, but not entirely, since loading a game doesn’t bring back those of your team that have previously perished.
Seamlessly traveling in elevators and up and down stairwells was quite a thing for the Mega Drive, as are the various effects created by flashlight and night vision goggle pickups. Weaponry is a nice mix, too, featuring everything from handguns and uzis to flamethrowers and pulse lasers. The shotgun is a solid standard with excellent range, violently blowing enemies apart, and, in a neat touch, spattering their brains against nearby walls. Amazingly, corpses all stay in place for the duration, helping to visually denote areas you’ve previously visited.
While Zero Tolerance was once an impressive technical feat, it sadly hasn’t aged all that well. The controls are cumbersome, your turn starting slow and then speeding up — sometimes too quickly — requiring you to place precision shots mid-way through your heel spin. The weapons compensate with increased range and the shotgun is especially satisfying, but the enemy AI just rushes at you blindly, and every time you take a hit you bounce around in a disorientating manner.
You can only hold five items at a time, meaning one has to be depleted if you want to collect something else; and certain tools — such as night vision — hamper the already slow frame rate as badly as a room filled with enemies. While the graphics have a gritty sci-fi personality, with windows featuring clever panoramas, it’s often too dark to see much of anything, requiring constant switching to the map to pinpoint your position. In floodlit areas like the Engineering Level, it’s much easier to see, but with every wall essentially the same pattern it’s rarely straightforward to orient yourself. The music changes only three times for each of the game’s three chapters, and is a woefully bad, uninspired series of sparse, tepid beats and metallic clangs.
Even for those who have fond memories of it, Zero Tolerance is testing to connect with nowadays. Taking your team through its three chapters is no mean feat, and with a whopping ten-hour duration, surviving the tedium is perhaps its greatest challenge. While seek and destroy is a fun premise, once you’ve killed off a few floors it becomes a gnawingly repetitive grind. With enemy counts regularly at 99 in the final chapter’s alien-infested basement, seeing it through requires more patience than most will be willing to muster.
Zero Tolerance Underground, the “sequel”, is pleasantly surprising for the first few minutes: smoother, visually clearer, and with more precise controls. But at just nine stages, it’s both the polar opposite of the original’s weighty ask, and several times more difficult in terms of survival. It has some nice graphical improvements, including a moving subway train and advertisements plastered on the walls, but it’s more nifty re-skin than sequel, and doesn’t elevate itself beyond the original’s basic routines.
Beyond Zero Tolerance, once unlocked, treats you to a prototype set on the alien scourge’s home world. Existing fans have no-doubt obtained the ROM and played this already, but for everyone else it’s essentially more of the same in an unfinished but playable state — with more aliens.
The most irritating aspect of the Zero Tolerance Collection are less the games themselves, which are a product of their time, but more the lack of effort from publishers Qubyte Interactive and Piko Games. The selection screen is lifeless, the new options disappointingly basic. We didn’t even realise strafing was possible until we got lucky by holding down the button assigned to jump, duck and interact. It’s not marked as ‘strafe’ on the controller remap screen, inexplicably, and even then it’s terribly difficult to use. Our first thought was to remap the strafe to the shoulder buttons, but you can’t, and there’s no option anywhere to use dual analogs. Worse still, Zero Tolerance Underground features strafing using the shoulder buttons as default - so why not allow the option elsewhere?
Additionally, the Mega Drive original was pioneering in allowing co-op play via a link cable, two machines and two TVs. This is a big game-improving feature that should be present in some form or another, either locally or online, but is nowhere to be found.
Conclusion
Once a technical marvel, Zero Tolerance Collection is now severely dated. Fans who live to relive days gone by might get a kick from diving back into the Planet Defense Corps facility, and the new Underground set of levels is a nice, if limited, bonus extra. But tweaks to provide an updated graphics option, improved frame rates, audio tracks, and true button remapping would have been greatly encouraging for existing fans and newcomers alike. As it is, this collection is largely just a ROM set thrown into a lacklustre zip file, with a frustrating level of non-effort.
Comments 25
I can't wait to get my physical copy! I grew up with this game and I LOVE IT!!!
Seems tailor made for the original fans but not welcoming to new comers.
no coop mode seriously
Terrible game, I remember renting the Sega Genesis version for one night and disappointingly return it back to Hollywood Video the next day. It was that bad.
I preordered it as more of a curiosity. Will probably not play them very much.
What a strange generation of gaming this has turned out to be. So many obscure games have emerged from the woodwork and given a new lease on life, and in physical form no less! And to say nothing of the ridiculously extravagant special edition! Who exactly is the audience for this?!
But I am inexplicably intrigued. Wolfenstein 3D was one of my earliest gaming memories, and the convoluted interface of Zero Tolerance reminds me a lot of a Wolf3D clone by Apogee Software called Blake of Stone: Aliens of Gold, which was completely overshadowed by the game-changing DOOM, which followed just a week later in December 1993. Apogee would later go on to develop Duke Nukem 3D, which released three years later, and like DOOM before it, was groundbreaking as well, and perhaps also paved the way for sexual content and coarse language in mainstream gaming, which was a rarity at the time.
Zero Tolerance looks so intriguing somehow, but it's going to be a fairly costly gamble picking up Strictly Limited's standard release, which I'm tempted to pick up alongside Jim Powers, another obscure oldie that I've never played growing up, but it reminds me so much of the platformers I used to play as a kid.
The last remaster I bought was Powerslave/Exhumed and though it wasn't bad, it did make me think about "how low you can go?"
Honestly how many more remasters do we need? It seems to me these companies are really scraping the bottom of the barrel, so to speak.
There just aren't that many old games that has aged that well (even Doom II and 64 felt underwhelming - Doom 1993 and Duke Nukem are still great though - true classics imo).
Even PS One games (once my favourite platform ever) feel archaic now. And I played the Tomb Raider and Resident Evil games up until 2015 (the OG PS One ones of course), but now I just feel they've become too dated both gameplay wise and graphically.
(Ok I wouldn't mind a few PS3/Xbox 360 remasters I admit - give me some Batman Arkham for example and I would be all over it)
Can’t say I’m really interested, but it’s still nice to see an old game like this get resurrected.
I have the physical copy pre-ordered. I know how difficult this game can be because I owned it after it came out, lol. It'll be fun for nostalgia sake though.
From the sound of it it wouldn't even make good YouTube fodder. Unless this game also links to Halo somehow.
@shgamer
As someone whose weekly diet consists mostly of "old" games — whether it's the original Doom or, now, Halo 3 --, I don't really understand what you're talking about.
Hopefully we can preserve as many old games as we can, not just the best of the best. Because even agreeing on what is "the best" is contentious: Doom 2 and Doom 64 may not be as consistent as Doom, but they're still very good.
@Beaucine I'm talking about some games are better left dead. And this looks like one them (it says it's a collection but then in reality is more one game plus an expansion - and then a "prototype" - that one's probably REALLY fun ).
I just watched a walkthrough on Youtube and it sure looks archaic; short draw distances when you're outside, poor framerate, not much to actually do other than shooting and finding your way through the various levels (and the shooting doesn't even look satisfying).
It doesn't excite me at all to be honest and I believe most people will agree with me. As I said you can "go to low"; there are games that are better left alone.
@shgamer
It doesn't excite me either because it's a dark, janky console FPS from 1994 and PC or Mac alternatives like Doom and Marathon from that same era clearly wipe the floor with it.
But none of this matters. It's still valid to release and preserve even the failures of the past, because you don't know who'll find it interesting or worthwhile. And at any rate, you don't have to buy it.
@Beaucine It's free world so I people can release what they want, but you're right; I won't buy this one.
This was my first full FPS, back in the day. Friends all switched to PCs, just as I'd finally saved enough to get my first console.
Bah, humbug!
But, yeah, this was great back then. It hasn't aged, though, and I don't think modern FPS Gamers should dare attempt it if they don't already have those special rose-tinted spectacles!
Honestly, after what happened in Highland Park, it's hard for me to look at an FPS right now.
@BloodNinja I hear you brother. So sad. I’m really not sure what can cause people today in America to do these atrocities but I’m willing to go with whatever changes need to be made to ensure the safety of our people. Stricter gun laws, stricter bans on our media/entertainment, any other changes they want to experiment with im for it. Drastic measures for a drastic change needs to be made.
The jim power collection these same people did not only has no rewinds quicksaves or other forms of accessibility and is always in a stretched aspect but also glitches up the screen to unplayability if you load/make a save state. People need to put their rose tinted nostalgia goggles aside and hold these companies accountable for their awful preservation attempts😑
@TYRANACLES I agree completely. Great post, friend
NINJA APPROVED
I will wait for a steep sale but I’m a sucker for nostalgic FPS experiences (Ion Fury is an excellent halfway experiment) , and though I never played this, I still want to experience it at least once.
I wouldn’t mind playing William Shatner’s Tekwar again either
I will be grabbing a physical copy regardless. It’s almost 30 year old, of course it’s dated. It’s a nice collection with a classic, a lost and an unreleased demo. It’s all valid criticism for new players, but they’re not the target.
@Ara Yeah, I would love a physical copy of this too. PIKO interactive aren't my favourite peoples, but I think I will have to make an exception for this. I still play Zero Tolerance every now and then via a Raspberry Pi + CRT TV combo, but owning it again on a modern format will eventually prove too big a draw for me to ignore
I remember the odd early FPS like this back in the day and being fascinated by them when giving them a go of freinds' consoles. More of a historical curio to read about than something I'd buy now tbh
I mean, if you're determined to own every Sega Genesis game ever made, then it makes sense.
if it comes out on the thing that you put into your switch im buying it.
I find games especially the indie type games may go on the shelf for a year or so and then to be never seen again.
so im buying those types of games.
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