Customer Reviews

Ground Zero Texas

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The plot of this full-motion video shooter is similar to Invasion of the Body Snatchers: The Texas town of El Cadron is being overrun by an alien race called Reticulans and you've been brought in to stop them before the military drops a nuclear bomb on the town. You control 4 camera guns strategically placed in key locations, and you have a teammate in each area.

In the first stage, you have to switch between each of the four areas. Your job is to shoot the Reticulans, protect your teammates, and avoid shooting humans. As the level progresses, each teammate has a run-in with a Reticulan disguised as a human. If you save them, you collect part of a 4-digit code. If you fail, your teammate is captured and you won't know their portion of the code. You can protect townspeople from being kidnapped as well.

The second stage is a search for the Reticulan hideout. This one is much simpler than the previous stage. When you reach the hideout, there is a 4-digit code to enter. If you saved everyone in stage one, you will have the complete code. If you lost some team members, you will have to guess - one wrong digit means everyone gets blown sky high. All captured teammates are freed at the end of this stage.

Once this stage is completed, you switch to the 2nd disc.

The third stage is a revisit to the town, and the aliens are easy to identify in their stormtrooper outfits. Once again, you have to randomly switch locations throughout the town and shoot the Reticulans while avoiding the townspeople.

In the fourth and final stage, you must progress from camera 1 to camera 4, eliminate all the Reticulans (no innocents to worry about here), and then take out the source of the invasion.

The gameplay was pretty simple: shoot, shoot, protect, and shoot again. The video window in this game was bigger than other Sega CD games like Slam City or Double Switch, so the picture was improved, but only slightly. The game had its share of cheesy dialogue, which seemed to be a requirement of every game from Digital Pictures.

The Reticulan costumes were pretty laughable - combine the outfit Dorothy Stratten wore in Galaxina with a motorcycle helmet, and you've got the Reticulan stormtrooper costume. The Reticulans on stage two looked like outfits you'd find at a Gwar show.

There were a number of issues with this game:

(1) Hypersensitive controls: Barely touching the D-Pad make the crosshairs fly from one side of the screen to the other, making it very difficult to target enemies.

(2) Shield issues: There is a shield option for the cameras, but with the shield on, it's harder to distinguish between aliens and humans.

(3) Frustration: On stage 3, if you shoot a single human it results in failure. There is nothing more frustrating than shooting over 60 aliens only to shoot one human by accident and having to start over.

(4) Too much multitasking: Sometimes alerts occur in 2 camera areas at once, making it impossible to protect both locations at the same time.

(5) Too short: With only 4 levels, this game is very quick - once finished, there's really no replay value.

I did notice a few postivies:

(1) Stage Restarts: If a mission resulted in failure, I didn't have to start all over again from the beginning of the game - It gives the option to start at the beginning of the stage.

(2) Memory Storage - On my Sega CDX there is a memory function that stores when I complete a stage, so I could turn the unit off, play other games, and try again later instead of trying to beat the game all in one sitting. Keep in mind, memory cards were not common on game consoles back then.

(3) A surprise actor in the bunch: During the 2nd stage one of the actors says "Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!" I knew the voice but couldn't place it since the video quality was pretty poor. By checking the credits, I found out it was Danny Trejo! For those of you who don't know, he's been in several Hollywood films including Heat, From Dusk Til Dawn, and Spy Kids.

All in all, this was a game trying to be an interactive movie, which cost (believe it or not) roughly 3 million US dollars to make. It's hard to believe it cost that much, since the hardware limitations of the Sega CD downgraded the quality of the full-motion video and gave it the look and feel of a B-movie. Games like this one are what led to the downfall of the FMV game genre and the Sega CD console, since consumers didn't want to pay high prices for a game that could be finished so quickly.

I would recommend this game for Sega CD collectors - for more casual old school gamers, there are plenty of Sega CD games which have higher replay value than this one.