An unused review for Zero Tolerance (Mega Drive)

I've been writing for the video game website Hardcore Gaming 101 under the accidental pseudonym of Apollo Chungus for nearly five years now. I've written over 50 articles for the site, some of which have been published in books such as NES Cult Classics and The Guide To Retro Indie Games Vol. 2. One of my earliest articles even inspired a fan translation, for the obscure puzzle adventure game Noobow on the Game Boy.

I'm lucky to say that I've never had problems writing for the website in all that time. However, there is one article I wrote which can't go on the website. Not for any bad reasons, don't worry.

It was an article for the SEGA Mega Drive first-person shooter Zero Tolerance, a fairly neat if repetitive corridor shooter with some cool ideas. I pitched an article covering the game and its cancelled sequel in late 2020, having heard about it some time before and wishing to discuss them as an example of early console FPS games (at least those that weren't ports of home computer games like Wolfenstein or DOOM), and the site's editor gave me the go ahead.

I managed to put the entire article together, gathering screenshots for both games, and even discovering interesting tidbits like how the creature designs for the sequel were done by the late Yasushi Nirasawa. But when it came time to submit the article, the editor discovered he'd accidentally double-booked it - someone else had already written and submitted an article for Zero Tolerance!

Considering how many people have written for the site and how many games have been covered, I totally understand how you can sometimes lose track of which games are being covered and who's covering them. I let the editor know that he could go with either of the two articles, and there would be no hard feelings (it's an article about a Mega Drive first-person shooter; it would be very deeply silly to have hard feelings about that of all things). A few months later, Hardcore Gaming 101 published the Zero Tolerance article written by Steven Barbato, and it's a good article that digs into what's interesting about the game but also explains what its issues are.

For whatever it's worth, I've decided to post the article I'd written, along with some of the screenshots I'd taken.

Zero Tolerance - Genesis/Mega Drive, Windows (1994) 

Developer: Technopop Inc. 

Publisher: Accolade, Piko Interactive (Steam) 

Genre: First Person Shooter 

Themes: Alien Invasion, Big Maze Levels, DOOM Clone, Player: Bearded, Player: Female, Science Fiction 

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While the early-mid 90s PC gaming scene exploded with first-person shooters, there were very few that appeared for the considerably less powerful home consoles. Apart from ports of the most popular games, consoles like the Mega Drive only received a handful of original shooters. One of these was Zero Tolerance, a decent romp by US developer Technopop that's enjoyably repetitive and has some clever ideas to back it up. 

The orbital space station Europe-1 has been taken over by aliens, and the cooling system has been destabilized to the point where it will melt down in only a few hours. It's up to you and your crew of tough-as-nails soldiers to head inside, destroy all the aliens, and stabilize the cooling system before it's too late! Zero Tolerance is a shooter very much in the vein of Wolfenstein 3D, with big flat mazes to navigate as you wander round, pick up weapons and items to help you out, and shoot various kinds of enemies. However, there's a handful of mechanics that make the game stand out.  

When you start the game, you pick from one of five squad members who each have separate stats and loadouts. "Soba" packs a handgun and a bullet-proof vest that lets her take a few hits without losing health; "Basse" carries a shotgun and a bio-scanner to detect enemies; "Psycho" has two explosive mines; "Weasel" comes bare-handed but is the fastest and takes less damage; and "JJwolf" gets more health from medipacks. When you die, that character is permanently killed and you have to pick one of the others, and it's game over when all five are dead. 

Mechanically, your main focus is to find and kill every enemy on each floor, with an onscreen counter to help you see how many are left. When you clear each floor, you'll be given a password to enter from the main menu that logs everything you've done up to that point. You can choose to take the elevator that brings you to the next floor at any time, but you won't get a password - and won't get one until you reach the next set of levels! 

These ideas, while fairly interesting, do have the potential to turn things into a frustrating affair. But the game does a good job in preventing this for the most part. If you die, all killed enemies stay dead and your equipment transfers over to the next character, letting you get back into things immediately. Passwords are quite short, so you don't have to write down too much when you want to resume later. You always know where to go thanks to having a map of each floor in the pause screen and an onscreen minimap that shows enemies as red dots, while corpses hang around to help you see where you haven't gone. 

That leaves Zero Tolerance free to push on with its basic premise of blasting every enemy in sight, floor by floor, and it's pulled off quite well. Gunplay is fast and furious, with enemies rushing towards you and a lack of recoil ensuring you can keep shooting like crazy in tight situations. Each floor offers different degrees of complexity and challenge, making for a spontaneous experience with interesting puzzles or sights. The enemy types even change with each new set of levels, so there's always something to look forward to.  

 It is quite a repetitive game, since you do nothing but explore mazes and shoot anything that runs at you, but it's the kind of repetitive that can be quite relaxing when you're in the mood for it. If there are any flaws, it has more to do with its technical limitations. The game only uses the Mega Drive’s three button controller, and while a decent attempt is made to make a control scheme that works within that, there are some hiccups.  

You can carry five items/weapons at any time, and pressing C changes what you’re holding - but only in one direction. So you'll have to press it a few times to get what you need, which can be frustrating if you're in a jam (this isn't helped by how items such as bullet-proof vests and bio-scanners can be "equipped", but otherwise don't do anything). While console shooters of the day often required you hold a button to strafe, Zero Tolerance makes it awkward by not letting you move backwards while strafing, instead forcing you to crouch (a completely useless function since everything happens on the same plane). 

Perhaps the most obvious example of the limitations is the framerate, which is fairly low to begin with and tends to dip when in open spaces or dealing with enough enemies. It never reaches the point of becoming unplayable, but it can grate when you're trying to simply move around or deal with enemies quickly. That said, the visuals still manage to impress.  

Despite the small gameplay window you're given, the layout is clean and you can see all onscreen elements clearly enough to navigate and blast your way out. The walls and skyboxes change every few levels to keep things interesting, along with some nice touches such as smoke in floors beset by fires and windows showing the outside world. There's a particularly great attention to detail in how enemy corpses are left behind, walls can be damaged by gunfire, and blood splatters trail down the wall. It all culminates in giving the fights a more tangible feeling. 

Sadly, the same can't be said for the audio. The sound design is shockingly good, with enemy grunts alerting you to their presence, punchy gunshots that make every firefight satisfying, and even the sounds of your own footsteps to provide a sense of atmosphere when wandering the hallways. Unfortunately, the music by Dezso Molnar (who seems to have only worked on this game) features very short, sparsely composed loops that soon become obnoxiously dull when levels take 10-15 minutes to beat. Thankfully, it can be turned off from the main menu, letting you play more appropriate music to your heart's content - or at least something longer! 

Something you can also do from the menu is activate the multiplayer mode. Yes, Zero Tolerance actually has multiplayer in which you and another player tackle the levels in co-op, but the only way you can do this is with a special link cable ordered from Technopop. Not only that, but since it doesn't have split-screen, you need two televisions, two Mega Drives, and two copies of the game in order to play it! It's deranged, but it's very admirable that they managed to get it working at all. 

Zero Tolerance is generally an admirable game for what it sets out to do and achieves. While nothing special compared to other shooters of the day, it's nevertheless an enjoyable romp and certainly one of the best shooters available on the Mega Drive. And as it was publicly released in the early 2000s as freeware by Technopop's founder Randel Reiss, there's really no reason not to give it a shot. (It's also on Steam courtesy of Piko Interactive, but it seems to be a basic emulation and costs $10. Do what you will.) 

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Beyond Zero Tolerance - Genesis/Mega Drive, 32X (Cancelled) 

Developer: Technopop Inc. 

Genre: First Person Shooter 

Themes: Big Maze Levels, DOOM Clone, Player: Bearded, Player: Female, Science Fiction, Unreleased 

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Zero Tolerance received a good deal of acclaim at the time, and seemed to do well enough that Technopop began working on a sequel that would deliver the same monster blasting gameplay, but with a few changes. Taking the fight to the aliens' spaceship, the crew would go back and forth between its various floors, now having to create a map of each floor as they explored every nook and cranny. Status items now took up their own slots in the pause menu, leaving you to equip five weapons at your discretion. 

While a fair bit of progress was made in developing Beyond Zero Tolerance, with plans to even port it to the 32X add-on, it was cancelled for reasons currently unknown. A prototype of it was also made publically available by Randel Reiss, but it's in a rough state with garish color palettes, no sound effects, and enemies being much more difficult to deal with than they would likely have been. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Beyond Zero Tolerance is that the enemy designs were handled by the late great Yasushi Nirasawa, who created the suits and monsters for various Kamen Rider series, the phantoms in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and designs for countless other works. His designs for Beyond are featured in the posthumously published art collection BLOOD of NIRA'S CREATURE. 

As an odd footnote to the games' legacy, Eidos Interactive announced plans in 2005 to release a game called Zero Tolerance: City Under Fire for the PS2 and Xbox. However, Randel Reiss sent a cease and desist notice to Eidos, claiming he held the copyright on the name "Zero Tolerance" and that an unknown licensee was planning to remake the original for the PSP (which never materialized). Soon after, Eidos renamed their game to Urban Chaos: Riot Response, making it a sequel to the otherwise unrelated Urban Chaos. 

WEBSITES AND LINKS: 

A tribute website to developer Technopop, discussing Zero Tolerance - http://www.technopop.net/ 

An overview of the Yasushi Nirasawa art book BLOOD of NIRA'S CREATURE, containing enemy designs from Beyond Zero Tolerance - https://youtube.com/watch?v=531G-RTsF90 

An article discussing the legal issues surrounding the Zero Tolerance: City Under Fire naming controversy - https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/eidos-comes-under-fire-from-developer-over-trademark-issue 

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-Jim/Dougal/Apollo

(27th February 2022, listening to - Gordon's Gardenparty, by The Cardigans: