HuZERO - a score attack PCE racing game FREE to download!

[A Black Falcon]

Cool stuff, F-Zero is my favorite 4th gen racing game, I should say that first.  I'm a huge futuristic racing game fan, and F-Zero is one of the best (Another futuristic racing game, Sega's Outrun 2019 for the Genesis, is my 2nd favorite 4th gen racer.).  So yeah, I can't help but compare this to F-Zero.  And the graphics and music are great!  Yeah, it's linescroll and not Mode 7, and that's too bad, but for a linescroll-style F-Zero game it looks very cool.  Love the rendition of the music as well.

But as for the gameplay... this definitely isn't as good as F-Zero.  It doesn't play anything like F-Zero, and wish it did.  HuZero looks amazing in screenshots, but is kind of frustrating to play.  Perhaps my biggest issue with it is the handling.  The way your car "angles" based on how many times you've pressed the dpad in one direction or another is so weird, you almost never see that in racing games.  I guess Michael Andretti's World Grand Prix for the NES is kind of like that, but pretty much nothing else I can think of, and that game is really confusing to play because of how each tap, instead of just turning you  like in a normal racing game, changes the angle of your car, which then locks in the angle it's now set to, just like this one.  Sure, after a little while I started to get used to this game, and these controls certainly make HuZero a more challenging score attack game, but as much as I like the visual look of the game,  I don't think I like the controls; shouldn't it play more like, well, F-Zero, if it's an F-Zero-like game?

Anyway, my best score so far is 64,890.  These controls, and the horrible pingpongey death waiting you if you make even a tiny mistake, makes this a quite tense game to play...


Maybe the most impressive F-Zero-style homebrew-ish game I've seen is this one, F-Nano 2 for the MSX Turbo-R:

 

This is a cool tech demo and all, but playing it isn't as fun as I think it could be. Once you start ping-ponging there is no recovery. And it's REALLY easy to start ping-ponging uncontrollably since the track is so thin. I'd decrease the bounce amount. I've noticed that homebrew games almost always tend to be crazy hard. Nice "transparency" with the power bar, though! The music is great as well, I just wish the TurboGrafx-16 was capable of some bass.

Yeah, the fact that if you go too far in one direction or the other you set off an unrecoverable pingpong bouncing chain is one of the worst side-effects of the games' controls.  Perhaps the idea was that since it's just a two minute game it should be hard, and it does add to the challenge and make the game a bit harder to learn, but is that a good hard?  I'm not so sure.

Still, it was kind of satisfying when I finally managed to get through two minutes without bouncing back and forth off the walls.

[NightWolve]

Hey, folks.  I've been doing a little coding since February on a (fun?) little game that I call HuZERO.

Wow, that's awesome work Chris! I can't believe I had a reason to pull out the microSD card so soon from my Everdrive flashcart and load it up with something to give it a quick test.

I can confirm it works on a TurboExpress with Everdrive. Fine, fine work, you even remade the explosion, smoke and camera effect of it quickly going up and letting the player view the resulting explosive failure upon death like the original and to the best of the system's abilities.

I take it button II doesn't brake ? Looks like, otherwise I should be more able to avoid getting bounced around back'n'forth like a ragdoll into explosion on your wily curves. Heh.

Anyway, like Bonknuts, you're a helluva programmer.


EDIT: LOL, what the heck ? Chris did political alarmist commentary in the title screen... After a little while post-credits and apologies to Nintendo, you see the following:

"STOP THE US NSA!!"
"PRISM IS GLOBAL!!"
"AND WATCHING YOU!!"

"PRISM" referring to this. - ECHELON Part II as it were.

I was like, uh, wait, what did I just see ? Heh-heh. Had to let it run again and pay attention.

[ccovell]

Oh, come on, I used fewer exclamation marks than that...   

[NightWolve]

True, I partly added 'em for emphasis, you ran out of room seemingly, thus I also assumed.

EDIT: HiScore just now: 54526 err, now 65985!!

Yay!

EDITx2: 71,453

Yaaaaaaaay! Still 2nd place to Necro, though.

[esteban]

I finally played this (but not on real hardware...that will have to wait until holiday vacation). At first I was awkward learning the mechanics/controls. Then, PANG! Everything "clicked" and I have been having a great time playing this.

I can't help but feel that Covell spends a lot of time polishing the little details/refining the mechanics (not just the aesthetics, which are also amazing).

For the folks who were commenting on the mechanics and control: I believe that Covell was trying to create the best possible experience + challenge given the constraints (2:00 minute time-attack).

I feel he carefully chose and fine-tuned the mechanics... and it works.

The fact that this game doesn't play the way we "expect" it to play reveals how inflexible we are when it comes to gaming conventions, especially  the conventions within genres.

I had to get used to the controls, too. But I'm glad Covell forced (some of) us out of our comfort zones.

For the record, I would love Covell to experiment and try different things in future incarnations of HuZERO (I want rain effects with a slippery road—just kidding. I *do* want my car equipped with a single surface-to-air missile, though, to launch from my car when a helicopter appears overhead. The missile/helicopter won't have any actual impact on the game, it will just be an homage to Spy Hunter).

FINALLY: If HuZERO didn't have the trappings of F-Zero, I wonder if folks would have been more willing to accept the controls/mechanics?

[NightWolve]

Oh hey, that's a great idea actually, este, if Chris thought about combining elements from Spy Hunter, so make this a hybrid of F-Zero and Spy Hunter, rather than just trying to port the same exact game over which is perfectly playable where it came from, etc. Yeah, that would be nifty.

[A Black Falcon]

FINALLY: If HuZERO didn't have the trappings of F-Zero, I wonder if folks would have been more willing to accept the controls/mechanics?

That would help, yes.  I'd still dislike the controls, though.  The way that you change the car's angle, instead of turning the wheels as in a normal racing game, is so odd, and I definitely don't like it as much as normal racing game controls.  I mean, I do like this demo, but the controls hold it back a bit.

For the folks who were commenting on the mechanics and control: I believe that Covell was trying to create the best possible experience + challenge given the constraints (2:00 minute time-attack).

There must be better ways to do that than making the controls really odd, though?

[Joe Redifer]

Consider the NSA stopped! Thanks, HuZero!

[NightWolve]

Consider the NSA stopped! Thanks, HuZero!

   

So, I can't beat Necro's score, I'm stuck at 71,453, my best... Like somebody said, you gotta move left and right to bump up your points. I really concentrated on one game and had a perfect ride, no hits, full power, just glided at maximum speed and I wound up with only 60k+ points... So it's not just a matter of going max speed and trying not to touch the sides, etc.

EDIT: Got up to 72,995. Surpassing Necro is nearly within reach along with stopping the NSA!!! ALMOST! This really isn't all that difficult now I see. If you respond to the curves in time, you'll do fine, really.

[Necromancer]

Frag's score is even higher, NW.   Keep fighting the NSA!!!

So yeah, I can't help but compare this to F-Zero.

You don't say. 

[NightWolve]

Oh yeah, so Frag's the champ now ? I take it he posted a photo in the score thread.

It's really tough to get past the 72k mark still... It's gonna take a lot more practice. Just can't seem to do it.

[Necromancer]

Yep.  He's got me edged out by a mere 149 points, but try as I might I just can't get any higher.

[NightWolve]

Here's a Christmas meme in Chris' honor there.   Randomly ran into it again.



So how does the fight go against the NSA ? I surrendered still at 72k, I just can't edge past that so far. As they say, you don't win a silver, you lose the gold, and until I can edge past that 75k mark, no point in photo proof. I'll reserve that for when I defeat Fragmare's score and it WILL happen!!!

[ccovell]

Some news that has made me a bit happy:

HuZERO was ranked 4th in the scene website 4Sceners.de's "Game of the Year 2014" awards.



Also, if you can speak Spanish, there's an interview with me that was just put up on the site RetroManiac.

[esteban]

Some news that has made me a bit happy:

HuZERO was ranked 4th in the scene website 4Gamers.de's "Game of the Year 2014" awards.



Also, if you can speak Spanish, there's an interview with me that was just put up on the site RetroManiac.

As anyone who has conquered Hydride would say...Congratulations.

A well-deserved honor.