Zeus Ex

**Sl1p** · 18 Jan 2003, 05:04 AM

Sega likes to test their new arcade games at SVGL, so when I heard that we were getting a new game in this week I was pretty excited.

"If it's F-Zero, Im shitting my pants."

So I got to SVGL early today and checked it out. Not suprisingly, it wasn't F-Zero. That was just wishful thinking. Instead what we got was a weird 3-D shooter by the name is "Zeus Ex". No, I haven't heard of it either.

The most common remark about the game so far is "It's like Space Harrier..but bad." and thats a pretty accurate description. The game plays most like Planet Harriers. A 3-D, over the shoulder on rails shooter where you fly around and shoot things until they go boom. Instead of a random guy holding a cannon, you get to pick between one of three mechs. One being fast, one being strong and of course one being average.

You control you mech using the joystick to fly around like Space Harrier, and 3 buttons for attacks. One shoots your basic beam, which you can power up so that it just shoots up to 4 of your basic beam at once. The second button is used to lock on to a random enemy on the screen, then fire a powerful missle at them. You have to collect fuel to actually use that attack and since you can kill most enemies with a single shot, it's fairly useless. The last button is the standard "Everything dies" button which is typically reserved for bosses. You also get a dodge feature which uhhh...dosen't quite dodge enough. It ends up just looking fancy then doing you any good since you're moving slower then just simply moving in that direction.

The problem with the game is that your mech is so huge, and the camera follows you in such a way that you never have a good view of whats going on. This leads to not being able to aim properly and getting hit constantly from seemingly invisible attacks. Another flaw is the aiming system itself. The cursor you use to aim with is always in the center. So when it comes time to actually shoot something with accuracy (Lets say, a boss's weak point or an item holding enemy) you have to fly for quite a bit until the camera catches up to you.

So thanks to a useless dodge feature and a horrible camera, you're subjected to getting hit by just about everything. So far, the farthest I've seen someone go was just after the first boss. It's pretty ridiclous.

I'm loaning out my camera so I didn't have it on me. I'll make sure a friend of mine brings his so I can take a few pictures since I don't see any sites with it online.

I'm really hoping this is a very early test version and not anywhere near the final. It shows promise, and it's fun when you can actually see whats going on.

**skelly** · 18 Jan 2003, 05:11 AM

Thanks for the details! Any idea what Sega team is behind it?

**Tracer** · 18 Jan 2003, 07:18 AM

That sucks

Thanks for the details and info though, many thanks.

Maybe they'll fix it up a bit and make it actually good. Zeus Ex is a cool name but too akin to Deus Ex.