Corpse Killer

By: The J Man

Corpse Killer is one of the last of the interactive movie games from Digital Pictures and guru Tom Zito. These games were their specialties, and really only continued by virtue of new console hardware, namely, the release of the 3DO, 32X, and CD-i; all of which were intended or outright designed to do a better job of showing live action video at higher resolutions. It didn't help the quality of the games though, but it does explain why they were still being made, and why they were still released on the wimpy ol' Sega CD.

The name "Corpse Killer" is an intentional oxymoron that will give you exactly the right idea about the subject of the game. You're a special forces Lieutenant air-dropped with a squad of four others onto the remote tropical island of Cay Noir. The details of your mission become more clear as the game progresses, but the idea is stop the mad Dr. Hellman, (played by veteran character actor Vincent Schiavelli) and his out-of-control research into creating an unstoppable army for the United States. His methods to get there should come as a surprise to no one - good old fashioned voodoo - and his results are an island full of zombies and spiritual nasties. Your goal is to shoot through a never-ending supply of zombie soldiers to rescue and un-zombify your four captured teammates.

Assisting you throughout your quest are a single-minded female reporter named Julie (Brigett Butler), and a Rastafarian and voodoo specialist named Winston (Jeremiah Birkett). Winston, endearingly, is only interested in finding enough pirate treasure to buy a Humvee (take a shot every time he says the word "Hummah" - you'll be on the floor before the intro movie is over). However, he is infinitely useful in providing you a Jeep for transportation, information, and all sorts of voodoo brews. You can even have him read the future from chicken bones back at the base camp, and he will make appropriate suggestions as to which path to take - more on this later. The reporter's not quite as useful. Or anywhere close. At all. She essentially rides around and takes pictures, whines if you don't help her out with her quests, and schizophrenically wavers her acting from flatly delivering backstory as if she's reading bullet points, to ineptly attempting some sexual innuendos ("Neat gadget! I bet you know how to TURN IT ON." - real quote). At least Winston won't let you down, and in terms of gameplay, Julie at least keeps her tits out of the way.

Winston, like most men, aspires to recieve a glorious Hummer.

The game breaks out into a series of linear shooting galleries. The camera always scrolls left to right for the length of about four screens, while zombies walk sideways, toward you from the background, or pull off amazing leaps. Your health and ammo are tracked at a standard display at the bottom of the screen, complete with a little image of your character (who resembles Mike Nelson from MST3K). You have four flavors of bullets you cycle through with the B button, though two of those bullets must be created using items you can gain at the end of missions. The C button will instantly abort your level and let you regroup. There are no pickups to collect or anything else to shoot; you simply fend off waves of digitized zombies until you reach the end of the "gallery," and automatically move on to the next video clip.

The clever parts involve how the game breaks up and gives purpose to these shooting galleries. It's a linear path of shooting-movie-shooting, up until you save your first comrade. From here, Winston takes you to a graveyard that works like a base of operations. The graveyard is the only point where you can access your PDA, which holds backstory, information on items you can collect, Winston's fortune-telling ability, and the map. The map shows all the various missions you can choose to undertake. At any time, you can take on the central plot by selecting to raid Hellman's fortress and rescue the next guy. Otherwise, randomized side quests will appear. You can choose to help Winston find treasure for his Humvee, or help Julie get some Pulitzer material. You can take quests to get armor-piercing ammo. You can take quests to attack certain groups of zombies and get a random powerup as a reward. The "missions" all simply entail a single shooting gallery, but completing it gives you the item you came to get, or something to assist you in your quest. You can even get ambushed along the way, and having Winston read the bones will make suggestions about avoiding missions that will lead to such traps.

It gives the game a level of strategy, and makes this the most elaborate FMV game I've played yet. It's certainly a great leap forward from watching a couple video screens and hitting traps at the appropriate time, or selecting a list of witnesses and watching an uncontrollable video clip as you question them. It's also the most like an actual game, despite still being hawked as a "U-Direct" interactive picture. You're not simply following a linear movie order or picking your next move out of a list like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book - you'll have to consider tactically where you want to go next, and your shooting skill will help determine the outcome.

Another major key to introducing some strategy is the Datura plant you sometimes get after missions. Datura, as Winston explains, has anti-zombie properties. It can either be used to give you powerful bullets, or as the only method to replenish your health. Each time you get a plant, you get a screen asking you if you want the bullets or the health. Both, as you can imagine, are awfully useful. Regular zombies can be dispatched with your infinite supply of standard ammunition. Yet there are special voodoo spirits that also appear in the shooting sections, and can only be killed with Datura bullets. Same story with your captured fellow soldiers. So to continue with the plot, you need these side quests for precious Datura, but you're not required to take them. As soon as you feel you're ready, you can go raid the fortress. If you want to take your time and build up an impressive stockpile of Datura bullets, you can do that too. You also have your health to balance, which stands to take a hit each time you venture out for supplies. You soon may need to use that Datura for your health instead.

You may further need to take quests for armor piercing bullets, to have enough to create Datura bullets, or may have to take other missions while you wait for a "Datura quest" to show up. Point is, you're making decisions and frequently weighing the consequences of "voodoo bullets vs. health," instead of simply watching some video and pressing a button every now and again.

The shooting sequences similarly go out of their way to be standard arcade blasters that happen to use digitized video for the characters. Zombies appear independent of the background, and react individually, allowing for many to be on the screen at the same time. It's not a cutout shooting gallery like Ground Zero, Texas was, with one enemy appearing at a time, and scads of down time. Here, you get swarms of bad guys without loading or similar breaks in the action.

Of course, it's not without faults. In order to have the characters separate from the video backdrop, all the actors in these shooting sections appear to be on wires. I understand wires for the jumping ones, but even walking/running zombies appear to have been hung up in front of a bluescreen and told to run in air. It results in a strange swimming look to everyone's movements, and creates characters who obviously are not a part of the scene. I think the tradeoff for a quick and seamless shooter is worth it; others may believe it simply looks too hokey. And since these characters are simply overlaid on the scrolling video footage, it creates situations where they ignore the foreground. The video is set up to have some field of depth, with totems or sheds sometimes passing by on multiple layers of distance. The zombies ignore these and charge right on through. The developers have, at least, masked these zombies out if they're "behind" something, to maintain the illusion of 3-D. It will still result in running zombies suddenly appearing through solid walls, usually too close to you to react in time.

Another smaller issue is that characters near the edge of the screen simply disappear if the screen is about to scroll past them. I kind of like it, since it was a lifesaver for me a few times. Practically, it means you should never waste your time shooting at enemies near the left edge.

Control is the wild card here, and it's barely up to the task. You will be able to complete the game with even the pad controls, but none of the schemes can be called particularly ideal. For the control pad, the issue is the loose crosshair. You will be able to move around swiftly to deal with threats on either side of the screen, which will get you through the large majority of the game. You will not be able to pinpoint anything, or hold down a button to modify the cursor's speed for more accuracy. This results in drawing a square around any small objects you're supposed to hit, like thrown grenades or knives. The lack of real accuracy also means much of the game will be spend waggling the cursor around in a "spray 'n pray" style. At least you have those infinite bullets.

The game can also work with either of the Sega CD lightguns. Aiming becomes less of an issue, but lag does. The game puts a red bracket on everything it registers as a hit, while your cursor continues on. So you can be shooting at your next foe, but if that red bracket hasn't faded from the last enemy, then that's the one the game is still thinking about. All of the zombies require multiple hits to drop, which isn't such an issue with your automatic main weapon, but can result in thinking you've dropped an enemy when you haven't done enough damage yet. Through a combination of this and the lag, the only sure way to kill a zombie is to keep firing until it falls. This will always require more bullets than necessary, and usually allows a different zombie to close to biting distance. Fortunately, the generous health you have (100 points, and each zombie takes 4 off) help to mitigate this, so a single blow will never be much to worry about.

The graphics, as is always the case with the Sega CD, are where most of the hurt is. It's pixelated, it's blocky, colors shift around frequently, and most of the beauty of the live island location gets lost to fierce compression ratios. Fortunately, it's never unplayable. Characters never get lost in the backgrounds, though some thrown projectiles do. It can also be hard to tell a regular enemy from a silhouetted "shadow man" (all-black ghouls that damage you if you shoot them) at a distance. But you will still be able to find all of your targets and deal with them without dropping frames. Don't get any other versions of this game expecting improved or easier gameplay; what's here is good enough, and you'll really only be getting better quality video for the plot films. The movie sections are of standard cutscene quality, and you can usually tell what's going on with enough detail. Still, they're not pretty to look at, and the crushed blacks often mean that poor Winston's face blends with his dreadlocks and the grille of his Jeep, resulting in a character you can sometimes only see by grinning Cheshire Cat teeth.

Dialogue on these sections are at least clear, though Winston again suffers here. He speaks with a heavy Rasta accent, complete with authentic pronouns like "I-and-I," which may result in some people not understanding what he's saying. I didn't have an issue here, but I do know that all other versions included a subtitle option for everyone who doesn't speak accent. You'll want to track one of those down instead if you're the kind of person who has to watch the Yankee-dubbed version of Mad Max.

Nobody here gets to flex their acting muscles to any real degree. Winston manages to be my favorite character, since he actually helps you through the course of the game, and Birkett seems to be having a great deal of fun with the role. Digital Pictures always was good at creating a useful buddy role, and finding an actor perfect for it. Julie is an annoyance, at best, and Butler seems to be running on autopilot. Vincent Schiavelli, poor guy, did this role so many times that he probably lost track of what film he was in day to day. He was a better actor than this part, and you can tell pretty clearly that this one was a paycheck job. Hellman is appropriately lunatic, and feels no qualms about letting you in on his perceived brilliance. As for the men you rescue, well, their acting amazingly gets progressively worse with each one you save.

Corpse Killer is one of the shining examples of the genre. No wait, don't laugh yet. Night Trap was the perfect introduction, and the voyeuristic gameplay made the most sense for telling a story in cinematic language while trying to maintain some level of gamer control. It sucked as a game, and the second-generation titles tried to remedy that. You can see here how this is a standard arcade shooter, but with FMV characters and FMV cutscenes. It has enough "gamey" elements to make it a title worth existing, and the interactive movie parts support the game rather than attempt to replace it. That is about the nicest thing that can be said for such "interactive movies." It's really your call as to whether you want to consider that praise or not.

-reviewed 3/31/07 - game copyright 1995 Digital Pictures, Inc.

An average game created with FMV features, rather than a bad movie lamely masquerading as a game.

Unoriginal plot and unexciting characters means there's not a great deal beyond killing corpses - which has been done better in other games.

	7
	7
	6
	7
	64%

MobyGames - Corpse Killer
Intro and gameplay video on YouTube (3DO)
Behind the Scenes at Digital Pictures

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