Zero Time Dilemma is the third game in the Zero Escape series, which includes 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward. Strictly speaking, you don’t have to have played them to jump into ZTD, but you’ll have a far better experience if you do. Zero Time Dilemma makes ample references to its predecessors, Virtue’s Last Reward in particular, and events from both games play a part in ZTD’s overall narrative. They’ll also help you immediately comprehend ZTD’s highly unusual game structure, which hops between visual novel info dumps and multilayered puzzles with little consideration for linearity. You’ll find yourself switching between three teams of characters experiencing different events at the same points in the time stream throughout different histories…it makes sense in context, I promise, but it certainly helps to have gone through it before.

Masked villain Zero (a new one) is tormenting a fresh allotment of nine victims, locking them in different wings of a bomb shelter 50 meters underground. There’s only one door out, and it will only open after at least six people have died. So, everyone can sit around and get to know each other really well over the next several decades, or they can betray each other, commit a bunch of murders and see daylight again. You do have to make choices in Zero Time Dilemma, but you’re also encouraged to explore each and every option. In fact, sometimes you have to go down routes you’d otherwise avoid in order to unlock new rooms to explore. You can be trustworthy or devious, kind or vicious, safe in the knowledge that the game isn’t judging you or expecting you to behave a certain way. These are paths meant to be travelled, so go ahead and hack up that girl with an axe. It’s all good. 

Deaths will absolutely happen and they are brutal, by the way, including being trapped under showers of hydrofluoric acid, gutted with a chainsaw, and several different varieties of gunshot. That said, Zero Time Dilemma is not a gory game at all. Deaths typically happen off screen, and the violence that is visible is cartoonish. There’s some horrifying stuff going on in that bunker, but most of it is left up to your imagination.

The puzzles of Zero Time Dilemma are marvelous, requiring lateral thinking but never demanding outside research. Everything you need is right there in front of you, so long as you know how to use it. There are a few old chestnuts like tile flipping and block sliding, but by and large the challenges make clever use of their locations, like a biolab, trash incinerator, and locker room. The one drawback is that you can’t jump between puzzles if you’re stuck; you must finish the story fragment that you’re currently in before you can begin a new one, so if you’re stumped, you have to abandon it and start from scratch later or tough it out. The game makes it as easy as possible to hop around, though, letting you fast forward through cinematics even if you haven’t seen them yet and allowing you to select any available game fragment individually. If you just want to jump back to a decision point to choose “yes” instead of “no” and see what happens, you can, without having to re-do everything that led up to it.

Zero Time Dilemma’s story is very convoluted and a bit repetitious (you hear about a snail a LOT), but the game’s biggest downfall are its visuals, which are blocky and poorly animated. It’s painful to watch how much the lips don’t synch with the speech that’s coming out, and the gouts of blood that erupt from an injury more serious than a stubbed toe were apparently designed by a toddler with a red crayon. The long hair on the girls flaps around like it’s a living thing, and everyone has apparently had way too much caffeine based on how much their eyeballs twitch. It’s not an ugly game at all, but it’s super awkward.

But does it really matter that the graphics are a bit naff when there’s a guy in a plague doctor mask running around drugging people because of the butterfly effect? It does not. Zero Time Dilemma is for Professor Layton fans who watch Hannibal, those who don’t mind wondering how a head ended up in the freezer. If you’ve already bought into the Zero Escape series’ charming kind of malice, there’s simply no question that you’ll enjoy this, too. If you find yourself curious about rescuing people from certain doom by solving puzzles, I strongly encourage you to at least start with Virtue’s Last Reward, and preferably go back to 999 and enjoy the entire blood-soaked journey.

The Verdict

4

4 out of 5

Zero Time Dilemma review

Professor Layton for people who watch Hannibal.

The post Zero Time Dilemma review appeared first on Game News.

Above: How does Vita stack up against the 3DS, iPhone and PSP? Let’s break it down by specific features

Rather than inundate you with a catalog of message-board-flame-war-ready numbers and stats, we decided to break down some of the Vita’s key hardware specifications and look at how they impact the average player’s use of the machine, as well as compare them to the primary existing handheld competition.

The display

Vita has: Five-inch OLED screen – 960×544 pixels (qHD) @ 220 ppi

The Vita’s big, bright touchscreen offers crisp, colorful visuals that are a far sight better than Sony’s earlier PSP. At 960×544 pixels, the Vita display is considered a qHD, or “quarter HD” screen, since its screen has one-quarter the pixels of a full 1080p display at a 16:9 aspect ratio. The “ppi” spec refers to “pixels per inch,” which has become a popular way to describe how crisp a screen looks in the wake of Apple’s iPhone 4 and 4S Retina displays putting up a remarkable 326 ppi. More pixels per inch means less pixelization or fuzziness, and more cleanly rendered text and visuals.

Comparatively, the Vita display weighs in at just 220 ppi (though we’ve seen some Android displays with higher ppi stats put up slightly more pixelated-looking text and images than what we’ve witnessed thus far on the Vita). Either way, the Vita is still notably sharper than the last-gen PSP, the standard model of which boasted a 4.3-inch display running at 480×272 for a ppi of 128, while the smaller PSPgo screen, at the same resolution, squeezed 145 ppi into a 3.8-inch display.

Above: To compare those resolutions directly, here’s a screen from Lumines: Electronic Symphony for Vita at top (scaled down from 960px to 620px to fit our column width), with a screen from the PSP Lumines at bottom (scaled from 480 px to 310 px to maintain size ratio)

Directly comparing the Vita and Nintendo 3DS screens is a trickier proposition. The 3.53-inch top screen of the Nintendo 3DS runs at 800×240 for a listed ppi of 237, purportedly topping the Vita in 2D. However, with the 3D effect, the screen splits that resolution between each eye, effectively becoming a 400×240 image (132 ppi) for each. Meanwhile, the lower screen runs at a rather paltry 320×240 pixels across 3.02 inches, for a 2D ppi of 132 that matches the top screen’s 3D number. But we don’t have to tell 3DS owners that the bottom screen is a fuzzy, dated little thing.

Graphics/processor

Vita has: Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor w/ quad-core SGX543MP4+ GPU; 512MB RAM with 128MB VRAM

Above: Uncharted: Golden Abyss is one of the Vita’s more visually impressive launch titles

The PlayStation Vita pumps out the most impressive visuals we’ve seen to date on a handheld, with characters, environments, and effects that nearly approach the levels of early PlayStation 3 titles – and it’s sure to improve over the coming years. The handheld’s quad-core processor reportedly runs at upwards of 1.5Ghz, compared to the 1Ghz dual-core A5 processor seen in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2. Similarly, the Vita, iPhone 4S and iPad 2 all utilize similar PowerVR GPUs (graphics processing units), though the Vita’s is a quad-core, while Apple’s devices run dual-cores.

Above: Meanwhile, Infinity Blade II is generally seen as the high-water mark for iOS visuals

Additional processing cores and a higher overall processing speed mean much more processing muscle to handle detailed visuals at higher frame rates. Both the iPhone 4S and Vita have 512MB of core system RAM, while the Vita adds an extra 128MB of VRAM specifically for the graphics. In total, the Vita has more total RAM available than the PlayStation 3, which offers 256MB each for both general RAM and VRAM. The additional RAM helps explain why the Vita offers cross-game chat, while the feature remains MIA on PS3.

Lining up official specs for the 3DS proved mostly fruitless, as Nintendo’s handheld uses a proprietary processor along with a single-core PICA200 GPU, plus 128MB of system RAM. Meanwhile, the PSP utilizes a pair of 333 Mhz processors along with a 166Mhz GPU, which utilizes just 2MB of VRAM alongside a paltry 32MB of system RAM and an extra 4MB of dynamic RAM.

Next page: Controls, battery, storage and more

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The post How do the PS Vitas specs stack up against the competition? appeared first on Game News.