November Eve 2: Cherry Pie

Set Design

In contrast with Lebensraum's decision to have as much of the board be invisible until players actually enter a room, Tseng sticks to the tried-and-true design of just building a level. This lets players plan their attack route through each screen more efficiently. It also allows Tseng to do more with decorative elements as not everything needs to be plotted during gameplay or meticulously crafted with invisible objects becoming visible. Cherry Pie debuts just after the earliest of early KevEdit releases, one not yet suited for much more than art, making it a gargantuan effort to set up multiple objects which each change to a different character.

The approach is simpler, but ultimately capable of doing more. It makes the trade-off of fewer surprises in exchange for more interesting room designs. Tseng's rooms are certainly different from the monotony of carpets and statues in Nadir's game, but I wouldn't exactly call them well thought out.

There are still plenty of carpets with slightly more detail, an endless number of yen-plants, and a number of rooms that amount to supply closets lit by a torch. Most rooms try to liven things up with some more distinctive furnishings. A few really nail it, turning idling enemies into a form a comedy. On occasion Kim will burst into a room with some guards who were previously chilling on a sofa watching TV. At one point a lone guard is just ogling themselves in a mirror. These cute moments give Tseng the ability to incorporate his signature humor into the gameplay without having to stop and tell players what's so funny in text. It's all told through the room arrangements themselves.

The rest is a bit more what you'd expect from standard ZZT furnishings. Dining rooms with a number of chairs around the table, fireplaces, paintings on the walls, and such. Sometimes things are a bit more dynamic. Kim can shoot and shatter bottles in a wine rack or blow up what come off as massive floor lamps, darkening the room afterwards by getting rid of some yellow fakes that surround them. There's room to for Tseng to play around with these toys, yet seemingly little interest in doing so for long.

This is most apparent in the third level which takes place about a Geriatric (that's the name of the alien species) space ship. It's a setting that offers so many possibilities for these kind of props, and instead most of its rooms are devoid of anything but some purple pillars. A single "heart of the ship" control panel that takes its name quite literally is all that players get to admire. It's a shame, as these interactive environmental components are the defining feature of the game. Without them, the levels themselves come off as rather generic.

Game Canceled. Go Away.

Getting back to Tseng's motivation of making a good game during what he perceives as a drought in quality releases... he doesn't exactly succeed in making a good experience. While the action isn't half bad, Tseng's attention span for the game doesn't last for very long.

After finishing the game's third level, Tseng loses interests and just stops the game. Given his reluctance to be ZZTing at all at this point in his life, I suppose the obvious "To be continued..." wouldn't be much of an improvement. Though at least that would have a proper #endgame. Screens like this are always miserable to run into, just killing the mood of the game outright and saying we're done now.

Just put Joey on the spaceship. Have Steve be there instead of the boss being a Geriatric general. It wouldn't be satisfying, but it would at least show a little respect to the people playing.

The actual moment where Tseng called it quits was a little bit later. The file contains the introduction and first few boards of the planned fourth level. Kim's escape pod lands on the ice planet Leirbag where she cheekily points out that Gem Hunter 3 already had an ice cavern level.

She crash lands in the mountains which luckily for her are not far from where Gem Hunter is currently playing his Hood Ball game, giving her a location to head to, and a chance to inform Gem Hunter that their child has been kidnapped. With no clues as to what would have come next, it's anyone's guess how the game would have proceeded beyond that point. Fighting Steve in a stadium full of people could certainly be something, he's turned audiences into slime before after all.

It's shame the game ends without players getting to see this level. The opening screens feel like a departure from what's come before, with Kim now shooting her way through the great outdoors. No longer does the game need to be filled with cramped corridors that fill up an entire board. Instead, Tseng had the opportunity to let players fight in a location less common in action titles than fortress tower and space ship.

He also shows off a pretty spiffy looking snow effect tucked into a corner. Again, the moments where the game looks considerably less static make for a more memorable scene. I genuinely think this is the best looking board in the game, and it's something players won't get a chance to see without opening the editor.

Where things actually end, make me wonder if the sudden renewed interest in what might be coming next would have lasted. Kim enters the cave, and we get an incomplete room with a return to form. Rectangular rooms always and forever.

There's some hope though, this board is broken up such that players would have to enter and exit it multiple times to reach each room contained within. Then again, the board is called "Ice Maze 1", so I don't think the unique layout was going to do much in terms of fun exploration.

Kim "Commando" Gemson

It wouldn't be an action game without a variety of cannon-fodder enemies to blast your way through. The Da Hoodian games as a whole have pretty much all boiled down to angry men with guns shooting anything that inconveniences them. Beyond the female protagonist here, this is certainly no different. Though Kim's foes are all at least directly working with False Leader and playing a role in the crisis. Gem Hunter is the kind of guy that will threaten to kill a service worker for moving too slowly. Kim's foes are basically what you'd expect of an action game. Weak guys with guns, leading into stronger guys with guns.

Guard - The name says it all. They exist to move and shoot randomly until they die. Ironically, because of their movement being completely random, they are a tremendous pain to actually hit. Early on, when ammo is more of a concern, you can waste far too much of it on just one of these guys.

Special Forces Guard - Takes the opposite approach, only moving towards Kim and only shooting at her when aligned with her. If you don't stun-lock them, they can be deadly.

Monster - No idea what they're meant to look like. They also rush the player down, although they bite rather than shoot. I feel like in any other game of this era these enemies would have been dogs, so props to Tseng for realizing that people don't want to shoot dogs earlier than most game developers.

- A sort of mini-boss that only appears once. They show up on a return trip through a series of rooms, opening doors as they advance to where Kim is. A cool half-baked idea, as they just move like a guard, shoot like special forces, and have a knife for a melee attack. The marine also shares a character with how Kim is traditionally portrayed in story sequences. I'm surprised he went with cyan.

Geriatric - These guys have come up in name in Gem Hunter games, and a cut-scene in the third. Intended to be some of the most dangerous species in the known universe, Kim finally gets to be the one to fight them. This variety is particularly bitey, backing off for a moment before rushing at Kim.

Geriatric - What if you gave a Geriatric a gun? Well, they'd act like the marine without any melee attack. Let me point out that the Geriatrics are depicted in an art board where they look like giant pi symbols. Why they don't use the pi character, I cannot fathom.

Bear - Hmmm, this seems like a step downward in terms of threats. First they run at you. Then they bite you. Not actually seen unless you edit your way to the incomplete fourth level. They're also probably not working for False Leader.

The basic enemies all have one thing in common: They take a huge number of shots. Kim's pistol is one of the weakest I've ever seen in ZZT, and given the challenge of aiming at foes at medium/long range, players can expect to chew through their ammo quickly. Five shots to kill an enemy would normally be enough to earn the label "beefy", but here that's where enemy health begins. This is especially problematic in the first level where Kim's starting ammo of fifty turns out to not be nearly as much as you might think.

Combine with enemies only shooting at the player when aligned to minimize friendly fire and it can take a surprising amount of time to clear a room.

Each level is capped off with a boss fight, giving every level something to culminate with. These are a mixed bag for sure.

Tseng has had some really impressive boss designs across his games, especially in Gem Hunter 2 where pretty much every boss has a unique gimmick instead of relying on overused run-and-gun fights. November Eve had its RPG engine which shoehorned a PlayStation game's combat system into ZZT. It worked well for what it was, though many of those fights had safe spots Kim could stand in or attacks that were just unavoidable entirely. Something experimental, and maybe not as successful as Tseng may have liked, but certainly appreciated for trying to capture the mechanics of a modern RPG in ZZT.

Cherry Pie is unfortunately nothing but run-and-gun. It's not as bad as it could be, as the arenas Kim does her fighting in allow her to take advantage of the layout to better kite her opponent. Whether that's satisfying or not is left to the reader. If I didn't have such a strong association with Tseng and memorable boss fights, I'd probably have responded a little more warmly to them. Instead, they're overall disappointing.

The first boss, Blackwell, played the role of the cop that hated guns in Parasite Eve from its ZZT parody and was eventually killed. Kim doesn't believe that's she's actually fighting Blackwell, and the fact that I had to go back to look up who this guy was leads me to wonder if Tseng was going for anything here, or just grabbing a name and making him evil now. Is this Blackwell back from the dead on the anniversary of the night we all betrayed him? Is this an impostor? I have no idea, and Kim doesn't seem interested in finding out.

Tseng doesn't want to try with him. Or more accurately, doesn't want to #try with him. He moves, he shoots, he loops. Due to the use of #go instead of #try in the code, Blackwell can pretty easily be lured to a corner of one of the roughly-circular pillars and get stuck until Kim moves in such a way that his attempt to get closer to her will move him in a different direction. You can get away with dancing back and forth by these corners, luring him out to be shot, and then ducking back in so he returns to the corner.

Pretty rough by Tseng's standards, and barely passable in general.

The second stage fares somewhat better with Kim having to go up against Sephy Lee Roth, a dude with a big sword. Though known for his skills in melee combat, the fight is closer to that of Vulcan Raven from Metal Gear Solid. Kim enters a room of intersecting hallways while Sephy moves from intersection to intersection shooting quickly and running off elsewhere.

If you're getting deja vu, that's because Tseng already did this fight in Gem Hunter 3 with CraNKGod. Here, the battlefield is smaller and the walkable space made as narrow as possible.

Again, players can cheese the boss by getting them into a corner and positioning themselves opposite of the walls that fill the arena as depicted above. Doing this, Sephy can only hope to move in two possible directions and players can shoot where they know Sephy is headed, effectively getting him pinned in the corner. It feels fun to shut down a boss like this rather than the usual way in ZZT of just firing an insurmountable number of bullets. Though if you were hoping for a challenge, you won't find it here either.

The third level brings in the most difficult boss of all. A brand new character by the name of Reiko. Reiko is the general in charge of the Geriatric ship Kim finds herself imprisoned on, and is nothing more than a generic villain with no real bearing on the game's story.

He is by far the deadliest opponent in the game, fitting for what ends up being the last fight. Part of this stems from his much more bullet heavy loop that makes repeating the tactic that worked well for Blackwell a lot harder to properly time. Pinning him against an escape pod corner is easier said than done.

His movement commands also include a few instances of moving perpendicular from the player, causing him to frequently juke out of the way of any bullets fired in his direction. This is a real battle of attrition made worse by the real source of his difficulty: my utter lack of health.

In previous levels medi-kits had been fairly rare, just two per stage. Given their potency, that's enough to get by reasonably. However, the precedent didn't last. Entering the final complete level with only thirty-something odd health had me anxious to find some healing only for it to never arrive. That's right, there is not a single source of healing in the game's final playable stage.

By the time I reached this last boss, I was unable to take any damage whatsoever. To Tseng's credit, I did eventually make it through the fight unscathed. There are moments where it is possible to land an attack, it just requires a lot of patience and a lot of bullets, both to play the odds of Reiko walking into them and also the sheer number of hits required to bring him down. (Fourteen!)

Errors Errors Errors

And of course, despite promising to show everyone what a good ZZT game is, Tseng manages to include a number of bugs to contend with.

These sort of action games where players fight exclusively object-derived enemies means having to try touching them to see whether players (or enemies) have a melee attack. In this game, you don't. Yet, you may still want to act as if you did with the special forces guards. A coding error in them causes some of them to try to jump to the incorrect label for their combat loop :attack versus :alerted. This causes an error and freezes the enemy in place until being shot wakes them up again. It seems Tseng noticed this bug at some point as not every special forces guard causes an error.

...That doesn't mean the code was fixed.

Yes, instead of updating the label to the correct one, Tseng instead just removed the line entirely, which prevents an error, sure, but still causes the enemy to come to a complete stop when touched.

The game shares a bug with Lebensraum, that you can expect to run the risk of in any ZZT game where enemies try to go through doors where a closing door gets blocked by an enemy, leading to a stalemate where neither object can move. This one doesn't have an easy fix, short of changing doors from swinging to sliding, or making them destructible so players can "fix" it themselves.

Then, the third level is where the trouble goes from helping players out to preventing progress without cheating. In order to access the escape pods, Kim needs to collect three keycards held by specific enemies. There's no indication as to which enemies you're after, though these enemies can be identified in death as they don't turn into a bloody red fake when killed. To acquire a keycard, players need to touch the corpse to search it. Normally, this should work fine, however...

The final shot label itself never gets zapped. If you happen to have additional bullets beyond the one that deals the killing blow, they'll hit and the :touch label will be zapped again, preventing players from being able to grab the key. Not only does the significant health enemies have encourage players to fire in bursts that will trigger the bug, but by the time players are fighting the Geriatrics, they've probably seen their share of foes that suddenly stop moving. When an enemy doesn't turn into a red fake, players believe the fight isn't over yet, so even if you do get one with just a single bullet, it's not unbelievable to then shoot again.

This also leads to a less important issue where you can get extra points by shooting at these enemies causing the status screen the end of the level to show more kills than enemies were in the level. Though this is tough to even notice since Tseng manages to get the enemy totals wrong in all but the first stage anyway.

Yet as always, Tseng's popularity within the community meant there's no shortage of credited testers here. Four names show up in the credits, all of whom would have been quite capable of of identifying these problems which have trivial fixes. I know QA can be rough, but these aren't anything obscure. At the very least, I cannot imagine the Geriatric bug having gone undetected by every one.

At least when a game has no listed testers, there's hubris to explain these bugs. Honestly, if you told me this was the beta and he didn't feel like fixing anything or somebody else uploaded it later.

Oh hey. Interactive Fantasies did a feature on Tseng and the game. It's still just there on the old IF page. Yep. Right at the top, unfinished game that got released anyway. Planned to be maybe five levels... the monsters are Xamboxumbadria mutants which connects to the previous game. Hey, he even specifies wanting his game to look nicer then Lebensraum which can't happen with hidden rooms. I feel so vindicated.

Sorry to the unnamed testers. I bet you signed up to test when it was finished and never got a copy prior to Tseng publishing it.

Final Thoughts

November Eve 2 ends up not being a bad game. It's a reasonable, if somewhat difficult ZZT action game at its core, which works well enough. The trouble is that whenever Tseng does something of note to make the game stand out a little more, he does it once and then never speaks of it again. Between enemies rushing in, more enemies appearing in a cleared area, and a melee-only sequence, any one of these could become a key characteristic of a ZZT action game for the ages.

Yet every time something wows the player once, it's no longer in the cards. On paper, a list of the game's features would lead you to believe this is an impressive entry in one of ZZT's more crowded genres. Yet upon playing it, all of that stuff amounts to little more than something to make the game more marketable. If the game's novelties were features rather than one-off gimmicks, then Tseng could have set a new standard here.

There's obvious potential here. Tseng just won't ever capitalize on it. Rather than this game being a solid foundation for a ZZTer fresh on the scene, this is a post-exit release from somebody who has already shown us better, multiple times. Tseng even admits as such in the game's documentation: "Under no circumstance would this game ever be better than either NE or GH3, but here you go, anyway." It's one of those games that's annoyingly close to being really worthwhile, had it gotten the full attention and care it deserved. It didn't though, and so we're left with a half-finished game that relies more on Tseng's other work to get a passing grade.

Fans of ZZT action games have plenty to choose from, and this one still has some place on the list of action games worth playing, but it really helps to know going in that this is not a complete game, and so any time spent getting invested in it just won't last. If you're a Tseng-fan, this is yet another component in the machinations of Da Hood, albeit one that shows Tseng's time in said universe is up, and for good reason. This is the final game that takes place in Da Hood and stars Tseng's ZZTing career long cast. It's a shame it had to go out like this.