GAME CLEAR No. 50 -- Ground Zero Texas: Nuclear Edition

Ground Zero Texas: Nuclear Edition (2021, Multiplatform)

Nuclear Edition of: Ground Zero Texas (1993, SEGA CD)
Original Developer: Digital Pictures
Original Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
Nuclear Edition Developer: Screaming Villains
Nuclear Edition Publisher: Screaming Villans (Digital) Limited Run Games (Physical)
Clear Date: 9/7/2021
Clear Platform: PlayStation 5 via Backwards Compatibility

At the beginning of the year, I raved about Screaming Villains’ wonderful re-release of Night Trap with their 25th Anniversary Edition, so when I saw that they were doing Ground Zero Texas, another Digital Pictures FMV game from that era, I jumped at the opportunity to buy it. I went with the physical copy from Limited Run Games, though, so my copy only recently arrived.

I’ll start by saying that while Ground Zero Texas: Nuclear Edition is a step down from Night Trap 25th Anniversary Edition, it still gets a number of things right and is a well-executed remake overall. It’s just that its source material wasn’t that good to begin with.

The basic premise of the game is that people of the fictional Texas border town of El Cadron have begun disappearing. The game starts with some military characters in FMV cutscenes addressing you directly. They say you’re some kind of expert on the matter, and they plop you down basically in a drone control center. From there, you control four “BattleCams,” which are gun-mounted cameras that are positioned around El Cadron. The aliens, either through shapeshifting or body-snatching (it’s not really explained) appear as townspeople. Your job is to take out the aliens without harming humans. A small problem you have is that human weapons are only capable of temporarily stunning the aliens. This is quickly resolved, though, as intelligence comes through that there’s an alien base nearby, so once you breach that, your team equips alien weaponry to the BattleCams, and you’re able to truly take the battle to the aliens. It’s a good thing, too, because if you don’t succeed, the government is prepared to drop a tactical nuke on the town (hence the name Nuclear Edition). Good luck, no pressure!

The game runs I’d guess about 45 minutes from start to finish. A natural consequence of these fully-acted, FMV games is that there was really only so long they could run while remaining affordable to these studios. If memory serves, Night Trap only had about a 23 minute runtime in a succesful playthrough. I don’t really have a problem with that.

What I do begrudge is that this is just a good bit less fun than Night Trap. The gameplay consists almost entirely of stationary shooting galleries in El Cadron (and very briefly two other locales). You switch between your different BattleCams and drag your reticle around the screen to shoot bad guys. The silly cowboy town setting works okay, and the exaggerated backwards jumps the enemies perform when you shoot them are amusing, but it still gets old very fast. The BattleCams have ample health on normal difficulty, and I did not have trouble staying on top of things. Once you kill enough guys, the story basically advances on its own. There are a couple moments where the player has to save a team member from the clutches of an alien with a quick shot, but for the most part, the cutscenes are non-interactive.

Surprisingly, I think that’s fundamentally why Ground Zero Texas is less fun and less charming than Night Trap. In the latter, the game revolves around saving a group of high school kids from a vampire family that has invited them to their vacation home. The house is rigged with numerous traps (used by the family themselves to capture victims) that the player character has gained access to. Using these traps, you eventually capture the vampires and their underlings. Hooray! The difference is that instead of having a bunch of story-irrelevant gameplay sequences interspersed between non-interactable plot moments, Night Trap plays out largely as a short, campy horror film during which the plot is almost always advancing and the player is frequently bailing out the good guys and capturing bad guys. It’s a much better way to do it, and it’s a shame Ground Zero Texas couldn’t manage it.

I certainly won’t blame Screaming Villains for the issues of the original gameplay of Ground Zero Texas. They did a fine job bringing this old game to modern platforms with the best visuals it has ever had and perfectly replicating its gameplay. I could nitpick about how I might’ve liked gyro controls or how it would’ve been nice to have live feeds of all cameras at once instead of just the currently selected one (a feature Night Trap 25th Annivesary Edition added), but I don’t think either would’ve done much to enhance what is just a dull game to begin with.

However, I will say I’m at least slightly disappointed with the extras included with the game, at least compared to the excellent offerings of Night Trap 25th Anniversary Edition.

But I’m conflicted there as well.

Ground Zero Texas: Nuclear Edition does a hell of a lot of things right! It includes deleted scenes, behind the scenes footage, and even high resolution scans of original scripts and development documents. That’s extremely cool! Many, many video game re-releases don’t go nearly that far. On the other hand, Night Trap included all of the above in addition to interviews, retrospectives, a playable prototype of Scene of the Crime (the original idea that would eventually become Night Trap), and an additional survival mode. It’s an even fuller package! I guess the point I’m trying to make here is that the bar for video game re-releases is insanely low. Screaming Villains cleared it easily with both of the aforementioned games! But with the absolute wealth of bonus content in Night Trap, this game just felt a little bare. It’s entirely possible they just had less to work with, and I’m very glad they preserved and included what they did.

Overall, Ground Zero Texas: Nuclear Edition is probably the best possible re-release of the original game that could be hoped for. It captures a brief particular moment and fad of video game history very well, even though some may argue there was little real reason to revisit said fad. To hell with them, I enjoyed it.

I look forward to giving Screaming Villains’ re-releases of Corpse Killer and Double Switch a look as well. I doubt either will charm me into truly enjoying them like Night Trap did, but I’m sure they’ve done a great job of bringing them to today’s audiences, and I feel somewhat obligated to support that endeavor. I didn’t really like Ground Zero Texas, but I’m still glad it exists in its new format. Maybe Double Switch or Corpse Killer will surprise me.