#zero divide

Zero Divide

It wasn't quite a release title, but it was early enough that plenty of us got it with our PSX when we were able to get one a little later, and while it was certainly no Virtua Fighter, it was a fun beat 'em up that made the most of the PSX's fancy new 3D graphics in creative ways with lots of weird character designs and stages. I remember it fondly!

The game had eight characters initially, but there were several more secret characters that you could unlock via gameplay, e.g., the game's penultimate boss character, Zulu, who was unlocked by beating the game with all eight of the other characters, and then the game's final boss, XTAL, who was unlocked by beating the game with all eight base characters and Zulu, without using a continue, and then NECO, who was unlocked by beating the game with XTAL, and so on. Those came for free. You got the extra characters for free, as a reward for playing the game.

This fucking thing came with a whole other game in it, also. You could play a shooter called Phalanx by holding down some buttons while the game was loading, and view a secret comic strip by inputting a code on the title screen once you'd beaten it on Easy mode without using any continues. And there was more, even! It wasn't a given that players would have an internet connection back then so whatever was in the game at launch was all it was ever going to get unless a sequel came out, so not only did this mean that they were often loaded with rewards and secrets, it meant they were fucking finished when they were released and would be rightfully panned if they were discovered to be even a little buggy. The expectation was that you would buy a game and be able to play it and probably keep discovering things in it for years.

Never forget what they fucking took from us. It could be this way again if corporations and CEOs weren't so fucking greedy and so desperate to strip out anything of value from a game in order to resell it to players separately.