Sometimes I’ll admit to a bit of schadenfreude here at the ZRC, when an Anti-Zombie project crashes and burns spectacularly:

A car combat and zombie game developed by Wellington firm Sidhe has failed to reach New Zealand stores after its publisher decided it would not be popular enough in Australia.

Sidhe developed Blood Drive, for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, for major United States publisher Activision last year. It had 50 staff working on the project at its peak.

Activision had announced the game would be distributed worldwide, but public relations manager Natasha Brack said it decided Blood Drive would not attract enough consumer support in Australia to justify a release, making a New Zealand release “difficult”.

Publishers typically release games in both countries, or not at all.

….

Sales so far had been lacklustre, but he was yet to see figures from the Christmas period, which is traditionally a good time for game sales.

“It didn’t get much of a marketing push, which was obviously a little disappointing for us. Without a marketing push, it’s really hard for an original game to get traction.”

Activision usually published licensed titles, which did not need as much marketing.

“We’ve given them our thoughts about the process and they’ll assess whether their marketing was sufficient or not.”

Hmm, yes, marketing was the issue, and not, say, the game’s hilariously incomplete status when sold to customers:

Yes. The sole purpose of Blood Drive is to smash zombies. Unfortunately, that’s all it does and it doesn’t even do that very well.

Wait, a bland zombie game? How did anyone whiff in the game genre equivalent of the tee-ball league? To be fair, Blood Drive provides the occasional glimpse of what could have been. But as it stands, the game is incomplete — mind-numbingly incomplete. It’s as if a gentle, loving hand crafted the game halfway, then the art teacher walked by, snatched it up and said, “Sorry students, we’re all out of time.”

…

Does [VIDEO GAME] have a save option?

No.

The only way to save in Blood Drive is the auto-save, which initiates only after completing a cup. Not so bad for the first cup. It’s 4 events long. About 4 minutes per event, that’s 16 minutes of gameplay plus load times to the nearest save point.

But the final three cups comprise 14 events, 14 events and a whopping 30 events, respectively. 30 events at 4 minutes per event, you’re looking at 2 hours. Plus load times. If you can stomach it, the bonus Hardcore Cup is another 30 events.

*snicker* Hahahahaha… oh man. That is just.. *amazingly* stupid.

I really shouldn’t do this, but just out of pity if nothing else, here’s an Amazon link to where, for now, you can still buy this aborted half-game:

Tags: Videogames

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.