Yay!

So we just spent two great hours playtesting Infected for the PSP. It’s a third-person action shooter from Planet Moon Studios (creators of Giants: Citizen Kabuto.) And it rocks!

First the setup. You may or may not know that I am an active member of a group of PSP owners in NYC (NYCPSP.) A couple of weeks ago, one of our members advertised our group on a PSP site, and our Organizer got a call from Majesco (publishers of Infected) inviting us to come out to their offices in NYC to get a sneak peek at the game.

Of course we were happy to.

So earlier this evening, we show up at their offices. We get escorted to a conference room. Sitting on the table are 8 PSP dev kits. Nachos, chips and sodas nestle in the corner for the grabbing. A few boxed Xbox dev kits are stacked in the other corner. A producer from Majesco is there. So is a guy with a videocamera. Yummy.

First a bit about the PSP dev kits. These things are pretty cool. The main unit is a mini-tower PC enclosure, about the size of the old-school PS2, standing on its end. It’s got a standard DVD drive, a UMD drive, a Memory Stick slot and a wireless antenna. Connected to it is the “Controller.” The Controller is, for all intents and purposes a PSP, except it has no UMD slot, no Memory Stick slot, no wireless LAN and no battery (it gets all those from the base station.) Pretty neat.

Anyway, back to the game. We settle in to play. The producer gives us the setup. We’re to play some deathmatch. The premise of the game is that New York City is teeming with zombies who’ve all been infected with some sort of virus, which renders them invulnerable to everything except your blood. To survive, you have to weaken the zombies with conventional weapons, then shoot darts full of your blood at them to make them explode. Multiplayer (up to 8 players via adhoc wi-fi) is the same but you’re fighting other players (duh.) The twist is, if you win a Multiplayer match, your character “infects” the other PSPs, resulting in them seeing you throughout their single-player game. To rid yourself of the infection, you have to beat at least three other players.

So the producer hosts a deathmatch game, and we all join. It takes about 30 seconds to learn the controls, but after that, hoo boy is this game fun! The analog stick lets you move forward and backward, and turn left and right. X shoots your conventional weapon, Square shoots your viral weapon (blood darts), Circle gives you a speed burst. The R button locks on to a target, allowing you to circle-strafe, and the L button performs a quick 180 degree turn. Conventional weapon selection is done using the up and down buttons on the crosspad. There is no jumping or looking up and down in this game; everything happens on a single horizontal plane.

The graphics in this game are average for the PSP.  It looks very much like a somewhat souped-up PSOne game, and the framerate is choppy, but that’s to be expected from an alpha build. It does have some great effects though. Blood spatters appear on screen, as if they were splashing across the camera lens. Explosions are satisfying and rockets leave an nice-looking trail of fire behind them.

But it’s the gameplay that makes this game fun. There are lots of great touches. Blow up a group of enemies, then use a single dart to take them all out. Fight zombie santas, mad cows (there’s even a multiplayer mode called “Mad Cow"… more on that in a bit) and I swear K even saw Homer Simpson in there. Fight with pistols, rocket-launchers, chainsaws and a few other things. There’s lots of mayhem and chaos in this game. It’s awesome for parties.

But, we were playing a pre-alpha build of the game, and it showed. Glitches and crashes abound. There were several places where you could fall through the world. Picking up powerups as needlessly difficult, needing pinpoint accuracy. Framerates were choppy at best. At some points, whole streets would disappear, only to pop into view a couple of seconds later. Organizing a multiplayerr game using one of the other game modes (in addition to Deathmatch, there’s TDM, a mode called “savior” that we saw and the aforementioned Mad Cow) was an exercise in futility - someone would always freeze a few seconds in. Or everyone would go invisible. Or, horror of horrors, a Blue Screen of Death would appear!

Yes, folks, PSP dev kits show BSODs.

We did, however, manage to get a semi-complete game of Mad Cow in. The game is basically a variation of Tag. You race to grab the Cow in the level. Whoever gets it first becomes the Mad Cow, and everyone must kill him. When the Mad Cow dies, he leaves behind the Cow for someone else to pick up. The longer you are the Mad Cow, the higher you place in the rankings.

As we played, the video guy was getting our reactions and we smiled, waved and trashtalked into the camera. None of it was fake; we were all having an absolute blast. There were more people than there were dev kits, so some of us rotated out for some matches.

Yours truly managed to win a deathmatch, infecting all the other PSPs.

Criticisms of the game were few and far between, for my part. I think the HUD needs to be reworked a little - right now it has the viral weapon ammo count at the bottom left, and the conventional weapon ammo count on the bottom right, with a minimap at the tot right corner surrounded by your health and run meters. I think the health meter is too small and hard to spot in a firefight. I also think lifespans are a little short. If someone gets a bead on you there’s pretty much nothing you can do to prevent getting killed; getting the drop on someone else is the difference between winning and losing. There is no cover (though there will be in the final game) and the characters run too slowly to get around a corner and out of range in time. This problem s exacerbated by the fact that the auto-aim is way too liberal (and this is without using the lock-on.) If your targeting reticule is anywhere near an enemy’s bounding box, you will score a hit, no matter how far away that enemy is. That will need to be tweaked for final release.

Even with all the problems and glitches, the base gameplay is so good that I’m calling it right now: Infected is the best PSP action game yet. It’s so much fun, and if you own a PSP, you owe it to yourself to put this one on your pre-order list.

And we got cool Infected Beta-tester T-shirts, we’re going to be invited back next month to test a Beta build and our names are going to be in the credits (in the Special Thanks section.)

I know I’m getting this game the second it’s in stores.

All in all, not a bad evening.