Z (E) ISO

Sega Saturn ISOs

Rating: 4.9/5

Z is a real-time strategy game much in the vein of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 (except, of course, its about gun-toting Texan robots in a red vs blue war). In fact, before playing this game, I did not know that particular design of an RTS game went so far back. You start each (1 of 20) levels with your fort, some units, and probably some territory & factories that are producing units that you are likely to IMMEDIATELY go and change what they are producing since by default they produce basic/weak units. Rather than lay out the RTS genre as a whole for you, I will say it simply that in Z you do not harvest resources or build bases. Rather, you capture territory which may or may not have a vehicle or robot factory associated with it. The more territory you have, the faster your factories make units. Levels introduce progressively more and more variants of units, though you're generally going to see 'traditional' modern military unit flavors only. Played properly, each level will be done in less than 30 minutes since you are rewarded heavily for being offensive and taking territory quickly. If you do not properly manage your territory very quickly, you can irreversibly lose as soon as the enemy benefits from the increased factory speed of territory for.. basically any time at all, because it takes so long for units to move around the map. Units are also organized into "squads" wherein selecting one unit will select and command many units. You can band-box multiple similar units together to make a bigger squad, but as far as I know, you can't split squads. That isn't really an issue, since the game takes care of production for you. Factories make whatever unit you have told them to make ad infinitum. Something else that may be of interest to you in this game is that vehicle's crew can be killed and the vehicle captured (happens very frequently and very often in the enemies favor), so be sure to keep infantry near vehicles or else the enemy will capture them. The game's terrain is also destructible, so if you see infantry randomly throwing grenades, it's probably because they have grenades and decided that blowing up that wall is faster than walking around it. Tanks will also shoot out walls if there's no road path to where they have been told to go. The AI prefers pathing over roads, TO A FAULT. Sometimes micromanagement can really help get infantry to their destination quickly. You can also read the roads as the path the enemy AI will send vehicles in particular. If there is a road somewhere, the AI is going to send units down that road at some point, so watch out. All things considered, this is a surprisingly advanced RTS game for its time. It plays decently on the Saturn, and in my opinion the game has a lot of charm that makes it worth playing. The Saturn version does suffer from incredibly long load times and a password system (rather than a save system). Another note: Though this is a PAL game, burning it to a CD and playing it on a real Saturn via Pseudo Saturn works fine.