Countdown Vampires

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Countdown Vampires
How to not develop a Resident Evil clone.
Protagonist(s): Keith J. Snyder Genre(s): Survival horror Rating(s): ESRB: M Platform(s): PlayStation Release Date: JP: December 22, 1999 NA: July 2000 Developer(s): K2 LLC Publisher(s): Bandai Country: Japan

""Yeah, that's it. That's the best ending you can get. There's absolutely zero reason to play this game. It came out almost a full fuckin' year after Resident Evil 3, and two months before the PlayStation 2! If you thought this was an early-release PlayStation game, I don't blame you! But, no! This came out in the year 2000! This was like a fart coming out of the decayed corpse colon of the original PlayStation! Looks like if ass could make a video game! One more thing I wanna mention: there's a second story mode you can unlock if you beat the game in under 8 hours. Unfortunately, I was too slow, and wasted 9 hours and 37 minutes on this festering fuck-heap. And, the last thing I wanna do on this Halloween is spend another 8 hours playing Countdown Vampires! I'd rather get jerked off by a jellyfish while I eat a platypus's asshole! I mean, actually eat the negative space of its anus! So, fuck this game! Die, monster! You don't belong in this world!""

— Angry Video Game Nerd

Countdown Vampires is a survival horror game developed by K2 LLC and published by Bandai for the PlayStation on December 22, 1999 in Japan and July 2000 in North America.

Gameplay

The gameplay is pretty similar to the first Resident Evil games, as it uses the same controls and the same use of fixed camera angles to navigate through the levels. The only difference is that here you must shoot the vampires with your anesthetic gun and sprinkle them with white water to "restore their humanity".

Plot

Keith J. Snyder is a policeman who was deemed for the murder of his partner Wesley Simmons, and as a disciplinary measure, he is assigned to provide security for a new horror-themed casino. Soon enough, the sprinklers engage, spewing black water on the party guests and turning them into vampires. From here, your quest is to investigate and discover the origins of the mysterious black water.

Why It's A Vampire (In A Bad Way)

1. Ridiculous plot which makes no sense. Keith Snyder was accused of murdering his partner, and instead of going to jail, he is assigned to be a bodyguard for protecting assorted VIPs at the opening of a horror-themed casino.
   • Besides that, the feeling of a story progression is barely felt because the game doesn't explain the plot at all. Some of the background stories are explained as you read some documents that you can find while playing, but the premise is still difficult to understand and many things are unexplained.
   • To make things worse, you have to play through the game at least twice to get the full story, because only a portion of the plot is revealed in the initial playthrough and the rest is locked up in a special “story mode” that you can unlock if you beat the game on normal in less than 8 hours, and the ending of this special mode is not even worth it, take a look by yourself.
2. The graphics are not very good; the models look like someone poorly did cel-shading and look blocky; their animations look like they were made out of wood, and the textures look muddy. Games like Mortal Kombat 4 (which was originally released for the Arcades but got a PS1 port), Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout, Mega Man Legends or the N64 port of Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue look much better than this.
3. The entire gameplay is a rip-off of the original Resident Evil games, as it uses the same tank controls and fixed camera angles. This gets worse when you notice that many games at the time were compatible with the DualShock controllers, even the original Resident Evil 2 has compatibility with this controller, something that this game doesn't have.
   • It's worth mentioning that the game also rips off the well-known countdown sections of Resident Evil, but here they appear in the beginning, in the middle, and a puzzle with two of them.
4. If you manage to get killed in the game, the game over screen will only show your corpse and the classic "game over" phrase without any kind of sound or music, thus giving the feeling that it wasn't finished.
5. Confusing and frustrating level design. Most of the time a room can have several exits and makes the task of going to the next room a chore, and since the camera angles change from room to room, you can get lost pretty easily. Also, some parts don't make any sense, there is a part in a corridor where you need to go down a ladder just to walk a few meters and climb up another ladder, and not only that, many parts of the game require a lot of backtracking just to find a single item that wasn't there before.
6. Lots of typos and grammar errors, mainly because the game was developed by a Japanese developer, but even games like Sonic '06 do not have many typos or grammar errors. Examples include, but are not limited to:
   • I have erred in my interpretation - I haved erred in my interpretation.
   • Thanks again, with much gratitude - Thank again. With much gratitude.
   • Randy Jones - Rany Jones
   • Some words are missing spaces, like mystical strength as mysticalstrength or be pouring as bepouring
   • Stun glove - Stun globe
   • "There's an elevator, but it doesn't turn on the power." - "There's an elevator, but it doesn't to turn on the power."
7. The game takes three memory cards to play, which can be a problem if you don't have that many. Pretty much if you have only one memory card instead of three, then the game will be unplayable.
8. Repetitive missions; you pretty much have to run somewhere, get a key, run back to a place you came from, use the key, and get another one that opens a different door back where you came from, rinse, and repeat. Even performing infinite combos that deal no damage in fighting games is more fun than this.
9. God-awful voice acting that makes the dub of the first Resident Evil game blush. Keith Snyder's voice sounds like he was 15 years old and it obviously doesn't fit his physical appearance, Misato will often cry like an injured puppy, and the death sound of the vampires resembles more of the laugh of a junkie.
   • Jeff Manning himself is a very talented voice actor, known for voicing characters in anime and various video games, with his most notable voiceover being Red Bomber from Super Bomberman R as well as the announcer and Master Hand from the first Super Smash Bros. game, but the way how he was forced to record his voice lines for Keith is embarassing and sounds as if his talent went for a vacation.
10. The title is very lazy and is very literal since you mostly fight vampires and there are a lot of countdown sequences.
11. Countdown Vampires is a home to arguably some of the worst A.I. ever seen in a survival horror game. Most enemies randomly walk into walls and they sometimes just freeze completely. One of the most notable parts as seen in the Angry Video Game Nerd's review is when two enemies ran into a passage but got stuck, followed by two more getting stuck without even moving forward as if there was an invisible wall in the passage. Because of all this, the A.I. in this game feels more like genuine stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.
12. The box art looks so poor that it seems like an amateur edit you would find on a 2000 website.
13. At the start of the game, you have to type a first name, and the last name and select your blood group, but these options will not affect the gameplay in any way, making them entirely pointless.
14. The opening cutscene introduces a lot of characters that never appear in the game again, besides the main character, only two of them appear in the actual game: a security guard and his waitress. And if this wasn't enough, the security guard is one of the first characters to die.
15. There is no need to shoot the vampires with your dart gun much less spray the white water on them. You can shoot them with your regular weapons and they will still die. Also, the manual of the game says that you can get a bonus for splashing them with the white water, but this is a lie, as the game will not reward you whatsoever.
16. False advertising: The manual says that using white water on the enemies you killed to turn them back to normal can give you a bonus, but in reality, there are no bonuses given if you use white water on them.
    • This pretty much makes white water nearly useless aside from just turning the enemies back to normal.
17. The ending cutscene is extremely poor and is arguably one of the worst in a PS1 game; Keith asks Misato if she means she never heard of Gells, followed by her laughing evilly saying that Gells is the Emperor of Darkness, confusing Keith, before saying that she's kidding and kissing him. That's it.
18. Even in Normal mode, the game is rather easy. Even if you kill every enemy, there are loads and loads of ammo you can find throughout the game, pretty much making you not worry about getting a game over.
    • As mentioned before, the A.I. is terrible and makes the enemies easy to kill and run past.
    • There aren't many differences between the easy and normal difficulty (which is the highest in the game), the most notorious is the fact that the vampires will hop around as if they were frogs.
    • The resources are not limited. The game gives you too much ammo. For instance, the AVGN got 834 bullets across eight different weapons at the end of the game, and he wasn't even trying to save ammo, as he killed every single enemy in the game.
19. This game nearly destroyed Bandai's game division, but fortunately, it didn't happen that much, as they still released good games after that. Eventually, in 2005, everything calmed down completely after they merged with Namco to form Bandai Namco.

Redeeming Qualities

1. The game can be funny for some players due to how bad the voice acting is.
2. Keith, despite him trying to ditch Misato when he comes across her, as well as his bad voice acting, is a likable protagonist since he genuinely cares about the safety of others, ushering casino patrons during the chaos, turning vampires back into humans and escorting Misato. Additionally, when it is revealed that Alicia/Claudia is brainwashed, he shows kindness and understanding.
3. The general idea of turning vampires back to humans using white water, regardless if dead or not, is an interesting concept; it's just that it wasn't executed that well, especially thanks to the aforementioned false advertising in the game's manual.
4. The music that plays in the opening scene before the chaos occurs is admittedly catchy and awesome to listen to. It sure gives a great feel of spending a really great time at the casino.

Reception

"What were they thinking?"The Shit Scale Games that are debatably bad High level of shit contamination The very high category The severe zone Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Major code red 👆 This product belongs to the "Very High Category" category of the AVGN's Shit Scale.

Countdown Vampires received mixed-to-negative reviews and it has an average of 41 out of 100 in Metacritic.

Tim Tracy from GameSpot gave the game a 3.3 out of 10, shortly describing: "The game is flawed on so many levels that only the most dedicated survival-horror fan might get some enjoyment out of it.". However, not all of the reviews were negative, PSXNation gave the game a score of 76, the highest of all the reviews, saying that "Countdown Vampires falls squarely in the middle. It offers gamers two discs of entertainment that are not original, not half bad."

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Trivia

• The developer studio, K2 LLC, was acquired in May 2008 by Capcom and helped the development of Resident Evil 5.
• Bandai had hoped that the game would spawn a long-running survival horror franchise that would compete with the likes of Capcom's Resident Evil and Konami's Silent Hill. With reception and sales below expectations, plans for a sequel had been scrapped, and there will certainly never be a sequel to Countdown Vampires, and the game's critical and commercial underperformance almost destroyed Bandai's game division. To save their game division, five years after this game's release, Bandai reached out to Namco, and it was clear that both Namco and Bandai needed each other to survive, when the companies merged in 2005, they became Bandai Namco.

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