A few months ago, QuByte Interactive re-released both The Humans and The Immortal as the first in a line of old school games they are calling QuByte Classics. Fast-forward six months and they are back with their next release – Zero Tolerance. This Genesis first-person shooter was a technical marvel when it first came out and showed gamers everywhere that the 16-bit systems still had a little life left in them. It’s cool that this old school oddity is finding a second life on PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and Switch, but is this game actually worth playing in 2022? To answer that question, I decided to flip through the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro, Mean Machines Sega and more classic magazines to see what the critics said about Zero Tolerance back when it first came out. Join me for another action-packed episode of QuByte Classics Review Crew.
0:00 – Introduction
1:03 – Commercial: Zero Tolerance (1994)
1:34 – Zero Tolerance (Genesis)
5:22 – Question of the Day
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I'm pretty hyped for the re-release, can't wait to get my mittens on the physical version. I never had Megadrive/Genesis myself – mainlined with SNES and PC – so this is one of the VERY few classic FPS games I never got to play. It looks surprisingly good, like a prettied up Wolfenstein 3D.
QOTD; DOOM is DOOM, can't argue with that. That said, I practically breathed FPS games growing up, so I played most of them up until 2003 or about. Duke 3D, Blood, Heretic, Rise of the Triad… I could go on until the comment box is full. Good stuff, there is a reason why the modern 'boomer shooter renaissance' is a successful thing on the indie arena right now.
Bloodshot came out before zero tolerance in 1994 and was a FPS….I don’t know if it’s any good or not I only just found out about it 30 seconds ago
Qotd I have biggest nostalgia for Duke Nukem 3D. Friends and I would go on lan party (few houses have 5,6 computers and they would rent per hour) Once we were there whole night smoking and playing Duke Nukem 3D against each other. Still remember some maps,and crazy guns like shrinking gun which shrinks opponent and you need to step on him. Fun times
Corporation came out before all of these. It's awful but still came before.
Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, & Star Wars: Dark Forces
I love quake. My personal favorite. My first purchase on the switch.
Remember seeing this in a couple mags and thinking it looked crappy. Prime example of a game that needs to be seen in motion. Liked how it had the map on screen since it used the same sprites over and over for the 3D.
QOTD, Duke Nukem 3D.
Favorite old school FPS is probably Descent, to the extent that it counts as one. I have fond memories of playing it on my cousins' old mac.
i loved this game theres a lot of problems with the controls but for a fps on the Sega was still pretty fun never beat it i think i remember getting to level like 14-18 something its pretty hard
I bought this the second I saw it on our Series X. I may have been playing Doom (32X, Jaguar, and PC), Doom 2 (PC), AVP (Jaguar), and Wolfenstein 3D (PC, Jaguar) when I got this but…I loved it just the same. It was such a different game and it was harder than nails but what a good time I had with it. I wish a Sega CD port made it out because unlike the Genesis that needed extra software solutions to pull this off (like scaling) Sega's add-on was built for this. SEGA!
Addendum- I got the Sega Saturn and PlayStation the day Sony released their console on 9/9/95 at the same time. Even with both 32-bit powerhouses and a 486DX2@66MHz I still loved Zero Tolerance.
Fun Fact- The Game Players Magazine review is highly suspect. They say shooting at the enemies with the regular firearms results in the same thing…not if you shoot the enemies multiple times. You can make them stagger backward as you fill em' full of lead while they spray the walls. 😉
Gotta be unoriginal and say Wolfenstein 3D. Can still remember playing it at my friends place, and feeling somewhat guilty for playing it, with all the blood and gore. But it was one hell of a time, and one i'll never forget.
Yeah, this does seem like one that is more made for those who liked the original back in the day. As for the question, never really got into FPS games, but there was one Star Wars FPS game I remember dad had on his PS1 that was fun. Specially when you put in certain GameShark codes, like one, think it was like maybe infinite health, can't remember for sure, but after putting in that code, I could aim the gun at the ground, and shooting it would send me up into the air. Had a blast, no pun intended, doing that when I was a little girl.
Oh man, talk about a game I had forgotten about. The flood of memories when I saw the thumbnail 🤣
QotD: Wolfenstein 3D. We had the shareware version on our IBM PC, and it was the rare game my father would actually like playing as well. I still enjoy how simple the game is while still hitting most everything that works for the FPS format.
QOTD: Doom by a mile is my favorite FPS of all time. I own too many copies 😂. I still have my original Ultimate Doom disc for DOS. HOWEVER, to kind of add to the question, a game I enjoyed playing back in the day, I would love to see re-released would be the first three Rainbow Six games. Rogue Spear was a game I literally wore the disc out on. If that could somehow make it's way to modern PCs I'd be thrilled!
Very impresive, a big programmingh marvel, but still, poopoo doody. Too much sacrificed to make it. However, if it was on snes, snes has an fps edge, the L and R buttons for STRAFE make a huge difference.
Dunk hunt on the supper karate systim
Zero Tolerance was my game when I was 14. I had bought a copy of it from a store going out of business. In my twenties I sold it and later regretted it. About ten years later I found it at another store and bought it. When I opened the case it had all the same codes I had written when I was 14 and the same writing on the cartridge. It was the exact same one I had sold.
I've never been able to beat this game, but I still absolutely love it
I remember playing this at my cousins' house and loving it. I didn't really get to play FPS games at home until my parents eased off on letting me play violent games in the summer of 97 though I occasionally snuck time on shareware FPS episodes that were part of various shareware game collections we owned before then and I played many older FPS games after my parents oked it. I still find it weird that my parents were ok with me playing strategy games many of which required my forces committing genocide to win but killing some soldiers, aliens or demons was too much due to the digitized even though I've been a diabetic since I was three so I saw my own real blood multiple times a day, and they were fine with me watching TV shows and movies with blood as long as they weren't rated R (They eased off on R-rated movies at the same time they eased off on bloody video games.).
As for my favorite old-school FPS I'm not sure though I'll always have a soft spot for Rebel Moon Rising. I still have the novelization of the prequel.
Outside of Doom, my favorite old school shooter was Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. It ran on an improved version of the Wolfenstein 3-D engine.
I hope by now you've had a chance to enjoy the Zero Tolerance Collection itself. My mind was blown when I finally tried Zero Tolerance Underground to see that it is essentially a newly released (unreleased as QuByte claims) Genesis first-person shooter in 2022.
Great to see a great game getting more exposure!
I personally really liked this game on the original Mega Drive