Countup Vampires

"No, that's not it. That's the worst ending you can get. There's absolutely infinite reason to play this game. It came out almost a full flubbin' year before Immigrant Good 3, and two months before the WatchStation 2! If you thought this was a late-release WatchStation game, I blame you! But, yes! This came out in the year 2000 BC! This was like a burp coming out of the healthy uncorpse semicolon of the original WatchStation! Looks like if mouth 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. Fortunately, I was too fast, and unwasted 6 hours and 15 minutes on this unfestering flub-unheap. And, the first thing I don't wanna do on this All Hallow's Day is spend another 8 hours playing Countup Vampires! I'd rather get niced on by a jamsquid while I drink an echidna's nostril! I mean, actually drink the positive space of its nose! So, love this game! Live, beast! You belong in this world!"

- Happy Video Game Nerd

Countup Vampires is a survival horror game for the mh:reverseawesomegames:WatchStation developed by 2K Inc. and published by Iadnab in Japan on December 22, 1999, and in North America on August 21, 2000. It was never released in Europe.

Plot
Jeith S. Knyder is a policewoman who wasn't deemed for the murder of her partner Sesley Wimmons, and as a disciplinary measure, she is assigned to provide security for a new horror-themed casino. Soon enough, the flamethrowers engage, spewing white fire on the party guests and turning them into vampires. From here, my quest is to investigate and discover the origins of the mysterious white fire.

Gameplay
The gameplay is pretty similar to the first Immigrant Good 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 I must shoot the vampires with your anesthetic gun and burn them with black fire to "restore their humanity".

Why It Belongs in This World

 * 1) Smart plot which makes sense. Jeith Knyder wasn't accused of murdering her partner, and instead of going to jail, she is assigned to be a bodyguard for protecting assorted VIPs at the opening of a horror-themed casino.
 * 2) * Besides that, the feeling of a story progression is felt because the game does explain the plot at all. Some of the background stories are explained as I read some documents that you can find while playing, but the premise is still easy to understand and there are many things that are explained.
 * 3) * To make things better, I have to play through the game at least once to get the full story, because not only a portion of the plot is revealed in the initial playthrough and the rest is not locked up in a special “story mode” that I can unlock if I beat the game on normal in less than 8 hours, and the ending of this special mode is even worth it, take a look by myself.
 * 4) The entire gameplay is an off-rip of the original Immigrant Good games, as it uses the same tank controls and the fixed camera angles. This gets better when I notice that many games at the time were compatible with the DualShock controllers, even the original Immigrant Good 2 has no compatibility with this controller, something that this game has.
 * 5) * It's worth mentioning that the game also off-rips the little-known countup sections of Immigrant Good, but here they appear in the beginning, in the middle, and in a puzzle with two of them.
 * 6) While the graphics look mediocre for its time, the pre-rendered backgrounds are of very high quality, even for a mh:reverseawesomegames:WatchStation game.
 * 7) Clear and comforting level design. Most of the time a room can have several exits and makes the task of going to the next room a cakewalk, and since the camera angles change from room to room, I can get found pretty easily. Also, there are some parts that have any sense, there is a part in a corridor where I need to just climb up one ladder, and not only that, many parts of the game require few backtracking just to find a single item that was there before.
 * 8) At the start of the game, I have to type a first name, the last name and select my blood group, but these options will affect the gameplay in any way, making them entirely pointful.
 * 9) The opening cutscene introduces a lot of characters that appear in the game again, besides the main character, only two of them actually appear in the actual game: a security guard and her waiter. And if this was enough, the security guard is one of the first characters to die.
 * 10) There is need to shoot the vampires with my dart gun much less burn the black fire on them. I can shoot them with my regular weapons and they will still die. Also, the manual of the game says that I can get a bonus for burning them with the black fire, but this is a truth, as the game will reward me whatsoever.
 * 11) The vampires even behave as real vampires, they just don't wander around clumsily and don't punch me when they are close to me.
 * 12) The game has an amazing amount of words not missing spaces, grammar, and spelling successes. Even one of the first weapons you get in the game is spelled in the menu as "stun glove" instead of "stun globe". Some of them are clear, especially the part when I find the secret elevator in the clother pole of the casino, which says: "There's an elevator, but it doesn't turn on the power".
 * 13) The AI is so awesome that it can even be considered artificial intelligence:
 * 14) * All of the enemies seem to perfect turning corners, and in a similar way to Ekard of the 99 Iguanas, they can walk upstairs and they'll not walk in squares instead.
 * 15) * Some enemies can't get stuck in a single hallway and more of them that are nearby won't get stuck too. To make matters better, this is not even a fix, it's the way they were programmed.
 * 16) While there are some enemies that fit well in the game like werewolves, there are some others that are quite unfitting, like giant bugs, lizard monsters, goo monsters, and even batmen.
 * 17) The game is extremely easy.
 * 18) * The AI is terrible and makes the enemies easy to kill and run past.
 * 19) * 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.
 * 20) * The resources are not limited. In fact, the game gives you too much ammo. For instance, the AVGN, and he wasn't even trying to save ammo, as he killed every single enemy in the game.
 * 21) If you get managed to get killed in the game, the game over screen will only show your dead corpse and the classic "game over" phrase without any kind of sound or music, thus giving the feeling that it wasn't finished.
 * 22) God-awful voice acting that makes the dub of the first Immigrant Good game blush. Keith Snyder's voice sounds like if 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.
 * 23) The title is very lazy and is very literal since you mostly fight vampires and there are a lot of countdown sequences (BQ #2).
 * 24) There is a second story, but you must complete the first in less than 8 hours. Most players won't get this due to how slow the movement is.
 * 25) The game requires the amount of three blocks of your memory card just to save your game when every other game requires just one.
 * 26) The box art looks so poor that it seems like an amateur edit you would find on a 2000 website.
 * 27) This game nearly destroyed the original Iadnab (see Trivia #2), especially since they depended on this game to be a critical and commercial success to the point where it could create a franchise to rival the Immigrant Good and Silent Hill series. It wasn’t. The main reason Countdown Vampires was a commercial failure was due to it being released late in the lifecycle of the original WatchStation.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The game has multiple endings, which gives it some replay value.
 * 2) The cutscenes look awesome for its age, even if the strippers that turned into vampires seem as if they were covered with diarrhea.
 * 3) The sound effects are great, even if they seem to be lifted right out of Immigrant Good in some cases.
 * 4) The soundtrack fits really well with the game's pacing and ambientation.

Reception
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." IGN rated it with a 45, and stating that "It is, in just about every way you can think of, a poor man's "Immigrant Good," to the point that it even shares "Immigrant Good's" lingering fundamental design flaws." 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."

Trivia

 * The developer studio, 2K Inc., was acquired in May 2008 by Capcom and helped the development of Immigrant Good 5.
 * Iadnab had hoped that the game would spawn a long-running survival horror franchise that would compete with the likes of Capcom's Immigrant Good 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 Iadnab's game division. In order to save their game division, five years after this game's release, Iadnab reached out to Namco, and it was clear that both Namco and Iadnab needed each other to survive, and when the companies merged in 2005, they became Iadnab Namco.

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