Z: Steel Soldiers post-mortem

I have finally found the time and motivation to complete the wonderful real-time strategy game from The Bitmap Brothers, 'Z: Steel Soldiers', the sequel to their hard-to-google DOS game 'Z'. Although I purchased it a few months after its release (according to the receipt at 4.09pm from salesperson Mustapha on 14^th October, 2001), I had only made a few aborted attempts to play it through to the end. I was mainly dissuaded from playing by the annoying necessity of inserting the game CD prior to starting, which became even more of a problem as my CD drive was progressively dying at the time. After all, what's the point of installing the game to hard disk when the CD is required anyway.

Fast forward to a month or two ago. This time the CD requirement annoyed me enough to do a google search for workarounds, and I struck lucky. What you're after is a 'game fix' or 'nocd' patch, and they're readily available. Once that's installed you'll find yourself playing a lot more often, and the time-wasting search for the CD EVERY TIME YOU WANT TO PLAY A QUICK GAME will be just a horrible memory.

When a game offers the choice of easy, normal or hard, I normally select easy, kidding myself that after I finish I'll play again on a harder difficulty level. With Z:SS I assume I chose easy, but I couldn't find any way of finding this out a month after the fact. Anyway, the levels were pretty well set up in terms of difficulty for the first half (ie. the first 15 of 30 levels), but then something wacky happened and it all got really easy. What I want is for me to have to restart a level 5 or more times, trying slightly different strategies to try to get the advantage. This is how it worked out initially, but after about level 15 I would easily get through on my first attempt, apart from perhaps 2 of the remaining levels. Although it was nice to win, it lessened the sense of achievement.

Once you're worked your way through the single player missions you might be tempted to try some skirmishes against the CPU, but for some reason it is incredibly easy to win, and thus exceedingly boring.

Lastly, you'll be enticed by the multiplayer option. This was truly the greatest part of the original 'Z', which I played for many hours against my brother in LAN games. Whilst Z:SS advertises multiplayer, this is an unfortunate situation where real life intervenes. The game was originally released with a horde of bugs, most of which were eliminated in patches. However, while the single player game is bug free, the latest patch (from 17th August 2001) admits that:

MULTIPLAYER - Fixes - GAMESPY

- Reduction of critical errors although there is still one problem we are currently trying to track down hence the 'BETA' nature of this patch.

This one problem causes the multiplayer game to crash after a few minutes, rendering it unplayable. And whilst the note about the patch makes it sound as if that final fix is only days away, this was unfortunately the time that the publisher of the game went bankrupt, and so no further patches were ever issued.

So, while some of us live in hope that one day the Bitmap Brothers will pick up the source code and spend a few hours fixing the multiplayer code, or release it to the open source community for fixing, the current situation is that this is a truly great single-player game that can now be purchased for not much more than the price of a blank CD.