QUByte Classics: Zero Tolerance Collection

Movement is stiff, you can’t see very far ahead of you, enemies fly at you almost out of nowhere, and the level designs are more perfunctory than interesting. An interesting relic of the past, but not much more than that outside of its original context.

Once a technical marvel, Zero Tolerance Collection is now severely dated. Fans who live to relive days gone by might get a kick from diving back into the Planet Defense Corps facility, and the new Underground set of levels is a nice, if limited, bonus extra. But tweaks to provide an updated graphics option, improved frame rates, audio tracks, and true button remapping would have been greatly encouraging for existing fans and newcomers alike. As it is, this collection is largely just a ROM set thrown into a lacklustre zip file, with a frustrating level of non-effort.

I’m sure that there are people out there that have fond memories of Zero Tolerance and will appreciate having the collection available on modern consoles. Far be it for me to criticise the developer and publisher for preserving more niche art like this. However, beyond being a curiosity of the era and something worth experiencing, briefly, for people who are interested in the history of video games, there’s no modern entertainment value to Zero Tolerance. Once, it was probably impressive. Today, it’s impossible to have any tolerance for it whatsoever (yep, of course I wasn’t going to resist the temptation to make that pun).