♦ Livestream of 5 ZZT worlds. ♦
♦ Stream Contents ♦
• (1:49) "Trivia (Ancient Rome)" by Jacques Bouchard [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/triviarome/]
• (27:47) "Death Squad" by Justin Raynard (1995) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/dsquad/]
• (41:04) "Gambit (No. 1 of 3)" by MDBowers, SMokey666 [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/gambit/]
• (51:13) "Contra SS" by Igl00 (1995) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/contraigl00/]
• (1:06:06) "X - Demo Version" by Joker9025 [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/x-demo/]
A slew of action games after a much longer than expected edutainment detour!
Originally planned to be streamed half jokingly on the ides of March, Ancient Roman Trivia is the first game of the batch. For ZZT edutainment titles, it's one of the stranger ones. Players can choose from questions wagering varying amounts of points depending on the author's perceived difficulty of the question. At first, it seems like your typical high school history course level of questions: "What's a republic", "What's a plebian", that sort of thing. But then it starts getting more and more detailed, targeting a demographic few ZZTers would have found themselves in.
And then it really gets fun when it starts asking about the decline of America and how it compares to the decline of Rome! Needless to say, what was expected to be answering a handful of the questions and then moving on turned into a real crowd pleaser.
Afterwards the action could begin with Death Squad, a game that spells its title incorrectly on the title screen. Your job is, of course, to kill Barney the Dinosaur and his supporters. Another violence heavy anti-Barney game, with a surprising amount of organization to the bloodshed instead of just explosions of red slime gore. By the usually low quality of these kind of titles, this one was one of the more well put together ones.
Which can't really be said about the next game, Gambit, another X-Men fan game that while hardly the worst such game, doesn't have too much to offer. Some bright and pleasant to look at boards with tigers to shoot and the obligatory drawing of the blackbird jet. Gambit heads to New Orleans in search of the kidnapped professor X and his captor Sabertooth. There is an attempt at animating the Blackbird coming in for a landing, which with ZZT's struggles of moving objects together looks more like a crash than anything else. So that's fun.
Then we took a look at Contra SS, the first Contra fan game we've seen. Openly inspired by ZZT classic Link's Adventure, the game has players run through some nice look side-view boards effortlessly shooting forward at creatures, with a lot less dying than I'm used to when playing anything Contra-related. The base sequences are a bit emptier, with weird alien patterns on a few boards. It's also quite possible to miss finding the game's torches and entering a dark maze which ain't great.
Lastly, an original title "X", is a lengthy demo in a sci-fi setting about a hired mercenary joining a rebel group working to bring down the government. It's extremely blue and ended up being pretty light on action. What it's not light on is cliche romance with two women crushing on the protagonist and the protagonist getting to choose the girl of his dreams.
A trip through a war zone after a bombing campaign makes things a little more interesting, though the player rarely needs to shoot anything, mostly just using bombs to blast away debris to proceed onward. It's kind of like a lesser version of clysm's Turmoil as the character personalities aren't really there, and the conflict between the rebels and the government goes unexplained as well, making you just kind of coasting along hoping for something to happen to give you some stakes in the outcome.
♦ Play these worlds directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/triviarome/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/dsquad/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/gambit/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/contraigl00/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/x-demo/
♦ Originally streamed on March 17th, 2024 ♦
