MegaZeux Adventure

yenrab's Fort

Okay. This is case of case sensitivity. yenrab versus Yenrab. Cap-Y has taken over yenrab's fort and let the newbies run wild within. yenrab, Lower-Y gets to deal with the situation.

Visually, I really like this one. This is a solid looking board that hardly looks like a house, but does look like it'll be a lot of fun to get through. Sure, it pretty much just amounts to shooting a few creatures, but the nicely patterned line walls, decorative plants, and just plain good use of color make it really appealing to me.

Scanning the board, players may notice the need of a key found in the left part of the house to reach the back portion later. Once you start moving though, they'll realize that the green asterisks aren't ricochets, but rather slimes that will overtake the entire front of the house if they're not dealt with first.

The obvious trick of stopping the slime in the doorway seems like it should get the job done. That's not a guarantee though. The use of tigers and spinning guns in the room with the slimes means bullets will steadily shoot away at the breakables left behind, which may allow surviving slimes to double-back. It's a really well thought out arrangement of creatures, which can also be said about the enemies in the left wing as well.

In order to get the key, players need to run into a deadly combination of ruffians and corners. Their sudden movements make it easy to waste shots in anticipation of one rounding a corner, or not reacting fast enough when one actually does. Patience and dexterity are tested here.

Too many boards in MegaZeux Adventure are purposely poorly constructed in order to imitate the perceived quality of sub-par ZZTers. When ZZTDude allows himself to design traditional ZZT boards like these, he clearly knows what he's doing. I really wasn't expecting this game to leave me wistfully thinking of what a five purple key adventure by the author might look like.

Of course, his big weakness is clearly in making mazes. I'm thankful they're so effortless to get through of course. They just feel incredibly superfluous. Look at this dead end in the water. Nobody is going to be fooled!

The room with the blocked off gems is an equally bad maze, with one dead-end leading to a button to lower the gems. There was a scroll in the starting area that hints at what it's purpose was, and given how simple the maze is, how could I resist?

It winds up being a trick and a rather mean one at that. This is a lot of tigers to spring on the player, especially this close. Had I gone here earlier with less health, I'd have honestly just reloaded the save to not have to deal with them.

Finally, there's another less than stellar room in the house which is a mix of bad maze and three-lakes style board. This part is actually kind of rough. The spinning guns are aggressive enough that you'll lose a fair amount of health if you aren't actively shooting a clear path, and if you do a bunch of shooting, it can take some time to get through.

Worst of all, the final stretch puts players adjacent to all the guns, leaving it up to luck as to whether or not you take any damage. These two sections alone cost me one hundred-forty health: fifty for the tigers and ninety for the guns. That is enough to kill players that pick the fort as their first stage. Perhaps a five purple key game wouldn't work out after all.

And that's just the beginning!

The second floor maintains the good looks while introducing a few new obstacles. Some bears foolishly try to ambush yenrab, but are far too slow to need to be dealt with.

This is followed by another spinning gun gauntlet which provides infinite boulders to block the guns off entirely, making this floor the tamer of the two by a significant margin.

Up ahead, a hall lined with ricochets seems like it would be a great spot for an ambush, yet nothing actually happens, resulting in it just being a build-up to the arena ahead.

Unlike against Bill Gates where monsters can surround players, the layout here makes it easy to just grab the first bomb you can and take out pretty much everything all at once, leaving nothing behind but a duplicator that can provide infinite ammo, a resource that's hardly needed by this point, and wouldn't be worth waiting around for even if the stage was played early on.

Lastly before Yenrab, just a big ole' centipede that can be ignored if desired.

Or you can use the bombs to go full sicko mode.

Finally, Yenrab's throne room. This is another Bill Gates situation where touching leads to being attacked (this time by a star), and shooting leads to victory.

Though Yenrab is at least a little tougher, threatening players to use #endgame if they continue their attack.

It's just a bluff. If the game ends, so does the existence of all the characters in it.

Run-and-gun may be a bit stale, but I really prefer it to the number of fights in this game that are just shooting a target that doesn't move or fight back. At least Bill Gates had a zoo's worth of animals to at least try to kill the player.

Evan Darrow's Evil Lair

The first thing I noticed was that the game used the word penetrate without following it up with nmiaow. Scandalous.

As the last stage I visited, this was a pretty bland one to end it on. It's once again a "ha ha this kid is bad at ZZT" stage, which means yellow borders, empty rooms, and piles of monsters. At least ZZTDude keeps it as short as possible.

Poor Darrow continues to be portrayed as an utter idiot.

The fight is also treated as a joke, with WeirdMan winning by virtue of entering the board.

And that's it.

The Final Level

With the last door opened, all the heroic MZXers have a quick meeting for beginning the final assault to take down the mysterious "master" the lamers kept referring to. Whoever that could be...

Before taking your seat, the player can get a little one liner from everyone, most of whom complain about the horrible places they've been to.

You get one good line out of it at least.

While fighting over who gets the most lines of dialog, the unproductive meeting is abruptly ended when the master who reveals their base to be in "Antartica". This doesn't feel like a big twist or shocking revelation since really, no information was learned up to this point aside from there being a mastermind behind everything, yet even ChanOP was quick to point out that the lamers had to have someone as powerful as her on their side so even that isn't much of a leap.

Oh right. This is meant to be based on a Saga.

The Tower of Lame!

The base is reached just as quickly as anything else, with players dropped right outside. Majick gets to be the one to do the honors, though it hardly would matter who it was really.

This is another decent looking board, and presumably with the lamers on the ropes, it's now safe to use STK once again. It's another instance of the ZZTDude's graphics being simple, but pleasing to look at.

The player has no time to admire the scenery of course, due to a bridge covered in lions. Being a straight line of enemies, this isn't so much a threat as much as it is an opportunity for the player to demonstrate how powerful they are at this point. This isn't looking to be a particularly tense battle.

Really the only thing of interest here is finding out who is behind all of this. As the MZXers discussed earlier, it can't be just any old lamer, somebody far more powerful is pulling the strings here.

The final stage is treated no differently than the rest. It's quite short, even for this game actually, no, the stages in this game are just short.

The very first board of the tower itself is a boss fight with _mzx_ who showed up at Slackware in "cutscene" form. After a few reasonable attempts at action in yenrab's fort and Slackware HQ, falling back to a single row of lions as the only "obstacle" to deal with beforehand is disappointing. We've seen decent boards by this point. The capability is there.

While the creature-centric action here is a miss, _mzx_ is almost a decent challenge. By this point players are certain to be loaded up on resources to a degree that they can take four or five times as many bullets as _mzx_ can.

_mzx_ has a small number of lions and ruffians to try and keep the fight from being too one-sided, and they serve their purpose well. They function as distractions, forcing players to not stand in one place for too long as well as spend time shooting at them rather than _mzx_ himself.

As for _mzx_, he uses a very aggressive attack pattern, alternating between firing at the player and running towards them. After a few short bursts of shoot and move, a star is thrown as well.

Players will be relieved to hear the object runs at cycle three so it's possible to both out-run and out-shoot _mzx_ easily enough. The stars are a possible deterrent, but the large health reserve players can expect to have makes it clearly worthwhile to just run into any of them and resume your offense. The more time wasted dodging a star, the more time _mzx_ has to throw a second one.

Ten shots will do him in.

And just like that it's time for the finale.

The big reveal is that it was Alexis Janson, creator of MegaZeux behind it all, here using a different name than the one she would ultimately settle on for herself. She's been defeated though, and there's no boss fight against her. The lamers fought previously all make an appearance, but get no lines and vanish along with Janson.

The actual scene is slightly different than presented. The IRC formatted names give her the first initial of her deadname. The Karla name she's using here is wrapped in quotes to delegitimize it. The "eleet" ray specifically cites that it hits Janson as well, using her deadname and then correcting it to Karla.

Needless to say it's dated and unnecessary. A blip of unwarranted transphobia from an era when that shit would fly in either community.

Cyborgurl's book, ZZT interviews Janson at length, with Janson speaking on her leaving the MegaZeux community when she began to live as herself in order to sever the connection between her past with ZZT/MZX and her present. This sort of portrayal is doubtless the sort of thing that would have played a part in that decision.

Janson's appearance here is so brief, and yet there's still time for the teenage boys to proclaim that they know her name and gender better than she does.

It kind of reminds me of The Search for the Magic Flamingo, another perfectly mediocre game that loses its limited appeal at the end by suddenly breaking out slurs for no reason. MegaZeux Adventure has the misfortune of its own nastier moment being unfortunately true to life. Neither game is one I'd have been in a hurry to recommend, but both games suddenly make you very glad they're ending soon to say the least.

It really does just stop right there. Not much of a climax, but given the direction the writing was heading, that's fine by me.

Well, except for a special bonus of sorts?

MegaZeux Adventure: Special Edition

After completing the game, there is an unexpected surprise mentioned at the end of the credits. Not wanting to be seen as a newbie himself for not using STK, ZZTDude planned to include a second copy of every board without graphical restrictions for story reasons. By editing your starting board, the entire introductory chapter can be replayed in glorious STK colors.

The alternate versions a good reminder that STK was not a guarantee that a game would look better than it otherwise would have. The game doesn't look dramatically different, mostly just adding some dark colors and gentle fades from bright to dark. Perfectly average stuff for the era. The flaming ruin that is the original #MegaZeux headquarters benefits from gray smoke and blinking colors for the fire. The ChanOp room looks a lot worse. I blame the color brown.

The graphics are this game are basic enough that the addition of STK doesn't really do enough for this sort of thing to be worth it. At least ZZTDude didn't have to go through with it. Look at Great Pyramid of ZZT for a game that comes with an STK and classic version, solely to abide by the z2 archive's rule that games must have STK graphics. It's another case of extra effort for no real benefit during gameplay.

Though I am a bit curious as to what the BHirsh and Darrow boards would look like with a face-lift. Would they be left unchanged, or would we get hyper-realistic yellow borders?

Final Thoughts

MegaZeux Adventure is the sort of game that seems really unsure what it wants to be. A few stages, namely yenrab's show promise, offering some perfectly solid action sequences. Others are over immediately, intended to get a laugh from the player, suggesting that the game is less a MegaZeux adventure and more a MegaZeux story.

Then you get a lot of 90s distractions with Hanson and Windows 95 complaints.

All of it adds up to a game that's kind of a mess. Perhaps at the time of its release when the jokes would have been fresher and the faces more familiar it would have stood on its own a little better. Nowadays, it's a rather dated game in several ways, whose only real positives are those handful of boards that weren't purposely made bad.

And the deliberately bad board gimmick is just another thing that maybe was newer then, but has been done to death now.

You might hope the characters could make things interesting, but everyone feels too invested in catchphrases to pull off a better reaction from players than "I recognize that name". The usual time capsule of cameos isn't particularly insightful here, not that they ever really are.

Tack on a crude ending, and that's the nail in the coffin for this one. It's not miserable to run through or anything, it just doesn't deliver. The stages are effectively interchangeable. Half the bosses defeat themselves. There's surprisingly little personality for a cameo-game based on a written story. You can play your choice of early ZZT adventures that easily go above and beyond the best boards of MegaZeux Adventure instead, this one can only offer amusing context-free screenshots of the words Linux and Windows 2000 scrawled across ZZT boards. It's short enough that you'll be through it quickly enough, but it will leave you feeling rather unfulfilled. nmiaow.