♦ Livestream of the ZZT world "Weekend of ZZT February 2004 [Sacrifice]" by Mooseka, Various (2004) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/mwoz04/] ♦
Some unexpectedly high quality creations made over a 72-hour period. The first ever Weekend of ZZT looks to have been quite the success!
...After you pre-emptive ditch a few of the junk entries meant to harass the judges. That's mid-2000s ZZT culture for ya.
It's also quite the ad for the then recent ZBitmap image to ZZT board converter. Expect a lot of converted images in a number of games.
(4:28) - "Sacrif ice ice baby" by TTTPPP sends a man off on behalf of his sick master to plead to a god to save the dying man. Unfortunately, his sins are many, so it's going to take quite a lot of sacrifices of arbitrary things to get this god to help out.
An annoying hub with a good dozen exits to individual puzzles may be unpleasant to navigate, but the actual puzzles are fairly good given the time limit. Some more than others. You've got bouncing shots at fish in barrels, a spin on the original "Fox, chicken, and seed" boating puzzle, dice rolling, name-that-tuning, and then squandering any goodwill by demanding the player play Simon for _THIRTY_ rounds.
An ultimately bugged and incomplete game that's the first of many victims of the time limit. Yet still a very impressive start.
(54:30) "The Damned" by Commodore - After failing to defeat a great evil, you have been sacrificed and sent to a demonic realm. Fate says otherwise though, with an angelic figure presenting you with a powerful holy blade. Now you must fight your way through dark forces and take on Satan himself.
A simple dungeon crawler that showcases Commodore's ability to make some great animations. Especially with the introduction sequence. Enhancing your journey are special first-person screens that let you choose actions and items from a sidebar, making the game seem almost like a Shadowgate style game. This system is later used as well for RPG combat against some cool looking enemies with unique damage animations.
Spoiled a bit by a lack of health when fighting outside the RPG scenes, and a tragic passage error that causes the game to be unwinnable without cheats, but otherwise a really great showing.
(1:16:37) "Terrix" by My Liver Hurtz - A action game that's more what I expected a game made over the weekend to play like. Part of a side-story to the author's Nexus series, the game dumps a ton of lore on players to get them up to speed with what amounts to "Bad guys took over your planet. Free them."
Some straightforward fights against enemy soldiers with a bit of key collecting as you fight your way to a K'Ton base's main generator to blow it up with an EMP device which will make every K'Ton base explode. (Bad wiring?) Forces players to make a moral decision about blowing up kids or not. Also forces cheats as some blinkwalls fire too fast to make the return trip through them.
(1:41:08) "The Sacrifice" by Team The League of Extrordinry Centipeeds (Nanobot) - Escape from a vague tribe's prison before you're sacrificed to the gods. A game that borders on being a throwaway entry with instant game overs, big near-empty boards, an annoying password guessing puzzle that requires brute force, and a final boss that takes too many shots.
♦ Play this world directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/mwoz04/
♦ Originally streamed on July 26th, 2024 ♦
