♦ Livestream of the ZZT world "Weekend of ZZT February 2004 [Sacrifice]" by Mooseka, Various (2004) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/mwoz04/] ♦
(2:40) Temple of Souls - A very extensively coded dungeon crawler where you have been hired to defeat some evil forces that have been sacrificing people. Has magic spells, sword abilities, and an inventory all accessible via the cheat prompt. A constantly cycling gems value is used for randomized drops as well! Very ambitious on a technical level. Reasonable dungeon crawling, that unfortunately has a few bugs and an incredibly difficult final boss fight that hold this one back from being one of the better entries.
(36:44) Perseverence Episode 0.5: Sacrifice - An incredibly incomplete game with nothing more than the character's home to explore. It does have an incredible animated ad playing endlessly on the TV though.
(40:35) Assassain [sic] - Saved on the wrong board, this game focuses on a stealth engine with players steering an object around on bright green and blue fake walls to represent light and shadow. The color choice is a consquence of ZZT-OOP for the purposes of detecting which tile you're standing on, but it does make for an ugly game. Unintuitive controls make it difficul to get started, the engine doesn't really do much, and the throwing knives you receive aren't enough to get through the endlessly patrolling guards that need to be defeated to complete a level.
Ends with an RPG battle that amounts to rolling the dice in hopes that you win.
Sounds cool, but really doesn't deliver.
(1:00:55) The Day CTHULHU Got Up On The Wrong Side of Bed and demanded a sacrifice - A botched sneeze in a grocery store summons Cthulhu who demands a sacrifice. Turns into a silly game when you travel through a hidden passageway to the land of elves. An absurdist comedy with some easy to miss boards. Pretty fun overall and the meta ending cut-scene is the first time I've seen anything like it.
(1:19:50) Angry Cave God - After a cruise ship causes you to become stranded on an island, the stereotypical natives hurl you into a volcano to appease the angry cave god that lives within. You then search for a way out, hunting for keys, collecting ammo and torches, and doing the usual ZZT action thing of fighting some lions and ruffians. A very classical adventure that's so-so. It too ends with an RPG battle that amounts to rolling dice, albeit one with some nice art. (The title screen is quite pretty as well.)
(1:39:21) Chaos Warrior - It's blood for the blood god Khorne (of Warhammer fame). When Khorne's champion falls in battle, his followers raze a village sacrificing anyone they can find to their god of chaos. You play as one such warrior, with the goal of sacrificing the most skulls to be the one crowned champion.
A piety system allows the player to pray for better weapons, armor, and even physical mutations, which feel hardly needed as the game is a real power trip for players. Villagers merely flee in terror, while the guards and clerics of the temple are little match for the warriors preying upon them. The wizards put up a good fight though. Credit to the wizards.
A surprising amount of fun given that you mostly just hold down a direction until you chop somebody's head off. Having to race against a timer (torches represent the skulls sacrificed by the best warrior that isn't you) means the effortless enemies are the source of a frantic chase rather than a boring one-shot kill. The only real issue is that you have to constantly return to the altar to sacrifice skulls in batches of five, which makes for a lot of backtracking.
(2:08:32) The death of z2 - A junk submission that I wanted to show off for being more silly and bizarre than as mean-spirited as the others. A revenge fantasy between a ZZTer upset with ZZT archive z2's owner where either the site or its owner must be destroyed.
♦ Play this world directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/mwoz04/
♦ Originally streamed on August 2nd, 2024 ♦
