♦ Livestream of the ZZT world "Joel's World 7 & 8" by Joel M. Smith (1999) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/joelwrd2/] ♦
After weeks of struggle, the Joel's World series is finally tamed as we finally see what we've been missing for all these years. Despite the setbacks of the mediocre quality of the previous games, the final two are easily the most interesting.
(1:58) Joel's World 7 - A strange murder mystery that drew comparisons with a number of other worlds including Link's Adventure, The Lost Monkeys, and You Vs. Stupidity. Travel the globe on the hunt for a murderer and evidence of his crimes. Is it all just more lion and ruffian shooting? Yes. But there's some attempt at payoff discovering bloody knives, dead bodies, and chasing the culprit down.
Anyway at one point the murder transforms into a tiny ball and you take him with you. As evidence.
Also one of the victims is found in a cave where a fishman that will claw you to pieces lives. I don't know if we can confidently pin their death on the murderer and not the monster.
(51:24) Joel's World 8 - The final chapter! It even says as much.
Once again the structure of the game changes wildly, now being an open world adventure with a generic "find the elemental crystals" plot. Some of these crystals are guarded by children's TV characters including Bear from Bear In The Big Blue House and the couch from Big Comfy Couch. No Barney!
There are some oddities to be found. You can find melee weapons of varying strength, but from what I can tell, no enemies are actually vulnerable to them. You can play a multi-level shoot em up game from the start that's honestly kind of impressive, were it not very slow to control and easy to break. Cramming all the levels onto a single screen though is a first for me at least.
The game's action is the same as it ever was, and kind of drags on given the size of the world to explore and the need to follow linear paths. It's more of a maze structure with individual routes to reach most boards rather than something you can chart your own way through. This gets particularly nasty as you need to find some cruelly hidden secrets with no hints as to where they might be. Just start touching walls until you find them.
It's also incredibly limiting on ammunition (and to a lesser extent health). I had to cheat for extra ammo constantly. Even perfect accuracy wouldn't be enough to get by. Some missed hidden rooms allievate this somewhat, and you can eventually buy ammo at a rate of 5 per 2 gems, which might be enough to get through, but would mean regularly having to return to the starting area to buy it.
Even with the flaws, these two are definitely the best in the series to me today. They feel much more cohesive than the earlier games, giving them a structure and simple story. They look decent enough, and the individual boards aren't terrible to fight your way through. Having given ourselves the context of the first 6 games instead of jumping into the two that were missing does quite a bit to make them appreciable.
♦ Play this world directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/joelwrd2/
♦ Originally streamed on August 4th, 2024 ♦
