DOS Capital
The core gameplay loop, buy items in one town, sell them elsewhere, and repeat, is a rather dangerous one for ZZT, especially these days. It's hard to give a game like this a fair shake when it demands slow, repetitive gameplay. It's basically poison to me, and while others probably don't feel quite that strongly about it, the reality is that ZZTers today aren't going to chip away at this one over the entire summer as one might have twenty-four years ago.
Orange sets themselves up with two massive challenges to conquer in order to make this game a success. They need to ensure that the actual mechanics of buying and selling items is engaging enough that players want to keep doing it, and they need to find a way to make the game more than just holding right until you reach a place to sell, then holding left until you return to the place where you buy.
This is still a ZZT game and there are certain expectations that come with that. A menu driven trading game à la Drug Wars, may be fine on your graphing calculator to play during math class. Yet even in the primitive world of ZZT, there's the expectation of something more.
To his credit, Orange does an admirable job. I've been thinking about how you would make this game play better, and I don't feel like there are any obvious answers to be had. Considering this is both a first release, and a ZZT game from the year 2000, what we have here is pretty brilliant to see in action. This game is not a case of a glaring flaw that the author chose to ignore. There's a very clear attempt in the number of places to check out and the various secrets to uncover. Some obvious, some impossible. It's trying so dang hard to pull you into a world, and ensure that your trips from town to town take you to places other than the market.
My expectations were low enough coming in that I assumed I would buy some pocket knives for X points, sell them for Y points, and those values would be identical for the entire game. While it is true that the price of items bought from the Neeston factory are indeed always X points, I was quite surprised on my second trip to discover that prices had fluctuated.
As it turns out, the game has a form of randomness in the form of a flag to mark what "day" it is. This information is always hidden, and isn't necessarily representative of an actual day (it's easier to call it that though), but it is used considerably throughout the game in order to keep things from getting stale.
One day, Furbies are a hot commodity, the next, the market is crashing and there's almost no profit to be made. A timer object handles all this, appearing on every board that's outdoors. After a set number of idles (roughly fourteen seconds) a flag encoding the current day is cleared, and the next one is set, looping forever. This simple invisible timer is the source of all the game's randomness, allowing prices to fluctuate, hotel rooms to be occupied/vacant, and special items to be available for limited times.
Orange deliberately keeps the timer hidden, as exposing it makes it easy to destroy the illusion that this is a living breathing world. And it's a powerful illusion to have. The Score! winds up being quite possibly the most alive feeling space I've explored in ZZT at this scale, right up there with the hustle and bustle of Sivion's Bespin. People live in these towns, they have their own routines, and the world goes on regardless of whether or not the cargo boy is there.
It inherently gives players a reason to explore everything repeatedly both for short and long term benefit. Is your bag full of PCs currently worth no more than scrap metal? Why not explore the town's art museum or theater and see if anything new is happening? You might discover an NPC willing to pay top dollar right now for one. Perhaps you'll get invited to play a little game with someone and win ammo or torches to sell at the local pawn shop. Then, when you're done with all that, maybe the market will have made a rebound and you can walk back home with a bag full of score rather than unsold goods.
As they say, "Don't like the economy? Wait a few minutes."
In the long term, repeated exploration may lead to discovering new places and treasures entirely. This is best seen with the hotels in each city that have multiple rooms. Each one has multiple possible rooms to stay in, using the current day value to determine which the cargo boy gets assigned. While they all function the same, offering a bed to rest in for health, a hot shower to clean off any mud, and a toilet to flush because ZZT, sometimes you can get lucky and find a forgotten wallet with some score inside or a rare golden egg if you happen to visit them at the right time.
If you aren't looking at your currently set flags, something that was impossible to easily do at the time and today requires the use of ZZT source ports, it's possible to stay a number of times before lucking into the right room. The goal is to continually drip feed new things for players to uncover even in places they've been to a dozen times. By doing this in a number of locations in a number of towns, Orange simply plays the odds that you'll eventually see most of what the game offers, though when that may be can vary wildly from player to player. Similarly, they can be confident that your first trip to any town won't exhaust everything it has to offer, no matter how hard players may try. Manipulate the timer all you like, sometimes there's just a locked door, which is itself another motivator to try and find a source for its key.
Dislikes: Boy Scouts, Niles, Mud
Despite the obvious potential sources for conflict within the cargo boys group, the game never really puts you in direct competition with one another. Players are introduced to the concept of cargo boys at a collective meeting at the cargo boy HQ which tries to be more humorous than establishing any stakes. A room full of initiate cargo boys...
...and cargo girls leads to establishing the credentials of joining to be "be human". This causes an alien to leave in disgust. Listen, it's a silly game.
You do however have one cargo boy that will give you trouble, a rival so-to-speak named Niles. Niles is your typical rich jerk who bumps into the player at the start and immediately goes feral. Yelling how it was you who bumped into him, how he's an elite and important person from Timelapse city and filthy kids from Neeston shouldn't waste their time in sales and should certainly know better than to draw the ire of the wealthy.
While the other cargo boys aren't entirely MIA once the game begins, they're a surprisingly rare sight in a world that revolves around child couriers. Appearances are brief during promotion ceremonies, but even then the focus is always placed on Niles and how he can be a jerk. He'll throw out wild accusations about the player stealing money to reach the promotion level, with the protagonist rightfully asking why he insists on being so abrasive. Pretty smart for a 10ish-year old honestly. Alas, he's not so smart as to avoid engaging with Niles any further, leading to a wager placed that the first cargo boy to reach level four will receive the other's money.
Niles is a pretty arch typical character who wouldn't be all that interesting as a villain on his own. What makes it work so well though, is that the adults in the room at Cargo Boy HQ are also sick of this kid. They can't show any favoritism of course, so all we get is the occasional sigh when it looks as if Niles is going to be the number one cargo boy for the year. When it looks as if Niles is going to win the bet, the adults grumble about how they wish it would be anyone else. This kid needs to be brought down a peg.
To the adults he's no threat of course, just a spoiled brat who is constantly causing problems due to his ego. ZZT games with child protagonists usually don't offer much perspective from adults, so it's a refreshing change of pace to see some portrayed as more than just authority figures or cardboard cutout characters. Adults in ZZT games starring children tend to be clueless to what's going on, so seeing some adults wishing Nile's parents taught him any manners is a welcome departure from the norm.
Even as the antagonist, scenes with Niles are fairly rare. He's only seen during the game's cinematic boards, which eschew the usual "box in a corner" model for a more natural "sit down and the meeting will begin" format. The real obstacle to a cargo boy's success can be found out on the roads between towns which with the vast amount of backtracking throughout the game make them the true villain.
Enter the scouts. Not just any scouts, the "Buffy Boy Scouts". The Buffies appear to be no different than actual boy scouts, found in matching uniforms doing outdoorsy activities on the roads between cities. Their group functions consist of archery, with their projectiles crossing over the road to reach their targets; as well as ball throwing, again, with scouts lined up on opposite sides of the road and little care for any traffic. Woe to any cargo boy that doesn't watch where they're going, lest they get smacked in the face.
The dynamic between adult and child is worth noting here as well. The Buffy Boy Scouts are never far from their troop leader who is unwilling to acknowledge the problems they're causing for anyone using the roads. Instead, he'll politely smile and say hello, rhetorically asking if his boys are getting in your way at all. The oblivious to everything around them attitude is much closer to the norm for authority figures in ZZT. As a child, you are powerless to do anything to the Buffy Boy Scouts that outnumber you, nor can you hope to have your needs acknowledged by an adult who has no responsibility over you.
The scouts seem like easily justifiable obstacles to get in the player's way. Like everyone else though, they're presented as individual characters and not just a row of objects shooting south on repeat. Take a ride on the subway from Imaginapopolis to Neeston, and the cargo boy will run into the troop on their way back home. Here the kids aren't in the middle of an activity and speak freely, revealing that they have a low opinion of cargo boys. There's a lot of youthful territorial behavior, praising their group and dissing the cargo boys as sissies who sell and play with dolls. Had they been given more screen time, they would be just as likely as Niles to root for your failure.
They're even jerks to Joe Bunny!
The last regular obstacle preys on impatient players just as much as the scouts do. Road that are washed out or cut through the marsh-lands are often covered in mud. For the most part, the mud is decorative, turning gray roads brown, and can be traversed like any other terrain. On muddy boards though, some of the mud is actually a hidden object that flags the player as dirty if they touch it. The cargo boy trips and face-plants in the muck, which negatively impacts the way certain characters act towards the player. Exporters will refuse to sell to such an unprofessional salesperson, importers won't buy from you, certain NPCs will simply tell you to leave, and places like the science museum will refuse entry lest you dirty up the place.
The solution for any accident is to take a shower, which requires paying for a hotel room where you can also rest to restore health. There is one home where you can befriend a parent's child elsewhere and be welcome to borrow their shower for free, though it's so far out of the way and later enough into the game that the money for a hotel room is essentially nothing by the time it's available.
There's no tell for what mud tiles are dangerous, requiring players to make a note of any they find. The good news is that you can't become muddier, so once you do fall, you can experiment freely with finding an easily repeatable route through muddy boards.
Best Supporting Cast
Finding things to do in town rather than just existing as a pack mule is what makes The Score such a memorable experience. Orange has made sure the townsfolk have more to say than "Welcome to Imaginapopilis". Some of them do the obvious thing of wanting to buy directly from the cargo boy, but there's some real creativity on display here.
For one, the game has just a hint of fantastic elements to it. You may be hustling real world products, but that doesn't mean you won't befriend scientists with teleportation technology, talking rabbits that just happen to be big fans of Bugs Bunny, and running into Gandalf traveling with an entourage of dwarves.
The world feels chipper, practically idyllic at times. It's a mixture of Earthbound, Pokemon without the Pokémon, and Leave It To Beaver. The game is peaceful, with the only real conflict being a bit of a rivalry between the cargo boy and a snobby rich kid plus some oblivious scouts.
It's a world where small children enter the workforce not only in a non-exploitative manner, but where they are free to roam unsupervised, book hotel rooms, talk to strangers, and haul pricey electronics through marshlands. Nobody finds any of this unusual.
Everything in the game that isn't directly related to buying and selling cargo has a rather unique freedom. Exploration is all that matters, which gives Orange free reign to pretty much make anyone and anything he wants to when it comes to people to interact with. The variety of personalities and characters to meet do a lot to give each city its local flavor.
Scientists working on teleportation technology? Check. Talking rabbits? Check. Disgruntled hotel owners? Check. Adults that awkwardly ask you to leave their home? Check. The list goes on and on. You'll meet cops concerned for your safety, students making music with computers, kids that want Furbies they aren't close to affording, sculptors with predictions on how the human body will evolve, and so many more. All have little to say, making them hard to really elaborate on as their stories are pretty straightforward, but there are just so many that have no other comparable NPC in other games that they contribute so much uniqueness to the game. Never did I find myself wishing I didn't have so many folks to talk to, only curiosity at what strange character I might meet next, and wondering if they were there to be a silly inclusion like the dwarves on the subway or going to be relevant to completing the game fully like the cop whose anniversary is coming up soon.
They all contribute to keeping players busy, as each new bit of information or special item uncovered gives you reason to double check if someone is about to become important, and because their character is bite-sized, quickly established, and unique, if you ever have a hunch as to who might be interested in a new watch, you'll have no trouble finding them again.
Minmax Or Bust
Ultimately any enjoyment gotten from The Score comes down to whether or not players have things to do, or if they are stuck either waiting for time to advance or backtracking again and again along the same roads.
As much joy as the game can bring, it pales in size to the work players have to perform to get it. Things move at a glacial pace, with a few moments of excitement when the game introduces players to some new stuff.
This game effectively has two states. You are either opening presents on Christmas morning: exploring a new city, meeting new people, and uncovering secrets. Or, you are waiting for Christmas. Counting down the days until something changes.
As soon as I realized the market had randomness, I looked into how it was being done and to see how best I could manipulate it to my benefit. This is a game of slowly watching a number go up as you repeatedly cross the same screens, dodge the same projectiles, and buy the same goods to sell for the same prices.
Using cheats to look at the flag for what day it was and to be able to adjust ZZT's game speed without quitting to the title screen, I was able to minmax my way to victory. A process that still took over three hours. You buy knives until you can also afford to buy finger boards. You buy those until you can afford Furbies. You buy Furbies until you can afford computers. You buy computers until you can afford TVs.
Orange did quite a bit to try and take the edge off, but even the shortcuts sanctioned by the developer rarely do much to save time. Once players reach level two, the subway system becomes affordable. It still requires you to head to a station, enter the train board, wait for the doors to open, wait for the train to "move", and wait for the doors to open again to exit.
For some routes, I don't even think it actually saves time. The only real perk is that the subway is devoid of obstacles which means less time stopping to avoid being hurt or maneuvering to avoid mud, which translates to less time detouring to hotels to rest and shower.
There's no easy fix here. A lot of things need to be sped up to keep the game from becoming a grueling endless march. Being able to carry nine of each item rather than five would have helped. As would have reducing the amount of score needed to get promoted. The problem is, selling at anything other than the highest possible price does nothing but adds additional identical trips to your itinerary until you can get promoted to the next level.
Orange's solution is to entice the player with other things they can do that will benefit players. You can take a break from hawking TVs in Timelapse to play mini games and exchange them for prizes with monetary value. The effort is appreciated, yet the benefit from doing these optional activities, whether that be a mini game or buying keys to open locked rooms with goodies inside never provides a substantial enough reward to surpass just buying and selling goods like a cargo boy should.
If you spend a bunch of time exploring the swamp and find a wallet with 200 score in it, rather than celebrate, you'll be thinking that it would've been faster to just run another shipment of Furbies to Chaylice instead. Everything you do in this game boils down to making a number go up. Selling goods is the most efficient way of doing so.
Your other options are only less tedious in the short term. The novelty of doing something else for a change makes earning 200 points in two minutes vanishes once players realize that they could have earned 400 points in the same amount of time, and they need to grind out 7,000 to reach the next promotion.
Without taking advantage of modern source ports to be able to more quickly (it was still a pain) ensure items were bought at the lowest price and sold at the highest, this game would take ages to complete. It would be a matter of whether you felt like selling low for minuscule profit or standing outside the export center and waiting an unknown amount of time for prices to change, hopefully for the better. There's an objective fastest way to play, and a subjective fastest feeling way to play. Once the illusion of options breaks down, you'll realize that whether you're selling PCs or finding a hidden treasure you're still walking to a town, entering a building, and touching an object to make your score go up. Some objects just happen to disappear afterwards.
The way everything gets reduces to numbers begins to carry over to other stats as well. Sure, you might wind up for one reason or another having ammo and torches, but ugh why care enough to go to a pawn shop to sell them? It's not a TV, so why waste your time?
Even your health begins to suffer. At some point you'll find yourself contemplating whether it's faster to avoid hotel rests by carefully passing by the Buffy Boy Scouts' arrows or if you'd be better off just holding down an arrow key yourself and hoping to make it through unscathed. Is it better to lose time waiting to cross or will you actually be better off taking any hits and having the hotel room be your time spent not hauling goods? I have no idea where the truth lies, but it feels faster to just hold down a key rather than insert numerous tiny delays every trip.
