Egg On My Face
The worst part though, is that to finish the game, you need to do more than hit 30,000 points to get promoted to the maximum level. For drama purposes, going from level three to level four is presented as a race between the cargo boy and Niles. The two place a bet where the first person to get promoted gets to keep the other's score as well. In a world where a new computer's factory price is 400 score, getting an extra 30,000 is pretty huge.
Orange does something very clever during this chapter of the game, even if the consequences are to slow the game down even further. A hidden object in the Neeston Export Center checks when players hit 20,000 points. At this time, there are "supply issues" and you're unable to buy any more of the top-tier electronics.
The supply issues are resolved automatically when players reach 24,500 points. This means selling 4,500 credits of profit worth of Furbies and pocket knives. (For some reason finger boards are also unavailable.) That's a larger gap than the game's beginning goal of selling such items to reach 3,000, though it is somewhat faster as you'll have enough cash to immediately buy a full inventory.
This isn't communicated well. There is an NPC at the center that explains the supply issues, however the objects that players touch to buy items fall back to their default messages of being unable to buy these items. I genuinely thought the game was bugged at this point which would have made me livid.
Not that I felt all that happy after having to dig through the game's code to try and track down the bug in order to discover that this was all intentional.
So you suffer the shortage, and finally are able to amass the 30,000 points, beating Niles (you can't actually lose) by minutes. Just when you finally think the game is over, there's one last snag: the level four passes has been stolen. The solution, according to the official Cargo-Rules, is that if a cargo boy brings in a former level four cargo boy they can take their pass.
This is pretty arbitrary. It's clear why this is happening though. All those NPCs you've been talking to now need to be checked again to find someone that fits the bill. Niles meanwhile decides to travel up north to where his older brother lives to bring him in for show and tell.
I had absolutely had it with this game by this point, doing zero investigation on my own. I cracked open the Museum's file viewer and searched the code to find who I was looking for.
It wasn't Gandalf, or the music teacher, or the theater concession stand worker, or Joe Bunny, or the mayor of Chalyce... It was Whitey, a blind man that lives in a shack away from society on the road from Neeston to Imaginapopolis. Fair enough.
Problem: This isn't disclosed to players until they complete his side quest, which it now turns out is a mandatory quest. Whitey once had a golden chicken that laid a dozen golden eggs. The chicken ran off and the eggs are gone, and he would like the eggs back.
So now, after all this time players are now treated to finding a dozen hidden eggs around the entire world solely to get an ending.
This is hardly the first hidden item hunt in ZZT. Nadir's port of Fantasy World Dizzy does essentially the same thing, depriving players of an ending until they go back and find all the gems. I assume this is a case of 80s British microcomputer game design being kept alive in the port.
But it wasn't alone. By the time The Score had been completed, the entire Gem Hunter Anthology had been complete. Those games at least gave players an ending for finding some of the gems, offering true endings for folks who found them all.
Both of these examples are nightmares to try to find everything within without looking at guides or the editor, and The Score joins their ranks while managing to be the most hair-pulling experience of them all. You see, Dizzy and Gem Hunter are fun. This game led me to believe I had finished all my work and then gave me a new assignment.
Whenever I play something for an article, I try to do as I'm told to get the experience the author intended me to have. Just because I didn't expect find every egg on my own didn't mean I wouldn't try to get them over the course of the game. I still wanted to explore every location, talk to every person, and engage in as much the game had to offer as I could.
This gave me a head start of a single egg.
In the Timelapse police department, players can see one of the eggs in the holding cells. They can also, as a surprisingly radical move for a ZZT game of this era, pay the bail of the prisoners to have them released, which keeps the doors open and allows the egg to be acquired.
A second egg that I knew how to get, and just hadn't bothered can be purchased as a prize for gems in the Timelapse Science Museum. The games here aren't very involved, nor do they reward many gems, so I decided to just skip this one until I had to get it.
Egg number three can be found in Timelapse city as well. The pawn shop has a door that can't be interacted with normally. It vanishes on its own once the cargo boy is on his egg quest.
The fourth egg also can't be found until the need for them arises. The next time the cargo boys swings by Mike's transport station in Neeston, they'll find Stan from the science museum visiting to check out the device. In the process of using it, they drop a golden egg.
The Teddy Theater in Imaginapopolis has a purple door with the fifth egg inside in the restrooms. Purple keys can be acquired from the music school for playing a music reciting game which are there able to be used to open a few doors with prizes inside. You can keep playing even after opening all these doors, and need to do so to get a spare purple key.
A sixth egg can be found in a slightly awkward spot, that would be very unlikely to be found prior to committing to the egg hunt, though isn't too difficult to reach once you're looking. The subway car from Imaginapopolis to Timelapse is the only one that doesn't have a wall on the eastern side, allowing players to move to a new board where the egg is found in plain sight.
This one gets a pass due to a man on the subway talking about how he's seen treasure in the back of the car before.
It's unlikely to be found early on though, as the trip is one players never would want to bother with. Players have to be level three to access Timelapse, and would have little reason to bother going back to Imaginapopolis once they can. You'd only really ride this train if you got your city names confused or if you really wanted to see all the people on the subway. Honestly though, you might.
These are what I would consider the good eggs. You can get them by either revisiting a location during the end game when you're going to be hunting down a level four cargo boy anyway, or behind doors whose methods of unlocking them are straightforward.
Then we get to the bad eggs. Some are still within the realm of possibility, but some demand way too much scouring of every possible space something could be hidden to be discovered.
The Yellow Inn in Imaginapopolis has two possible rooms available. One of which has the seventh golden egg inside. Requesting a room is hard coded to assign players the non-egg room twice, and then the egg room.
This one is kind of borderline. I was able to find a safe route through the mud on the road between Neeston and Imaginapopolis quickly so I didn't really need to make use of its hotel very often. Players that just run through the mud and accept that they'll need to pay to wash up before buying more high-end goods again are likely to run into this one while working on reaching level three.
On the other hand, this entire game revolves around maximizing your profits. The moment you realize that hitting a mud tile means paying for a hotel room, you are going to start looking into ways to avoid that mud. Since there's no penalty for falling into mud additional times, it's perfectly normal cargo boy behavior to throw yourself in as much as possible to learn where you'll slip and where you'll step safely.
For egg number eight, players need to return to Timelapse yet again. This time, they need to enter one of the skyscrapers in the background by just blindly walking at solid walls to find the one that's actually a passage. Nothing in the game hints that you can do this, making it the actions of the desperate.
The same is also true of the ninth egg. On the muddy portion of the road to Timelapse, there's an invisible passage in the corner of a tree.
Incredibly, the egg inside isn't immediately up for grabs. Instead, it's protected by a breakable wall that needs to be shot first. Nearly every board in this game disables shooting, and those that don't seem to have been an oversight. This one wall is the only time the cargo boy is meant to shoot. Because of this, and the fact that ammo can be sold in various places, I didn't have any on hand when I was searching for the rest of the eggs, and said the heck with it and zapped.
The alternative was to run the gauntlet of boards to reach the ammo hut on the pier and win some in a shooting gallery game. No thank you, I'll skip the frustration felt by anyone who discovers this without any ammo on them.
It's also worth pointing out that this isn't a kid throwing a rock or a BB pellet or anything. A late game opportunity for selling ammo is to exchange it at the police station to "keep it off the streets". Cargo boy has gun.
Eggs ten and eleven are found together. They're just in the back of the Imaginapopolis pawn shop behind a locked door. Players won't know what's behind the door until they find the key, but it's a locked door, you're gonna wanna find out how to open it.
The answer is practically worth its own section.
The first step is getting the red key. This can be acquired from a the police station. There's a cop that's lamenting not knowing what to give his wife for their anniversary with the key being the reward.
The cop in turn needs a gold watch. This can be acquired on the subway going from Imaginapopolis to Timelapse. One of the riders is looking to make a deal, offering up a gold watch in exchange for something that won't be coming out for another year.
The rider in turn needs a DVD player. This can be acquired in Chalyce City. Joe Bunny will beg the cargo boy to give him their "Bugs ring" which is indeed named for Bugs Bunny. According to him, it was once a cargo boys item that got discontinued a few years back. Give him the ring and he'll give you a DVD player that the cargo boys will be selling next year in exchange.
Finally, to get the Bugs ring that's used to start this entire trade sequence off, the cargo boy needs to buy it from the science museum's prize counter for 150 gems.
Between this and the egg bought from the same location for gems, that's 250 needed. That's a lot of time playing mini games. There are a few larger caches that can be found in one-off form from talking to Stan the scientist repeatedly, or lucking out into finding some in the salt marsh. For a repeatable source of gems, players have to play games that provide four to seven gems at a time.
Following the trades backwards like this, it looks extremely unlikely for anyone to unravel it. Starting from the beginning however, it's not as outlandish as it seems. The ring is obviously a weird and unique item, and while the ring's description doesn't mention the bunny, the clerk that gives you the item suggests giving it to a Bugs Bunny fan. Joe Bunny is the stereotypical choice.
Joe in turn if talked to again after getting the DVD player says a friend of his that rides the subway a lot might be interested in it. That narrows things down quite a bit, though there are a number of possible subway routes to check.
As for the watch to the cop, well, why not I guess?
Like everything else in this game, Orange does his damnedest to make the intolerable tolerable. Like everything else, it's still quite the process to get through.
Only one egg remains.
It too is found behind a locked door. The final egg is in the Imaginapopolis art museum where it's part of an exhibition of sculpted golden eggs. The creator found the original and found herself inspired.
This time the quest is for a green key.
The key can be found behind a cyan door in the science museum. The cyan key can be purchased from the locksmith for 200 score.
Congrats! That's all twelve eggs. This last one may seem a bit anticlimactic and like it belongs with the easy eggs listed at the start. You're 100% right. When I was playing this game, I completely overlooked the green key just out in the open in the museum. I even had the key purchased already! Then, when looking into how to find a green key, I incorrectly assumed it would be given out via an object's code and genuinely thought that this game was bugged. Only when writing this did I think "Maybe I should double check with Zookeeper".
>>> import zookeeper
>>> z = zookeeper.Zookeeper("Score.zzt")
>>> for b in z.boards:
... for e in b.elements:
... if e.name.lower().endswith("key"):
... print(e, b.title)
...
Blue Key Pawn Shop Backroom
Green Key Timelapse Science Center
Can you imagine farming 30,000 points, then hunting down eleven eggs only to have the game break at the last possible moment? To be unable to see the ending, the big celebration for hours of hard work? I'm so incredibly relieved to find out that this I didn't actually need to zap the door to the final egg.
...Yet I sure am noticing that I seem to have two flags tracking my eggs instead of one.
@Golden Egg
[...]
:egg6
#clear eegg5
#set egg6
#die
#end
The greatest fear, realized. When you collect your sixth egg, a typo prevents the flag for the fifth egg from ever being cleared. All eggs collected afterwards will see egg5 still set, and give you a sixth egg again and again. Cheats are back on.
The last glimmer of hope, was that perhaps not every egg object had this typo. The eggs placed on boards to collect were likely to be copies of one another, so it was no surprise that they were all affected. Maybe if you had your sixth egg be from one of the more unique eggs, you could at least theoretically work around it.
Ten of the eggs are identical, save for the accidental addition of blank lines at the start of the code (hitting enter one too many times when putting the object into the ZZT editor's buffer). The egg dropped by Stan in the transport room is named @Egg rather than @Golden Egg. It shares the typo.
It would come down to the egg purchased from the science museum. It's a bespoke object that just might have been written up before deciding to include an egg and thus all the flag handling code. If the code was copied, it was all over. If not, then some really awkward routing would make it possible.
@Gem Exhchange
[...]
:huh
#take gems 100 toopoor
#send GoldenEgg:go
#zap huh
#end
This too proved broken. An invisible copy of the standard egg object is hidden on the board, with its :touch label replaced with a new one that the clerk sends it to. All is lost.
After everything this game puts the player through. You get 95% through it only for it to finally break down. It's tragic really. As much of an unfun slog as this game becomes, it's really something else. There's so much ambition here. Orange698 seems rather aware of what he's asking players to do in order to get through this, and I cannot deny that he put in a ton of effort into not just the main path, but in building up the rest of the world to try to prevent the game from becoming so repetitive.
It might not have been enough, but this game is impossible to not admire. There's no other ZZT game like it as far as I'm aware. It's taking an established genre of trading games and fitting it into ZZT while trying its damnedest to cater to ZZTers' interests in more varied gameplay. It's something special no doubt, and just tragically falls short of accomplishing its rather lofty goals.
Like hundreds of other ZZT worlds, a bit of cheating makes the unwinnable winnable, and the game can be finished with a -EGG5 after grabbing your sixth. That one cheat spoils the game, forcing a disclaimer to be added to any recommendation for the game. Yeah, you can play this game, and get some genuine enjoyment out of it. Just remember: At this one arbitrary moment, to type in this mantra lest you doom yourself to more excessive work and completely harsh the buzz just to see the final moments of a game that will almost certainly have gotten old by the time you reach it.
Final Thoughts
The Score! is a classic tale of a ZZTer flying too close to the sun. It's a game that is trying to do so much that almost pulls it off. This is the sort of game that should have held my interest for all of five minutes. A trading game in ZZT? Yeah sure, you buy ammo, torches, and gems on one board, then sell them on another ad nauseum. It doesn't sound fun, but it sure sounds possible. Orange meanwhile considered who you would be playing as, why you'd be motivated to sell things, what kind of places would be interesting to travel to, how to create obstacles that made sense, and just put in so much work into creating a world for the game to occur in. There are so many things to see and do in The Score! to make the game so much more involved than just the number grind of getting your score to go up.
There are plenty of flawed ZZT games where I feel like there's something obvious that's not being done. You've got the French vampires of Walter's Quest throwing the game's difficulty way out of whack. There's the utter lack of early game resources in Adventure Part 1. The Score! joins them, with its point thresholds being set too high and turning the motivation to explore via hidden golden eggs into a requirement that demands players exhaust so much of a densely packed game. Turn the numbers down! Cut the egg requirement in half! Players that want to max out everything about the game can still do so by not claiming their last promotion until they've maxed out their score, and the rest of us that don't want to join this cargo boy cult can have our fun and still get a happy ending.
Given the clever randomized aspects of the game, I'd love if the game had gone all in on them, and instead encouraged replaying the game to see everything rather than essentially force players to if they want to (almost) finish the game. Perhaps an emphasis could be placed on speed, using a flag to count the "weeks" passed with the timer. There just needs to be some reason for players to not simply wait until the correct moment to sell, and special events only available based on the timer could be more plentiful, allowing players to still amass cash even if they can't get a good deal. I don't know. It's all spit balling here really to just come up with something that could still be crammed into ZZT without asking for the entire game to be rewritten in the process.
Perhaps some method of adapting the clock to the obstacles faced on the routes. Using different passages with a different one opened depending on the day leading to variations of each route. Maybe the boy scouts are on the road one day, maybe it's muddy the next, maybe a stray dog needs to be evaded on the third. Something needs to break the monotony of it all, and it ain't riding the subway, which itself is a miserable process of waiting for doors to open and close and weirdly rigid paths of fake walls that have to be followed when boarding and departing at a station.
It's hard to suggest a game with this much stuff in it needs more, but the crux of the matter is that the game is still too repetitive and grindy. I know I didn't actually see everything the game has to offer. There's no reasonable way to discover anything you might have missed. When you reach a point where exploring rarely yields results, you're going to stop exploring. The main score grind just takes up so much time that it sucks all the oxygen out of the room. If you're buying and selling at subpar prices and not able to easily manipulate the timer, it will only take longer. It's an unbalanced ZZT game, just not in the typical sense.
Case in point, while digging into the game for writing this article I managed to discover a bass player that you can sell some ammo to. If you then talk to him fifty more times you can earn a whopping ...250 score. That's less than a single Furby sells for on a good day. Of course, if you talk to him 49 times and try to claim the prize, or talk to him 51 times, he refuses to speak with you again. It's a ton of work that's pure profit, and it takes more effort than just hawking a Furby.
Similarly, an off-colored tile on one route lets the player pick up some "Rich grass", setting a flag that nothing in the game checks for. There's already so much here. The score thresholds need to be toned down so that it stands a chance of being enough.
I want to like this game, and in many ways I do. It's quite different the usual adventure. A trading game sounds like a recipe for disaster, yet Orange698 manages to do so much here to make it worth at least some of your time. It's far from a game I'd suggest folks see through entirely, and normally I'd be all for exploring a game until the shininess fades, but the slow start makes it tough to suggest even a casual glance. If you're going into this one, you need to be ready to find a balance that works for you of sinking in the time to earn score legitimately against cheating in some extra points (again, requiring an enhanced ZZT source port). The Score! is absolutely one for the history books. The hall of fame is another story.
Stay golden cargo boy.
