♦ Livestream of 3 ZZT worlds. ♦
♦ Stream Contents ♦
• (1:53) "Thug 2: Thug of the Jungle" by Brian McFee [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/thug2/]
• (12:57) "Thug In Space 3" by MacroSoft (1993) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/thug3/]
• (29:38) "Crim" by A$$A$$IN (2003) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/crim/]
A trio of what sounded like three crime related games only for the first two to not really be that at all.
Thug is an instance of a trilogy with a missing part one, forcing us to jump in and hope we could figure out what was happening. The answer wasn't crime. Except perhaps copyright infringment as Thug is more of a George of the Jungle kind of character that shares George's theme song.
Thug's pet lion Fluffy has been captured by poachers and so he sets across the jungle and river to reach the campsite and rescue him. This consists of shooting not-Fluffy lions, ruffians, and some weird boards that take place over the river but very clearly are not set on a bridge.
The camp is cute, with sleeping poachers all cozy in sleeping bags, and seemingly impervious to any noise Thug might make. A coding error causes the guards to not continuously check for the flag when the cage key is taken, so the mission becomes pure stealth.
It's a short world that suggests it was an early Brian McFee title, but it's cohesive enough to have a start, middle, and end.
The third game starts on the wrong board, which when corrected gives us the story of the X-Lacks trying to take over the galaxy. Thug jumps into the vaccuum of space and boards the S.S. Keester. Inside are some similar simple action boards and a few references to the ZZT game Attack of the Snargles.
No boss fight this time. Instead you use a computer and tell it to blow up the planet of X-Lackia and call it a day.
Two silly games.
But the third game, "Crim", really won us over. It's a Grand Theft Auto inspired adventure that starts with the player escaping from prison, making it clear right away how bizarre the game's logic will be. Once you escape you begin looking for work in the criminal underworld, learning about secret backrooms at McDonalds and discover the terrifying truth of how the curry gets made at Kamahl's Curry Castle in the mall food court.
It ended up being a surprisingly fun game about exploring a small city and having everything favor the protagonist. The number of people killed unintentionally to the player's benefit is surprisingly high! The mall has a few shops to explore and people to bother, or sometimes help as well.
Sadly, the game is incomplete and eventually you'll run out of things to do with no real indication that you've stopped. The game is also another victim of flag errors, requiring manual clearing to keep the game running smoothly. And, for the stream a number of edits were done to remove some ugly stereotypes from the dialog. The source material makes this one a bit rougher, making an unexpectedly enjoyable game a bit tougher to deal with in its natural state.
Still, we were left wanting to see more. Remove the ugly blemishes and there's something to this one.
♦ Play these worlds directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/thug2/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/thug3/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/crim/
♦ Originally streamed on November 17th, 2024 ♦
