♦ Livestream of 4 ZZT worlds. ♦
♦ Stream Contents ♦
• (2:08) "Ed Grimley in The Great Cowlick Rescue" by Unknown (1997) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/grimley/]
• (21:40) "Death To Barney 1" by Greg Gilbert [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/diebarne/]
• (45:31) "Death To Barney 2" by Greg Gilbert [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/dbarney2/]
• (52:22) "Yoshi's Quest" by ThePiper (1999) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/yoshi/]
Our final (expected) games featuring Barney the dinosaur and Yoshi the dinosaur.
Starting with an incredibly unexpected fangame of a Martin Short character turned Saturday Night Live success turned Saturday morning cartoon, Ed Grimley. He's just barely before my time, so I went in assuming the character was going to just be a fun character name for a ZZT game.
Unlike most recovered ZZT fangames, this one actually does a paretty solid job of getting you up to speed if you're unfamiliar. I learned about Ed's goldfish Moby, his landlord Leo Freebus (well, Freebitz in the game), and of course his triangle dance.
Freebus has captured your girlfriend and it's very short adventure to rescue her by shooting a few tigers, and visiting a bar which includes other characters like Homer Simpson, who brings up Barney (Gumble) leading to a moment of wondering if Barney the dinosaur was going to show up at all, or this was a just a misinterpreation of the Barney Homer was talking about. Barney (dinosaur) shows up soon afterwards, and even Ed Grimley, who seems like a decent guy, can't stand the dinosaur, whacking him with his triangle and filling the board with purple slime blood.
There's not much to it, but I've got to respect it for doing a good job with Ed's dialog now that I've since gone back and watched a few of the old sketches to get an idea of what this guy's deal was.
Then, the more direct approach, two games focused on killing the dinosaur. The first has a bit of a world tour theme, and wastes no time on "traveling". On one board you'll be at the white house, the next, New York City, then suddenly you're in Iceland playing the slot machines at their casino. The nice thing about Iceland is that their hotels have free munitions storage, letting players stock up on a gun and ammo before visiting the Iclenadic PBS (PBSC?) for the final confrontation.
Good luck defeating him though, as coding errors prevent you from actually harming him.
The sequel is less of the same. Nice graphics with STK colors, but the travel is much more limited and the game is overall shorter. Barney is a bit more aggressive, openly trying to kill the player first, but there's still not much excitement to be had. Your travels bring you to PBS and then off to China, to finish the job.
Lastly, a more lengthy adventure starring Yoshi on a quest to find total happiness in "Yoshi's Quest". Unfortunately, the tree of happiness has been stolen by WIZZOBOSER, leading you on a tour of Yoshi's island to recover the missing tree.
This one has some nice visuals, and represents the Mario aesthetic in ZZT fairly well, with smiling cloud backgrounds, rainbow roads, and a variety of environments to search through. Levels contain fruit to collect for health (we suspect it may be inspired by Yoshi's Story for the Nintendo 64), secrets to find, and enemies to fight in a faux-platformer side view with limited vertical movement.
While it could have been a lot of fun, the incomplete nature of the game really holds it back. Board connections are frequently missing or misplaced, mandatory secrets require touching one of dozens of identical tiles, and a chaotic arrangement of boards internally make it difficult to navigate the game as intended even when manually jumping to new levels.
Alas this extends to the bosses as well, with a few partially implemented, but unbeatable, and the confrontation with Wizzoboser having no code at all. For what's likely to be the last rediscovered Yoshi game anytime soon, it's a bit of a sorry end for the dinosaur everyone loves rather than hates.
♦ Play these worlds directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/grimley/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/diebarne/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/dbarney2/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/yoshi/
♦ Originally streamed on December 22nd, 2024 ♦
