This month's choice fell on a small mini-game that should not be overlooked: ZZTris, by Masamune/Mwasson.
ZZTris is a Tetris engine for ZZT, something what only a few programmers have tried to create and sadly, they all failed. Masamune, however, managed to do it, which is awesome. Needless to say, this is a programming masterpiece.
ZZTris is just like Tetris: you get blocks (in different shapes) which start falling down. On their way down, you can rotate them. Your goal is create "lines", get score and keep your field clean. Well, you probably all know the story... ZZTris features three difficulty levels: easy, medium and hard.
The engine gets stuck sometimes and sometimes it also causes ZZT to get a run-time error. There's nothing much to do about the run-time errors. It's very hard to put such a complex engine into one ZZT board with a limit of 20k.
The graphics are very poor, but it doesn't really matter. It's all about programming here. Smiley14 (who was still Smiley13 back then) made better graphics for the engine, but they got lost due to another run-time error.
Overall, this mini-game is a great achievement and should definetely be in every ZZTer's collection!
