♦ Livestream of 2 ZZT worlds. ♦
♦ Stream Contents ♦
• (5:26) “Blood Rush” by Trigger [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/bloodrush/]
• (1:00:25) “Kamikaze Ninja” by JDanWin (1998) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/kninja1/]
The drought is over! (For now)
After no new discoveries of long lost ZZT worlds for many a month, the unpreserved queue is finally populated with some streamable worlds and that means a return to the Wildcard streams. So we started with some more actiony sounding titles and got this series refresh off to a good start!
"Blood Rush" is an interesting one, as the game's author isn't obviously stated anywhere. But if you know your late 90s-era ZZT the author becomes unmistakable when "Anita Blue" shows up. Trigger (or Trigger Trap) is indeed Tseng of Triggersoft, author of the Gem Hunter series and known for having pretty much all his games set in the same universe and revolve around the same set of characters in different scenarios. And it still manages to feel like a Tseng game, albeit a very primitive one in comparison to his better-remembered works.
The title screen plays an animation of three warriors on top of a mountain waiting for their 4th buddy to show up when suddenly the monster that rules over it arrives and promptly wipes them out. Time passes and you eventually learn what happened to your friends and vow to get revenge. Using the "Trigger Trap Sword", you hack and slash your way around the mountain to become strong enough to challenge the beast.
Gameplay is pretty straightforward when it comes to touching and slicing up enemies, but Trigger is indeed an RPG lover and is constantly throwing players into RPG battles with a seemingly ever changing engine. Your attacks have dedicated buttons to press with different animations and damage values, but a lack of RNG in general means figuring out what color hits hardest and spamming that until you win.
The engines are very fragile, and can be broken by really mashing your attacks to interrupt animations. Some of the animations use bullets that are turned into stars for a flashy effect that looks cool until the bullets traveling down the health meters mean damage is suddenly nullified. But the variety of characters who come and go from your party, and unique enemy designs still make it a treat to push through.
The rest of the visuals aren't as interesting except when they are. That is, a few boards really stand out as being of much higher quality than the rest. Don't get too excited though, as the credits eventually confess to borrowing a few boards from the ZZT RPG series Rhygar that have had minor edits made to them.
The ending also gives you three possible paths which vary wildly. They're not tied to any actions you take, just a matter of which unlabeled passage you pick.
It's a fun little first(?) game. Just watch out for the fake inn that forces you to reload your save if you enter it!
Afterwards it's the unfortunately named "Kamikaze Ninja", which turns out to not be a playable game, but rather a short ZZT movie to watch. The ninja who politely is always referred to as KNinja beyond the first board, flies to Alaska to beat up some bad guys! They eventually get the upper hand and the big boss has him trapped in a cage of lava and demands he tells them everything he knows. He does a cool flip to escape.
He then meets one of the other ninjas who is trying to kill the rest to become the strongest, and the two tussle until KNinja reminds us of his name and grabs and throws the other ninja off the cliff with him. The game then ends on this cliffhanger (cliff-faller?)
It's not much, but it is well constructed and has some nice animation and sound. There's more to it than smiley faces walking in straight lines at one another which make it cute little animation to watch for yourself.
All in all, a neat set to return to, showing off the many fun surprises and unexpected game ideas you get with these old ZZT worlds!
♦ Play these worlds directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/bloodrush/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/kninja1/
♦ Originally streamed on August 31st, 2025 ♦
