The previously played game, Space Station ZZT ended up being a blast. For an early ZZT world by two authors working together to do more than rehash Town, it succeeded at exactly that. Incorporating more story elements, less derivative board designs, and a then novel setting of a space station that had been abandoned after the robots began to malfunction and attack its crew. Jerry Hsu and Jesse Chang wound up making their first foray in ZZT one of the better titles available early in its history, winning me over with cool vehicles, and a number of common ZZT space game tropes that it appears to be the originator of.
All the while, I wanted to check out its sequel, which I remembered being even more impressive from an old unfinished stream. Finally getting to sit down and explore it in full, I'm glad to report that Starbase ZZT not only maintains all the positives of its prequel, but it builds on them significantly. The game is considerably larger in scope, with more to the story than a single scroll of motivation. This time the ship's AI computer has gone a bit screwy. Systems are misbehaving, power is flickering, and unlucky members of the crew are in need of your adventuring skills to rescue them.
That's right, we've got a crew this time! There's cast! And they're more than just purple keys in disguise. Each one has their own areas of expertise which allow them to make vital repairs to the starbase, opening up new areas for the player to explore until it's possible to contact mission control back on Earth and find a way to save the base, or sheepishly head to the escape pods and let history repeat itself, abandoning it for the machines, just like Space Station ZZT before it.
The authors demonstrate considerable growth in their skill-set for this sequel. The starbase is filled with creative traps as before, but now much better integrated into world around them. Now each screen feels like a new location on the ship, no longer a screen filling ZZT board with little connection to what's around it. Players will access computer data banks for information via the Automatic Archive. They'll avoid arcs of electricity in the teleporter room, beaming themselves down a nearby planet filled with carnivorous plants and hostile alien fauna to rendezvous at a long range teleporter capable of bringing in people from Earth. They'll deal with genetically engineered animals in the bio-labs that have been set loose, and so much more.
All of this is set across a lovingly crafted world. The base feeling significantly more like a man-made structure than before, with some gorgeous views of nearby planets and a massive rocket ship docked with the base. It's another show stopper for its time, and one that holds up excellently even today. But there's much to cover here, so let's not delay. The base is in danger and there's only one hero who can save it: ...he doesn't have a name.
Starbase of Operations
Starbase is no mere retelling of Space Station ZZT with the benefit of hindsight. The sequel manages to call back to its predecessor while boldly going forward with a lot more new material than rehashes of what Hsu and Chang accomplished before. A scroll at the start ties the games together. Our protagonist is the same hero from the previous game who managed to escape the dreaded Space Station ZZT alive. Upon arriving back on Earth, he was hailed as a hero. However, one year later, his stardom has begun to fade.
Still, life is easy for him. He's a bit of a guest of honor on the newly christened Starbase ZZT, having no formal job title or responsibilities in contrast to everyone else on board. He's here as an insurance policy. His quick-thinking and survival skills shouldn't be needed, and this mission should be a relaxing one. As long as nothing goes wrong, that is.
The game begins with said hero in his quarters, an opening theme plays and immediately casts aside any worries that this game will offer little improvement over the first game. There he discovers that the replicator intended to provide breakfast isn't working. A quick check of his email shows that an all hands meeting has been called, but upon arriving, only one person is there, and they're panicking as the security lasers have been incorrectly activated, leading to a dangerous arrangement of blink walls. Right away the game gives the player their first challenge, finding a way to slip past the lasers in order to reach a panel to disable them.
This is easier said than done, as Hsu and Chang's knack for taking basic board premises and fine-tuning them to excellence is as intact as ever. The lasers cycles are staggered, so walls frequently cut one another off, alternating which one blinks first. Seemingly safe tiles to wait on betray players when a different wall gets priority next time due to the deliberately inconsistent timings.
The desks also make it a bit risky to run horizontally, a temptation that can get impatient players zapped. Rather than rush in, you'll actually be better off taking longer routes through more walls where the amount of ground to cover between blink phases is shorter. It's one of the more impressive blink wall boards I've seen, pulling off giving players an open environment without removing the challenge outright in the process.
When the terminal is reached, the authors put in a lot of work to make the board transform itself from a deadly trap to a mundane work environment. Boulders methodically are pushed to guarantee that no stray beams are on before the blink walls themselves are erased.
Completely normal afterwards. This is now any other ZZT office environment.
The rescued Dr. Jerry Hsu (where have I heard that name...) gives our hero a task. Search and rescue the remaining crew members and bring them here so they can figure out what's going on with the computer, and maybe find a way to fix it. Players get a few leads to guide them, which given the size of the starbase, is quite appreciated. In practice, the station is wisely locked up to prevent players from going places that aren't yet relevant, but this won't be known at the time which helps make the initial exploration of the station less overwhelming.
Now primed to look for crew mates, the central hub for the game gives players an explosion of choice. Five exits in all four directions plus two passages means a lot of roads to travel. Hsu and Chang opt to take a direct approach in telling players what they'll find along each road, writing directly on the board itself. Text on the board like this is something that was frowned upon for a time in ZZT. It would be called ugly and immersion breaking. Proper ZZTing would be to add another terminal to the board that could be touched for the same data in scroll form.
But that sucks! There are so many paths here that I'd never remember what's where, and would find myself either checking the sign every time the board is visited (which is plenty. It's the hub.) Alternatively, I'd just stop caring about what is where, and just pick a direction I hadn't gone in and start moving. Putting the text on the board lets players actually make an informed decision without demanding any of their time.
The layout itself, is gorgeous. This is no crossroad of perpendicular lines. The hallways gently curve from a central sphere, and there's a distinct lack of symmetry to the board, allowing your eye to see something a little different wherever it looks.
The doors are classic Trek, sliding into the adjacent walls to stay out of the player's way. The larger doors have dedicated buttons that open quickly before closing again, dividing up the board in a way that cleanly delineates the central orb from the rest of the base. Then we have these revolving doors that use conveyors and boulders to load players in and out at specific intervals. There's so much here to indicate a high tech environment, that it's impossible not to fall in love with it.
The hater in me may cry about the need to wait for the opening in the conveyors, and the slower rate of travel than just walking a few tiles. The button-powered doors mean futzing your way to the side and waiting for what could have just been a hallway. Delays are introduced where they don't have be. Yet it's so clearly worth the minuscule waits so make the space that more more interesting of a location. Every ZZT board where there aren't any obstacles could just be a straight line. Who needs personality?
More Being A Hater
The sprawling layout of the station makes for a game filled with sights to see and obstacles to overcome. Hsu and Chang never turn down a chance to impress players with yet more to soak in on their travels, but the massive scope of your environment isn't without drawbacks. Some of which I'm willing to bet aren't only in my head.
Unlike Space Station ZZT, which set players loose until they collected a few keys and found the escape ship that required them, Starbase restricts players by flags. This lets the world be significantly more sci-fi than before when you're looking for people with teleporter access codes or skills to repair an out of order turbo lift. The trouble is, these aren't things the player does. They're things done by the crew once they're been safely returned to the lab.
This method makes it frequently difficult to realize what's changed whenever a plot event occurs. For the crew members, you can head back to the lab to talk with them, which usually provides some guidance, but it's not a pleasant walk to make every time something must have happened. Not all the events are tied to crew members either, which can lead to some genuine frustration in the late game when it's hard to tell what even remains to be done.
The arrival of Dr. Friel is the worst intended instance of this. Once communications with Earth have been re-established, mission control tells players to wait for Dr. Friel to arrive with a software fix for the computer. Naturally, the place for this is on the small teleportation station established on the surface of the planet. However, when you check the teleporter, it's not yet the scheduled time of arrival. So how do you advance time in a ZZT game where it only does so the author says it does?
The answer is a contrived one. The actual way to advance the clock requires finding a key to another room of the station. No information is given on where to acquire this key, and I wound up searching through game code to figure out who needed to be talked to.
It's of course, customer #4 in the McDonalds board! (The game's sense of humor is sharper than ever.) This fine person is always present on the board, simply saying "Hello" if you speak with them prior to contacting Earth. There's no change here to observe. Players need to get so desperate that they begin talking to seemingly ancillary NPCs that appear to be no more than part of a punchline. Even when you do get the key, it's only half the battle.
Opening a door isn't the same as it being 14:00. The door allows access to a sleeping person as well as a number of lockers for crew. One of which has a clock in it.
A clock that makes a joke about how clocks don't talk. This seems like any other joke the authors could find a spot to squeeze in. It's another load bearing one however. To actually advance the time, you need to check it again and again. That might not be too bad were this just a clock in a room somewhere, but this is the middle a row of lockers.
Players will inevitably run across the row, seeing what they can find inside, and then consider it done. These lockers provide a few gags, some blaster ammo, and a hostile alien that takes a chomp out of the player for disturbing it. Everything about the lockers as a collective reads as a one-off thing for the player to investigate. Not the location of a game-critical plot advancement.
The space walk portion of the game is also a major annoyance. In the first game, going out into space meant finding a few exits to a secret satellite that had one of the game's keys. This time, the only thing you need to do out in space is present on the very board where you step into it. Poor Carl is the victim of a malfunctioning airlock and is unable to re-enter the station until the player flips a switch to turn one of the airlock exits back into an entrance. That's all you need to do, and it's perfectly fine, with some amusing text if you answers his cries for help (in space, nearby persons can hear you scream) without flipping the switch first, causing you to both be stuck outside until you run out of oxygen and suffocate!
However, you can still explore "outside", and quite a bit! The boards are very much designed around the player being outside, leaving just a little bit of room so that you hug the base's exterior. You can actually wrap around a significant portion of the base, only stopping when continuing the board connections would mean drawing new boards just for this scenario. At one point there's a satellite providing auxiliary power to the station that can be destroyed by a clumsy player for no particular reason. It sets a flag, but it goes unused, making for a very long and useless trip. You'll be out in space for nine boards to reach the satellite, and then of course be motivated to continue exploring for a total of twelve screens before discovering that you have to turn around and traverse it all again. It's miserable, and thanks to the flag going unused, entirely meaningless.
All the while, you may be tempted to explore the tiniest distance away from the starbase which is rewarded with instant death. Realistic? Sure. Fun? Ehhh...
This is admittedly more of a problem if you've played the first game, where taking a step away from Space Station ZZT was required to complete the game. The assumption is that this may carry forward to this one, and so I meticulously died in deep space again and again and again. One time, entirely on accident as I had to go around a bulge in the starbase's shape that pushes players to the edge of the board to squeeze past, and overstepped. Some of the more novel ways of dying are definitely a part of the game's humor, I just wish it had been kept to perhaps the board with the airlocks where you actually were moving away from the base a good amount when leaving the board rather than on every screen. If you don't want me to go a certain direction from a given board don't assign it an exit.
And of course it is with a heavy heart that I must reveal that this game is bugged and unwinnable without opening the cheat prompt.
The computer core for the final showdown can only be reached via maintenance tunnel. These tunnels run through the base ...exactly like the space walk. That same twelve board walk in space, also has a layer within the base itself that can be followed. At the end of which, there's a passage that leads players where they're intended to go to complete the game. However, while the exit from the vents is present, there's no way to actually get inside them. The route begins at the airlock, where there's no way to get past a conveyor that blocks the entrance. I checked the code of everything on the relevant board. I looked for fake walls or objects that might let you enter the vents from the middle. Nothing works.
You're forced to zap your way through. Often when games have that one tragic bug like this, I worry if I'm overselling the problem. ZZT makes cheating trivial. You type ?ZAP once and the game can be completed as intended. Here though I think the bug hits particularly hard. You can see this passage very early on in the adventure by using a different access hatch for the vents. For basically the entire game players are well aware there's a passage here, though it's unclear if it's meant to be an entrance or an exit. As nothing tells you where it leads, it's easy to assume you just simply haven't gotten to the part of the game where you need to be there yet. When the time finally comes to enter it, you have no way of knowing that you're supposed to do so.
Unlike when you defeat a boss and the exit doesn't open, or you find some DYNAMITE only for the pile of debris it's clearly meant for to mistakenly check for TNT, there's no sense here the anything is actually broken. You'll keep wandering the base until you give up and look up the answer, wasting who knows how much time.
Oh, and for a final kick when you're down, that dozen board walk through the vents can be cut short. The observation telescope, if not retracted after players take a look, will block the path, forcing you to turn back, head to the observatory, and then do it all again. On the one hand, this is needlessly cruel, but on the other hand, this is perhaps the greatest troll on players ever conceived. The telescope doesn't even start out extended. If it blocks your path, it's because you didn't put your toys away. Were the authors intending to aggravate players, they have done an impeccable job of it.
Other annoyances don't felt so deliberate. Right away, when dealing with the security lasers in the western labs, a challenging board is made harder than intended due a lack of clear communication. What's the goal here? Should the player head to the trapped crew member? Perhaps one of these many computers () Surely it's the one that has a char near it. That's bound to indicate importance.
No? Well, the green # is certainly eye catching. Maybe head that way? Oh! Are those secrets in the walls? One yellow and one cyan? Still nothing?
Ah. It's the bracket in the lower left. Fair enough.
I won't pretend that bracket isn't emphasized enough or anything, but there are so many objects that seem suspicious or emphasized in some way that it's very easy to go out of your way for false leads. The numerous terminals print little messages about what software they're running, or yell about security alerts. The green object (the one I'm most mad about) does nothing. The terminal with the little block is Dr. Hsu's personal workstation. The mis-colored walls are where future rescued crew members are kept partially hidden until they need to be present here. I suspect this game predates the knowledge that placing an object over a different object allows it to be recolored without losing its code.
Doing something to cover up some of the false leads would be a big help. Putting some blink walls directly in front of where the crew members spawn to make them out of the player's reach would do the job just fine.
With a few rocky moments, mostly book-ending the game, there's a lot of game that remains with nothing to complain about. Starbase ZZT's flaws are best gotten out of the way now, lest they be seen as spoiling the quality of the game. There's far more to discuss where the game excels, making it one of the most impressive early ZZT worlds I've seen.
High Quality. High Tech
Not too long ago on the Discord, we were talking about how a number of ZZT games, past and present, suffer from starting the game off with so much text and background information presented at the very start that players don't yet have any idea what the game actually is to be able to really appreciate it.
Hsu and Chang take their own stab at this dilemma with the Automatic Archive. The game provides a brief bit of backstory at the start. You're the guy from the last game, now you're on this new starbase living a life of ease, until things go south again. Then it gets nicely underway. However, you can still read all kinds of information here that the authors couldn't dare to not share with players. It's entirely optional, and for those who engage with it, they'll find that it's a lot of fun to read given that the crew of this game is fictionalized versions of the game's authors and friends. Even so, it is just a sudden stop in playing the game, taking a good ten minutes to read all its information and listen to all the "entertainment" for material that is almost never relevant to the adventure.
Despite the time commitment, I do find this to be an excellent board. Not overwhelming players with detailed bios of the crew from moment one or a deluge of information on the station's development and facilities contained within was definitely the right call.
The unique "archive" format of information instead of a more typical list of links from a single menu fits in with the game's high-tech themes while also adding some natural, if brief, breaks from reading text. To access data, first you must tell a robotic arm which data cartridge you wish to withdraw from storage. It then zips over and grabs the media before handing it back to you. From there, you take a few steps to a player module where that information is presented. It adds a moment to step back into "playing ZZT" mode. A number of "entertainment" cartridges simply play music when loaded, helping to make the sheer number of carts more manageable as they aren't all walls of text.
The information contained on each cart isn't entirely fluff. While never essential, it can offer some useful tidbits of info for boards not yet seen. Learning about the planet the starbase is floating above will give players a heads up that many of the plants there are carnivorous and should be avoided when possible. The cart about AI psychology is (in addition to being a real treat today) explains the sort of games they like to play with humans, suggests that some games like Tic-Tac-Toe can only be won against them by cheating, and helps suggest that sympathy should be had for the malfunctioning AI that causes the events of the game to unfold. Did you know that so computers are uncomfortable playing Global Thermal Photon Torpedo War because they get stressed out at making decisions that will result in the deaths of millions of humans?
The computer being more than some annoying machine, an egotistical jerk that sees humanity as playthings for its amusement and instead one that feels joy and stress and sorrow just like humanity is a refreshingly optimistic idea. It's alive, and just as neurotic as we are is comforting in a way.
Learning about the authors crew is a treat as well. It really reads like some kids imagining the best possible future for themselves where they become super important scientists and invent all kinds of great things and are responsible for all sorts of breakthroughs. The future will be glorious for everyone involved. New lifeforms are created with xeno-biology. Dr. Hsu pioneered AI technology at the age of 18. Dr. Chang developed the fusion reactor. These kids are going places.
The entertainment section contains some conversions of classic tunes. Space Station ZZT had a few of these scattered throughout, all of which felt like they were being played at 75% speed. This is no longer the case. They're pretty good tunes! It's all certainly worth a listen:
The game also really leans into humor far more than its predecessor. Space Station ZZT had a few good gags like requiring a security deposit before heading into space or Buzz watching in disbelief as the player activated the warp drive on a damaged ship. This time, the laughs are everywhere, including more than just finding dumb ways to die. Sometimes, the comedy isn't even tangential to the game, being fully incorporated into the world surrounding it!
Digging through the crew quarters, one cabinet contains a pair of Mickey Mouse ears. What appears at first to be a touch of humor to reward players for bothering to explore all the cabinets does in fact set a flag. These ears are important! You'll never guess why.
Proceeding through the terrarium, the xeno biology labs feature pink elephants that have escaped their confines. By donning the ears, players can avoid being trampled and instead frighten the creatures and corral them into a cage before freeing a trapped crew member. It's hard not to smile as this "threat" and its resolution.
And then it comes full circle, with Jennifer thanking you for your help before politely asking if she can have her Mickey ears back.
Not that the dumb ways to die have gone anywhere. A closed off hall is dealing with a toxic waste spill, (a nice call back to the previous game). The well animated mess requires you to wait a bit for a robot to clean up the hazard enough to be not immediately fatal, but if you want to override the lockout...
The way the station itself is consumed by the corrosion, taking out everyone and everything inside once the hull is breached.
Re-establishing contact with Earth is a key part of your mission. Once the comms array has been fixed, you can report the emergency situation to get the ball rolling on a fix. Alternatively, you can try to order a pizza from Domino's.
The comedic timing makes gags like this even harder. Hsu and Chang really sell just how complex the communication system is by interspersing messages sent/received over the satellite with bullets shooting to/from the antenna. You get to watch as data is sent in and out, another great touch that leans in to the absurdity of trying to order a pizza. Alas, you call is taken as a prank and dismissed. McDonalds is going to corner the market here for sure.
And sometimes you get to eat a Dorito :)
