Now back on Earth, Joel and the bots are shocked to discover that the movie monsters are on Earth as well! Much like an MST3K film, just when you think it's finally over you discover it's barely halfway done.
The next few screens consist nothing more than city streets with a bunch of enemies to shoot. Some of the buildings can be investigated as sources of health and ammo.
The path appears to split, but the player is only able to head down the alleyway where they meet up with Gypsy and proceed to Deep 13 after shooting a lot of lions in narrow corridors.
The entrance to Deep 13 is full of slimes which fill the room up with breakable walls, but can't actually harm the player. The player needs to shoot their way through the walls left behind if they find themselves cut off, but the game has been good with ammo distribution at least.
Poor Tom has nearly given up on stopping whatever it is the player is supposed to be stopping, and dumps some ammo on them to make up for any spent on the slimes.
Town of ZZT has a pretty famous board called "The Three Lakes" which is a zigzag path just like this one but only with three bodies of water. By having three bodies of water, progress can be made fast enough that the board becomes a fun challenge rather than here where it takes forever to get anywhere. Of course, unlike Town's board, this one doesn't return you to the entrance when you get hit, which makes things a bit more bearable than what it could have been.
Now this board is one which I actually like! It's a puzzle involving pushing boulders in such a way that you don't accidentally close off the critical path through the room. I can't recall ever seeing a puzzle like this in any other ZZT worlds, so it stands out as something original and fun to play through.
And after a fun puzzle, we're back to time waster boards. The centipedes will move back and forth along the corridors and the player has to slowly warp their way across the board. Since the centipedes have no room to turn around they're forced in one direction until they hit the end of a corridor. This makes it trivial to get through without getting hit as the player can just wait until the centipede is a safe distance from the exit transporters.
Town of ZZT has a pretty famous board called "The Three Lakes" which-
Wait a minute. This is the same board from earlier.
It's a mislinked passage error! The game is unfinishable in its default state.
After editing the game to start on what should be the next board, we get this work of art that is yet another maze.
By this point I had had it with this game.
And so we enter the boss rush phase of the game. This fight plays out the same as before. Gamera, friend of all children, continues to stand still and shoot bullets. This board also seems to have a leftover debug object in the corner that when touched gives a bunch of health and ammo and doesn't go away afterwards.
Next up is Daddy-O. My strategy is to pretend he isn't there.
Rather than fight Ken, you fight Rocky this time. Who behaves exactly the same as Ken, and also looks identical to Ken.
Rommel and his friend are back and just as easily pinned against a wall as before. There's no dialog in this room at all either which is kind of odd.
Boss #5 is Timmy, who shoots in a straight line and is immune to bullets. Timmy is essentially an evil Tom Servo that's colored black rather than gold. In the show they apparently used the Tom Servo puppet that was used in the theater scenes and decided to get some extra use out of him. At least I learned something here.
Timmy is defeated by touching him, which means taking a few shots.
TV's Frank will have none of this. He begins his attack pattern by moving in circles and shooting. Unlike Rommel there's enough room that he likely won't get caught against a wall making this the toughest boss yet, an incredibly low bar to clear.
He takes several shots to kill as well, with some different dialog between him and Joel happening with every hit.
The bots are there to give Joel some final words of encouragement before taking on Dr. Forrester.
Dr. Frank is a puzzle boss. The player can't shoot and has to use bombs to blast their way to him. There's a time limit as well so the player needs to move quickly as they'll lose health every half minute.
The player is going to lose health here no matter what as it takes nearly an entire column of bombs to be able to hit Frank once, and it turns out they need to hit him three times.
After bombing the doctor enough, he dissolves and the player is free to proceed to the next room.
The first Forrester is revealed to have just been a hologram, what a twist.
The real Dr. Forrester shoots a bullet out of the area he's enclosed himself in, and it changes direction whenever one of those purple objects gets hit. You can see the bullet towards the top left in that second screenshot there.
Of course, the bullet eventually loops back around and shoots Forrester, who is revealed to be yet another hologram!
Dr. Forrester is quickly defeated with the power of a drum machine. I really love the object being named "You have the right to remain...DEAD!"
With Forrester's last strength he activates Deep 13's self-destruct, and Joel needs to escape before the base goes up in flames.
The escape sequence consists of running down twisting corridors against a regular ZZT time limit. If you fail, you just lose 10 health and are warped back to the start of the screen, no big explosion and a game over or anything.
Once outside, you still have to outrun the explosion itself. The good news is that it's extremely slow, and anybody who can make it through the corridors on the previous time limited boards will have no issue at all getting through this one.
After making a successful escape and reuniting with the bots, Joel has done it. The game comes to a close and we get a little follow-up on what happens to each of the characters. I love Joel being a teacher, student, and janitor at the same school simultaneously.
The ending is a cliffhanger, which leaves a possibility for a sequel which never happened. Adam LaChapelle has no other known credited ZZT games.
Final Thoughts
MST3K for ZZT is simply bad. There's something ironic about a game whose source material is a show that lampoons poorly made movies being turned into a poorly made game.
While most of the games I've written about have had some merits, MST3K really brings nothing to the player. It exists as a small window into the mind of a fan of the show, and doesn't reveal anything to captivate one's interest.
It has a bug rendering the game impossible to complete without editing, the puzzles are trivial, the trivia serves no purpose, and its combat is just piles of lions and tigers with no real thought to the environment placed around them. Then you get multiple mazes to add to the tedium.
I find it difficult to come up with positive things to say, unlike Bug Town where the game was crude and felt pretty lacking, Janson went on to keep honing her craft, LaChapelle released this and nothing else. I enjoyed the boulder puzzle room, and the ascii art of the bots stands out, but playing this game is just unfun.
At points you'd almost thing it was trying to be bad in the spirit of the films watched on the show, but it doesn't seem self-aware enough to really be going for such a thing.
If you happen to try this one for yourself, you probably won't get much out of it. If you've never seen any MST3K the game won't make any sense to you, and if you have, you won't really get anything out of having that knowledge other than better odds on trivia questions.
I should really just relax.
