NMZmaster's Star Trek: Battle Commander is the most ambitious of the ZIG worlds available. I was excited for it, expecting it to be a port of the vintage BASIC Star Trek game. It seemed like it would be possible to replicate in ZIG and would be a real show-stopper in terms of complexity.
The compilation time before the game can actually be played takes a moment. For the other titles it's been near instantaneous or done in just a few seconds, but this one actually takes a bit of time to load. Still nothing to absurd to wait through, but not what you'd expect from a ZZT clone.
The game's menu mimics the Enterprise's own systems.
The credits show off the non-functioning coloring methods for text and give a few shoutouts to various folks.
The game's documentation lays plans for a thick tome.
The controls show quit a bit of complexity. There's a lot to do here.
None of the tactics sections are implemented, but it again sounds like this game should have huge amounts of content available with all these different races available.
It's frankly overwhelming. Thankfully none of this stuff is actually written other than the engines which work as you'd expect, increase or decrease them to change speed.
The game itself places the Enterprise into combat immediately. There are clearly lots of stats and information on this HUD, but I'll be damned if I can tell you what any of it means.
The enemy ship moves in towards my own while I'm still fumbling trying to so much as move around anything other than extremely slowly. ZIG's keyboard handling XOP causes some issues with responsiveness. If an object is moving at cycle 5, it will only check for input every 5th frame making it difficult to even get menus opened as input will usually just get dropped at the end of each frame.
I have no idea what ECM or ECCM levels are.
EVASIVE MANEUVERS
I need to fight back and modulate my weapons?
What am I looking at?
I. Do. Not. Understand.
I AM NOT GOOD WITH COMPUTERS
As much as I flail around I cannot figure out how to attack the enemy, but this seems to put us on even ground as the enemy ship never fires at me ever again.
I crack open the editor, curious what the code for all this looks like. And it looks like this. The Enterprise ship has more than TWO THOUSAND lines of code.
There's clearly a ton of work put into this, but it's completely obtuse and the lack of any of my button mashing have a visible effect leads me to believe that if I had more than a cursory knowledge of Star Trek that it wouldn't be any better.
Or maybe I didn't modulate properly. I don't know. I'm getting out of here.
None of those strategy games for me, I'm up for some straightforward deathmatch with MasterTMC again, this time accompanied by Avi Schranz in ZIG Arena GOLD
Oh yeah, tipituf.mod is still going.
ZIG Arena is a singeplayer arena shooter that is very clearly inspired by Quake 3.
The goal is to defeat all the opponents to escape from the arena, and use money earned from the fights to buy better weapons and ammunition.
Plenty of weapons and ammo to purchase, though not enough starting money to get anything but more clips. Also shotguns use clips in this game.
Another object tells the player about the weapons available. The shotgun is the big daddy of the pistol.
Can I tell you, the typo "tacticle" is really good?
I head to the arena to face off with my first opponent. He moves diagonally throughout the arena, bouncing off walls at a 45 degree angle and shooting when lined up with the player.
The sheer size of the board makes it very easy to avoid him so there's no trouble with staying alive.
Unfortunately that also works in reverse making him extremely difficult to hit. He has infinite ammo.
You don't. I did hit him a few times, but there's no indication for doing so. This game is a mess.
Some of the backgrounds for the other arenas are pretty cool looking at least.
The ending, not so much.
And look, it took us this long for something called ZIG to be hit with a reference to All Your Base!
