Talk to this guy in Bandit Camp several times and he'll give you a gem to leave him alone.
I did a very bad job with my seashell hunting in the earliest portion of the game apparently, since I managed to miss this easy to find gem.
Back in Whirlybird Caves, there's a secret passage up here that reveals when touching a certain wall. This one's tough to come across normally, but it is hinted at as the entire area is solid rather than the fade used throughout the rest of the cave.
Ditto for here. This secret also reveals the red key to the secret bonus area which I hadn't found.
This gem is terrible and involves opening Kim's empty fridge several times before it finally decides to have a gem inside instead of nothing.
Shoot some people in Enigmus for a surprise! The surprise is a gem.
This is a cruel one, hidden on the one way bridge back to the starting coast. If you take your corners efficiently you'll never run into it. Plus the player is unlikely to take this path more than once as there are better ways to get around via Bandit Camp or the Shuttle Mesa cave that requires the levitation spell to access.
Tseng's guide describes this gem as the most unfair gem, hidden away in a seemingly empty corner of the transporter maze you have to navigate before the fight with Showdown.
Again, we're still dealing with a buggy game here and there's only a cyan key rather than a blue one. It's quite a mistake to make, and means the player will need to cheat to get their last gem and the true ending.
The bonus area consists of yet more cameos and one liners from members of Damage Inc. as well as the game's cast of pointless characters (Nimrod, False Leader, Qwerty, etc.) It's all pretty bland.
I will never tire of teenagers trying to write dialog for drunk people though.
Lastly is this boss fight with Stealth, the guardian of the final gem. Once more we get running around and shooting, but this time with an enemy that's invisible. Fortunately the constant stream of bullets mean he's not particularly hidden.
The bosses in this game illustrate the general weakness of boss battles in ZZT: they tend to be very similar to every other one. Stealth's second phase demonstrates how the alternative oversized boss that can't move is probably even worse. Stealth controls some large machine with fangs and guns that constantly shoot in the general direction the player would be. Most locations on the board are completely safe for the player to stand on so there's not a ton of danger here.
Eventually the machine is destroyed and the last gem can be safely picked up before following the exit off the board back to the coast with Master Walnut.
With all 31 gems collected it's time to see the true ending.
The true ending is just a copy of Gem Master's home, but with some new dialog.
It's so copy/pasted that you can even pick up this gem again. The characters have updated dialog, but it's not anything remotely substantial. The only thing left to do is talk with Gem Master now that the mission is complete.
And then the player is warped to the credits once more. That's really the entirety of the "good" ending. The whole conceit of this game that's supposed to hook you and make it stand out from every other adventure on an island out there is that there are secret gems to collect, and this is what you get for it. Good lord.
Final Thoughts
Ok, so that final ending was a bummer, and there's plenty of this game that doesn't really work (especially without the greater context of Gem Hunter 2), but it's still pretty fun. "This is a good idea, but..." properly sums up the experience overall.
Firstly, there's the gem hunting. I complained about having to find a bunch of gems in Zenith Nadir's faithful to the source ZZT remake of Fantasy World Dizzy, but there it was tacked on at the end, locking away the game's ending. Tseng does a much better job of handling this quest to find hidden items. A good chunk of the gems are hidden reasonably, encouraging the player to interact with the world around them, and keep an eye opened for anything unusual. The gem hunt is a good idea, but there are enough gems that are just too obscure to find on your own that you're going to be frustrated uncovering a few of the stragglers like the one in Kim's fridge, or the transporter maze of Shuttle Mesa. This could be improved by having some indicator that there are any gems left to collect on the screen, possibly even making a gem locator that the player obtains around Shuttle Mesa, letting the player challenge themselves to collect as much as possible, and then let the game guide them towards the rest.
I was quite pleased to discover that the gem hunt was ultimately not necessary to finish the game, but getting much much weaker ending for doing so really hurt the concept. There's a lot of backtracking when you're trying to obtain what you missed (which would only get worse without a guide), and the end result is incredibly empty. Perhaps an extended cutscene with Kim, convincing her to join him? The sequel has an opening cutscene that takes place on another planet with Kim and Gem Hunter arriving at a spaceport. It's not really explained at all why she's there.
Next is the structure of the island. Early ZZT worlds often followed the same structure of Town of ZZT which meant nonlinear exploration. Gem Hunter sets itself up quite well for this with its exploration based gameplay, but ends up being very linear. I admit, it does a very good job of masking how linear it is, with the general layout of the island being interconnected, while actually forcing the player through a set path. Despite the large cast of characters, there's not really any story that would make giving the player the ability to travel from the starting coast down to Bandit Camp not make sense. The only real sense of progression is Kim always being wherever Gem Hunter's next location is. It would have been really cool to have Kim's appearances be based on some event flags, letting her say "Okay I'm headed to Enigmus" and waiting for the player to decide to explore Enigmus before she'd advance to a next location. This would let the player travel freely while also allowing Kim to function as a guide who can offer advice on a region when the player finds her.
Most of the game's locations are rather small, but they're all distinct enough and have memorable names which makes it easy for the player to tell where they are and where they're going. I just feel like an open structure would have only added to the game.
The cast is needlessly massive. There are so many named characters and they nearly all serve zero purpose. The bosses work for fight sequences, but could have just as well been robots who didn't say a word. I still have no idea who these people are, why they're here, or what they're trying to accomplish. The series's cast only expands from here too. Nobody spends enough time in the spotlight for the player to make any connection to them, and what little dialog they do have is typically just complaining about Tseng or making references to Smash Mouth. You could drop so many of them without even noticing.
In the end, Gem Hunter: Special Edition is an oddball game. It doesn't feel as refined as Tseng's later games, but it still feels like there's more too it that an early attempt at making a ZZT world. It really evokes this feeling that Tseng tasked himself with sticking to the original's plot and structure exactly, even if it felt primitive to his other games of the same time period. Gem Hunter feels less like it was in need of a special edition, and more like it should have gotten a full retcon.
