ZZTV 3

So that's all for DarkFLR's contributions to his own experiments. Now it's time to check out some community contributions, starting with Oof's #STD which thankfully stands for "Spoof Televised Digitally". This one sticks with the TV theme for a lot of its original content, but doesn't shy away from playable ZZT previews rather than just ads for upcoming releases.

First off is ZZT Cooking! This will very quickly get you onboard with ditching the theme and just working on creating things for a channel as it takes as basic of a concept as "reviews of ZZT games" and turns it into a "cooking" show that offers basically nothing.

Strangely, it uses the cheat menu to set a flag to activate the object rather than just touching something, but whatever.

OH BOY.

Ringworm presents a small menu of genres to offer a game recommendation based on your tastes, so I guess it's not quite a traditional review in that you don't know what game is going to show up, but there are only five games and it's not like it's some in depth quiz to figure out what you'd enjoy, so functionally it's just going down the list and seeing what the games are.

These metaphors are wild. 30 ML of PROGRAMMING. 2 tablespoons of REPLAY VALUE. Honestly it doesn't do a very good job of promoting the game because of how generic all the "ingredients" are. Lebensraum was an early hit by Zenith Nadir that tried to turn id's Wolfenstein 3D into a ZZT game. It's one I definitely need to cover at some point, as it's one of the definitive ZZT action games, especially when it was new.

And now you know absolutely nothing about Flame Frost Blade, a fantasy adventure that I can recall being pretty hyped in the community of this era. Like most ZZT demos it never got completed, but Ringworm's recipe tells you nothing of note other than "it's an RPG".

The recipe for Zem! 2 is the most detailed just because "Lemmings" is more descriptive than "RPG".

And this one just makes an absolutely massive hit sound incredibly bad. Even in 1999 Draco's reputation of "the drug guy" was pretty solidified.

Next is a late night talk show hosted by Ringworm, who just so happens to be interviewing Draco.

It uses the same format as the cooking show with the player getting to pick and choose what they want to see and not a linear episode.

The year is 1999 and no talk show host can avoid making very dull jokes about Monica "Lewinskie". Not even ZZT is safe.

For something a little more tolerable, there's the latest news on ZZT company Lame Game.

Notable here is the list of company members including Ringworm, Gerbil, and Viovis, all of whom contributed channels to ZZTV 3 making more than half the content being a Lame Game production.

We also get a list of upcoming games! "Evisceration Uroboros" is an incredibly 1999 ZZT game name. Of the ten games listed, it would seem that only PPDV2 ever got a release. (There is a game called Omega Force 1.5, by Ringworm, which may be related to the Omega Force Zero listed here though.)

Plus another vintage URL, but unfortunately not one preserved.

I'm including these for completion. I love the primer on the four horsemen of the apocalypse for those unfamiliar. Were these ever funny to anyone? Or actually insulting?

But without a doubt, where digging through ZZTV worlds pays off, is in the interview segments. Here we get to see Draco's inspirations for the "trippy" genre of ZZT worlds, with Pop! and Winter specifically cited.

There is of course a recurring joke that ZZTers quit the community every week, Draco actually did move on from ZZT to work on his music. After Teen Priest 2, his only releases were a compilation of his finished and incomplete projects, the bizarre Inedible Vomit (a rejection of the original game's morality that's almost entirely identical to the original), and one or two collaborative releases where others were working with existing material.

Now for a weird mix of themed and unthemed ZZTV, the shopping network consists of Ringworm's art, but with some writing about purchasing the art as if it was being sold on one of those shopping channels.

Each board has commentary from the hosts of the show, but like the recipes, it's far more fluff than anything insightful about the development of the pictures, if they're intended for a game, or how long they took to create.

Also lots of bad jokes with the letters used in the 1-800 numbers to call.

There's an overarching theme of violence between these pictures, so typical teenage boy stuff. Teenage boy stuff also includes the hi-larious phone number for this one.

This one at least reveals its origins of an issue of the ZZT magazine iFantasy... but #6 doesn't have the art in it, and neither do any other issues. It's also a rather small art section, but I supposed with the ZZTV concept still being fairly new, I can't imagine wanting to dedicate the time to creating a bunch of original pieces. Even in later issues I think far more common was to include art for then unreleased games.

Finally, we get some actual interactivity. Not that I'm complaining, since this isn't exactly a traditional ZZT world, but The Hungry Monster is the first playable demo we've seen. Rather strangely though, this is a game credited to Gerbil. They were both in the same ZZT company, so it wouldn't seem too odd to include another member's content, but Gerbil has his own channel in this same world.

Honestly, it's probably better as a ZZTV mini-game than something that would be all that fun for a full title. It's weird conceptual engine where you avoid being struck by falling snack food and knocked into a dinosaur-like creature's mouth.

It's simple fun, and consists of duplicators spawning objects that walk to the south while moving erratically sideways. I won on my first attempt and from the screenshot you can see how generous the game is before the player is eaten. Throughout the stage the monster yells about being hungry or how yummy the snacks are.

Eventually the time expires, and the player can leave.

One annoyance of ZZTV channels, is that in these sort of games, you still frequently get a game over when you lose requiring the player to restart and navigate back to the channel again.

The next demo is a lot more complex in nature and feels like the game it's for could actually be something worth playing. It's Tut's Tomb Legends, an action game about exploring ancient pyramids. This one actually got finished, and unfortunately by looking at the finished product I got to learn that "Germany Jones" is a nazi working directly for Hitler. Dang.

I opted for Egyptian Jamal, a native to the region. The introduction mentions being able to choose attacks via a menu, but accessing it lists zero attacks, so I'm guessing it's just incomplete at this point.

The characters are different in how they react to bodies, with their personalities determining if they "loot" for gems, "drain" for health, or "search" for ...fewer gems.

These sort of ZZT dungeon crawlers were becoming an established genre in this era, with Anthony Testa (aka BlueMagus) in particular putting out a lot of games in this vein at this time period.

Ringowrm emphasizes the combat descriptions, with each attack getting unique lines making for a surprisingly visceral experience as you violently stab and decapitate any of the wild animals in the pyramid that get in Jamal's way.

Defeating foes gives experience, which appears unused in the demo and is perhaps how the player gets new moves.

The pyramid of course has items to loot, from the utilitarian stripping of torches from the walls to keep your own light going, to chests filled with gold.

There are more ways to die than snakebites as well, with traps scattered across the level. Poison darts shoot from walls and the limited vision of torches means you need some very good reflexes.

You can also see a boulder that's rolled into the end of a hall as well on the edge of the lit tiles.

After reaching the exit, I wanted to see if I had missed anything notable, and a very thorough anti-cheating mechanism instantly erased as much of the board as possible, leaving only the objects and bloody fake walls.

The other unexplored section has a king cobra enemy which isn't all that different from the regular cobras. Enemies have lengthy death animations which can definitely slow you down if you need to wait for them to disappear in order to pass them.

The demo says that it's two boards long, but the passage leads back to the main menu despite there being a second board in the file. Whether this passage error is a mistake on Ringworm or DarkFLR's part, we'll never know.

Honestly this game looks kind of fun, and definitely fulfilled its purpose in making me want to play it. Perhaps we'll see it in a future article.

Moving on to "A Newbie Toolkit" is this very cute joke where the classic toolkit, A.I.Z.I. Enhanced with ZOP is stripped of its special colors and turned into a collection of readily accessible ZZT elements. I enjoy seeing the various blends reduced, and in plenty of early ZZT Worlds you absolutely would see skies and sunsets with these natural fades. It's a good goof.

Next is something completely reprehensible: a demo of Life Of A Player. LOAP is a parody of The Life of a Scotter, a game which turns ZZT RPG battles into something more like Monkey Island's insult sword-fighting. LOAP however, takes the fun back-and-forth insults and instead turns it into manipulating women to keep them from breaking up with you once they realize they're being cheated on or taken advantage of in some other way! A M A Z I N G

It goes on and on like this, including a part where the correct answer is to claim this other girl took advantage of you while you were drunk. Awesome. Great.

It is without a doubt the worst thing I have ever seen in ZZT. There have been some gross scenes before, but I suppose with the number of people out there who actually do approach relationships this way, this one feels skeevy rather than ignorant like most juvenile male power fantasies of romantic interactions with women we've seen before.

Also the full game got released and has a sequel.

And now to never speak of this ZZTV channel again.

If you want experimental, Viovis is your man. #TUS, which stands for "The Unknown Stuff" is up next and is full of weird pieces that wouldn't really fit into a standard ZZT game.

The menu offers a list of all the passages with explanations as to what they contain. I'm just going to go through them in order.

I particularly like this art board because it's Viovis doing his thing in 1999. You can see this sort of style more developed in later releases like Pacifying Fall and Life, but here the colors are more uniform and less chaotic. Whether this is because it's older work and Viovis grew into the more wild designs or simply because this is from 1999 and had to be done without an external editor is unknown.