ZZTV 3

Stoch 2 is more of the same. They're both very nice to look at.

Now this one's a novelty, a ZZT ant farm consisting of breakable walls and tigers that dig through them with stars.

It has a rather lengthy explanation, despite being extremely simplistic. You just watch the tigers dig, and tour around the perimeter to guide them towards the player.

The egg laying system isn't explained that well, as the tigers only throw stars on their own.

Instead, the player must use the erosion feature to reset the dirt, and then some of the stars are transformed into eggs which can then be hatched.

Unfortunately, ZZT doesn't have a way to adjust a creature's properties when spawning them during gameplay, so all the offspring will be cyan tigers that shoot bullets instead.

Erosion also increments the days counter which for some bizarre reason caps out at 9999 days. I can't even begin to imagine hitting the button that long.

"4" is unrelated to the point-and-click adventure game by Jojoisjo, and is instead just an ode to the number.

The store is just that, some shelves full of whatever, checkout lines, and a group of friends hanging out in the middle. It's very difficult to make out what exactly this is. Are these based on real people? Established characters? Are these just objects for the sake of having objects?

Some of the shelves contain things you might find for sale at a store, though likely not all of them together. Take me to this sock and comic store.

Other shelves just greet you or meow at you, as shelves often do.

The first of the group is CrimmyH who is shopping to remain alive.

Lyle's personality is that he collects stamps.

Fernando is the writer, traveling with the others for inspiration. He's written a zine that the player can take a look at, and what is ZZTV if not an interactive zine?

But before we get to the zine, there are some brochures to read. A lot of them. Plus options to eat or spin them. It's a bit overwhelming.

Most of them are just goofy nonsense and pretty forgettable. Feel free to go through all of the brochures using the file viewer, but this one on eating right is the best one by far.

After talking with Fernando, the shitty magazine becomes readable. But if you were expecting another wall of text, well, yes, but not just that. It instead opens a gap in the wall letting the player exit to a new board.

The shitty magazine is "Verdammen Alles" (damn everything) and offers some much more coherent content about the ZZT community and Viovis.

The tone shifts to suddenly being intended as something informative, and Viovis can tell already that by including something in his ZZTV channel, it gets to live on for that much longer.

People have been declaring ZZT as dead or dying even as far back as 1999, which is a wild thing to say, as it's one of the more prosperous years for releases, and had a thriving community with very active forums and IRC groups.

Though, perhaps Viovis's point is that there's no real signs of life in that you submit you game, it gets added, and then nothing. A lack of feedback is of course a big killer to motivation to continue, and in most cases, you'd never have any idea how many people played your game unless it was a massive hit.

Also boy am I glad he chose to call it a morgue and not a museum.

Or perhaps he was more worried that ZZT wasn't being used as a tool for self-expression, but for jockeying for that praise and coveted Game of the Month title. Viovis's work stands out for rarely being a "game", and you get a strong sense that he was significantly more interested in sharing his creations than getting a numeric review score for a reception.

This being the era where every game had to have an RPG battle in it probably didn't help convey originality.

Hey it's 1999 and Viovis is discussing the overlap between game jams and crunch culture. He was talking about this stuff in the previous century, and seems to be pretty ahead of his time.

Again you can see Viovis's interest in creativity with the idea of more frequent 24 Hours of ZZT events with the intent of making them smaller affairs with more detailed judging. Sure enough, this is exactly what modern game jams go through where the bigger the event, the less likely it is that your game in particular will get considerable time dedicated to it.

And an insight into the Y2K scare, and the view that companies were taking advantage of some software bugs that would need to be fixed and turning it into a marketing opportunity, essentially scamming people with their services.

As far as "rants" go, this is a lot more relatable today than IRC wars.

That's all for da sto, and it's zine within a zine.

Tut's Tomb Legends was a game I hadn't heard of that looked to be fun after its demo. PPDV2 is the very much awaited sequel to the original, Purposely Protected Dynamic Visualities, some outsider art in a community full of outsider artists. While this one did come out, it wouldn't be released until March of 2001, so the few glimpses shown here are a very slow tease.

You will not enjoy this one.

Like, do not feel obligated to watch the whole thing, because this introduction goes on for so long and feels so meaningless. Admittedly, this is probably the point. However, if you told me this was a ruse to trick people into not looking forward to PPDV2, I'd believe that as well.

This is another vestigial ZZTV concept. Channel wars where two authors would have a back-and-forth at each other throughout releases? It doesn't sound very fun so it's not really a surprise that the idea didn't really go anywhere. Since DarkFLR left the project after this release, it looks like Viovis had the last word here and won the war! Congratulations Viovis on your insight into how nobody wants this.

His little signature is great though.

Wrench II, sequel to Wrench is another art board.

Does it mean anything? Does it need to? Does the first part in ZZTV 2 reveal anything? (No.)

Finally, Viovis leaves us with some thanks to DarkFLR and Nadir for helping make ZZTV a success.

Viovis's channel is definitely the most interesting one in this volume. It's most willing to showcase the unusual and not just rely on previews/reviews that you'd see in any ZZT company magazine.