ZZTV 3

Gerbil receives the distinction here of being the first person to make a channel showcasing a game that's been covered as a Closer Look before, with Scooter. Gerbil also happens to stick pretty tightly to the TV theme, but does it in a way that feels a bit nicer than Ringworm's.

We've got our remote and our popcorn, and the station is tuned to Gerbil Land TV, so let's begin with the six o'clock news.

Gerbil really sticks with the original concept, having ads before each channel segment of original content. In this case, the ad isn't for anything ZZT related, but a webpage dedicated to Tiki idol icons.

And yes it's still preserved.

Now for the actual news, as told through a highly interactive anchorman.

He's just as confused as to how this works through a television metaphor as the rest of us.

Only in the medium of ZZTV can you get an explanation of natural selection from Charles Darwin wearing a Rage Against the Machine shirt. It's an amazing line.

The anchorman will have nothing to do with it however.

The news offers another glimpse back in ZZT's history. There is no backup of Gerbil's personal site available today though. The biggest news is issues with trap.cx (later mtrap.org), which was a major hub for hosting ZZTer websites. It looks like it is/was ran by college students.

At this point in time the outage was likely temporary, but the inevitable death of the service led to a lot of abandoned ZZT websites being lost for good.

Once all the news has been read, it's time to sign off and check out the next show, after these messages:

My brain keeps thinking this is some weird McDonald's parody, but I think it's just parodying the action-hero trope where the hero is named McSomething. We'll never know for sure as it's unreleased.

In 1999, making your pentagram wrong meant admonishing yourself for the mistake because of the effort required to correct it. While KevEdit lacks the ability to flip a selection, it does have copy/paste so you could at least grab it one row at a time. Cool pentagram though.

Next is a quick plug followed by a demo of Scooter, a game covered in a Closer Look already!

This is one of those games whose title screen really sells you, so I think the inclusion here was definitely a good call, seeing as how prior to the Museum, ZZT archives didn't have screenshots.

The demo of Scooter looks to be no different than the final release. Gerbil doesn't bother explaining the controls, instead instructing the player to just try them out. It's still got the cute squishing animation when Scooter falls off a ledge, and you can still eat some broccoli for bonus points.

The only thing I noticed is that the second level is "Cavy Vally" instead of just "Vally" as it is in the final release.

Scooter can't actually die here (though the player can trigger a game over by hitting the unexplained self-destruction button twice), but Gerbil took the extra precaution of adding a passage to leave that can be accessed without completing the level. Unfortunately for him, the passage winds up going to a board in DarkFLR's channel by mistake. Beating the level properly reveals the normal level exit passage which does work correctly.

It's probably a safe bet that anybody playing a ZZTV volume wants to see everything in it, but the Scooter demo is technically hidden behind the art show. I think it should have gotten its own passage on the menu just to ensure the most eyes on it.

The next show is "JetpackMan", which offers up an original minigame, that I wish was a little bit longer than this one board diversion.

A lot of poorly coded ZZT games that want an object to follow the player will just have it loop /seek which works, but also pushes the player everywhere. In most games it's annoying (the correct thing to do is check if the object is adjacent to the player before trying to move), but here it's the gimmick, pushing the player endlessly as a jetpack.

I kind of just flew around the UFO that shoots bullets downward and ignored the lion as well, and while I don't know if this is a good enough idea to make an entire game out of, I do think you can do something with it for more than just one board.

It does still suffer from the flaw that when you change direction, there's going to be a moment where the player is diagonal to the jetpack object meaning moving towards the player is 50/50 for two directions. This would make quick movements frustrating as the jetpack can't be consistent. (Though I'm wondering if you could use player clones to track the last direction the player stepped in and manually move it to the correct location.)

Touching the jetpack object also causes it to stop pushing you for a moment which gives the player time to pause before rushing through the UFO's bullets if they don't just go around the whole thing.

But really, I probably want more JetpackMan just for Jetpack Doggie, who is the coolest dog in ZZT by far.

Finally, Gerbil's last show is just some text about himself. In an online world where social media is maybe invite-era LiveJournal at best, honestly posting things in these ZZT collections probably got more people to see them than a post on a random Geocities page ever would.