Game number four is Wayne's World Hockey. For some reason, this title screen comes up way more frequently than it should on the Worlds of ZZT Twitter.
It always gets plenty of faves because look at this title screen. I genuinely want to play this. This is already the best looking game in the batch by a long shot, but can it hold its own through gameplay?
There's a lot going on here already.
This board is actually the only board aside from the title screen. It has all the elements needed for some street hockey. Wayne has 25 hockey pucks (ammo) and 10 health (so the game will end when the board's time limit expires).
Garth plays goalie, which consists of constantly moving either left or right towards the player. Some invisible objects keep him fenced in so he doesn't leave the goal or move south.
I may have played up the benefit of trimming down hockey to something like this for ZZT. While Garth does a good job of preventing the player from having a direct line of sight to the goal, he is still oblivious to the puck itself. All the player needs to do is shoot and then step to the side to make Garth move away and ensure a goal. The board enforces a limit of one shot at a time so there is at least something preventing Wayne from rapidly firing off 25 pucks in a row.
The distraction from Stacey is not a particularly deep mechanic. She paces back and forth on the sidewalk and sometimes says hello. You can't actually go over and interact with her directly, and unless you're actually distracted by "Hi Wayne!" she has no impact on making goals.
The final element is the car which moves around randomly all over the road. This is kind of a necessary conceit since obeying traffic laws would make it very easy to just take advantage of how wide the road is and ignore it entirely.
Although because the car isn't going anywhere in particular, it can end up getting closer to the goal and being a significantly more difficult obstacle than Garth's goaltending. It will also drain Wayne's health and score if he stands next to it for too long. Don't get run over!
When time runs out, the game simply ends, with everything running at max speed, meaning Stacey will endlessly say hello. There's no ranking for how well you've done other than the actual high score table. The game providing a set amount of ammo means it's pretty easy to max the score if you want to compared to if it gave more ammo than could potentially be shot before the time expires.
Final Thoughts
This one honestly feels out of place to the others. This is like somebody saw Wayne's World and wanted to make a ZZT game out of it, came up with one scene and decided that was enough. It's still a bad game that's boring to play, but it honestly demonstrates the most advanced programming we've seen so far.
Wayne's World Hockey is also distinct in that it has a text file that actually does give some insight into its creation. It was made at the request of a friend which explains the brevity.
The title screen is excellent.
Unsurprisingly, "sports" is not a common genre seen in ZZT. The lack of an ability to make objects follow anything other than the player, and the difficulties of getting things to move in non-cardinal directions means the genre is mostly full of garbage.
A simplified version of hockey where you're simply shooting pucks at a net, at first glance, is a pretty smart way to water down hockey into something ZZT can handle.