Dragon Woods

The tower bursting into flame may be a little unprecedented sure. Nadir nails the effect which not only illustrates great effort in scripting the burning, but it looks great when the fire flames out and leaves a charred looking mess behind.

I was a bit disappointed that freeing the townsfolk doesn't change Grapemarket at all. All the buildings remain inaccessible and nobody that was captured can be seen wandering around outside.

Several boards of backtracking later, and Lindor can finally deliver the password and get on with it. Speedrunners will be disappointed to learn that although there is this large list of possible passwords to select from the start, the correct answer isn't available as an option until Lindor learns it. No Grape-skip strats here.

Ugh.

This is a worse than average style invisible wall maze as an object constantly makes revealed walls turn invisible again. Nadir doesn't use the "accepted" technique of bumping into a wall causing the whole maze to flash, but just that one tile, so the code is actively making this more of a pain to complete.

Thankfully it's a fairly short maze just confined to this corner. Touching the flickering blue object encased within it gets rid of a different invisible barrier preventing Lindor from continuing into the next room.

The next room is a generally sensible transporter maze. The only thing notable about it is that some of the transporters will lead the player behind the walls of the room.

If you look closely you can also see a boulder which needs to be moved in order to reroute one of the transporters. This is done by exploring the outer walls and discovering some fake walls and an invisible transporter.

Typically I'd frown at the design decision to require the player to find something that's invisible, but the boulder and the transporter pointing south that's below it do a good job of implying that there's something there. (You can also note a slight discrepancy in the outer walls as well.)

Likely though, you won't be thinking about secret invisible transporters and the first time through you'll push the boulder the other way around and softlock the game. Admittedly this does reveal the secret transporter for next time. This isn't the best puzzle but even if you break it, it's still faster to navigate it twice than getting through that invisible wall maze once.

The next board has something Nadir was clearly proud of, going so far as to place a copyright in the object name explaining the "Simon Engine".

Except this puzzle isn't Simon at all. There's no sequence presented to the player for them to then repeat. There are just seven fake walls and standing on them in the incorrect order kills you.

At least talking with Nadir in the ZZT bar had him give the solution. Being handed the answer (I guess somewhat obfuscated by only listing the first letter of each color) defeats the purpose of what is a bit of a complex series of objects that make up the puzzle.

Attempting to do this without talking to Nadir would be miserable. Either way this board is a wasted opportunity.

This, however, is definitely cool. This kind of hybrid board that's part traditional gameplay and part art conveys a lot more about Count Cracula than we'd otherwise get if he was just a cyan smiley.

The humor is not good, and the boss fight isn't much better.

It's still better than the battle with the wildmen since there's only one enemy. Cracula moves around, shoots a lot, and sometimes throws a star which will eventually be transformed into a centipede. This is again a much better approach than letting stars expire on their own.

Again like the fight with the wildmen Nadir just drops 100 health on the player without saying anything. This time there's no ammo given though, so if you were shooting all the bogeymen earlier you're probably in a bad situation.

Cracula takes 22 shots to defeat and moves erractically enough that he's a pain to actually hit. Cut his health in half and this would probably be a pretty decent fight, but instead it's just too drawn out to stay entertaining. Still, it's not too terrible. It's definitely doable and the free health was enough that when it was all done I only left the room with 30 less than I entered it with.

Once killed Cracula explodes into blue dust and the trolls have been avenged. It would have meant a lot to me if Nadir included a passage here to exit the castle. Instead the player has to backtrack (of course) through the transporter and invisible wall mazes again to get back to the castle entrance.

Finally Lindor is back on track to get the Minfannon. No more castles, no more towers, no bogeymen, no vampires, no trolls. All that remains is getting through a volcano.

I don't get the purpose of this board. When the player finishes walking to the edge, another manual cutscene trigger occurs and a passage reveals for the player to walk in to continue. This could have just been on the bottom of the bridge troll screen above.

Ah, scratch that. There's a secret passage to the west that takes you to a board filled with supplies and plugging the band Prodigy. Obviously.

I was hoping for a cute scene of Lindor climbing the mountain, but he goes for an alternate way inside.

There's one transitional board where the walls fade from gray to red before leading to this crossroad.

My immediate assumption was that the temple would hold the Minfannon and so I should explore the rest of the volcano to get whatever item I'd need to obtain it.

As Lindor travels deeper into the volcano's heart, he complains more and more about how strong the heat is.

On this board there's a return to shooting basic ZZT baddies, but it feels like they're just haphazardly placed compared to the structure of chambers in the darkest part of Dragon Woods. This board feels like a step back in quality, but again like the fight with Cracula, it's not "bad", just not "good".

Lindor makes his way through, shooting anything that moves and isn't a shark.

Okay this again a pretty good gag where a few seconds after talking about how he can take the heat Lindor suddenly burns up and dies.

It turns out you go to the temple to be able to complete this branch and not the other way around!

Now this is a beautiful board. I am really impressed by the temple's appearance and while there have been some nice scenes before, this one stands out the most to me. This would totally be the preview image for this article if it wasn't for the fact that it has nothing to do with the actual "Dragon Woods" part of the game.

The temple isn't quite as impressive on the inside, but at least it's compact. Immediately after entering the head priest runs towards Lindor to explain the dwarves' plight.

After a large wall of text, Lindor is stuck taking one last quest, using his magical knowledge to learn some spells and defeat the dragon who coincidentally blocks the path to the Minfannon.

The spellbook offers five abilities for Lindor to learn. Ammo is used to represent Lindor's capability to learn the spells. This doesn't cost ammo, but just checks that you have that much ammo to begin with, so 100 ammo is enough to learn everything listed here.

Of course there's a Barney spell. This is a bit of a late game to have Barney jokes in it which I suspect is more just that the ZZTers who began ZZTing in the heyday of Barney-bashing games continuing it solely because Barney-bashing is a thing in ZZT games.

The only other thing of interest is this one final shop. The prices aren't that great, but the player can cannibalize their score to get more gems and thus ammo. At this point in the game buying torches is completely pointless, and in my case since I had already cleared out that one room with creatures, buying health is as well.

Now it's possible to reach the end of the volcano and not die.

The final obstacle is a slider puzzle that looks more complicated than it actually is. The entire right half can be ignored and just a few pushes let Lindor grab the key and have a path both forward and back if needed.

The sign states that the lightning dwarf village is to the north, which means it's time for the game's RPG climax.

It wouldn't be a late 90s ZZT game if it didn't end like this.

There's a whole lot of explanation, but as is usually the case, this is a highly random fight that is entirely luck-based and winning requires saving after luck works in your favor and loading when it doesn't.

Where it really falls apart is the now these spells actually cost ammo to cast, and the costs are massive.

Looking at the battle scene proper, I immediately open with a Barney attack. This is of course the strongest attack available (and it can miss like every other attack). It deals five damage on a hit. This is just over a quarter of the dragon's health. A basic attack deals one point of damage. The other spells do three.

The dragon's attacks are roughly comparable, but they have no limitations on using any of them. Lindor's magic will be quickly exhausted (if he hasn't found the Prodigy room) while the dragon will average three damage per turn.

The animations are fun at least. Again this is a case of the numbers being way off for this sort of thing.

The one unique feature this RPG engine has is that stalactites fall when the dragon uses earthquake. If the attack misses, Lindor catches a rock and can then throw it for two damage. The battle turns into you hoping for this to happen constantly as it means Lindor can do something better than a basic attack without spending any ammo.

Even still, this is how badly Lindor fared on my first attempt.

Next time the randomness was much more in my favor to begin with and I had a significant head start in damage.

It still wasn't enough to win legitimately. I cheated for ammo to keep casting spells and was reloading whenever I'd miss my own attacks. Even with perfect accuracy the fight was just barely won. (I could have and probably should have been reloading when the dragon didn't miss.)

Folks, it's pretty bad.

The fight just stops and the player moves on to their reward.

The Minfannon is collected and Nadir finally shows some sympathy by not making Lindor walk back to Coaster.

Of course it ends with one last goof about needing to go back for the instruction manual. It's a very Ghouls n' Ghosts ending with the need to redo everything once the game is completed.

Despite the chance to end with a gag, Nadir gives everyone a happy ending. There's a second quest off screen and then the Minfannon is used to non-violently depose of King Asphalt and put Salmonella on the throne.

One final animation draws each letter on the parchment and roll credits.