Whereas Zenith lost last Game of the Month with his game psyche to New Earth Operations Disc 1 by Chase Bramlage, he won this month - ChickenWire v1.5 is this month's GOTM. Only few games were released this month (most of the recently uploaded games have been finished in September) and ChickenWire v1.5 was in my opinion the best of this month's few releases.
ChickenWire v1.5 is, as you could have guessed from the game's title, an update of the original released quite a long time ago. I already enjoyed the original, but the update has several neat improvements.
Zenith himself describes this game as the Rangest of ZZT (Rangest being a MegaZeux game by Darren Hewer). The game also resembles Darkness (another MegaZeux game by Darren Hewer). If you haven't played any of the mentioned MZX titles; this game is a seemingly incoherent bunch of very odd, yet intriguing boards linked together.
If it's incoherent, then why is it a good game? Well, this game wasn't meant to be coherent in any way. Coherence is of no importance in this piece of silly Zenith humor. The game is full of references (a lot of them being ZZT community references) and several of them require some involvement in the scene to understand them. If you aren't really involved in the scene, the jokes are probably not as funny to you, but if you get what is being said, this game can be damned hilarious at some points.
ChickenWire doesn't feature much graphics, but what's there looks really good. It also has a few nifty tunes by Viovis. As for programming: ChickenWire features some tricks used in all sorts of random ways. The main part of this game is, of course, the silly humor and random things spread around the small ZZT world.
If you are up for some good laughter and enjoy a good bit of weird humor, then download this game. If, however, you are looking for a serious and coherent game, you got the wrong thing here. Anyway, thumbs up for this cool update of ChickenWire, released under Lame Game.
