Dogfight

The glowing cube distorts the space around the player. The path back to the runway closes off with the opposite wall disappearing and revealing a new path forward. I'd say things were going to get weird if they hadn't already what with the pigeons and arenas.

Another gameplay shift follows. This board would be right at home in early trippy worlds like Kudzu or Bizanloo, though beating them to the punch by multiple years. There's just a surprising amount of atmosphere here thanks to the previous room and narrative text that make what is really just a very basic puzzle board feel far more otherworldly.

Four keys need to be collected from the board. A scroll points to one of the lone solids saying "IN" which activates a player clone powered warp to the corner where the white key can be acquired. Another scroll points to another teleportation button that dumps the player back out.

The cyan and green keys are protected by some of the surrounding floor actually being walls rather than fakes. It's hard to call it a maze as there are really only a total of five intersections in it so the entire thing can be done in maybe thirty seconds. As such, I will award it a "tolerable maze award". Good job yenrab.

The final key is in a tiny transporter maze that again has so few options that it's over before you know it. There's a "puzzle" element to this one in that you have to push a boulder into place in order to be able to transport into the key chamber. The puzzle consists of a single move to complete and it's the only move available so there's no possibility at all of making a mistake and causing the key to become unobtainable.

The setup with the magic cube? Perfect. Thanks to the limited kinds of walls available the graphical effect of touching the cube and having the walls move doesn't really read as a form of teleportation in the same way as the player clones of the previous board. Step into this room though, and suddenly it becomes clear that the player has found themselves onboard a ship in outer space.

The traditional scrolling star field effect plays in the background while some kind of frazzled looking force field blocks the way forward, changing appearance in a way that makes it clear before examining it that it's no mere physical barricade.

As if the game wasn't here to appeal to me enough, it's got a mid-90s idea of what a futuristic PC might look like. Going by the available options, it must have a great software suite. Speccy, Internet Explorer, ZZT, and Adobe Acrobat (for viewing solar system termination plans).

It does what any young ZZTer does when they have to predict technology more advanced than anything in the present, taking something that currently exists, in this case fighter jets, and then cranks up the number. So if "F-14s" are cool, imagine how cool an F-922,125,321,995 must be.

The specs are for more than imagining a future where numbers are bigger. This is an opportunity to do a little foreshadowing. Our hero doesn't really know anything about these aliens, but the fact that their base has been cleared of all signs of life makes learning how to initiate the ship's self-destruct some practical knowledge.

Step 1: Find a space plane.

The other options are really just for cracking a few jokes. I can't think of anything more 90s than "it's also a microwave".

More tech also means more comparisons to actual modern tech, where this modem clocks in just shy of 400 megabits (assuming we're talking one bit per baud).

Correction. The player wanted to take a peek at what ZZT games the aliens had.

But the best interaction with the computer is in accessing the plans for termination

As the only way to read them is to print them out. You might argue that the player is making a paper trail for themselves. Having a hard copy of the plans would certainly be useful, but no, as with the other options there's a wait before everything is printed. I love the idea of a noisy 90s linefeed printer alerting everyone on the ship to this human's presence as they patiently wait for their document to finish.

Hold up. If you touch the printer before printing anything you get to learn that it's in fact a laserjet. I've been playing this game for more than 20 years now and this is the first time I've been made aware of this.

The computer and accessories are arrange into three objects and it's unclear which object is which component, so my attempt at checking the printer was actually just a giant 2.0 GHz CPU. I think by today's standards this thing is a cheap computer to buy in bulk for an office. Worst of all, it's a Cray that you can't even sit down on!

Oh, right. The whole destruction of the solar system thing. That's probably more important than the printer specs.

Everything is revealed or confirmed. Aliens are working on clearing the solar system of all intelligent life, and they started with your base. Bit of a downer that everybody's already been killed. It's very funny how much of a backseat the Air Guard ends up taking in Dogfight. They exist entirely to move the game's plot forward. The only ideas for who's there or what it's like comes from the alternate base and one mechanic who's way too into your cool jet. At the very least, they went down fighting.

And of course now that we know what this flying object is, it gets labeled an IFO. Brilliant.

So now what? Well, I guess the only thing to do is to find a way to stop the aliens and save the planet, and it looks like the ideal way to do that is to find a space plane and destroy the core. So that's what we're going to do.

Well, in a minute at least. In order to make sure that the player knows about the alien attack the option to lower the force field is hidden away on the computer until the printout has been read. Before that, touching the field brings up an option to try and squeeze through a small gap which is indeed represented in the depiction of the force field. This is just a red herring with the player unable to fit and losing a single health in the process.

I'm so excited for space plane.

I tend to post these scroll windows that open automatically after entering a board before revealing the board as it's usually a better dramatic effect. In practice though, there's always a brief moment where the board will be visible before the message appears. This is especially prevalent in games made with ZZT"s default editor as every object will run at cycle three so the delay can be longer depending on what tick you actually enter the board on.

When I hear "space plane", I think it's going to be a very goofy looking craft. Spaceship design in fiction typically wants to escape the comparison to existing aircraft, but I honestly can't help but admire the blue and white ships in this hangar. They look like planes, and they also look like sleek sci-fi vehicles. The linewall design is honestly pretty brilliant. While they look like planes, they also look like they would be unable to fly in Earth's atmosphere. Some alien technology is able to somehow make these things work.

Alas, our pilot here opts for the one craft that looks a bit more like the kind of craft they know how to fly. Fair enough. I just feel like the big red ship is far chunkier and less exciting. It looks outdated in comparison to the others.

Looks can be deceiving though. This ship is in fact highly experimental, incredibly fast, and incredibly powerful. It's exactly what its new pilot was hoping for.

This board contains no surprises whatsoever. Two things are immediately obvious here. There's going to be a takeoff animation where the walls vanish and stars appear, and there's going to be a way to kill yourself by taking off before opening the door.

Every. Single. Time.

(I love it. I get upset when I play ZZT games that have these sequences but don't let you smash into a wall.)

Of course, what actually happens is that everything works smoothly. For some extra detail yenrab makes sure to mention that before you fly towards the core to take out the ship that you spend a little time just zooming around. Maybe it's being practical since this is your first time in such a thing, or maybe it's just a lot of fun. This game has just enough humor that it really could go either way.

Though there's a downside in that by zipping all over the place, the aliens have time to scramble and get into their own space planes, which sure enough match the general shape of the more up close designs seen in the hangar. It's an appreciated detail that marks a return to the actual dogfighting aspects of the game, while also differentiating itself from previous missions.

Unlike the previous missions, the scale is a lot larger. While there are only four ships to take out, each ship is comprised of five pieces that move in sync with one another. There's a downside to this in that it means that in order to keep these ships from falling to pieces they have to move very deliberately in a simple back and forth pattern. As a way to make up for a return to the basic movement from the earliest missions, these things basically fire non-stop, which causes your own ship's infinite firepower to feel like it wasn't an aspect worth emphasizing.

It's a return to form with the big change being that we're in space now so the bright cyan sky is now a black void with white fakes for stars so bullets can pass over them. The aesthetic isn't nearly as good compared to the ultra cheerful skies from before. It's a technical issue so I can't get any more upset at it than I can in the cursor-driven first-person adventure game 4, but 4 would sometimes remember to do a background.

It certainly wouldn't look as a good as a traditional art board, but maybe tuck an Earth made out of green and blue fakes somewhere on the screen, or the IFO to make this scene out outer space actually look like a depiction of space. There's even an opportunity to take advantage of the limited movement of the ships and actually incorporate some art without fake walls in regions of the board where the player and enemy ship wouldn't need to overlap.

Yet while the board plays no different than before with your massive ship still inching across the screen and the enemy ships still just blindly firing downward, as a child going from planes to spaceships felt like a radical change to the game that I couldn't have imagined happening. The distinct design of the enemy ships and the sheer number of bullets at any given moment meant that this mission felt bigger than the others. This is for the fate of humanity, and the only thing that can stop aliens with a billion lasers if a human with a billion plus one lasers.

While the post-mission cutscene is nothing new, here it's baked into the interface used for the combat missions with your ship's shields now replaced with a timer for how long until the scene ends. Disappointingly though, nothing actually happens here. I wonder if yenrab was hoping to do a reverse of the hangar takeoff sequence somehow. Instead, the ship is already at the reactor core and the player mostly just waits for the timer to expire to let them know they've arrived. Trying to interact with the controls results in messages about autopilot and locked triggers. Nothing moves and nothing animates until the timer expires to let the player out of the ship and give them some information on what they're about to be up against.

This is what you get for tucking away your rations and ammo instead of keeping them on you!!

The game's engine is once again re-adapted to what is meant to be a "stealth" sequence. Now you get to pilot yourself! Rather than a shooter this is about navigating the maze in such a way that you aren't shot repeatedly by various guards patrolling the area. The guards move and shoot in fixed patterns so in practice there's very little to it. Stealth in this case can equally mean moving when guards aren't around, to more comically walking right up to them because they can't fire at point blank range. This takes some nuance though as when they're firing, the guards never really stop. A single mistake can be deadly.

To add a little bit of complexity, a key is also hidden in the maze which only limits the order you can grab the meltdown parts needed to get this IFO popping off.

One major change that could easily be missed is that the controls to pilot the pilot surround the player and make it impossible to resume play if you save mid-mission. Yenrab is nice enough to include a scroll and warn the player of this fact. Dogfight's missions have been brief and easy enough to finish that a mid-game save hasn't been a concern before, and that's not going to change now, but better safe than sorry. It's 1995 and who knows when a sibling will walk in and say "Mom says it's my turn to use the computer".

After getting through the previous mission unscathed, the next cinematic opens with the player being shot several times before just decking an alien and commencing the meltdown. This might stop the invasion, but there's still the matter of escaping with your life! Things are heating up fast and you need to get in your ship and get out!

It's safe to assume the player knows what they're working with by this point in the game. The escape sequence is similar to the previous mission, except you're once again in a vehicle. This time the objective is just as the mission title says: escape. This involves navigating an honestly half-hearted looking maze to reach the exit safely. There aren't that many branching paths, and the correct path disregards a significant chunk of the level, one that coincidentally has more spacious walls. While there aren't any enemies this time, there is now a time limit to deal with.

In game there's a little visual stimulation as the maze slowly fades in and out, becoming invisible for brief moments. There could be something here with having to commit upcoming portions of the maze to memory in order to get through them quickly enough, though really it's just a fade animation where you'll maybe take two steps before the maze begins to reveal again.

Your ship also steers identically to the previous mission, moving in four directions and having no momentum. There's no penalty for bumping into a wall, so the stage would really play identically if the ship was replaced with the player element.

The timer is fairly tight though, so actually heading down an incorrect path can make it impossible to succeed afterwards. It's not really difficult or anything, making the timer more of a way to build up some suspense on a sequence of otherwise little fanfare rather than a final obstacle to overcome. Really, the scariest part is that while the timer stops when you reach the exit, any bullets it has already fired still finish elapsing so if you do cut it close, you may have to run the player to the exit passage before a final bullet causes time to run out even with the mission completed. You can see how little time remained I had above. Thanks to the simple nature of the maze even two breakables of safety is more than adequate, but with a more complex maze it could've been a closer call.

For a final level, I wish this did something more. Having the ship move on its own and demand precise steering would be a better alternative than what's given. The timer function could have worked just as well on a final stage against more alien ships where you don't have the luxury of moving slowly into position and would have to take aggressive action to break through the final defenses. What you get is, well, a maze in ZZT. Steering an object instead of the player doesn't liven things up in any way, it just keeps things consistent with the other missions.

For an ending, you get a nice little explosion as your ship cruises through space.

Suddenly the game becomes a huge downer. Invasion ZZT this ain't. This entire game has been about blowing stuff up with heavy weaponry entirely without any hint of self-examination, justification, or anything. You've been committing mass murder from the very start! Perhaps a career in the air guard was not the best move for you.

There's plenty of time to reflect though as it turns out that the ship you were teleported to is actually nowhere near Earth and so our heroic reward is a long long nap with a hope that your return will be to an inhabitable planet.

I'm not one to demand a happy ending, but Dogfight has been far more cartoonish than anything remotely close to making a commentary on the horrors of war. Perhaps it was just the style at the time to surprise the player at the end that their fun little adventure actually sucks big time for those involved. (See Merbotia which was released a month prior for a similar bummer ending.) Up until this final board, Dogfight has been more G.I. Joe or some other Saturday morning cartoon with its portrayal of violence. It's just here to promote its shooter engine rather than play sets.

Final Thoughts

And maybe that's what the appeal was for me as a child. Flying around in various jets and space ships, shooting bad guys, laughing at toilet humor as ZZT's white bullets rain down from some birds, and then ending things with a giant explosion of an alien spaceship! Dogfight, like most ZZT games, requires an investment of imagination to wring out the entertainment from what in the grand scheme of things is subpar gameplay. Back when a child playing Dogfight I owned games like Air Combat and Star Fox 64 that obviously did aerial combat far better.

If you go into Dogfight really trying to immerse yourself in its world, you'll find yourself enjoying a short shoot 'em up that avoids falling into a rut with arena combat and a single on-foot mission. The gameplay is spaced out in such a way that it's a fun diversion for a bit, and far less of a commitment than any flight-based games created on a budget. If you go into Dogfight wanting to enjoy it, you will. If you go into it looking for a goofy kid's game whose world is nonsense and gameplay is cheese-able at best or dull at worst, then you'll get that instead.

I can complain about the lack of real variety, the missed opportunities in later missions, the pointless flares, and the planes that do fall apart despite yenrab's efforts here and now as I write no problem. The reality is that Dogfight is a product of its time tackling a style of game that ZZT can do little with. Modern spins on the genre certainly do it better. Agent Orange's 587 Squadron from 2021 uses a similar mission based structure focused on bombing runs rather than air-to-air combat. It looks and plays better than I'm sure yenrab could have imagined. All the same though, nostalgia is a powerful thing. Sit me down in front of Dogfight and you've just sat me down in a cockpit where I'm ready to blast some bogeys and save the human race.