♦ Livestream of the following 3 ZZT worlds ♦
• "Calvin and Hobbes: Destroy the Gork!" by Lysander the Great (1995) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/calvin_gork/]
• (18:04) "The Adventures of Calvin + Hobbes: Part One" by Mike Fennell (1996) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/calvin_advs/]
• (10:41)(18:04) "Calvin and Hobbes in: Seasons Come and Gone Part 1" by Reddragon250 [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/calvin_seasons/]
(Originally streamed November 13th, 2022)
ZZTers do what Bill Wonterson? Three games featuring the local darling of your local newspaper's funny pages. Like most ZZT fanworks, the quality is dubious at best, and has surprisingly little direct connections with the source material. Our first two games turned out to be the same game twice. We have nothing concrete to go by, but the idea that the authors credited between the two different releases are the same person, with the game getting a fresh coat of paint a year after its initial release.
Calvin fights off his classmates and teaches before heading home to resupply on ammo before going to his treehouse and then spaceship in order to fight the Gork. There's obviously some Spaceman Spiff here, but the game's text is virtually non-existent. The objects lack names which makes it very hard to tell who is who when they don't refer to themselves as Calvin's mom or teacher. I'm not entirely sure which of two objects was meant to be Hobbes, which says a lot about the game's characters. The revised "The Adventures of Calvin + Hobbes" makes the visuals a little more sensible, though the protagonist changes as now you're supposed to be rescuing Spaceman Spiff. Just some strange games that fans of the comic won't get a lot from, and those unfamiliar with a series that ended more than twenty years ago will be even more confused.
The third game, "Seasons Come and Gone" is still rough, but more recognizably Calvin. Set over the course of an entire year, Calvin's goal is to just go outside (at his mother's request) and have fun. Each season opens the world up a little more, although there's not a whole lot for Calvin to do. You can go swimming, throw water balloons at Susie, and have a slow ride through the woods in your wagon. (Conveyors don't work with fake walls so they player has to advance manually.) There are a few shops that sell items you'd expect to find in a Calvin and Hobbes game: water balloons, squirt guns (including Super Soakers), and Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. Plus some more specific items like bits of diving gear. None of the purchases actually matter, and the game itself ends before Winter (hence part 1), with some scraps of the Winter season hiding in the file.
This is all set across a pretty large town consisting of a number of boards which makes the game feel very very big and very empty. So while it's a big improvement over the Gork games, most of your time is just spent walking down empty streets for several boards in hopes of finding a place where Calvin can actually do something. You can certainly go exploring, but a magical world it ain't.
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