Last Momentum

In the far off year of 3955, if you need to make some scratch, look no further than Earth and its league of Momentum-Speedracing. Few careers are as lucrative as the handsomely paying position of a driver in this futuristic race of ludicrous speed. Careening at high speeds across all terrain in hopes of reaching the finish line in first place, or at least alive, you won't find a better thrill. The racers are beloved, the sport unmatched in popularity, and it's all thanks to NIL, creators of the Neo-speed Momentum Speedracer.

Racers willing to operate these vehicles rarely live long, but the money, fame, and thrills are all unmatched. Over forty deaths can occur in a single race! It's a blood-sport without the bloodshed, and the people wouldn't have it any other way.

coolzx's Last Momentum may not offer much in terms of its story, but the bits of information about the world it takes place in pull from enough inspirations that it's easy to imagine. A dystopian world ruled by corrupt corporations, and ultra-violent entertainment to keep the people happy. It's got the perfect mix of hokey-ness to it, that makes it feel like a ZZT adaption of popcorn flick getting a video game based on the film. Racing to the tune of podracing from the then recently released Star Wars: Episode I, in a civilization that's more Death Race 2000.

Large McHugeBig^[1]

Nonetheless, coolzx really does have a story here, even if it's almost entirely front-loaded and receives no real closure at the end. Still, compared to pretty much every ZZT racing game out there, providing any justification whatsoever is enough to set the game apart from its peers before you even step foot inside your vehicle.

Two rival companies, NIL (Neo-speed Intergalactic Labs) and WIRE (Windell Intergalactic Reactor Enterprises) are both in the momentum speedracing business and each would love to see their competition snuffed out ensuring the survivor to have a monopoly on the manufacturing of these pricey machines.

This is the owner of NIL, an 83 year old who refuses to give up his power over the company. He's the bad guy, which you could probably have guessed had I revealed his name first: Adolfus Speede. Mr. Speede has a proposition for WIRE with the hope of finally put an end to their feuding. Should WIRE be willing to select a pilot to run through NIL's most dangerous tracks, and should that pilot somehow survive, Adolfus will "move out and die" according to the introductory text. This little plot hook also provides a helpful explanation for the sport itself having numerous racers, while the ZZT experience is limited to Travis and Travis alone.

Honestly, I'm not 100% on the specifics of the story. Despite being just a few screens worth of text, I can't figure out exactly what each company does. It sounds like NIL makes the speeders and WIRE makes the engines they use. Adolfus is the head of the company, but it sounds like he'll only step down and not close the business? And even if he does it sounds like both corps actually rely on each other to produce this extremely successful line of speedracers that continues to increase in demand each year? I'm not sure what WIRE gets if the people currently buying their engines shut down, or if this old guy goes away. Regardless, they're all too happy to take on the challenge, or at least offer up some fodder to try.

It's easy enough to assemble what is here into a serviceable story if you don't dwell too long on the limited specifics. Two companies that just want the other one gone, and a wager to force one of them to shut down. I'm going to just assume that NIL is more evil than the average corporation thanks to Adolfus, and then it's smooth sailing to root for WIRE. Regardless of the actual logistics, that's for the suits to worry about. Players instead only need to worry about surviving these races, taking on the role of the only WIRE pilot that might stand a chance against what NIL has in store for them...

Trent Carwell.

At the young age of 22 Mr. Carwell is famous as one of the best momentum speedracers there ever was. Making things spicier, his father is a former employee of NIL that now does finances for WIRE. This doesn't matter. None of this matters, but by god am I so glad these two are here. These two names alone instantly instill the game with a very specific type of vibe. It's grand. It's over the top. It's dumb, but it's going to be great.

Fasten your seat belt, or don't because I don' think a seat belt will do much at these speeds. It's time to drive.

Hard Drivin'

The sport as described in the introduction isn't actually what players get to participate in. coolzx understands that the big draw of these kind of races where death is the norm is in the spectacle. The crashes, explosions, and last second swerves to avoid disaster. It's exactly the kind of thing ZZT struggles with thanks to the harsh limitations of its scripting and visuals. In ZZT, you'll be hard pressed to find any racing game with computer controlled racers on the course, so coolzx tries to play it both ways, describing the more exciting sport that ZZT can't handle, while giving players a stripped down version more suitable for the engine.

Some might disapprove of hyping players up for a game they don't get to play, though the countless adaptions of existing game franchises to ZZT had long since conditioned its players to accept that what you can imagine and what you'll actually get will never match up. Taking the approach with an original creation not directly inspired by any particular game is definitely unconventional, but I think it makes for a more believable spectator sport.

The inability to really have a race with multiple drivers made racing games in ZZT has a niche genre. Objects, being unable to tell tell whether the thing they've crashed into is another racer or a wall, and being unable to tell bumped objects to react to being struck have meant that every ZZT racing game I've come across has had to take a different approach. If you can't do a grand prix of racers, you'll have to settle for a time attack. This usually takes the form of a single-board course featuring a vehicle with the uncanny ability to instantly turn ninety degrees and trying to complete a set number of laps before time runs out.

Despite the limitations, the unique nature of driving physics forced upon players by ZZT has been one that I've always been partial to, and wished more games had been willing to experiment with. A few titles like Freak Da Cat include some racing levels, while games that fully commit to racing are much rarer. Back in 2021 I wrote an article covering Speed Racer X, one such game, and still had fun with it (at least until some bugs at the very end sent it crashing into a tire fire). With Last Momentum, I didn't even realize I was going to be playing a racing game until it started, the file originally only being tagged solely as an "arcade" game.

The racing seen here however uses a very different approach compared to Speed Racer X, one more fitting of the "arcade" genre. Rather than present the entire track from overhead with drivers completing laps on a closed circuit, it takes a view that's... still overhead actually, but functionality behaves closer to behind-the-car arcade racers a la Outrun. Players can only see a limited view of the track ahead of them. More detailed racers have the luxury of twisting tracks that can use sudden sharp turns to surprise players. Last Momentum is a game about avoiding obstacles while otherwise traveling in a straight line. Picture drag racing, but somebody up-ended a dumpster on the track. Instead of steering to stay on the road, your maneuvers are a constant stream of RIGHT! LEFT! RIGHT! as you swerve around obstacles both inert and erratic instead.

A cute engine sure, but surely not anything that could hold interest for an entire game's worth of racing. Well, as it turns out, it very much can. A lot of the finer details of the game take what could have been a engine only capable of providing five minutes of entertainment and instead turn it into a captivating arcade title that hits a sweet spot of playability and challenge.

First, your vehicle itself. coolzx refers to this as a "momentum speedracer" which while I respect the flavor, is a bit of a mouthful, and I will just type speedrun/runner/running instead of speedrace/racer/racing every time so let's call it what the object is named: car. Like a routine inspection, there's some formalities to get out the way first to get a feel for the engine's quality. The car and controls run properly at cycle one so things are snappy and responsive to player input. Control is limited to just two directions, with a cinder block effectively pressing down the gas pedal for the entire duration of the race. Unlike other ZZT racers which do use boring old cars, there is no brake here to slow down at the cost of losing time while maintaining speed.

Also, despite "momentum" being in the name, there isn't really such a mechanic, at least in the physics sense. Crash into something and you'll be penalized by losing momentum, but the car itself won't decelerate. You are always running at the maximum speed at all times. This can create some stressful moments compared to other racing games where crashing resets the vehicle's speed, giving you a moment to get your bearings again before zooming off.

"Momentum" in the context of momentum racing is merely a value represented by the player's current score. As you drive, this value naturally depletes at a rate of roughly one point per every 1.5 in-game second. The unusual mismatch here serves a purpose in that it forces players to carefully consider the value of two counters rather than one. Players have to be able to recognize when their momentum is too low and a boost will be needed to successfully finish a race that would otherwise be out of reach. For skilled players trying to maximize their earnings, knowing when you can just barely get away without using a boost means more money in your bank account, or more likely, more money to be able to spare for the more challenging races later in the game.

As you drive, two other counters are also slowly ticking down. Firstly is the actual course timer shown on the bottom of the screen represented with objects. This is a bit of a sticking point with me about the game. Given how fast paced things get, it creates a lot of needless (to me at least) difficulty in terms of having to look in several different areas to get all the information available to the player. The car is roughly centered. The timer is there on the bottom, and everything else uses counters displayed in ZZT's sidebar. Ammo is unused, and it would've been nice if I could have gotten away with just having to look to the right for all the numbers in play. Really, it would be ideal to have everything in one of these object-based displays, though coding such a thing capable of counting down by multiple values would be no easy feat.

The last counter used is the bonus prize for the race represented with torches. This is similar to momentum in that it also ticks down as you drive along while decreasing further when you hit something.

Upon finishing a race any remaining bonus is converted to cash. There's no way to restore lost bonus points, though the game doesn't end if they run out.

In the early stages, you can set aside a nice pile of cash by driving well which comes in handy when things get dicier later on. It's actually a great system that creates a sense of risk even in the more simple races and helps with the arcade sensation of going for a high score. Mistakes may not be fatal, but they can be the difference down the road (pun not intended, but actually now that I made it: yes pun intended) between finishing a race and exploding in the middle of the track.

Frog And Car, The Iconic Rivals

The game is broken up into four different stages with five tracks and one final "boss" track. Each region uses a different theme and provides different obstacles. From the start players can choose to race in the forest, an active volcano, or the atmosphere. Despite what the introduction says about Earth being the hot-spot for this style of racing, each of these stages is set on another planet, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter respectively. After completing all three of these, a fourth and final course, CyberCity is unlocked back on Earth.

Giving the player the freedom to pick a stage like this is an unusual decision. The stages are designed to be played in order as the difficulty steadily increases. Cash earned in the earlier races is essential to surviving the later ones. The amount of starting momentum provided to get through the first track of each level is just barely enough to complete it un-boosted. You'll get a much more enjoyable experience sticking to the stages in order, with no real benefit to planet hopping.

The boss tracks at the end of each stage differentiate themselves from the others with the help or large drawings of weird creatures, robots, and enemy vehicles that try to raise the stakes even further.

What it amounts to is just some objects that stay at the top of the screen, moving left and right erratically, all while shooting down in hopes of hitting the player's vehicle. On paper, they don't add much. Every track features objects that shoot from the top of the screen, and later tracks feature objects that shoot while they travel down the track so the only real difference here is that the vertical space for the track is reduced meaning the other obstacles will reach the top and start heading back down faster than before.

They end up being a great addition to Last Momentum if just for the flavor. The boss fights are great because of how silly they are to see. You can justify whatever you like for the races set on Mars and Jupiter. What happened on Earth that there are now giant frogs that dwarf your bleeding-edge speedracer in size and effortlessly keep pace with it?

That absurdity provides strength. Each course reveals the name of its boss fight before the first race. I found myself genuinely looking forward to these fights just to see what I'd be up against. Seeing the names "Frogg", "Kore", and "AirKraft" offer a tease of what to expect while not really letting players know much of anything.

The final boss is the only time the game remembers it did have a story to tell earlier. In the end, the courageous and brave Trent Carwell has to survive against a machine piloted by none other than that dastardly Adolfus Speede.

Pay To Win

With momentum being a stylized way of measuring health, you may be wondering if there's any way to atone for smashing into one of those Jovian dust-devils or if this is a game where the slightest mistake can doom you. Luckily, our protagonist has a cool dad that installed a computer system in Trent's car for just such an occassion. At any time during the race by pressing the down arrow a menu will open where your current funds can be spent on buying Klymax brand (nmiaow) momentum boosts.

These are the only purchases players can make, which is a bit unfortunate as three of the options are the same thing just with different amounts:

This object is really just your typical ZZT shop, just accessed while driving rather than in a nice non-moving brick and mortar building. All purchases instantly convert gems to score.

The pricing is a bit troubling though. coolzx has accidentally made medium boosts a bad purchase. There's no delay or cool down on using the computer, so players that find themselves with next to nothing left in the tank are still better off buying a small boost twice rather than paying more for the same amount of momentum.

Large boosts are instead a bit more tactical to deploy, especially in the earlier stages where use of the computer is minimal. While it is a better buy to go big mode, there's no benefit to having any leftover momentum at the end of a race. If you can get by with several small boosts you can come out ahead by making the minimum purchase to reach the finish line. That is, provided you drive flawlessly. All the same it can be equally tempting to splurge on a large boost just to give yourself a buffer in case you happen to crash into another obstacle.

The last option, the "Hennkor SpeedMax Drain" is the most interesting option, as the effect is greater the earlier into the race that it's used, though it can come at a greater cost than just the fifty gems to purchase it. When players buy SpeedMax, the conversion doesn't come from your gems, but rather your bonus money!

The formula here is not one that favors players. By forfeiting all your potential bonus money in advance you'll receive just a single point of momentum for every ten torches! For comparison, every two torches in the bonus counter at the end of the race translates to one extra gem, mathing out to the equivalent of 5.00 gems per momentum.

It's a real Faustian bargain. If you find yourself late into a race and in need of momentum, your bonus points have likely already run out making this something that has to be used as early as possible to be effective. Doing so means a little extra momentum early on, hopefully saving you from having to make purchases with your existing (or worse, depleted) cash, at immense cost of reduced cash for the next race. It's easy to say that this is an offer that should be refused, though Last Momentum does eventually hit a level of intensity where it can be your only hope for surviving some of the final races at all.

2 Files 2 Furious

The first three courses can be played in any order, though there's a very obvious difficulty curve that would make jumping into later courses ill advised. (Unless you're actually speedrunning speedracing here.) Once all three have been conquered successfully, a passage opens up allowing players to travel to the final set of courses, which is really where the difficulty spikes.

The sudden rise isn't just that the tracks themselves pull no punches (though believe me, they don't), it's that coolzx has filed them away in a second file locked up behind a password. As recently discussed in the Closer Look for the second file of Voyage of Four, passwords are sometimes used to transfer over flags and counter values, while others are merely a key for a lock. Unfortunately, the password here is one that doesn't transfer stats, meaning any racer that has what it takes to reach CYBERCITY is going to have a nasty shock when they look at their bank account. Rather than the nearly 3000 gems I had managed to hoard in the game's first file, the second tosses all that money out the window, hands players a mere 200 gem stipend and demands that they find a way to make it somehow work.

I'm fairly confident that if I had been able to bring my winnings along with me that I wouldn't have struggled so much on the final courses. Perhaps coolzx deliberately did this to make sure that players couldn't coast on the momentum (hah) of their previous earnings. If that was his plan, it definitely worked. The final courses are absolutely brutal, enough that it's definitely harder to recommend folks interested in Last Momentum stick with it until the very end. Suddenly, the SpeedMax Drain starts looking a lot more appealing...

The worst part is that the second file wasn't even unnecessary! The extra boards of the second file would have fit in the first by any measure. The board count remains comfortably below one hundred and the total size of both files barely surpasses 300 kilobytes, the old approximation for when a second file should be considered. Even if that was the worry, the second file has to duplicate several tool kit boards and create a new title screen as well. These boards, along with one for the game's music and another for a base template of the engine are all prime candidates for being blanked out if space was ever a concern in the first file.

My best guess is that coolzx probably had no idea how many courses he actually intended to include. Had the second file also contained a set of three courses then it would have indeed been a requirement. Instead it just puts a real nasty dividing line into the game that offers no benefit. This is an arcade game after all. Players are encouraged to play well, minimize their spending, and rake in the dough with clean performances in races. Now you can't even measure high scores easily!

Bugs On The Windshield

I've finally come to accept that no ZZT game prior to 2015 or so, no matter how well-received it is, no matter how many awards it won, no matter how many names are listed as testers, no matter how skilled the creator was regarded will be devoid of bugs entirely. If you're lucky, it's something trivial to avoid, or a line of dialog not firing that creates a momentary awkward transition.

There are three issues with Last Momentum that I crashed into. Two of which wind up making things easier for players which is a refreshing change of pace at least.

The first is a timer bug. The objects that are used to count down the time remaining in the course all have an off-by-one error with the 10s digit. Towards the end of the race the timer will tick down: 13, 12, 11, 10... and then the race is over and you win! This makes every race ten seconds shorter than it claims to be, which when you're trying to save yourself from buying more expensive boosts can be quite the boon. This issue with "digital" timers made out of objects happens surprisingly often, and I've definitely fallen victim to it during the development of the timer in Wordles of ZZT. Here though, the trouble made it all the way to the final release.

The issue is something coolzx is well aware of! It's outright mentioned in the main menu's help section. I suppose coolzx opted not to fix every single track in the game, and just let the player enjoy their slight advantage. With some change to the game's presentation, I think this could almost have been turned into a feature.

I didn't understand what that text was talking about prior to actually doing some races. Instead, I found myself unexpectedly having races end until I paid close enough attention to the timer to realize how it actually worked. There's something to be said about having a deliberately ambiguous timer, though the current form isn't the best way to go about it. Had coolzx had a value that counted up to one hundred representing the percentage of the course completed, you could create some fun yet stressful situations. Instead of having tracks count down with longer timers, the rate at which progress accumulates could be tweaked and then players couldn't so easily do the math to determine if they have the momentum to reach the end currently or not.

The computer could benefit from some adjustment as well for this. When I think of "operating a computer while driving" I think "don't do that". I'm picturing activating the computer toggling a mode for the inputs, making your car unable to be steered and using the arrow keys to cycle through purchase options while driving in a straight line. Currently that computer is a free moment to collect yourself and decide what to do next, when it could be a new obstacle to master. Or maybe that would be terrible and I have bad ideas. You tell me.

As for the second bug, it's the one that's all too common with ZZT engines like this: event dropping. ZZT processes objects in the order they were placed on the board (the stat list) with the controls to steer appearing first in the list and the car immediately afterwards. When you steer, the car jumps to a label to handle the steering. When you provide no input, the car uses a loop that checks if it's crashed into something, and if so jumps to a label to reduce your momentum and bonus cash. The same label is also used when shot by a bullet fired by an object which will appear at the end of the stat list.

Since the player can safely steer in a direction even if the car is blocked, it's possible to spam steering to prevent the collision check loop as well as the :shot label from running. Hitting obstructions tells the car to jump to the crash handler on its next tick, but steering again will instead tell the car to jump to the steering handler, bypassing the crash routine entirely. When this happens naturally with a last second attempt at avoiding an obstacle, it feels satisfying to pull off, as if you were parrying the hit by getting the timing just right. There doesn't need to be any timing though. If you hold left or right for the entire duration of a race, you'll complete it with zero damage.

While this bug serves as a get out of jail free card that helpfully lets players get around anything they can't handle (namely the second file), it probably should've been fixed and the difficulty of the final stages adjusted instead. On the bright side, Last Momentum can be finished without having to open up the cheat menu I suppose. There's nothing stopping players from finishing the entire game without taking advantage of the bug either, so I can't be too harsh about this secret tip you'd write into a game magazine to if such things had existed for ZZT.

The third bug is not so helpful. ZZT likes to follow jumps to labels when parsing messages which can create situations where a one-line message meant to be flashed along the bottom of the screen ends up gaining a second blank line via the jump, turning it into a multi-line pop-up window. In later levels, there are cases where your car will end up producing the latter style of message, breaking the flow of the game as the action halt and the screen is covered by what should be a simple indication of hitting something.

This also applies to the use of the SpeedMax purchase which isn't quite so bad as you already opened a window to make the purchase in the first place.

Given how frantic later races can be, it's easy to get multiple crunches in a matter of seconds, making it very difficult to time your inputs to avoid causing yet more of them. The later tracks need no help in making survival even more difficult, but you'll have to try and adapt.

Let's Drive

As a game that relies entirely on a single engine, it's easy to dwell on the technical details of Last Momentum. This is how your vehicle works, this is what happens when you hit something, this is what happens when you hold down an arrow key, and so on. Really what matters most is what the experience of playing the game is like.

Folks. This game was a blast.

Throughout my little adventure I recorded plenty of gifs, and these animated pictures will say a few thousand words

In its earliest stages, it's a little bland. Obstacles slowly descend towards the player, either static or zig-zagging. Some bullets are sporadically fired from the top of the screen. It's a leisurely Sunday drive. Almost worryingly so. You can very much get away with parking your car in a single column and nudging the steering wheel just the slightest amount to bypass most obstacles.

These stages feel like they really drag on. It's more like waiting for a pot of water to boil than zooming down a track at dangerous speeds.

Things pick up fairly quickly though! And once the game gets going, I found myself getting really into it.

As players progress through a set of tracks, the intensity keeps increasing, and the tracks themselves begin to narrow. A seemingly clear pocket of the road can at any moment be bombarded with bullets fired from an invisible object at the top of the board itself that shoots over the border (which is made of water) and adds random pockets of dangerous terrain.

The second set of levels which take place in a Martian volcano were the moment it became clear to me that coolzx really considered how to do add variety to the obstacles players have to deal with. This vertical bar (sadly nothing but the bosses are given names and the objects themselves just have names like "shooter" and "blocker") is the perfect example. It shoots randomly either east or west at it makes it way down the track. At first, it seems like dumb luck is all it comes down to, it either shoots in your vehicle's direction or doesn't when it's in the same row.

But then it occurs to you that objects can't shoot other objects at point blank range, and suddenly the rules of the road have changed. Now instead of just hanging out in the safest corner you can find, you have to get right in there. The only way to avoid being shot is to position your car directly adjacent to shooter so that it can't shoot you. Just like that Last Momentum has stopped being about avoiding obstacles and started requiring thinking about how else you might deal with them.

Other small touches contribute towards adding some unpredictability to each race. Crashing your car doesn't actually cause it stop in place. You'll find yourself instead being knocked randomly about from side to side which can quickly transform one mistake into several. The third (and to a lesser extent the final) set of tracks take it one step further with the high winds of Jupiter's atmospheric levels throwing your car all over the place, including north and south. Maybe you'll luck out and be pushed backwards overall, giving a slightly longer length of track up ahead to react to. The opposite can happen too of course, and you may find yourself pushed several tiles closer to the top of the screen, now having to react to the same obstacles even faster than before. At times, you'll almost be tempted to ram into something in hopes of getting some more breathing room.

Despite the unpredictable nature of it all, the width of the track, and speed of your racer make the game feel fair more often than not. The inadvertent quick-dodges performed by steering just as you're hit might not be an intended gameplay feature, but they create a sense that your reflexes allowed you to avoid disaster at the last moment. Things get frantic, but all the systems in play make your failures to survive a course feel like they're your fault rather than coolzx's.

Some exceptions may apply, particularly in Cybercity. Here pretty much every obstacle is constantly shooting in multiple directions while also moving far too chaotically to try and hug the side to avoid being shot. These later levels suffer from throwing just too much at once at players, turning what would be a great game into one of those ZZT games that stumbles in the last act. Mid-game levels provide a sense of satisfaction when completed. These ones offer a sense of momentary relief that quickly turns into dread when you realize you wasted your entire bonus and are now entering the next, more difficult, level with even less cash than you had for the previous race. Did Adolfus Speede plan this??

The flaws with Last Momentum are pretty obvious these days. However, back in the day I think the community was more on board with something that starts off challenging and becomes an exercise in frustration. The game's difficulty curve is overall graceful enough, that by the time you do start to struggle you're invested enough to want to stick it out to the end. Today, grinding attempt after attempt in CyberCity is not something I'd consider a good use of my free time. As a child, I think I would've loved this one. Being able to complete the last few races would've definitely been a source of personal pride. Last Momentum could be seen as a game to be conquered instead of a fun way to spend some time after school while the family computer is free.

Make your game enjoyable enough and a younger me would become immersed in it, no matter how primitive it actually is. If engine games like Barney9651's Dogfight and EdC's Speed Racer X could put me in the head space of an ace pilot or race car driver, then surely this one with its twitchy gameplay and crude story would have hooked me on proving myself to be the best damn momentum speedracer there ever was.

Final Thoughts

Despite the final courses being a bit too much for me to handle, I left Last Momentum quite impressed. This is the kind of engine a capable ZZTer could throw together on a dull Saturday afternoon and then get away with copying a few objects in slightly different arrangements to make as many levels as they wanted. Making a game like this in ZZT is easy, making it well is another thing entirely. I really thought that by the end of the first set of courses I'd have had my fill and would need to just deal with the fact that I still had to get through another fifteen levels.

Instead I found myself bragging to no one as I finished races without hitting a single obstacle, holding my breath as I bought the tiniest of boosts to make it to the end knowing that if I hit something it'd be all over, and deftly maneuvering across tracks to stay safe from horizontally moving projectiles. My racer would go wildly of course when struck with Jovian winds, and I'd take quick action to wrestle control back before smacking into something. Sometimes it didn't work out, and the knocking around of my car as I smacked one obstacle and thought little of it would send me spiraling into a half-dozen more, ending my run in an undoubtedly flaming disaster.

Last Momentum highlights how ZZT's engines can in fact be more than a sideshow. This one can use a bit of a tune-up, but Last Momentum is no lemon. Its biggest flaw is the second file being needlessly split from the first. Had the game been one complete world I really think this would be ZZT's best racing game. It could have been a rare instance where going for a high score could end up being something worth doing, whether to beat your personal bests, or to compete with other ZZTers to prove just who the best racer is. Even with its dents though, Last Momentum is an incredible example of an engine game done right, one that offers more to see than what shows up in the first track. Most drivers (myself included) will have to give in and weigh down the steering wheel to see the end, though if you're truly committed to 1CC-ing it may be a road worth taking.

• ^[1] Yes I know it's Big McLargeHuge in the MST3K episode. Large McHugeBig was the name given to a ZZTer's LiveJournal (who specifically, I do not recall) back in the day. I'm paying homage. Don't at me.