♦ Livestream of 5 ZZT worlds. ♦
♦ Stream Contents ♦
• (3:00) "Doomsday 2: Nick's Revenge" by Nicholas S. Midolo (1997) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/doomsday2/]
• (27:51) "Adrenalin (Demo v1.1)" by THMiles (1997) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/adrendem/]
• (41:28) "Armor (v1.0)" by Andrew Barbieri (1997) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/armor/]
• (48:00) "Block Runner (Demo v1.1)" by Vidwiz127 (1997) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/runnerdemo/]
• (59:10) "Adventures in RyanWorld (v1.1)" by Ryan Williams (1993) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/ryan11/]
A whopping 5 games thanks to starting in the middle of one and purposely picking extremely short worlds for the rest of them.
Doomsday 2 sees its finally with its share of star-heavy bosses that are effectively unplayable without cheats. Even so, the giant Neo Nick boss is pretty great. The target shooting less so. And I have no idea if any of the boards were from the first game this time, which means either they weren't, or I really wasn't kidding that taking a week off would be enough to forget literally everything about the first game.
But Doomsday is so last week. The other games are the more interesting ones this time around.
"Adrenalin" has a buck-wild story about scientists that worked on the atom bomb going on to work out how to upload a person's brain into a computer. The experiment goes so wildly wrong that you end up in the far future? Where ruffians have taken over the world? It starts as a weird gory looking shooter with some intense bugs before it reveals its RPG engine which is somehow pretty cohesive, and has a great molotov cocktail animation by alternating between upsidedown and standard exclamation-marks.
A second battle is locked away in the preview gallery of unplayable board that fires right up if you cheat the player on in letting us see some other attacks.
It's a weird one.
Then comes Armor which is just bad. Sorry. I do my best to find anything positive to say about these games, but this is a series of basically identically boards using something not quite the same as the "Power Armor" engine included in Super Tool Kit that's bugged and doesn't actually surround the player. It also takes damage when it gets shot so there is literally nothing you can do as you're intended to maneuver across ping-pong-paths that will get you killed before you make it to the first corner.
Block Runner is next, which looks like an action title focused around ZZT's default creatures. Each board is a level, with the original idea of requiring players to obtain boulders from parts of the board and push them to block blinkwalls that cover the exit. Honestly it was pretty fun, definitely something I wish was more than just a demo as it gave players a reason to go all over the board. Plus you can push multiple boulders at once so you can group them up a bit at times to reduce trips through hostile environments.
Lastly, Adventures in RyanWorld, a deceptively long game where you explore a marketplace, interact with the various shop owners, and sometimes commit acts of violence. Most of the fun is here with the subsequent boards being just kind of whatever until you fight the author of the game to the death at the end.
Overall, a much better set of games than I expected.
♦ Play these worlds directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/doomsday2/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/adrendem/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/armor/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/runnerdemo/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/ryan11/
♦ Originally streamed on July 16th, 2023 ♦
