My Name is Mister Z. That's M with an Ister Z.
For the true die-hards who just can't get enough of this game. The folks that saw Tseng introduce a new villain whose identity was unknown and just had to learn their secret identity, you can replay the first file to your heart's content until you manage to get all forty of those gems.
And when you do, Tseng handles the split paths through the second file in an unusual manner. Instead of having an alternate second password, he asks players to instead set a flag via the cheat prompt.
This doesn't really matter. It's just kind of odd.
When you do set this flag, the white walls blocking off the left passage here vanish, giving players the chance to switch to the new path that shortens the game overall, changing Gem Hunter's path through the base entirely.
Things start pretty ominously. This path is a lot more empty than the other one, attempting perhaps to build up some suspense as you wander down some halls. The fact that it starts by delivering some extra health and ammo is enough to leave you to believe you'll need it.
"Suspenseful" may be being generous to a Tseng that really just wants to wrap things up. The little bits of combat seen in the other path of the game are enough to keep players from getting bored. Here, there's nothing of the sort outside of boss battles, and frequently nothing to interact with on the boards.
The latter one here is a really unexpected design. Just a whole lot of supplies for ZZT adventures more than anything that feels particularly Da Hoodian. I'd sooner expect to see piles of off-limit items in the first Gem Hunter than anywhere else in the series.
The lack of so much as a comment from Gem Hunter here is a let down. There are more gems visible here than double the number needed to be able to reach this board. Gem Hunter should be salivating.
Thankfully it's not just touring empty halls. In fact, what Tseng does here is honestly pretty clever. Torie and Qwerty, mentioned as having "gone elsewhere" during the phone call with Reno about the laser are revealed to have been in these offices this entire time, where they're working on hacking in to the system and getting some information. Rather than repeat the phone call again, this time you get the information about Masamune's laser straight from the source.
The offices end and lead to craNKGod, as a special alternate fight.
And in a shocking turn of events, it's actually pretty cool! What seems like it's going to be another "turn invisible and appear elsewhere" fight ends up being much more fast paced, with crank turning into uh lines pointing in the directions he's about to shoot a bunch of bullets in. There are some hard-coded movements with a flag used to randomize between moving west then south or north than east. It's fast, has lots of animation, and actually hitting crank can be a challenge. He even throws a star towards the end of his lengthy combat loop so players have to keep moving as well.
Luckily, he'll stop every so often to yell "Mwahahahahaha!" which is when he's most vulnerable, though it is possible to land a few shots at other times.
He may be the best boss fight in the game actually.
Then he dies and Gem Hunter says nothing.
Beyond the boss fights, the only action players get to see on this path is a single red dot on this board the rushes at them and deals a tremendous 50 damage if it reaches them before being shot.
A small dot can definitely be a difficult to notice character in some scenarios. This is not one of them. For one thing it's rather than . For another, nothing else on this screen moves, so it's easy to notice the only thing that is, regardless of size. Plus it's bright red which isn't all that stealthy of a color.[2]
One last attempt at suspense comes from this board before the final boss of the alternate path. Masamune can be seen just making his leave from this board. How players are supposed to know it's Masamune is beyond me. Even if you've got an innate understanding that he's a white char two, that also describes Kev-San, Torie, Gem Hunter, and Kadro just in this file alone.
But of course, it has to be Masamune. The others, even the villainous Kev-San, aren't going to be used to build suspense.
The alternate final boss is Masamune in a giant... postal worker.
I can't thank Tseng enough for constantly confirming my vibes. First Resident Evil, now Metal Gear Solid. The PlayStation era was truly a blessing for ZZTers.
The Metal Postal Worker, a parody I cannot begin to comprehend, gives players one last hurrah for a Gem Hunter 2 style oversized adversary. It's not Tseng's finest work, but given the lack of bosses that really felt all that creative in this game, it's nice to see him trying to capture the previous game's magic again.
Things are a bit too blatant though. The white objects that hang around the MPW's hands and body will certainly never surprise anyone when they begin shooting. The ones on the body move around, trying to pin players inside their pyramid of bullets which they produce endlessly.
The question then is how to attack? The four little buttons on the shirt certainly look suspicious. I was expecting maybe one of them would randomly flash or there'd be something to clue the player in to shooting them in a specific order. No dice.
In actuality they're bombs that Masamune can drop which fall towards Gem Hunter and transform into stars. It's an attack that pretty much guarantees taking some damage as your ability to dodge while all these bullets are constantly dropping down as well means you're probably better off just ignoring it entirely. Attempts to evade the star long enough for it to disappear is just asking to run into several bullets instead, losing far more health in the process.
All you actually need to do is shoot the robotic postal worker's armpit when it flashes. Given the ammo players will have you can very much get away with just lining up in the right column and shooting upward sporadically to destroy enemy bullets and hit your target. The window to do damage is small enough that you need to predict when it will flash and shoot a few bullets in advance.
As is often the case, a second flashing armpit would have improved things.
Still, at least he can't be stun-locked.
Upon defeat Masamune just kind of vanishes. As does everything else on the board except for the passage to the ending sequence.
On this path, the spaceship isn't involved so while Masamune gets to escape, Mister Z can actually be confronted and unmasked.
I'm going to spoil this reveal, but only because I can do spoilers easily rather than the twist being satisfying in any way that knowing about it in advance might lessen the experience.
Click to reveal Mister Z and Thoughts
FALSE LEADER: You see, I've been in
control of most of the evil going around
here. Except for that upstart, Aric. Once
Tseng and Tyrone were out of the equation,
I started to use the Boys in Blue to
correct a few of my own errors. One of
them was the mistake of having Masamune
contact Professor Hercules about
Xamboxumbadrial Control and Mutation. I
was not aware of how strong Steve was at
the time he was created. So I had the Boys
in Blue sent over to help with the
situation. It was a foolproof plan to
kidnap Torie and drain some psychic energy
from her to power our G-Wyclef Cannon. And
I would have gotten away with it if it
weren't for you meddling kids!
GEM HUNTER: Can I speak, now?
FALSE LEADER: Go ahead.
• • • • • • • • •
After this startling revelation, Gem Hunter socks him in the gut, asks for a reason to not kill him, and then Qwerty and Torie bust in, very confused about why False Leader is here.
Torie is grabbed as a hostage so Falsey can save his skin, but he seems to have forgotten that the reason Torie is involved in any of this is because of her immense psychic powers.
Just before the ass-kicking to Sri Lanka can commence, Reno calls to tell everyone what that the self-destruct system for the planet has been activated. I assume that was Masamune's doing. Everyone has to flee which allows False Leader to make his escape, bringing the two endings roughly in line with one another, with the only real difference being that in the alternate ending Mister Z being False Leader is now known.
The escape is immediate and the game cuts to a new scene of Gem Hunter, Tyrone, and Kim aboard. The usual "I need a vacation" line is dropped, though in this version Tyrone asks Gem Hunter when he's going to pop the question to Kim. Not until they have some privacy, Tyrone. Please go away.
There's the common scrolling star effect seen in numerous ZZT games with space travel, as well as an extra layer of lines zipping past via invisibles being toggled that I suppose is meant to indicate lightspeed. Mixing the two is a bit weird, but at least it doesn't look the same as every other space scene.
Amusingly, this is the one time Tseng forgot to take other parts of the board into account, so as the animation plays one of the two beds that these lovebirds do not share flicker in and out of existence. I probably wouldn't point it out were it not for him making the effort numerous times with Zeux and Chuck to prevent the issue.
One other ending board shows Tyrone and his pals restarting the Boys In Blue, a group that I thought was still around. This game's got too much lore for me to keep track of.
Players are then taken to a slightly modified version of the previous epilogue screen. Most of the endings really don't change. Tyrone goes back to work for the Boys In Blue rather than resume training. Mister Z has his identity revealed in the text and an extra blurb tacked on about how he may be plotting revenge against Gem Hunter for ruining his plans or Aric for going against him in the first place.
It's really not that much.
It is however quite worrying to me that even this late into his ZZTing career, and with so many scrapped attempts at writing a third Gem Hunter, Tseng is really leaving things wide open for additional games, either an outright Gem Hunter 4 or letting Tyrone star again with the Boys in Blue.
Credits roll, and I can say goodbye to the Gem Hunter series forever. Unless I end up playing Gem Hunter 2: Special Edition or something.
Final Thoughts
This is another instance where I play the game, enjoy the game, and then write all the many ways the game let me down. I hate being so harsh on Tseng here because this is honestly the most approachable a Gem Hunter game has ever been. Open-ended, gem hunting entirely optional, not overloaded with Tseng's characters from previous games. For ZZTers at the time of release, all these cameos even if they don't add much of anything to the game, they do at least fill the world with characters without the need to know deep Tseng lore.
In terms of gameplay nothing is really groundbreaking here. The enemies you encounter are no more defined than a ZZT lion or ruffian, yet they do cater to the 2000s community's general belief that objects are always superior to built-ins.
What this game really is, is an incredible cross-section of what ZZT was at the turn of the century. A tightly-knit community with an established pecking order. You're either a cool z2 admin like craNKGod, an all-important IRC channel owner like Chuck, a prestigious member of Interactive Fantasies, or one of the community's targets like Chuck. What makes this game so difficult to truly enjoy today is how dated all of these former-upsides now feel. These days using built-ins is welcomed if they get the job one; cameos remain prevalent, yet rarely the focus unless a game is designed for an insular audience; and the hazing of members, in jest or otherwise, is no longer considered acceptable. Historically, this game is a fantastic representation of the era.
I don't think the people playing ZZT today though are eager to return to this time in history, when the community's lurch into constant hostility towards "others" brought it to its darkest days, and likely led to many would-be ZZTers to find a better way to spend their time. So you're left with a sequel that fails to click with modern expectations while the previous game was able to do so.
For those back in the day bored of November Eve's cut-scenes, they got their fresh new game with almost no reading or watching required until they were 90% through it. They got the luxury of being able to reach the credits without having to crack open the editor as the anthology with its gem list wouldn't be released for another month. This is a case of changing tastes having a huge impact on how a game is perceived, at least for my modern audience of me.
The game did fare well. Despite none of the Gem Hunter releases having any z2-era reviews (except for a single one of the original original where its reviewer is surprised that there weren't any reviews yet), some evidence can still be scrounged up for the game having been a success. Gem Hunter 3 is a winner of a Classic Game of the Month award. Review Knightt, the "Beaches of Stupidity" boss himself, speaks of the Hercules's commitment to never awarding a Game of the Month to a game published under his company Interactive Fantasies. Knightt says the time has come to give the game the award it deserved, praising the Mega Man-esque structure and classic Gem Hunter gameplay, and of course his inclusion in the game as a boss.
The old Tripod-hosted Interactive Fantasies website features Herc and Hydra giving the game high marks as well (though no full review) giving the game a 93% and 90% respectively. All the other games in the main series have scores as well, with this game doing the best overall. It's pretty safe to say that yeah, people liked this one at the time, even if the game's shine has long since faded. People wanted Gem Hunter and Tseng delivered.
In 2023 however, the game feels a little too simplistic for the grand finale of a lengthy series. The first Gem Hunter's cleaned up special edition offered a great starting point for the series, and the second game's creativity with its boss fights made it clear to me why this guy's games were so beloved back in the day. The third just doesn't have anything new to add to the equation. It streamlines its unique item collection mechanic to the point where it doesn't need to be there at all, the bosses mostly stick to the old-fashioned run-and-gun style, and the story offers nothing more than a basic justification for Gem Hunter's interdimensional travels. It hardly comes off as another masterpiece from the man who gave the world Master Walnut. It's more like Tseng coasting on his previous success, knowing that any Gem Hunter title is bound to draw attention.
Had the game built on what had come before it, I think there could really be something here. At times still Tseng offers these brief moments of him giving it his all, from the mansion of Blue Magus to the alternate craNKGod fight, to the almost-game-changing stage selection. Tseng needed to spread his efforts with Gem Hunter 3 a little less thin in order to have something that might not astound, but would be an easy recommendation for those that have played the previous games in the series. Shave off a few of the less interesting dimensions, and put that energy into transforming those that are merely okay into ones to remember. Maybe place some ammo and health in these dimensions or reset them on the stage select too. There's plenty of easily recognizable ways to improve the game without have to make any radical adjustments.
If you've checked out the first two games (and probably November Eve as well), Gem Hunter 3 is still worth the time to see where the series ends, even if that ending offers no real closure for the series. If you're after a readily playable slice of ZZT history for the time, Gem Hunter 3 is a great example of what was expected from a game of the era to be considered worthwhile. If you're hoping to jump right in to a well-refined game and Tseng at the the pinnacle of his performance, you're better off going back to the previous Gem Hunter.
- [2] (Linked board is not explicit. Other worlds in this collection are.) Pivoting to me, the never finished Aura 2 was to include "stealth" enemies which did use the tiny dot character with the idea that they'd be a lot easier to miss in a board loaded with moving enemies. I've got credentials when yelling about tiny dot enemies here.
