PPDV

You Vs. Earthworm Jim

Later players are treated to a horrifying look at themselves and their newest target: Earthworm Jim.

Sorry for anyone expecting him to be wearing his iconic super suit.

Ole Jim here doesn't stand a chance.

This one ends up being an important piece of the game as within it Viovis reveals his brilliant technique of repeatedly importing boards. The Zombies chapter made it pretty obvious, and of course even the starting ladder boards are identical save for coloration.

But really most of the game seems to be built up from scratch. Most boards have no matching components to the rest. At most you see some repeated objects that handle the slime effect seen a few times.

And So It Continues...

It keeps going, and I feel like there's not a lot to say about a lot of these. Even compared to what else has been seen by this point, many of the later sequences do start coming off as a bit low effort. Boards like this that are just a single scribble with some text overlaid. (In this case a series of boards mostly just naming the Ninja Turtles, but never really drawing anything or doing anything with them. Nothing absurd, nothing in-character, nothing clever, nothing surprising.

There's another fight, which is more of a fight than the RPG battle in that a single bullet is intended to be shot at an un-moving object. Though players are free to advance to the next board whether or not they do battle

I think I do have to show GroG though. This became an oft-repeated line among ZZTers for a bit. Or maybe it was just one ZZTer that developed a fascination with it. The records are spotty here.

At the very least it's something I had completely forgotten about until I reached the board, and then starting hollering in excitement. Grog! He's here! This is the GroG game! He talks in red!

There's a magic kid that looks a tad soulless thanks to his spinning gun pupils. I suppose that's something. He dies of a sunburn and explodes into blood like so many of PPDV's characters.

PPDV didn't click with everybody back then, and it's certainly not going to start now. With boards like this one though, I genuinely don't know what to make of them. Towards the end, a lot of what's included appears to be there entirely to bolster the board count. This is something you see plenty of times with more traditional ZZT games where authors don't want to end their game. Getting that vibe from PPDV is really weird. There isn't an inevitable finish line to cross that's being delayed here. There's no final conflict to resolve. It's pure board count, and yet Viovis still does eventually stop in the high 80s/low 90s for playable/total boards rather than go all the way and reach the one hundred boards permitted per world.

To The Art

There is some solace to be taken in the end of the game not just devolving into scribbles as it worryingly begins to. The game closes with a few art boards that while not exactly polished pieces do at least feel like doodles in the margins of a student's notebook. Still, it's better than the game going out with a whimper.

I think this is a self-portrait? If I am wrong then oops, sorry Viovis.

The end of game gallery also features this unlabeled drawing of members of ZZT company Damage Inc. It's always fun to see 90s kids immortalized in ASCII form.

There's no guide to who is depicted here. With nothing but text to go by, I think the left member is Tseng, based entirely on Tseng's "Agh. More dobermans." catchphrase being used. The others I have no idea. I can think of a few ZZTers that were really into Tool in 2004, less so for 1999.

Poking around at some of Damage Inc.'s magazines, it's still unclear. Plenty of art and member lists, nothing labeled. It's not even until the last issue that I could even be confident Viovis himself was a member. It would be such a power move to include drawings of ZZTers in a ZZT company you weren't a part of.

The Journey

I couldn't help but wonder as I was playing PPDV, why for all its tedium, I wasn't actually bored playing through it. Though the old reviews may have been a bit harsh they made it clear that this was a bit of a nonsense game of the exact kind that rarely impacts me whatsoever. Some duller moments aside, more often than not I did want to see what would happen next. It might not have been the most engaging game in the world, but there was still some pull. I didn't leave PPDV feeling like I just experienced a brilliant piece of art or anything. There's just something different about this game compared to other games one might call nonsense.

Maybe it's just the sheer number of ZZT worlds I've had to play doing wildcard streams that are truly nonsense. Games like City of the Darned and Peter's World were still fresh on my mind when I started up PPDV, allowing me to appreciate the ways it succeeded in keeping me interested while those others could not.

A major part of it may be how streamlined it is. I love the bizarre moments in these weird old unpreserved worlds. However these games rarely try to be as odd as they come across today. They're supposed to be the kind of grand adventure that PPDV has no intention of being. Viovis's boards rarely last more than a few seconds, placing the passage forward in close proximity to where players arrive on each board. With a lack of dead-air to slow things down, PPDV offers all the lolz and discards the lulls. It's greatest strength is that it doesn't give players time to stop and contemplate. There's always more to see and experience through that passage.

I will admit though, that if I started playing this world for my own enjoyment, or just to see if I wanted to stream or document it in some way, that I doubt I would have made it all the way to the end. As quick as getting through PPDV's boards may be, there are still more than 90 in total, with just a scant few not actually used. Those left on the cutting room floor are mysterious in their own way as aside from a few alternate "THE END" screens, each one would fit in as well as anything else does.

Order In Chaos

Viovis's creation certainly feels chaotic from the get-go. Any ZZTer merely downloading whatever new releases were made available on ZZT archives would have found themselves in for quite a surprise compared to the usual adventures of the era. This kind of game was far removed from the norm, making it stick out significantly from its peers, for better or for worse, depending on who you asked.

On closer look however, there's quite a bit of repetition within the world itself. A number of recurring events make things a little more predictable than initial impressions. Viovis's creation has a few common threads which add some signal to the noise.

The most reliable is how frequently things explode. So many objects play their roles and then exit the stage by turning into a red slime that spills blood from where they once stood. The randomness of this can certainly catch players off guard at first, but by the end of the game an object bumping into a wall and liquefying is almost to be expected.

Boards themselves are repeated here and there as well. The Earthworm Jim fight outright acknowledges the helpfulness of being able to export and import copies of a board. An odd place to bring it up as that vignette seems to build each screen from scratch. The zombies though, are a clear example of copy, paste, tweak, repeat.

PPDV also loves to lie to players as a form of humor. Text frequently says one thing while the game itself does another. Players are told of RPG battles, fight sequences, and hidden passages that need to be found. Then no battle commences, no bullets need shooting, and clear un-obfuscated passages forward are the only other thing left to for players to maneuver towards.

This is another instance where the principle is invoked so often that players will begin to immediately just assume the opposite of what Viovis writes. By the end of the game, the greatest possible surprise would have been an RPG battle!

Slimes show up in numbers as well. They really are the star of PPDV. When they're not being used to create gore, Viovis loves to shuffle textures around by transforming walls into other walls as the slime spreads around. This is easily the definitive look of PPDV. Once Viovis realizes this effect can be done, it becomes the focus of several boards for a chunk of the world.

The one aspect of PPDV above all others that truly left a mark on ZZTers is Viovis's use of inverted characters. Perhaps more than any other game before it, PPDV makes extensive use of tiles with their foreground color set to black and a non-black background color to allow the character to be seen. These are then complemented with the same tile, colors inverted. Sometimes it's a little more involved, with non-homogeneous characters or with a third color of the element with a bright foreground on black background.

Solid, normal, breakable, water is the mantra of ZZT shading. Almost every game that makes use of the extended colors afforded by Super Tool Kit uses those four blocks to fade from light to dark. Nearly every tool kit worth its salt will prominently feature these fades.

Viovis may have pioneered the idea that those elements aren't the only option when it comes to giving boards a texture. Some worlds like Moustache use it constantly. Others such as Micr0wave's Tim Ruff dabble in it as well. There's no real name for this kind of texturing, but for those familiar, it will almost certainly be associated with Viovis first and foremost.

However, it's worth giving some credit specifically to Chronos as well here, as it's likely that Viovis wouldn't have been able to use the technique quite as well were it not for Chronos's 1997 Weird STK, which created Super Tool Kit style boards for a number of odd elements. This is where most ZZTers first gained access to creatures without stats which PPDV uses all over the place as un-moving patterns compared to their statted counterparts which would shuffle around every cycle or two.

Viovis certainly recognized that he came across something worthwhile here. It can be found in several of his other releases post-PPDV. Green Day ZZT, Lil Buddy, and The Magic of Deff Leppard is Within Us all bring the style back at some point.

When a game is focused on the strange, nonsensical, and an abundance of art boards, it may even be described as Viovis-esque. And there's no easier way to make a game feel more Viovis-esque than to include some inverted character texturing, hands down the game's longest-lasting contribution to the ZZT scene.

Banging Tunes

Viovis also has the distinction of being one of the few skilled ZZT musicians out there, which means that this game has its own original score.

Rather conveniently, there's a dedicated soundtrack board hidden within the game, easily accessed from the Museum's file viewer if you'd care to take a listen to anything. It's quite unusual.

Specifically, it's every bit as weird as the rest of the game is. For one track "your selected soul" the logic behind the unusual sound becomes clear when looking at the source #play commands.

Words turned into audio are nothing new. You can even get some reasonable sound effects out of the technique as long as you're making sure to try to lean into words containing A-G as any undefined note is treated as a rest. Viovis is clearly capable of more though, with the rest of the songs being composed with only valid notes and parameters.

That still doesn't change how these tracks are to listen to. Just like everything else in PPDV Viovis straddles the line between high effort and low, with songs that are neither pleasant on the ears nor discordant noise. It feels too harsh to call what's here "bad", even if I'm somewhat confident that Viovis would describe it as such. There are a lot of false starts, fake ends, and portions of songs that feel like they're going to go somewhere before being discarded to move on to the next thing.

...Exactly like the rest of the game. Maybe it's the perfect soundtrack after all.

Final Thoughts

This is another case where I worry the article was harsher than how I felt actually playing the game. PPDV isn't really a game for me, and that's okay. They can't all be.

More likely, this world today can be seen as the groundwork for Viovis's (and others') later trippy art worlds. The kind of game that showed ZZTers that they were not under any obligation to make ZZT worlds that fit the mold of mainstream gaming on PCs and consoles. Your world didn't need to be The Legend of Zelda with the names replaced. Your world didn't need to be one story that starts at the beginning and ends at the end. ZZT was free-form enough that you could simply create with it for the fun of it, and if your audience didn't like it, then so be it.

As the years went on, that kind of design ethos would become more popular. Viovis with PPDV was ahead of the curve, and perhaps responsible for others getting on board as well.

For me, it was an unexpectedly engaging start once the magic book gave way for the bird cages for people and the two people to be killed. After that though, none of the other storylines really did much for me. They were quick to get through, which I'll always appreciate. They sometimes had some art worth looking at, or special effects with slime that made for a unique sight to behold. They just couldn't hold my interest for all that long, and towards the end, when the effort appears to be reduced, I found myself more interested in how many boards I had left than what those boards could possibly contain.

Going back to PPDV and realizing it's contemporary with Zem! 2, Stupid RPG, and Gem Hunter: Special Edition can help you appreciate it more for daring to be so different. It's certainly not for everyone, but for those that do enjoy the random and unexpected, PPDV is the basis of what that meant for ZZTers a few years later. I'm not in the best position to judge whether or not it's worth going back to over later works which likely did more with the concept. I can say should it happen to be a little too dated, that it's still worthwhile for allowing others to take the design further.