It is possible to break into the vault at the bank. If you do so, the safe deposit box gives you a key which opens a gate elsewhere in the game. If you check it a second time, you are supposed to also be able to find and collect one gem. However, the #give gems 1 command is mistyped without the number sign required for ZZT-OOP commands, and so it is instead printed in the text window as "give gems 1".
Coolness belongs to a second era of old school ZZT game design: one that came after the original Town of ZZT style, and died off around 1998-ish, as far as I can tell. It's a genre where every computer will fry you if you input a bad password, where purpose is sacrificed in lieu of having objects do odd things, where you sometimes have to touch objects twice to notice something odd about them, and where sometimes, just sometimes the author put a lot of work into cheat-proofing the game and it just comes off as kind of snotty and creepy. (My favourite quote: "You didn't think I'd find out you used a cheat code did you? Well, you will die for this betrayal." ...WHAT?) If you can put up with those pratfalls, you get to see and do a few interesting things and try some interesting puzzles.
You begin Coolness as Fletcher Long, probably a sixteen year old kid, sitting in a bank after helping out his father Marshall (manager of the bank). None of the tellers talk to Fletcher, and he wanders out of the bank and onto a road to pick up items and use them on other items for no apparent reason. This is another game where the main character will throw a hissy fit if you try to travel along a clearly placed road that actually has nothing beyond it. So the only places you can visit are along this road and inexplicably through a top-secret base located behind the backyard. Coolness is a branching game like Code Red, but here, you can FEEL when certain branches are being cut off, and it's intensely annoying.
I'd rag on some of the stupidity contained in Coolness, but the fact is you should be able to reach at least one of the endings without much trouble. The graphics are very similar to Code Red and Sivion, two contemporary games Coolness is very similar to. Be aware that there are a couple of bugs (the game forgets to increase the gems variable when you search an object, then kills you if you cheat ... another reason to never put anti-cheat crap in your game.)
Coolness is decent but it also shows the weaknesses of the branching design trend started with Code Red. In Town, you could go to any of the four areas, but you saw them all by the end of the game. Instead of one solid adventure, you get several diluted ones that all begin the exact same way and typically end with the same schtick. It's not a bad game, although it could be much less obtuse.
(A much cooler game by the same author: Warlord's Temple)
Wow. An incredibly good game for the time it was released and it's very good even by todays' standards. Gameplay is quite varied (almost no shooting sequence, a lot of puzzles, some quite annoying, some very clever and original). There are branching paths throughout the game, even if the short length compromises the replay value a lot (unlike Code Red, for example, even if the comparison doesn't exist since it had eight different endings, while Coolness only offers two/three (short) alternative paths, even if endings are actually four. On the negative side, though, the quasi-nonlinear feeling suffers very much from the rigidly linear level design: you can't visit many places, because you're not supposed to and you are confined every time in five-six rooms at max. I know it's a fault commonly found in zzt adventure games, but Code Red and other games have managed this much better than Coolnees does. It's still a very impressive game, though.
Graphics: 8 Gameplay: 7 Longevity/Replayability: 7.5 Fun Factor: 8
Overall: 7.5/10
the best game ever better then code red! code red is boring compared to this a guy has to face aliens and stuff on a very cool day heh pretty good Plot 10/10 great interesting
Graphics 10/10 awesome the drawers were original
Sound ? my computer cant use ZZT sound
Replayability 11/10 great not irritating at all!
over all 100/10 or 10/10
