Attack of the Mole
I'm not a ZZTer, or at least I haven't really used ZZT in many years.. I heard about all the work Nanobot was doing and it sounded neat, but kinda pointless. I was truly impressed by some of the things the encyclopedia demonstrated... this are probably well known and obvious tricks to ZZTers but I had no idea it could do some of the stuff it could. Still limited and all, but fun to play around with.
"Attack of the Mole" is an engine game. Its plot is a simple excuse to give the player one board of random dungeon-style combat. It has no real goal, save to kill all the enemies, which promptly respawn, and uses prefab monsters.
Clearly, a game like this can be likened to Space Invaders in that the only goal is to get a high score before inevitable dying. Such a game can only survive on its addictiveness; does it make the player want to get a new high score?
AotM doesn't, in my opinion. The action is repetitive without being the simple, addictive fun of a game like Tetris, and one particularly unpleasant bug, which wiped out both the ammo sources at once, made the game still less playable. Attack of the Mole might be fun for five minutes for those who like random dungeon games, but it's probably worth a miss.
Nice title screen, though.
