Smiley Guy & Toxic Terminator
Dude, you're not meant to post reviews of your own games on this database. But I'll let it go because this is a smart game, and you're a hero for making these games back in like 1991 and the writeup is quite interesting in terms of history.
Anyway thanks for liking my remake that I did in like 1999, even though it kind of sucked =(
Uh. I should write an actual review.
Well, there's not much to say, really. As far as games from 1991 go, the Smiley Guy games are the cream of the crop, so to speak (being previous winners of the superold ZZT's Revenge contest). The story is pretty simple- stop a mad doctor taking over the world- but I think this was the first game to frequently use objects as enemies (as opposed to like lions and crap), and the programming in general is a step ahead from a lot of games at the time.
The graphics are also awesome considering the lack of STK at the time, too. So is the music- the Toxic Terminator theme is still one of my favourite pieces in ZZT speaker sound (remember I used it on the stereo in Blue Moon?).
The whole thing is really good. If you've not played it, you ought to.
A word from the author . . .way to go Underdogs! Nice to see the old games have survived. Here's a bit of ZZT trivia about how these games came about. Smiley Guy was one of the winners of a game contest that Epic Megagames sponsored to generate interest in ZZT. I deliberately left off the password protection. So, it's great to see what Zenith did to improve the graphics. In fact, I had a graphically improved version of Smiley that I submitted, but it was too late to make Epic's publication. By the way, I no longer live at the address that you find early in the game. Smiley received fan mail. Yeah, fan mail! Tim Sweeney at Epic told me that Smiley might have been the most popular of the contest entries. So, I sent him a sequel, Toxic Terminator. At first, Tim rejected it, because he was moving to 256-color graphics with Jill of the Jungle, which I got to test while in prototype. Later, he called me and said his office got hooked on Toxic. So, Toxic became Epic's last ZZT game tied to the roll out of Jill of the Jungle. ZZT is fun and addictive. Enjoy!
