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 ZZT? Did you try to fall asleep and hit the wrong key or something? Is this a failsnore or a game?? ZZT is a blast from the past, back when computer gaming was still in it's infancy. Developed by Tim Sweeney and released in 1991 as an MS-DOS product, it was as far as I know the first game ever produced by a little company known as Epic Megagames. Those would be the people responsible for more recent hits like Gears of War, etc. ZZT is an action/puzzle adventure game. This will be a mostly blind LP, since I've done probably less than half of the first adventure, and none on any of the others. I've lurked for a brief time and enjoyed the offerings of others, and I hope this proves to be an enjoyable first LP for me at SA. What kind of LP will this be? I'm planning a SSLP/VLP hybrid, with subtitles, not commentary, for the videos. It seems to me there are some parts which work better for screens, some for videos. I should also note here that I tend to be more written narration-heavy than the SSLPs I've seen around, but I'll definitely try to show everything useful in visual form. What kind of length are we talking here? That really depends on interest. The initial release had one core adventure, and three more available for purchase. The first is Town of ZZT, the others are City, Dungeons, and Caves of ZZT. I'll start with Town, the only one I know much of anything about, and then do the others. Beyond that, there are a lot -- and I do mean a LOT -- of fan-made adventures you can play. Some are reputedly quite fantastic. Whether or not I delve into any of those, or how many, will depend on how much interest there is. This could end up as a proper megathread with dozens of adventures contained herein, or it could just cover the initial four offerings. What kind of community input are you looking for? First up would be suggestions of any further adventures beyond the additional four. Once I've finished those I'll select, possibly at random, a new adventure from those that are submitted. Also, there will likely be situations where I request a vote on what to do in a given game situation. How often this comes up will depend on the adventures themselves, and since I know very little about them by the very nature of a blind LP, I can't say how often this will be. As often as I think it's relevant, I'll put one up and then wait at least 24 hours for Discussions, criticism constructive or otherwhise, suggestions and ideas for improvement are always welcome. What say you about spoilers? Please refrain from any spoilers at all. If I absolutely can't figure something out I'll request hints in the thread, but otherwhise don't ruin it for me and anyone else who hasn't played through these before. And feel free to laugh, LOUDLY, at the dumb stuff I do. It's going to happen, I can already tell. Journeys So Far Town of ZZT The original stock adventure Chapter I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP3Xc40dWaQ Chapter II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_WYtbNPdPg Chapter III: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BxdB0BTMM Chapter IV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMmdSeiU0nI Caves of ZZT The second of four adventures from creator Tim Sweeney zorromorph fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Jun 28, 2016 |
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Jun 16, 2016 18:34
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Spoiler: There is no content in this LP.
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Jun 16, 2016 18:47
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I played a lot of this as a kid. It'll be interesting to see how the fan-made stuff holds up these days.
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Jun 16, 2016 18:54
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Volume I: Town of ZZT And here we are with the opening screen of the first starter adventure, Town of ZZT! Probably best to view it as the 'tutorial adventure', so to speak. Basically we appear to be in the town center at the intersection of two major thoroughfares, such as they are. Everything in ZZT happens in 2D, top-down format. I/we are the white smiley personage with the blue background, and using the arrow keys we will move around as we choose to do various things. We can navigate between screens or 'game boards' in one of two ways; move off the screen in any direction that we can reach the edge, or enter a 'passage'. In this case all the major points of the compass are open to us(north, south, east, west), and there is a passage into the Armory(upper left) or the Bank of ZZT!(upper right). You might also immediately notice the arrow showing the way to the Palace is through the aqua section to the lower right of the screen here. There seems to be something in the way of entering that though. If we try to move over there, we find that ...  More on how to get past this situation in a moment. This white symbol with the purple in the middle is a door, and all locked doors have an associated color. In the middle of the main interesection there's another white item, a scroll. Let's take a look at what it says.  Why do we want to get into the Palace? Who even are we to begin with? Dunno. A little sparse on backstory detail here, but at least we have a goal. The grammar nazis among us will note that there's only one 'r' in 'ferrocious', but that's neither here nor there. Find the five purple keys so that we can get into the palace. We'll need both combat skill and deductive reasoning, brawn and intelligence if you will, to succeed. Not sure what makes anyone think we have either, but be that as it may there is more written here.  So basically unless we find gems, we can get hit 10 times before we die. FYI there are no multiple lives here. If we die, it's Game Over and we'll have to start again from the beginning. The idea of needing a zillion saves is not encouraging in terms of our prospects, but definitely important to keep in mind.  This is all the scroll has to tell us. Let's take a gander at that 'detailed help file'.   The rest is just about using joystick/mouse/keyboard for controls and the stuff about help and gems is repeated. The keyboard is best in my opinion as it's more precise for this kind of game. 'Detailed' might be a stretch here. The four tips provided are good and useful to keep in mind, however. We can see always on the panel on the right side of the screen our current status: 100 Health, no ammo, torches, or gems, our score is 0, and no keys either. So we don't have jack diddly squat, in other words. There are three torches and three gems laying about near the bank. No reason not to just go pick those up.  Yeah we might have guessed that.  As we read already, twice. However, they also increase our score -- the three gems have given us 30 there, 10 points each. We've got the three torches as well, and Health is up to 103. That seems to be all we can do without leaving this area, so where do we go next? ** Enter the Bank ** Enter the Armory ** Go North ** Go South ** Go East ** Go West The most popular option will be selected. The Town of ZZT awaits!
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Jun 16, 2016 19:35
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If you're at a loss for impressive fan-made games, this might be a good place to start. That said, I hope you show off Super ZZT.  EDIT: What version of ZZT are you using? I flat-out can't get it to run on a 64-bit machine. Scaly Haylie fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Jun 16, 2016 |
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Jun 16, 2016 19:47
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ZZT owns! I used to play the poo poo out of it back when there was a big user-submitted archive of ZZT maps on AOL. One real big one i remember was code red or red alert I think it was called it was split up into 3 separate files and had like 9 different endings and a password system linking the 3 maps it was pretty drat impressive for the time.
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Jun 16, 2016 20:15
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There's Super ZZT and MegaZeux, I think. Also, all the provided adventures can be changed in the editor if you load them into a hex editor and replace the word "SECRET" with anything else; and Super ZZT also has the editor if you run it with the /e switch. ZZT's UCC is a mine of hilarious crap such as an adventure about an evil company reprogramming another company's photocopier to kill anyone who uses it, purely so that "we can advertise that they suck". Another one has one of the lines that still makes me laugh out loud.. the author wanted to do the classic "that guy who's been standing around innocently is the master villain" trick, but since ZZT's graphics can only show people as the smiley face icon and so they all look the same, he resorted to having them say "I'm that guy who was near the door! Prepare to die!"
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Jun 16, 2016 20:16
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The screenshots look strange. Are you photographing your monitor or something?
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Jun 16, 2016 20:59
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LizardWizard posted:If you're at a loss for impressive fan-made games, this might be a good place to start. That said, I hope you show off Super ZZT. Thanks, found that site and bookmarked already when I was looking up stuff to start this. LizardWizard posted:What version of ZZT are you using? I flat-out can't get it to run on a 64-bit machine. Version 3.2, via DosBox. dsf posted:One real big one i remember was code red or red alert I think it was called it was split up into 3 separate files and had like 9 different endings and a password system linking the 3 maps it was pretty drat impressive for the time. Saw a reference to a Red Alert ZZT game in one review, but I can't find any actual game to download by that name. FredMSloniker posted:The screenshots look strange. Are you photographing your monitor or something? Strange in what way? Just using the PrintScreen key, nothing unusual so far as I know.
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Jun 16, 2016 21:35
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zorromorph posted:Strange in what way? Just using the PrintScreen key, nothing unusual so far as I know.
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Jun 16, 2016 21:44
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zorromorph posted:Saw a reference to a Red Alert ZZT game in one review, but I can't find any actual game to download by that name. It's Code Red. I think it's by the same guy who went on to write MegaZeux.
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Jun 16, 2016 21:47
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That makes sense, I'll give it a try.
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Jun 16, 2016 21:47
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Hey, did anyone ever do an HTML5 version of the ZZT engine? It should be completely possible.
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Jun 16, 2016 21:52
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People have coded some crazy poo poo in that engine - Code Red is towards the tame end of the spectrum. Think platformers, RPGs and Tetris. The graphics also got a lot better when someone hacked together the STK, which gave access to colour combinations the standard editor wouldn't provide.
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Jun 17, 2016 01:07
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hyphz posted:
You can also type ?+debug in-game.
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Jun 17, 2016 07:09
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Awwww poo poo, it's ZZT. I remember playing a few games on this engine - it was never that great, but it had some gems.
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Jun 17, 2016 13:36
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Did anyone ever explain what ZZT stands for? It's certainly something that's been around. The Frankie Goes To Hollywood game published in 1985 had a "ZZT room", it appears to be the name of a band and the name of a celebrity "ZZ Top", and apparently it's a text message abbreviation in German (meaning something like "back to topic")..
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Jun 18, 2016 01:34
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Unofficially, it's "Zoo of Zero Tolerance." I'm... not 100% sure how that came about. Officially, it's because Tim Sweeney wanted ZZT to show up last on BBS software catalogs back in the early 90s.
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Jun 18, 2016 01:49
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hyphz posted:Did anyone ever explain what ZZT stands for? It's certainly something that's been around. The Frankie Goes To Hollywood game published in 1985 had a "ZZT room", it appears to be the name of a band and the name of a celebrity "ZZ Top", and apparently it's a text message abbreviation in German (meaning something like "back to topic").. 
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Jun 18, 2016 02:35
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hyphz posted:the name of a celebrity "ZZ Top" Oh god I'm old. My life would be very different today if not for ZZT. If you need game suggestions, here are a few that come to mind from back in the day. (I'm not necessarily saying they're good -- just memorable.) Yoshi and the Attack of the Mind-Warping Fingernails (by wired.com's Chris Kohler) Escape from Castle ZaZoomda by the /3rianator Mostly Morpine [sic] Powder Strangers by Barney9651 Slightly Morphine Power Rangers by the /3rianator (there were a lot of Power Rangers parodies) Sivion by Monthigos Escape from Planet Red by Barney9651 pop by tucan Island of Jerks by NL Aric Solomon Chumby fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Jun 18, 2016 |
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Jun 18, 2016 04:46
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I think zorromorph can take it from the number of replies compared to the number of votes that they should just pick directions that they know/think are interesting. Presumably we're going to have to go down all the paths anyway.
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Jun 18, 2016 05:20
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zorromorph posted:That makes sense, I'll give it a try. When you're using PNGs, don't forget to run them through something like OptiPNG to shrink their file size down. If you ever use GIFs, GIMP's GAP plugin suite's Optimize GIF for Web option's pretty good on that front... unless you recorded them with gooncam, which already has optimization built into it. Relevant articles on the SALP TSF wiki here (follow the link to r1ch's image format guide) and here. Anyway, I believe "ferrocious" clearly implies something that is "aggressively ferrous." Also, we should ** Enter the Armory, I guess. I'd be kicking myself over if I traveled all the way to the edge of a game world just to get told I should've checked the house I started next to for, say, weaponry or armor or some silly quest prompt I skipped. Sorry, I don't really have a lot to work with with such a small update. I'm used to SSLP updates being much longer. It's a little refreshing to see a shorter update, though. Reminds me of that one time FredMSloniker LP'd Alice in Wonderland. ElTipejoLoco fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Jun 18, 2016 |
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Jun 18, 2016 09:24
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Dear lord, I cannot count the hours I've spent fooling around with the ZZT editor. I kept my first computer, a 286, for several years after I had upgraded, simply because I had soooo many modules lying around, and I couldn't bear to part with them. I think a sizable fraction of that 40 MB harddrive was devoted to ZZT Oh, and ** Enter the Armoury, so that I can show off my favourite .gif
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Jun 18, 2016 13:14
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FredMSloniker posted:I think zorromorph can take it from the number of replies compared to the number of votes that they should just pick directions that they know/think are interesting. Presumably we're going to have to go down all the paths anyway. Agreed. Sorry ZM but it's a Hobson's Choice at the moment if you don't know the game. And if you do you know that it doesn't matter which one you choose and you do indeed do them all anyway.
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Jun 18, 2016 14:57
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hyphz posted:It's Code Red. I think it's by the same guy who went on to write MegaZeux. Found it, thanks. Seems to be one of the better ones by the reviews. SolomonChumby posted:If you need game suggestions, here are a few that come to mind from back in the day. (I'm not necessarily saying they're good -- just memorable.) Added to the list of things to consider if I can find them, thanks. FredMSloniker posted:think zorromorph can take it from the number of replies compared to the number of votes that they should just pick directions that they know/think are interesting. Presumably we're going to have to go down all the paths anyway. hyphz posted:Agreed. Sorry ZM but it's a Hobson's Choice at the moment if you don't know the game. I agree, and it's pretty self-evident we'll have to go all directions anyway. In that sense it's not really that meaningful of a choice, there will probably be other games that have more significant ones(apparently Code Red has multiple endings, for example).
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Jun 18, 2016 16:06
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Oh man, ZZT, that's a blast from the past. This game shaped my childhood. I'm pretty sure it was one of, if not the first, game with a level editor too.
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Jun 18, 2016 17:08
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Nah, Boulder Dash Construction Kit was 1986 and had a tile based level editor. Repton Infinity in 1988 had programmability, but not as good as ZZT's. It's the programming language that made ZZT special.
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Jun 18, 2016 17:49
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ZZT-OOP forever warped my idea of what "object-oriented programming" means.
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Jun 18, 2016 18:01
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If you're after scenarios to play, I remember kudzu being pretty strange, immersive, and well-programmed. There was also Evil Sorceror's Party, which was impressive for its ambition if nothing else.
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Jun 18, 2016 23:04
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I'd like to see Burger Joint, since I seem to recall thinking it was fairly impressive. There's also one that I'd rather not name, but it's insanely ambitious, of-its-time, and impressive in its own right. Do you have an email or something?
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Jun 18, 2016 23:17
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whybird posted:I remember kudzu being pretty strange, immersive, and well-programmed. Thanks for the suggestions. There seems to be quite a few possibilities, the difficulty will likely be in narrowing them down. Lizard Wizard posted:I'd like to see Burger Joint, since I seem to recall thinking it was fairly impressive. There's also one that I'd rather not name, but it's insanely ambitious, of-its-time, and impressive in its own right. Do you have an email or something? I use zorromorph@gmail.com for purposes such as this. Feel free to fire away. And now ... Town of ZZT: Chapter I In which nastiness to newbies is ultimately fatal to my initial attempt to progress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP3Xc40dWaQ
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Jun 19, 2016 07:05
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...what the hell is up with that preview image? It's making my monitor strobe. E: and weirdly, the quoted version looks fine.
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Jun 19, 2016 07:43
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Wow, this game is really unforgiving. Definitely from before the time of tutorials going on forever.
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Jun 19, 2016 08:25
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Slapping together some ZZT levels was literally my first programming experience. I almost forgot it even existed.
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Jun 19, 2016 09:00
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SOLarian posted:Wow, this game is really unforgiving. Definitely from before the time of tutorials going on forever. And that's a design decision I personally really hate.. throwing in a resource and usage mechanic just to make something (darkness) feel significant without thinking through what happens if the resource runs out. 90% of the time dark rooms in ZZT are just a mechanical decision to prevent the player seeing the entire maze/mechanism at once. Plenty of games didn't seem to remember that they also create a time limit. hyphz fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Jun 19, 2016 |
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Jun 19, 2016 14:56
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 The best reaction .gif e: Oh yeah. The labyrinth. I had forgotten just how absolutely terrible the base ZZT adventures were. Not even nostalgia can cover up how bad they were. inscrutable horse fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Jun 19, 2016 |
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Jun 19, 2016 17:10
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Wow, what a great example of terrible game design. What were they thinking? "Let's name a room 'The Room of Extreme Annoyance' and then do everything we can to make it extremely annoying." Because that's definitely how you want your players to feel!
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Jun 19, 2016 17:41
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Yeah, it might be a good idea to speed up the video or have a jump cut the next time there's a room that long and pointless.
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Jun 19, 2016 17:59
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I'm pretty sure the intended solution to the "guardian of the key" room is to put three boulders on either side of the spinny things. Incidentally, this video nicely demonstrates why "health" and "torch" are my favorite cheat commands. 
Scaly Haylie fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Jun 19, 2016 |
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Jun 19, 2016 18:07
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The room of extreme annoyance.
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Jun 19, 2016 18:33
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