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unlawful invisibles (zzt zinesters - screenshots)

 
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 3:26 am    Post subject: unlawful invisibles (zzt zinesters - screenshots) Reply with quote

in my feature in this week's escapist, i note the recent proliferation of game making software marketed towards non-professional game makers. and though i think this trend is increasing as digital distribution becomes more plausible and available, there has been game making software as long as there were computers to run it.

among the earliest i'm aware of is zzt.

zzt is the first game developed by tim sweeney (who now produces unreal) and published by epic games (which was then called potomac computer systems). i've told this story before.

what interests me most about zzt is the way it combines strict graphics (the ansi character set, sixteen colors) and sound (pc speaker) limitations with a deceptively robust scripting language (called "zzt-oop," for "object-oriented programming). this formula is black magic for the game author who has no game authoring experience: no need to create any outside art or assets, a set of characters abstract enough to represent anything the author could conceivably want to convey, and a simple but powerful scripting language.

it also fosters a hell of a lot of creativity. with one hand it imposes a long list of limitations; with the other it offers the tools to defy them. clever people have done an awful lot with this toolset.

previously i've posted about the tail end of epic's own zzt games; in this thread, i'm going to talk about games by third-party authors - by videogame zinesters, hacking away at the zzt editor.

these are zzt games that i like. i havn't chosen them for technical merits (though many of them are technically meritorious): what is technically impressive in zzt is often only technically impressive because it's in zzt. what impresses me is strong - or at least interesting - design. many of these games are flawed: there's an awful lot of sierra-style learning-by-death. but as the works, often, of kids tinkering with computers, they rarely fail to be interesting.

most of the games - and zzt itself - can be found on a site called z2. dosbox offers perfect text-mode and pc speaker emulation, though some of the more complicated scripting causes it to chug.



a hugely ambitious - and accomplished - work, ned the knight tells a charming adventure-game sort of story in a world that gets gradually bigger as you progress through it. the game teaches skills in a way few zzt games seem to do, and develops a set of recurring symbols and tunes that frame the story in a pleasing way. there are some pretty clever setpieces, too (the vents aren't one of them).







zapzak feels - more than anything - like a short story, no longer nor shorter than it needs to be. it is comprised of several puzzle / tasks that stand apart from the typical content of zzt adventures. on a technical level, there's actually a lot of ingenius stuff going on in this game, but it's all very subtle - some people have juryrigged zzt to play lemmings and minesweeper, but the effects of tim gallagher's zzt witchcraft are so natural that only experienced zzt authors are likely to even notice them.







YEAH, YOU KNEW THIS WOULD BE HERE. the author of this game actually visits this forum. and you know what, i love this game. it's an uneasy adventure through a surreal landscape where the discord between each scene actually forms the thread that ties them together. has a terrifying and absolutely perfect ending that the author later revised (play the original release!) and i'll never let him forget it.









mission: enigma is another game full of technical achievements, and unlike zapzak it wears them on its sleeve. the title screen itself is a long, extravagant cutscene: a kind of zzt machinima. but why i like the game has nothing to do with its clever scripting: i like that the first handful of screens have more going on in them than most entire games.







clearly informed by kudzu, pop is an adventure that's not quite so surreal as to be impenetrable. it's also gorgeous, almost as much a gallery of ansi art as a game. there's some clever meta-commentary about the nature of games and the relationship between player and protagonist.









in a similiar vein as myst, winter attempts to guide the player through its very fine internal puzzle logic. a deep and ambiguous sense of place reverberates throughout the game's settings, from its central hub location beyond. and though it has a tone that is very different from the stock zzt setting, the game repurposes elements of zzt that are often taken for granted to very clever ends.









an earlier work from the author of mission: enigma, gregory janson, robots of gemrule is very hard, possibly asking too much of the player and too easy to make unwinnable. but regardless i find it one of the most compelling of his games; i think it's how the game's structure, the way your explore the world, makes it feel much bigger than it is.









nightmare is a puzzle game, but what puzzles! it's set in the land of nod, a dream world you drift through searching for parts of your fragmented consciousness (which manifest as letters in the word "consciousness"). as it is dream, many of the puzzles obey the ephemeral nature of dreams: mazes that change shape around you, blobs of seeming noise that can only be navigated when you filter through the noise to find patterns.







six easy pieces, on the other hand, is almost the opposite: traditional zzt, parcelled and arranged with the deadbolt precision of a marksman. there is almost no scripting in the entire game, yet it is one of the most wickedly and masterfully designed of zzt's worlds. it is unremitting, almost as intimidating for its geometric beauty as for the fiendishness of its design.







there's something about ezanya that absolutely enthralls me. maybe it's how the game's use of darkness makes it feel much larger than it actually is. maybe it's how the sheer amount of stuff on each screen lends to the same. maybe it's how it was entirely crafted with the stock palette and tools available before zzt authors hacked the game to allow for more stuff and flashier tricks; there is an enforced minimalism at work that epitomizes what zzt is and why i find it so compelling.

then, finally, there's sugartits.








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Lestrade
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 8:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Oh my god, those screenshots are dirty sex in my mouth. I want gigantic prints of some of those to wallpaper my apartment with. (I don't think my wife would be too happy about that.)

Cool stuff!
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Shapermc
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 3:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I use to have a CD with hundreds of these games on it. I use to think they were freeware (which is true, but I never thought that it was just like people in garages making them) and had a lot of fun with these games back in the day. You should make some banners out of the images!
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Worm
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 6:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Some different voices no one wants to hear!
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 7:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i think the problem was that some different voices are completely off topic.
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 7:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Oh it was an aside, you know it, everyone knows it. Don't shit bricks in glass toilets honey.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 7:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

hey, i didn't move it.
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 8:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

yo, you forgot the "teeheehee" after that post
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 8:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Here's a quote from a 2007 interview with Tim Sweeney (creator of ZZT):

Tim Sweeney wrote:
I've always wanted to build a massive-multiplayer version of ZZT. In other words, a vast interlinked game world built and extended by users using simple ZZT-like tools. Like ZZT, it would be open-ended and community-driven. Players would be able to build their own levels and write scripts for objects, as well as play the game as a character, build up attributes and collect items.

Such a project would tackle all the key technical problems of MMO development without the complexity of a 3D environment. The data required for levels and motion data is also so simple that servers could be run by the community without significant bandwidth expense.

Alas, such a game wouldn't be much of a Gears of War killer. :-) So don't expect it to actually happen. But it would be interesting!
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 10:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 10:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

sweet, new desktop backgrounds
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 5:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Redeye wrote:

right
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 11:18 pm    Post subject: Re: unlawful invisibles (zzt zinesters - screenshots) Reply with quote









al payne's smiley guy adventures have some of the strongest design sense of all of the zzt worlds i've played. they're inventive, smartly paced, and they avoid many of the common pitfalls of amateur developers: uneven difficulty, learning-by-death. they're beautiful, too. and all with the original zzt palette and toolset.












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Harveyjames
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 9:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sly Stallone's famous catchphrase 'Go For It', there.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 10:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

dave bishop's games are also early ones: there's a certain charm to these very early titles, where the author is working with the editor rather than against it. these are action-adventure variety games of the style zzt was designed to create, but they manage something most of these games, even tim sweeney's own official games* can't: they're not unmanageably difficult. where managing scarce resources is an element of many zzt games' puzzles, darbytown and mask of cortez provide an ample supply. the author even took measures to make the game less abrasive, like alternate easy modes of some rooms and a "last resort" station where players can trade their score for whatever they're short on.

* prior to the super zzt episodes, but that's another story.











are you bad enough to rescue the president?
















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