Flaming Reviews: ZZT

ZZT was created way back before Lego Builder came out by Epic Games. Epic created a few other games that aren't really worth mentioning in this review.

To say ZZT is a game really isn't right because it's more of a game creator. It operates on a .zzt world-based file system, and comes with three games that showcase what the game can do and some decent ways to create stories and worlds without telling you outright to copy them. However in front of all of this is the fact that the default super-pastel colors of the game can make you go blind or become impotent. Thankfully, the internet was created and people starting wondering just where the other colors that are in old DOS games were and they were able to create them in the game, opening the pallete to some more eye-pleasing darker tones.

Creating a world in the game is easy, just open the editor and start placing lines down. You'll soon find the need, however, to create an object that does something exciting, or at least what you think is exciting. The Object Orientated Programming (or OOP, not to be confused with POOP) isn't very complex which makes the learning curve relatively low and it won't be long before you're going about creating these fantastic ancient 2-D adventures. Or maybe not.

The simple fact is that unless you were alive back when ZZT originally came out or your really into nostalgic crap you won't want to play ZZT because quite frankly running on a dual-core system that can run modern games decently feels like sitting in a Prius and playing your original clunky grey gameboy while listening to an 8-track.

If you want to know more, check out z2.

On a purely fan-of-the-game note, I'm getting back into ZZT after finding it on my hard drive. I lofe the nostalgic crap that this game brings back so there. Honostly some of the stuff is pretty good for such a simple interface and all that, and I suggest just checking the old bugger out.