OH MY GOD

[davidn]

It's always nagged at me that I've never completed either of the Best of ZZT games - I redownloaded Part 1 yesterday thinking that it couldn't possibly be as difficult as it had seemed when I had first seen it. From first appearances, it's actually slightly worse than I remember.

Well, that's something to keep me distracted from being on a plane tomorrow...

Comments

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Good grief... for someone not acquainted with ZZT, that just looks... well, it looks like the time I tried to learn how to play Dwarf Fortress. (I failed; the learning overhang curve got the better of me. :P)

I'm imagining a remake of that scene in the first Matrix movie, where you're sitting at the screen and saying "I don't even see the code anymore... all I see is Player Character... torch... treasure chest..." :P

D.F.

[davidn]

Oddly, I mentioned exactly that happening in the last entry - ZZT accustomed me so much to its own visual language that when shown in isolation, the yen symbol will now always look to me like a torch, ä will be ammunition, female rings will be keys, and so on... the trouble with this one is the sheer size of the puzzle, and I forget how much worse it must look to anyone who doesn't instinctively know what the triangles and arrows all are.

I also have to wonder about why a lot of those symbols made it into the American Standard Code - can you imagine:

BIFF: We've got #000, that's a space - how about #001? Should we start with the alphabet next, or go with the numbers first?
HANK: How about a smiley face? Then a different face. Then just do some card suits and other junk for a while and start the alphabet about sixty characters in.
BIFF: Perfect!

(NB. I do know the technical reasons for the placement of the alphabet characters... but it makes a more boring image.)

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

"Female rings"?

There are good technical reasons for why the alphabet starts where it does, but I'd still love to know what they were thinking when they decided what to fill the other spaces with :) And moreso with Unicode (http://text-symbols.com/cool/), since that actually had to be agreed upon by a bureaucracy!

[davidn]

Please don't tell me this is another difference in terminology that's gone unnoticed to me for years. From your own link - male ring ♂, female ring ♀!

And yes, Unicode does have an incredible amount of... stuff in it (I hadn't realized the extent to which it did, until you mentioned that) - putting in everything from the entire world sounds like a huge enough task, before you start putting in people's miscellanous junk like six different varieties of snowflake.

I can't describe the feeling I had when I realized that the upper and lowercase letters were 1 bit away from each other. It was as if a small part of the world suddenly made sense.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

"Please don't tell me this is another difference in terminology that's gone unnoticed to me for years. From your own link - male ring ♂, female ring ♀!"

I think Google's got my back on this one! Where did you pick that up?

"I can't describe the feeling I had when I realized that the upper and lowercase letters were 1 bit away from each other. It was as if a small part of the world suddenly made sense."

..........!!!!

[davidn]

Frankly, I was terrified of what might come up if I Googled either of those terms. I see it mentioned in images like this, but very rarely among the results... oddly enough, I remember almost exactly where I got it from - it was one of the daytime quiz programmes I grew up with, 4-Square or Turnabout or something, where one of the questions was "Is this [symbol shown] a male ring or a female ring?" And that the next question was "Is this an ampersand or a treble clef?".

And... am I to take it that you had a different justification in mind!

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I had no justification in mind at all! I just had the very experience you were writing about! :)

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

If you'd like a more worksafe workaround, Googling the astrological symbols for Mars and Venus will provide you with the same results. I believe they were, in turn, used as the alchemical symbols for iron and copper respectively, for other symbological reasons; either way, it might be less traumatising than "male/female rings". :P

D.F.

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

I've beaten Best 2, but I'm fairly sure that room is what stopped me from beating Best 1.

Slider puzzles are something that thankfully died out rather early. Now I'd love to make a game with an absurd one and as soon as you touch the first slider/boulder immediately changes all of it to empties with a "Just kidding!" message.

[davidn]

I'd love to see that, if anybody in the entire world was going to make a ZZT game ever again. Just looking at it has brought the itch back to me, a bit - even though I have the option now of making things far... broader in scope, there's something really charming about it that Megazeux, Zig, and whatever other ones there were just never replicated. I'd always wanted to do something with more involved, Silent Hill-type puzzles rather than pulling the standard library of obstacles out.

I think I last tried part 2 of the Best of ZZT when I was stuck waiting for my visa to come through, in 2006 (just before the last ZZT game I made, too - apparently it's easy to get addicted again). I absolutely couldn't get past a puzzle that I think was called "Musical Madness", a similar vast array of sliders. Scott Hudson surely can't have just overlooked the absurd difficulty level of them when putting them together...

[xaq.livejournal.com]

So this is what it looks like when ZZT has a diarrhea attack. O_o;;

...Damn, this just put an idea into my head: Use ZZT to make a Room Escape.