Super ZZT

The Good
In the early Nineties, Epic MegaGames created a game that used ASCII graphics. Known as ZZT, it was a series of episodes that combined adventure and puzzle-solving, and it also had an editor where users could create their own games and submit those games on disk. The following year, Epic released a sequel to the original game that improves on it in so many way. It includes three new episodes, and the objective of each one is similar to what you did in the last game – fight monsters, solve puzzles, etc.

Except for the title screen, the game's resolution has been doubled. As a result, everything looks bigger and it is easy to see everything. Each episode starts up with a nice introduction, letting players know what to expect in the episode. This is followed with the player being placed in a central hub where each level can be accessed with a key.

Blue dialog boxes appear when you talk to certain characters, but this time they have new things such as music and trivia quizzes. The music is through the PC Speaker, but each piece of music is brilliantly composed. The different notes that play as you make your way through the forest is impressive. As for the trivia quizzes, you will be faced with questions that you can find the answers to these days if you look on Wikipedia; and if you get it correct, you will be rewarded with something that will help you on your quest.

The puzzles are quite challenging; and in my opinion, one of the most challenging puzzles involve you navigating the ZZT River where you are desperately trying to get to an area you want, while avoiding strong currents that may force you in the wrong direction.

The controls are similar to the last game, since both ZZT and Super ZZT share the same engine. The direction arrows move your character, and pressing [Shift] and a direction arrow together allows you to shoot in that direction. Pressing [Enter] also bypasses those blue dialog boxes. Also, the cheat system is the same, which means that you can use the same cheats to award yourself with extra health or ammo, or destroy any obstacles that get in your way.

The Bad
The game starts with the last episode, in which there is no way you can jump to a previous one without accessing the editor. It would have made sense to automatically run the first episode, rather than expecting the user to access the editor with the /e parameter and then loading up the episode from there.

The Bottom Line
In conclusion, Super ZZT contains all the features that made the original game great, but contains new ones such as double resolution, in-game music, and parallax scrolling. But despite all these features, the game was not quite as sucessful as its cousin. If you like the original game and can't get enough, then you can give this game a go or simply download one of the user-created games from the Net.