Closer Look: Adventure of Sam

[kjorteo]

I did a thing for The Museum of ZZT.

Behold, a special guest Closer Look at my ancient and awful teenage newbie game, Adventure of Sam.

Because it makes references to other games and articles, here are those as well if you want the context (these were all written by Dr. Dos, not me):

Closer Look: Virus 302 Special Edition
Closer Look: School ZZT
Closer Look: Sewers of ZZT

All right, so this... hurt a little. Everyone gets that "Ugh my old work is so awful and embarrassing" reaction. I never actually learned how to cope with mine, though, and so my past these days is more redacted than a CIA document. I wasn't kidding during that part when I said I almost just let this one stay hidden forever. But... well. Dos is right.

Also, this is... strangely liberating? It was uncomfortable to confront all of this, but there's a certain get it off my chest feeling now that I have. I feel like I've just been to Confession. It's weird. You should try it, especially if it's a ZZT game. It's fascinating, and you're helping the Museum too. (And I just happen to have all of a certain someone's *VERY* Mysterious games in my old ZZT folder, still. Just, you know, saying. This is what happens when you're friends with a literal packrat.)

Anyway, to everyone with whom I've had the "Geez Celine, you've always been such a sweetie as long as I've known you" "You didn't see me before...." discussion... I told you.

Comments

[xyzzysqrl]

So..

This has decent structure.

The running "There's no Empire in this game"/"There is now!" and then having them be Comically Ineffective Villains with a Theme amuses me. (Particularly "They exploited my signposted weakness!" "...they shot me.")
I liked the dueling shop signs.
I absolutely liked that y-- "ChocoboKick" had a reply ready for when the player went straight for the trigger of the largest weapon available.
The ending's kinda weak, and there was no real concept of spatial layout, but uh... wasn't this a first-game-ever?

In short, oh gosh. It's a game made by an inexperienced teenager that turned out less well than hoped for. What a _tremendous_ shock that must be to the ZZT community at large, who were all professional game-creating adults with multiple degrees in Comedic Writing, Business Management and/or Accounting.

*pat* You're still fine. I bet that CK kid grew up okay too.

[xyzzysqrl]

if i adopt the phrase 'mog-darn' how violently will you full-body spasm whenever i use it

[kjorteo]

You're in luck; I so strongly knew that was coming that I've had plenty of time to mentally brace myself/come to terms with it.

[kjorteo]

I admit the dueling shop signs are pretty good. Most of this game is either jokes that fall flat and are just awkward for everyone involved or jokes that, uh, haven't aged well with modern sensibilities, but I have to give my younger self credit where it's due for that one.

That CK kid was kind of a temper-issues and "kicking over other people's sandcastles is funny"-humor little shit, but fortunately that mellowed out with age (and meeting you.)

[davidn]

If anything I'm really glad that, while it shared the punchline of "saying/doing things that are from other things" that plagues the current Internet humour, our brand of early Internet humour was in something so creative :)

[xaq_the_aereon]

Wow, is this ever a trip down Memory Lane. O_o;;;


My memory of those days is rather fuzzy (I'm fairly certain they're deliberately so), but this seems like a pretty accurate summation of the ZZTeam back then (minus one naming correction...sorry?)

[xaq_the_aereon]

It's also kind of interesting to notice how you and the other members of Team Hatoful got me to using that nickname again, to the point of copying it over to my fursona.

Still infinitely better than its original form, at least. O_o;

[kjorteo]

Okay, first off, how did you find one picture for that entire party dynamic?

I feel like Atomos comes across as the closest-to-benevolent (or at least the least openly hostile) of the team in this game, by complete accident. You and I had the "Kill Sam Y/N?" back-and-forth which I got way into and played up probably more than I should have, and then Atomos is just kind of there. He gets such character-oozing lines as, "You didn't know that on the other side is the legendary Sea of Aesor?" Which, given that we lost touch with him after this, I find a bit disappointing now; it would have been nice if there were more personality here to give me some sort of clue who in the world Atomos really was.

On the other hand, my portrayal of him here ends up being the most likeable of my portrayals of any of us, by virtue of 0 being a bigger number than -10.

[xaq_the_aereon]

The pic was a piece of cake to find. I'm a fan of Neo (short for Neopolitan) from the web series RWBY, which itself has a comedic spinoff, RWBY Chibi The scene with the Ray-O-Matic immediately reminded me of a couple of scenes in Chibi, including the one I screencapped for this.

I cliped Mercury from the far-left of it because there was nobody on the ZZTeam screaming "DO IT" on me fragging Sam in a Shia LaBeouf manner...well, except perhaps for me. XP Other than that, though, Neo's trigger-happiness, Emerald's "OMG NO DON'T" reaction, and Cinder's "act like you're working with them but basically just stall for time" routine just seemed to fit our old selves perfectly.

...

*goes to pull the trigger on the Ray-O-Matic* What does this thing do, anyway?

[xaq_the_aereon]

Oh.

[kjorteo]

I don't think you ever get to pull the trigger on it yourself and find out in the old series. In game 1 there's just that "Don't even think about it" warning when you try, and in game 2 (where the ZZTeam's shack is an optional area to revisit this time) they just use it on you for an instant game over the second you walk through the door. (It may not be clear from this game, but apparently our old selves did not like being bothered in their home. It's kind of subtle, I know.)

[davidn]

It's incredible to see this little... enclave, preserved in time in the form of ZZT characters :) I'm curious about where Atomos went as well, even though I never knew him.

[xaq_the_aereon]

Sadly, about all I can recall of him(?) is one ICQ chat he, Celine, and I were in where he was using the live-text option while we were using IRC text. After about 10 minutes of silence from him Celine had the idea to suggest hitting Enter.

POOF. Wall of text 10 foot high.

[kjorteo]

I probably still have an old QBasic game he made, if we can sort of get a sense of the author voice/personality/what type of person he was from that. I mean, I know I still have that folder, and I can't think of any reason why that game wouldn't be in there, it's just that I can't really run and confirm because 19-year-old .BAS files (and the compiled .EXEs from the same era) aren't exactly Win10 friendly.

All I can remember about it without playing it again is that I (as ChocoboKick) had a cameo as a boss battle in it, and I hit with an attack called Wark Speed. I was way too proud of myself for that one and I kind of still am.

[xaq_the_aereon]

"Wark Speed?" Are you sure I'm not the one who--

No, I recall the one QBasic game I made where you had a cameo, and the special attack you had for it was X-Zone...which was the only way to win that fight and had like a 5% success rate.

[kjorteo]

I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to hear that any of us were godmoding in our cameos in any of our games.

Edit: But yes, I'm positive Boss Cameo ChocoboKick attacking with Wark Speed was from Quest for the 5 Runes, Atomos's blatantly superior take on my QBasic Colosseum engine. Unfortunately, I don't have the .bas file so I can't look at the source code (it wasn't my game, after all.) I do have the .exe, and from the readme it looks like those are just unlocks from beating the game a few times, but that's... I mean QF5R is super grindy. I'll see what I can do I guess.

[chalcedony_starlings]

(−) very adventure

so sam

wow

(aaa we should get up and pull out the few incomplete other bits the second did at some point)

[davidn]

Thank you so much for sharing this and commenting along to it :) When you showed them to me ages ago I hadn't realized that they had never made it to Z2... you inspired me to revive my ancient laptop and to dig out some unseen scraps of my own, which I'll write about soon!

It's always embarrassing to go through something you made when much younger and cringe at it, but honestly this does not stand out in embarrassment among the other 90s children's ZZT games :) But as I used a different name at the time I wrote mine as well (though for different reasons), I also tend to think of my own ZZT games as having written by someone separate - some 16-year-old idiot version of me that isn't connected to me now. For that reason I even submitted my relics under the old name.

And this was a funny look back at the contents of ChocoboKick's imagination :) I'm trying to imagine, if I had made a game with villains from popular culture of the time, what they would have been. Probably the Teletubbies. I remember even when I was still young I disapproved of how they talked to children in a gibberish language instead of being taught about computers by Fred Harris.

The ZZT character killing people off casually is such a common trope (even in the innovative Burger Joint, I'd forgotten just how many people you murder in the course of a morning selling burgers), I wonder if it comes from the authors of the games letting a player do things without consequence in contrast to their very controlled real lives. And the friends being the heroes must definitely be inspired by that too - I remember when you showed me this first the name Xaq appeared and I recognized it, but I thought surely someone else must just have used that same combination of letters and it couldn't possibly be the one I knew...

I continue to be surprised at Americans' attitude to alcohol! Even you, as the most progressive and liberal person there is, were faintly shocked that you'd thought it was OK to put alcohol in a game that was nervous about cursing. And to me... of course that's okay! Swearing's not for children, but alcohol's just something that's... there, and benign. I remember my dad letting me sip his lager whenever I asked, when I was about three - it was disgusting but I felt grown up.

[kjorteo]

"You inspired me to revive my ancient laptop and to dig out some unseen scraps of my own" is about the highest form of praise something like this can receive! After getting my embarrassing confession out of the way, I'm almost giddy with excitement at seeing what everyone else has to offer.

I feel like 90s teens were just... edgier, as a whole, and this shone through not only in their games, but in their comics, stories, or basically anything creative they did. This was the Beavis and Butthead generation, even though my parents didn't actually allow me to watch that. (But they couldn't protect me from the schoolyard recess nursery rhymes about gruesomely murdering Barney.) Cynical mean-spirited disregard for the lives of anyone who annoys us was just... what we all found funny back then.

And I may be progressive and liberal, but I'm also a Toriel-esque mom at heart :) Or at least I am now.

[davidn]

It wasn't really violence, but I remember my mum didn't like me watching the Sonic cartoon because he was too American and attitudey. That worked out well, didn't it.

Actually I said it was non-violent but SATAM was probably the bleakest cartoon there was out there, equal with Reboot.

[xaq_the_aereon]

The Teletubbies would be an improvement. The project I had in the works used the Greek Alphabet. I recall having a running rivalry with Beta and the "boss fight" with Sigma having him pinball a shot around the room and ultimately hitting himself in the face.

[kjorteo]

You had something like four games on ZZT (the Xaq's *VERY* Mysterious ____ series), and at least the first two were totally done and released. All sorts of fun stuff in there to examine more closely someday. 3 and 4 are unfinished, though.

Your rivalry with Beta and co. hit its peak in Xaq's *VERY* Mysterious Dungeon 2. And since I was already rooting around in there looking for Atomos stuff, there also appears to be some sort of unreleased QBasic project you and/or I were working on named "Tek, Chapter I: Shards of Mentality" that looks like a crossover where you and I team up to fend up an attack from Beta and Spade.

Also, the you vs. Beta games all took place in the land of Xaqchoania because author references.

And this is what happens when you're friends with a packrat.

[xaq_the_aereon]

I think Tek was the one I mentioned in another reply thread here, with you having X-Zone as an attack option. Pretty sure that was a joint effort.

And yeah, one of them for sure is gonna be heaps of fun to look at just in regards to one character whose name you convinced me to change because we were young/naive enough to believe Capcom would sue me for naming a ZZT character "Rei Tigerfang." XP

[xaq_the_aereon]

...And then I wind up changing it to Jax somethingorother for a while, which led to worries about the guys behind Mortal Kombat doing the same thing. XP

[xyzzysqrl]

Obviously his name should've been Rei Tigerbutt.

that taaaaaaail

[xaq_the_aereon]

I'll be honest, I'd have more expected that comment from Celine.

[xyzzysqrl]

I'm sorry, I have just the one weak point.

(this is a lie.)

[xaq_the_aereon]

No offense, but I've seen Oscar Mayer factories less full of baloney than that claim. XP

[xyzzysqrl]

Correct. I have three dozen weak points, all mutually exclusive.

(this is also a lie but a more elaborate one.)

[kjorteo]

Psh. "Mutually exclusive." If anything, pressing all the buttons at the same time and getting some weird unholy chaotic girly pink point and click giant mecha puzzle solving DOOM mod w/batshit metaplot only amplifies the effectiveness on you.