Let's Play ZZT

[Dr. Dos]

So over on Something Awful they have a Short Game Theater thread where people will do single session (or just generally short) Let's Plays within the thread of various games.

Recently I got the urge to play some old ZZT games and I've decided to record them, the idea being that I will get somebody else to watch the record footage alongside me and then give commentary. I'd post these on to youtube as well as linking them in the mentioned SA thread.

Of course, in order for that to be the case I need somebody else to commentate with me.

Right now I've got recordings of me playing through Town and City and they're both around 50 minutes long. If anybody's interested I imagine Skype would be the easiest way to handle recording, and I would upload the file somewhere for it to be downloaded.

I might play Dungeons, but I highly doubt I'll bother with caves. I'd especially like the chance to get commentary from authors of the games themselves perhaps.

Anybody interested?

[Quantum P.]

I'm up for it, provided scheduling works out. I'm PST, are you still EST?

It would probably be a good idea to do some post-STK games, but I guess they'll all look pretty antiquated to the average observer. Story-oriented and puzzle games probably aren't a good fit (not as interesting to watch/talk about), but having a selection of genres might be interesting.

How long are the videos other goons are making?

Getting commentary from Tim Sweeney is probably going to be difficult. Looking at the Featured Games list... Half these people could probably be tracked down (Facebook is scary), but some of them might not be willing to revisit stuff they made when they were teenagers.

[Commodore]

You should play the games, if possible, on the speed setting one notch higher than normal. There's way too much running around in zzt to be entertaining as a video. Maybe commentary would help, but that's why I ended up only recording snippets even if I played the whole game You'll notice even some of those little clips have the speed increased too.

When you said commentary over a game I think the first thing I thought of was Hallucina for some reason. I just can't imagine what to say for the four or five minutes it takes to solve the rube board (again running back and forth a bunch) but something unconventional I think just generates material. Also I'm pretty sure fishfood is still contactable, at least I have contact info through youtube.

Anyway I'd have time to do something like that come dec 12th when I'm done with school.

[Dr. Dos]

The speed's off as it's from an old version of Tyger but the Rube board doesn't take very long!


I'd like a co-commentator to prevent dead air. Playing the games on a faster speed might be a decent idea but I'd like to avoid games that involve running around empty corridors all day. I imagine we'd get to talk about bugs, tropes, and other games. I was also surprised at how many typos are in the original games (not even getting started on #if alligned).

I'm not trying to hunt down original authors, just saying that if you're willing to co-commentate and have your own game shown off that it would be fitting.

[ajc]

How is this project coming along? Ever find someone to help out?

[Commodore]

I'm free to do it now, but I have a finicky internet connection and am prone to dropping calls in skype.

[Dr. Dos]

I did record over a playthrough of Town of ZZT with DavidN, but have yet to combine the audio and video footage and upload. It went decently, though there was definitely some dead air. I need to look into something other than talking over prerecorded footage though maybe since in some cases I'm doing things too fast to talk about all of them.

[Saxxon]

Kind of makes me want to implemented something like a TAS input with frame advance. That way you could do the entire game in the optimal amount of time. Wouldn't be compatible with the original ZZT for obvious reasons. But I did get the demo movies implemented in a way that the seed is stored as part of the movie file so it'll be consistently random... if that makes sense.

[Dr. Dos]

I'm super super lazy and hate the sound of my voice so I haven't bothered to combine and upload the video yet I'm afraid.

There are several MS-DOS game TASes out there on TasVideos. Apparently the emulator they use is JPC

[Saxxon]

Neat. I suppose ZZT is simple and light enough that pretty much anyone could do a speedrun of the worlds included.

Not that it would be terribly exciting to watch. But it would be interesting to see the solutions anyway, since the only official ZZT games I have completed are Town and Monster Zoo.

[Commodore]

Saxxon are you familiar with the milestone recording that WinVice uses? Might be cool for Lyon.

[Saxxon]

I am, lots of emulators (at least ones coded for rerecording features anyway) have this sort of thing, I don't know if anyone really cares about TASing these old worlds, but... hell, why not?