Introduction
The Best of ZZT was an official 1992 ZZT world. It consisted of user-created boards that were sent in, with the boards considered the best put together into two full ZZT worlds, named "The Secret of Headhunter Isle" and "Royal Treasures". This TAS completes the second world, Royal Treasures, in record time through bypassing the collection of the titular treasures and fighting the demon at the end of the game.
The disk image used for this TAS is available on the Museum of ZZT: https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/zztcollection-disk/
ZZT was relicensed in 1997 as a freeware title, so this should be fair to share. If the moderation team disagrees, feel free to take down the link.
Run notes
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.11
- DOSBox-X core
- Takes damage to save time
- Pretty much skips straight to the final boss
Extra notes
I made this TAS on the default in-game speed. While it's possible to set the speed of in-game ticks to run faster including throttled, ZZT worlds are usually built around playing on the default speed so I left it as is.
Thank you slamo for informing me of the Pause bug. When the main control method used is the mouse or the joystick, pausing and moving at roughly the same time allows for both double tile movements and preventing other objects from acting before the pausing. This allows for nearly double movement speed when there isn't any objects that need waiting for their code to run. Moving without pausing allows for certain objects to run their code when needed for progression.
The main routing is straightforward. Normally, the game expects the player to progress by getting the 4 royal treasures of the king to get the stick that weakens the demon at the end of the game. There's also a gate blocking the way to the demon as well as other sections of the game that requires 50 gems that most players will get by going through the game normally. There's two hidden switches on the first board that have objects giving the player 25 gems each so those are obtained. The demon is fought at full power which is perfectly doable, although the first shot needed is much harder to hit due to the stars. After the first hit, the demon is broken out of the star shooting loop in their object code so the fight mostly proceeds as normal outside of all of the walls that obstruct movement and shots in the arena.
The demon only needs 9 shots to beat. While the Pause bug allows for reaching the boss quickly, this is kept to mainly getting positioned right since in-game ticks need to go by for the demon to be vulnerable to another shot again. All excess ammo after the fight is shot before the final tally starts counting down the ammo to save a small amount of time at the end.
Special thanks
- authorblues, whose old ZZT streams lead me to checking out ZZT
- Dr. Dos, for curating the Museum of ZZT
- asie, for the Reconstruction of ZZT and Zeta
Publisher's note
Here's an extended input file that I used for my personal encode that adds text in the high score screen and displays the high score table as the last input: UserFiles/Info/638966718081597363
eien86: Claiming for judging.
eien86: Replacing movie with an improved one by the author
eien86: Aaah the charm of old ASCII-based DOS games. I couldn't find a comparable speedrun or playthrough to compare in terms of execution, but this one looks as optimized as it can be, especially with the pause bug. Looks good to me!
Accepting to Standard
despoa: Processing...