It’s that time of year again! I played through all of my ZZT friends’ Oktrollberfest games. (here: https://itch.io/jam/oktrollberfest-2024/entries)
d by jakeout
No relation to Kenji Eno’s capital-D, lowercase-d here is a series of misadventures of this fella from a one-dimensional-ish world fed up with his dead-end fast food job. Despite being a 1D game, the story takes some solid twists and turns over the course of its hour-long runtime, bolstered by a healthy willingness to kill the player.
If nothing else, it makes me want to eat a zeepza IRL.
Red Deviance by Dr. Dos
This is a game all about ZZT’s most inherently trolly enemy type, the centipede (the “deviance” in the game’s title refers to one of their parameters). Centipedes in ZZT have a tendency to perfectly dodge shots if you try shooting them head-on, since they’re the only enemy that turns when they run into a solid wall (and your bullets happen to be solid). Naturally, this is a game all about shooting them (over the course of 9 self-contained levels).
The different colors of centipedes have different rules and interactions tied to them, and keeping them straight in the heat of things is quite the exercise. More absurd than the rules, though, are the scripting shenanigans needed to implement some of them, such as the objects up top that invoke the actor-limit in order to count how many green centipedes you spared at the end of the level. There are also 3 different characters with different scoring mechanics and (sadly never relevant) fursonas.
LA VIE MODERNE DE V-QUEL by snorb
This is the fifth entry in Snorb’s long-running series of parodies of official ZZT worlds. This time the subject of mockery is The Best of ZZT Part 2, which was a collection of user-submitted boards cobbled together with some duct tape. Taken on their own, each of the boards in the original version provides a hefty challenge that would have worked well in a standalone format (likely owing to the submission process), but when taken all together results in something that is just Too Much, All of The Time.
Snorb recognized this, and thus created a game where each board is much more to-the-point, focusing on a particular puzzle or troll or joke. It’s still a mean game, mind you, but being the creation of a single author it is much more aware of how mean it’s being in the context of the whole game, and is thus more pleasant overall. Good times all around.
Anyhow I just wanted to highlight this quiz question that I got right on my first try:
the answer was very obvious to me 
Flypaper by dave2kb
This is browser only. It’s only 10 minutes long. You can play it right now. I highly recommend playing it. (No. It’s not a horror game.)
The Case of the Banged-up Banana Truck, pt. 2: October Song by zeketiel
Back in mid-August somebody calling themselves “Ezektiel Ewell” dropped a ZZT game onto the museum with an erroneous October 1 release date called The Case of the Banged-up Banana Truck. (This somebody was an experienced ZZTer doing some kayfabe as a seeming novice.) Its bizarre personality, sense of humor, and subversion of expectations would have made it a good fit for Oktrollberfest proper.
This sequel, on the other hand, is more of an art piece than a game, and only achieves its intended affect if you’re familiar with part 1.
WELCOME TO YUM YUM TOWN by orteruz
This is a MegaZeux game somebody threw together in like 20 minutes. Here is the eponymous Yum Yum Town:
There are with 4 NPCs, one of whom is named “gma” (short for “gmail.com”). This was an obvious invitation to do some ARG-like thinking. I solved the puzzle and got a long string of random characters that I had no idea what to do with.
The end. No moral.
Magic Quest by Jeremy Kaufmann
The real troll of this game was figuring out what it even was.
Ostensibly this is a brand new MegaZeux game.
MegaZeux doesn’t load it, claiming that the file is invalid.
I inspect the file in a hex-editor and notice that the magic bytes at the beginning of a zip file are a few-dozen bytes into it.
Someone is able to decompress it and get it running, but only 2/3rds of the boards work.
At the very end of the file is a URL to an archive.org upload of an updated version of one of the author’s previous Oktrollberfest games. It contains a suspiciously large file (several hundred megabytes).
I was then reminded that the author had recently posted an updated version of that same game to the Museum of ZZT at the beginning of the month. I download the game, look at it in a hex editor, and find an email address.
I send an email to the address and get a link to a file on Google Drive. The file is straight-up a gigabyte large.
The two files are just parts 1 and 2 of a multi-file zip volume (they exist). I try unzipping them.
Password required.
…
I use the random string I got from Yum Yum Town.
I’m in:
That is, indeed, an update to one of the author’s games from last year.
Bonus: I ran into this visual overlay glitch on stream about a couple minutes in and it never went away
(please ignore my angry face — i hadn’t considered before that WASD controls would conflict with my facial expression hotkeys)
10/10
My Game
Stuart Gipp, a Retronauts contributor and person who went to bat in a gaming publication of note to assert his opinion that Balan Wonderworld is better than Bowser’s Fury, had this to say about my game:
Genuinely proud of this endorsement.