News You Can Bruise for 2006 April 24 (entry 0)

(5) Mon Apr 24 2006 13:43: OK, the Beautiful Soup beta now stores everything internally as Unicode. You specify an encoding when you turn part of the tree into a string. Now I'm definitely going to work on my book outline.

Comments:

Posted by Jack Masters at Mon Apr 24 2006 21:19

Your old superzzt game ZZT: The Next Generation has been unearthed and is now available at the archive.

http://zzt.belsambar.net/

I can't get past the grey hall on bullwinkle moose III

Posted by Leonard at Mon Apr 24 2006 22:40

I hope you weren't waiting a long time for that; it's been on Da Da Warren Memorial Memorial for years, along with my ZZT games. Have you played The Forests Will Echo With Laughter? I think that's the only one that completely stands up over time. ZZT:TNG has a lot of funny stuff in it, though.

If you post a screenshot I can tell you how to get past the grey hall. As it is, I have no idea what hall you're talking about. I suspect it's the one with the key generator, but I can't imagine you having trouble with any of my ten-year-old ZZT puzzles.

Posted by Leonard at Mon Apr 24 2006 22:49

OK, I installed an emulator. You need to get into the prison.

SPOILER SPACE

You have to have proof that you've committed a crime. Thanks to the miracle of bad game design, this requires that you have, at the beginning of the game, acquired the Squandad Thing-Cutter and cut the tag off of your mattress. Show the mattress tag to the jail guard and he'll throw you in the clink.

Or just ZAP your way into jail.

Posted by Leonard at Mon Apr 24 2006 22:52

Man, that key generator puzzle is buggy. Also, I should not have gone through the game at the last minute and written Nethack-style graffiti all over the boards.

Posted by Leonard at Mon Apr 24 2006 23:43

I should have gone to sleep, but instead I played Forests, and it's okay but not great. It's good as a standard ZZT game, but there's not nearly as much satire on standard ZZT games as I remember.