Life, don't talk to me about life!

October is here and that means it's time for the annual look at something made with Super ZZT! This process gets more strenuous with each passing year as the number of Super ZZT releases is something like a tenth of the amount of ZZT games available. The quality of what little there is, also tends to leave a lot to be desired. Super ZZT as a platform never really matured in the same way ZZT did with larger, more ambitious projects by authors constantly trying to one-up one another with fancier graphics, more elaborate stories, or technical wizardry to make ZZT do things that had to be seen to be believed.

Yet even with such slim pickings available, there's still some cool stuff out there. This time, we're looking at Life, Don't Talk To Me About Life, a Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan game that blends its own sense of humor with plenty of direct lifts from Douglas Adams' beloved series of novels.

Its author, Joe McManis, is a pretty much unknown figure in the history books. Only two worlds are credited to him in the museum's archives, Life of course, and the strange Object Land, a single board "toolkit" of objects that just loop little animations with no organization or commentary or anything to give it some context.

Fortunately, he seems to have a knack for this. Life is an open-ended adventure to save the Earth from encasement in a time-slowing crystal that sees you traveling the galaxy to collect the keys to unlocking it. Arguably, it's a five purple key game, a style befitting a world from early 1993. McManis takes this primordial ZZT adventure format and drenches it with sci-fi to make the game come off as more than a retread of Town's basic series of rooms to conquer. Players visit numerous planets, all referenced in the novels, shoot their way through hostile aliens, pick up pieces of the Wikkit Gate that locks the Earth down, and even find time to make a few drinks.

It's a comedy, and unlike most ZZT comedies, it's far more action focused than anything else. The humor is saved for moments of progress towards your goal on each planet. A cheap laugh is a reward for a job well done. This isn't a game where you travel the galaxy talking with weird creatures and solving puzzles to get them give you items or allow you to go somewhere you really shouldn't be allowed. This is a basic action game that alleviates the repetitive shooting of tigers on Algolia, Argubuthon, and Squornshellous Zeta by making sure that at the end you're laughing rather than feeling exhausted.

Life is also of course dedicated to spreading the humor of Douglas Adams, incorporating a number of vignettes told in the book either wholesale or by turning them into justification for a video game level. You don't have to be familiar with Adams's stories to enjoy them here, though it certainly helps. All the same, this is another case of a game like Quest For Glory ZZT where I was introduced to an existing series through a ZZT game. Unlike QFG though, I have actually read the source material! ...About twenty years ago and never since. I think it's been even longer since I last played this one either...

Chapter 1

For as much as McManis will transcribe lengthy guide entries written by Adams and set them in his own creation, this isn't a mere retelling of any of the novels. While there are plenty of moments that are borrowed from them, McManis is more focused on creating a game set in the Hitch-Hiker's universe that can be enjoyed by fan and non-fan alike when it comes to the books.

Perhaps the biggest surprise are the characters. Not only do you not play Arthur Dent or Ford Prefrect, but they don't make a single appearance in the game. Few major characters ever show up, and their roles are rather limited.

While certainly an unusual choice, it does offer some benefits to the game that a more faithful adaptation wouldn't. McManis is now free to write his own takes on anything in the galaxy he so desires. There's no need to worry about continuity, or when the game takes place relative to the novels. He can instead focus on the locations Adams created and construct them as stages in a video game. And best of all, he can still take what does work in video game form from the novels and put that into Super ZZT. He gets to pick and choose facets of the books while being free to discard anything that doesn't fit his vision for the game.

This is evident right at the start of the game. Before things open up for the new nameless protagonist, players begin the game in a little introductory stage on a Vogon space ship. You are now just a random Earthling, and in this game Earth is not slated for destruction for a bypass, but instead the mostly harmless planet has been forcibly isolated from the rest of the galaxy out of fear that as human space travel develops, they'll spread out and screw up the rest of the galaxy as badly as they already have on Earth.

For the safety of the galaxy, the planet is encased in a force field that can only be broken if the pieces of the Wikkit gate are collected and used to reverse the process. A Slo-Time lock, they call it.

You, meanwhile, were taken by the Vogons as a plaything to torture for a bit (the captain is in a bad mood you see). This makes you Earth's only hope.

And if you can have a few good drinks while you do so, all the better.

Now trapped in a holding cell, you can pick up some scattered supplies covering the usual ammo and gems along with a more series-specific aid in the form of a Babelfish.

This is the first of many book transcriptions. McManis wants to spread the word of Adams and by god is he not afraid to write several paragraphs to do so. For a fan, it's a chance to admire the writing and not just point and say "Babelfish!" at the recognizable name. For those unfamiliar, they get these considerably detailed explanations of the weird fish they just found on the floor.

And the explanation is more than the unimportant sci-fi parts about "telepathic matrices" and "unconscious frequencies" of brain waves. You get the jokes too about how such remarkably useful fish could have evolved and how it disproves the existence of god.

As somebody who really hasn't touched any Hitch-Hiker media in so long, this means I was getting laughs from the very first object I touched in the game. McManis can't get the credit for a book titled "Well, That About Wraps It Up For God", but the man certainly knew better than to stop transcribing before getting to the good part.

Fish in ear, you can now understand the voice paging "the passenger" to the Poetry Appreciation Room.

Some parts of the book you'll forget. I still know all about Vogon poetry.

And it too is accompanied by more transcription. It makes for a very very wordy introduction to the game. Thankfully, it won't always be like this. McManis will eventually cool off with the entry after entry ...for the most part. There will definitely be more of these with generally better pacing between them, but there will also be the greatest wall of text at all when players actually get to read various entries from the Guide itself at their leisure.

Your first puzzle then is to figure out how to even make it to the poetry reading. Like other ZZT games such as Burger Joint, taking too long to follow instructions will get you killed. Yet unlike in the fast food business, if you hurry out the door and down the hall, you'll die the same way. There's a lesson the game is trying to teach players early on, to find actions that cater to their own interests, without considering how others might feel about what you're doing.

Here, that lesson takes the form of unprovoked violence. You have ammo. Use it.

It's an action game damnit. Even a mundane task like walking down a hallway is going to be made more deadly for the purposes of gameplay and comedy.

Dismissing McManis as a hack comedian who only knows how to regurgitate what Adams and other creators have already done is easy. Turns out it's not all that accurate though. This is a McManis original. The "Bad Moods Guns" fit right into Adams' world, make the most basic elements of ZZT gameplay into something far more natural to include in a space ship setting, and can actually get some laughs on their own.

The biggest difficulty of appreciating the game's humor for me was the constant second guessing myself as to whether a joke was written by the critically-acclaimed science-fiction author Douglas Adams or by a guy with an account on Prodigy. I won't claim the two are equally skilled, but McManis's own humor isn't to be taken lightly.

It basically comes down to how lengthy the gag in question is. Multiple screens of text? Adams. Quick and punchy goof? McManis. But due to my own lack of confidence here, that just means having to scour fan wikis and peruse a scan of the novel to try and figure out for sure who is responsible for what, and living with a permanent fear that I'm going to attribute "42" to McManis and be laughed out of the room.

Perhaps its because there's not as much of a difference between ZZT humor and Adams' as one might think. You could show this screenshot to someone who had never heard of Adams or the Guide, and I feel like they would immediately clock that something was horribly wrong here.

The poetry reading goes about as well as you might expect. It's an instant game over if the player didn't think to loot the body of the guard they killed and take his ear plugs. McManis matches the source material for the poetry, the desperate attempt at saving oneself from being jettisoned out of the ship, and the inevitable rejection from the poet laureate himself.

A lesser game would have the conveyors lead directly to deep space. Life takes a slower, more methodical approach where players helplessly watch the airlock open and the cargo slowly being pushed out with them caught in the middle of it.

In the middle of this, as you begin to float with some boxes in the middle of space, an expertly-timed guide entry pops up telling you all about just how big space really is, and just how bad the odds are of being rescued by a passing ship when directly exposed to it.

Before of course, you are rescued by a passing ship.

Just as it seems like your game is about to end, it instead begins. The introduction with the Vogon ship helps set player expectations as to what they'll be doing in this game, while giving them a good glimpse at the kind of comedy they should be expecting in the future. It's a really strong start, easily one of the better openings to a ZZT game of its era. You're immediately placed into the fray, escaping one bad situation only to find yourself in a worse one immediately after until the situation should become hopeless. But, as Joe McManis once said^[1]: Don't panic.

As for the Bistromath itself, it's not a very engaging space. Ultimately it will be little more than a central hub for traveling to each planet, which is fine, but compared to the personality contained in just that small portion of the Vogon ship, the Bistromath feels instead empty, as if there were nobody actually aboard.

This is where readers will really notice the lack of any recognizable characters. Or characters at all. This ship should be what sets you off on your quest to free the Earth from its containment, only for you to just wander a large interior with little information on how to proceed or even how to accomplish your goal. It's very easy to just start hopping to planets, seeing what you can find, and coming back with items for no discernible reason.

The main portion of the Bistromath is divided up into twelve large rooms aligned to a grid but not filling it. (It could in theory be around 4x4). Super ZZT makes it a lot harder to tell where you have and haven't been in a board as each room roughly fills the viewport, though the scrolling regularly reveals bits of surrounding rooms which may or may not be accessible from the cheerful doors placed along the edges.

At the same time, Super ZZT's scrolling is just as much a benefit. Unlike ZZT where the entire board is revealed upon entering, Super ZZT can surprise the player time and time again as they explore a significantly larger space. Despite what some may say, torchlight just isn't as capable. Surprises can mean unexpected things in a given space, or just "Surprise idiot. There are tigers down this hallway". Players lose the luxury of being able to plan their entire route through a board all at once.

The larger boards could really do with some landmarks. McManis doesn't try to make it easier to remember each location. Rooms are frequently devoid of objects to interact with, and the walls are always red which doesn't help things. What does work at least a little bit are the fun patterns drawn on the floors that give the ship the vibe of 90s arcade carpeting in most rooms.

Until the player discovers something aboard the ship they have no way of knowing what's there. Super ZZT's hint system allevates this a little bit (if you remember to use it) stressing that you should really make sure to find the "Room of Informational Illusions" and the "Hitchhiker's Guide Room". Both can easily be missed, and due to the size of the board, it's hard to resist the pull forward to something new rather than turning around to make sure you didn't miss noticing a branching path earlier.

After all the text so far, funny as it may be, having to read even more doesn't sound very appealing either. The Illusion room is your explanation of what it is you should be doing in order to beat the game. It's an overview of the Wikkit Gate, a symbol of the galaxy consisting of three pillars and two bails (which until today I thought was supposed to be balls). These are McManis' macguffins.

The game doesn't outright say that the components are what you should be after. Just that it's used as a key. Areas with pieces can't be left without acquiring them, so even if you miss this room or only half pay attention when the wall of text from Adams isn't a funny wall of text, you'll still figure it out eventually.

The guide also takes an unusual form here, where it seems to be a massive room sized device and not some far-future concept like "what if something book sized could present several megabytes worth of text to the reader".

Even with just six entries to read, it's a lot. If you're familiar with the books, it's a slog to get through it all. If you're not, this format is a very unappealing way of presenting the information to players. Lumping it all together and up front rather than when it's relevant at all.

Super ZZT's "H"int system would be a natural fit for a guidebook where this information could be referenced on demand, but in 1993 ZZTers were unaware that they could get away with a setup like this:

Which would allow external files to be viewed. Instead, the board here with the guide is over 13,000 bytes, taking up more than half the available memory making it impractical to store all the text in a single object copied between boards.

So instead you just need to retain this information. But only some of it. A few entries like The Bistromathic Drive are just there for the flavor, having entries in the source material and being relevant if not to gameplay, then to the ship that you're currently aboard.

Other entries are more helpful. They serve as hints as to things the player should do to avoid instant deaths elsewhere, as well as lists of items needed later in the game (though said items are automatically used if you have them).

It at least helps folks make sense of the engine room, an Italian bistro where robots are taking precisely calculated bites of precisely made dishes while have precisely determined conversations with one another in order to keep the ship operating. I promise that not only does it make sense once you've read the guide, but that I'm still thinking of it whenever it's time to pay the bill at a restaurant.

Going through the ship's bathrooms you'll find the only creatures aboard the ship that will acknowledge your presence. In the "why are you trying to talk to me while I'm going to the bathroom" kind of way, that is.

The bathroom doubles as the transporter room with a set of six passages to the various planets and other locations found in the game. This is an incredibly good gag that I believe goes to McManis. Made even better by the fact that there are hallways for male and female bathrooms that both lead to the same room regardless.

It's also where players get to discover that it's non-linear! That's always fun. I wound up going in order myself though as I didn't think to mix it up until I was about halfway done, and the last two locations on the list feel more unique than the first few. Still, games as buggy as this one will end up being benefit greatly from letting players see as much of the game as possible even if there's no hope of beating it legit.

Choose a passage and set forth!

• ^[1] That's a joke.