Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1293170/BZZZT/
Price: +- $9.99 USD
Blurb: “Jump into the retro-future world with the nostalgic arcade journey of a tiny robot ZX8000! Experience an engaging story, upgrade your robotic abilities, challenge yourself in stages full of ever-changing gameplay mechanics and compete with other players in global and friends leaderboards.“
You guys know me; if I like a soundtrack I hunt down the game. I also like chiptunes a lot. There is no downside to chiptunes for me. It is always happy nostalgia. There was a tune I ran across, Martin Linda – Chase for the avatar, that had a game link in the description. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=drXoh18E1xc) Those of you who know the podcast ‘VGM journey’, will be familiar with the tune. (https://castbox.fm/channel/The-Messenger-Presents-A-VGM-Journey-id2444712?country=us) Well, the game had Linux support as per Steam, which meant I had to try it out. As I don’t like DRM on my computer, I obviously took the Good Old Games version. It installed smoothly as all the GOG installers have so far on Ubuntu (Linux Lite, but potato-tomato). When I first launched the game, I was a bit surprised; the palette was bright and it filled my 4K screen. Though it looked a little fuzzy from the up-scaling. I went to the graphics settings to see if I could fix that. Imagine my shock (and delight) to find resolution support for my screen!! I will include 4K screen-shots; Ronnie may fire me for sending such large pictures, but it all looks fantastic.
The font was tiresome, but I did not mind too much.
It will be Christmas soon and I will have some time to play it more and give it a proper run for the money, but I just could not wait! The happy music, the bright palette, the gorgeous backdrops, I mean this is pixel art done right.
So it is a platformer, paying homage to the 8-bit Zilog Z80 computers, and, I suppose, the ZX spectrum – with a little robot named ZX8000. I recall seeing something about it months ago that pitched it as a puzzle game with robots, but let me assure you it is a platformer. Apparently this one sports a whole 50 levels and let’s not kid about those levels, they look gorgeous.
The parallax scrolling is like four levels deep, and really makes this world seem alive. The main sprite is nothing to write home about, basically being a block, but once you play the game, you will understand why that decision was made. The entry bar to this game is low; it’s really easy to pick up and start playing, but mastering it will take time. While the main character is simply a block, there are a lot of small details in the world with lots of moving parts throughout. It reminds me of old cartoons and it is brimming with cuteness. If you don’t believe me, wait until you get your first upgrade. The upgrade station is lovingly animated, and with analogue dials and whatnot. I suppose that is what makes this stand out from the myriad of precision platformers out in the wild. Speaking of upgrades, the upgrades spaced out with a few levels in-between, letting you get used to your new abilities before ramping up the difficulty and slapping you with your next power. This progression makes you feel like you are getting better at the game or mastering the game as you go deeper.
The game has a lot of locations and none of them feel the same as even the enemies change. There are also a wide variety of enemies that you will encounter, as the game gets more deadly and the levels harder and the obstacles increase. This is not a brutal unforgiving game, but it is also not a walk in the park. At no point did I feel like I wanted to smash the keyboard out of frustration.
There is a sort of progression board, where you will get your gold star if you beat the level par and also if you collect every single gold bolt in the level. If you are a completionist, they catered for you too. It would have been nice if there were more characters to play or unlock-able skins or stages if you perform certain feats, like collect all the bolts in five stages straight or whatever. I have not found any secrets, and it would have been nice if there were. Just for the replayability. (Maybe even a ZX Spectrum lookalike mode?). There are different difficulty levels, with the hardest giving you limited lives to finish the game. Heh, I think, as a throwback to the ZX Spectrum, that should have been three lives, lol.
The controls are good, you can play with the arrow keys or w, a, s, d, etcetera, and the responsiveness is right in the goldilocks zone. The game feels like it was meant to be played fast. The hit boxes are tight and at no point when you die, do you blame the game; you will know that you alone are to blame. On this note I would recommend that you play with wired peripherals, I tried with a Dell bluetooth keyboard and I could immediately feel the difference with a wired one, in terms of responsiveness. The game also has that “just one more go” feel when you die, so I guess it can get the addictive tag as well. Like all games, it has to be fun, or else you would not play it, and this is most definitely more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
I have not finished the game, I played about thirty to thirty five levels in the last two hours. Though fifty levels sounded a lot in the beginning, I think one can beat this in under three hours if you put your mind to it, but I’m enjoying myself. I have not tried this on my potato laptop as that is out of action, but the Steam page says Nvidia or AMD GPU, so you low-spec gamers will miss out.