Happy Pride Month, y'all!
Introduction
Atop the Witch's Tower is a 2017 ZZT game developed by John Thyer that was inspired by Anna Anthropy's book about ZZT. The game is about Mary the witch, getting ready for a sacrifice. I highly recommend playing through the game for yourself since it's both a short game and it's a narrative driven ZZT best experienced at a normal pace. Watching this TAS is not an optimal way to experience the game.
In 2023 asie, who has also worked on Zeta (a modern emulator made to run ZZT and Super ZZT on modern computers) and The Reconstruction of ZZT (a reverse engineered recreation of ZZT's source code) made a WonderSwan Color port of the ZZT engine. Atop the Witch's Tower was chosen for the first WonderSwan Color ported ZZT world.
There's a bit of backstory on why I did this. First I watched streamer authorblues play through a bunch of ZZT worlds on his stream a few years ago, which planted an initial interest of ZZT on to me. Fast forward to this year when after clearing up my backlog of physical books mostly about video games so I bought and read through Anna Anthropy's book about ZZT for myself as well. The book was a good and informative read of ZZT's history up until the writing of the book and lots of information on why the game was so compelling for others to both play and create ZZT worlds. After reading the book, I started playing some ZZT worlds on my own in earnest. I can say that I've enjoyed my experiences with ZZT worlds, and that's kind of partially why this submission exists in the first place.
Run notes
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- Takes damage to save time by running into the centipede
- Gets a ritual sacrifice ready
- Solves a few puzzles
Look, this ZZT world is more about the story so it's not really needed to talk about any mechanical specifics on combat or major routing decisions. The only parts that kind of matters is getting the key from the doppelganger last in the second half.
asie's work on Zeta means that there's a way to run ZZT on Linux. I hope that just mentioning that fact in this submission could possibly lead to someone using LibTAS and Zeta to TAS the numerous different ZZT worlds available out there thanks to Dr. Dos running the Museum of ZZT.
CoolHandMike: Optimization looks good. Did not see any room for improvement on the spots checked. This is one of those systems where the inputs vary position so each input looks like it was tested. Unless there are more new tricks this may be as fast as it gets.
Accepted to Standard.
Congrats!
