Where can I get Aceland?

Aceland is available on z2 as well as playable in browser via Archive.org.
You can also explore the world yourself on the Museum of ZZT Public Beta.

Aceland

It's very difficult to say what a ZZT game is. There are so many of them released over 25 years covering dozens of genres, aesthetics, and ways to play. Yet somehow amongst all the chaos, there are some games that just capture the essence of ZZT, and Aceland is a shining example of this. It's a bright grand adventure through forests, caves, and castles, but it's not a fantasy themed world. It has oddities and eccentricities, and just creates a mixture of ideas in that way that only ZZT can. Prak's Aceland is an iconic ZZT adventure.

Aceland has a very peculiar title screen. There's a blue and green blob which might be the world the game takes place on? It's being shot by spinning guns? There's a yellow object shooting from the opposite side.

Eventually the yellow object will shoot and reveal this number eight that starts shooting back? I have no idea what any of this means.

The starting board isn't any more traditional. An object pushes you up towards the passage. The other half of the room is a bonus object that can't be gotten for quite some time.

Finally, the game itself starts. A small street with a few homes, all very clearly labeled for the player. The pool warns of sharks, and sure enough there are a few there. It's just a silly addition, and completely avoidable.

The bad neighbor can be seen shooting bullets randomly, living up to his name.

Your roommate is standing outside your home, and gives you some starting motivation, but doesn't really tell you all that much. It won't take long before the game's plot is actually revealed to the player though.

The first place to check out is your house. As far as homes in ZZT go, this one is pretty lacking in the realism department. No bed, couch, oven, or even a toilet to be found. Just rooms containing some supplies to get the player up and running.

The scroll is a message from the author, who refers to himself as Prak, telling the player that they'll die in Aceland.

With some ammo now, the player is likely to try shooting their neighbor, only to find it has no effect on him.

The gardener expresses dissatisfaction at working for such a jerk. The cyan club is a tree with a gem on it that the player takes, which also causes the tree object to vanish. Other than that, there's nothing else the player can do on this board for now, since both the other homes are locked.

The city in Aceland is this single board. There's a lone object wandering the streets who will greet the player when touched, and also a single tiger for some reason.

The sign in the middle of the road gives the player the game's plot. They'll need to collect some keys (that aren't purple!) and defeat Mugerlock, who I guess must be evil. To do this, the player will need a microwave oven, the one thing that can kill a sorcerer. Don't question it.

With that all established, it's time to explore Trala.

The store consists of a regular shopkeeper who sells ammo and torches, and Tricia the great, a friendly magic user who beckons the player as soon as they enter the store.

For 5 gems, Tricia will transform the enemies on the board into ammo, which compared to the shopkeeper's prices is a very good deal.

The shopkeeper sells the usual items, and no healing. The player is given some interesting choices for how to respond to somebody who is talking about beans and pork. Aceland is a weird game.

Next up is the museum, which is an interesting thing to include in an unofficial ZZT world. This board explains what the default ZZT enemies do, and I can't imagine how few people (especially in 1994) played a fan ZZT game before playing Town and Demo where they'd learn all about these creatures.

There's also a "Torture room".

Even in 1994 people were questioning why tigers can shoot bullets.

Also take note that there are still centipedes in the tiger cage. This board features some overlapping stats that happen with ZZT sometimes, and as the tigers move around, centipedes will begin to appear.

Pushers being classified as creatures is a bit of an odd decision, but it does have some precedent since they're listed under the creatures menu and not terrain in ZZT's editor.

The back of the museum shows off more of ZZT's features, conveyors that move things along, invisible walls (which are annoying), fake walls, blink walls, breakable walls, bombs, duplicators, and energizers! It is a pretty decent overview for two screens.

Although the game suggest the museum for beginners, it's actually necessary in order to talk to your neighbor's wife. She gives you the key to her house to make up for him being such an awful neighbor!

With a key, rather than explore the remaining areas of the city, I head straight to the neighbor's house.

The neighbor's house is structured similarly to your own, only considerably more deadly. The green boulders that make up the background repeatedly flash colors which really make this board pop out visually in action.

The objective here is the cyan key which lets the player into the basement.

The basement is dark, but I'm showing it lit up here. The key gives the player more supplies, and a red key which can open the gardener's house as well as the supply room in the shop. Unfortunately I have the memory of the goldfish and did not get all the goodies in the shop with it.

There's a secret passage to the south to a world map. Passages show up in dark boards so the fake walls of the basement and hidden world map aren't really much of a secret, but I'm unsure still if it was meant as a reward for a player or a debug room.

The world map consists of two screens, and can take the player to essentially every board in the game, and even marks boards that are dark with torches. Seeing as how it's possible to warp to one board away from the game's end, I opted to just pretend like I had never found it and move on to the gardener's house.

This is another weird board. The gardener is a big fan of trees.

Of course, seeing a notice to not shoot the gardener's trees, I immediately do so, which causes it to fall down. Though there's nothing that happens for doing so, even if you shoot away ever single tree like I did. It's not being an awful person, it's a social experiment to see what will happen.

There's also a white key to pick up here. It's not a regular ZZT key, but an object. This is one of the keys that is needed to get in the tower of Pzia.

The museum quest is now completed in its entirety, and I can get back to exploring the rest of the city.

Banking in the 90s was a terrible experience from what I gather.

There's a fake wall that lets the player get right to the tellers, but none of them will have anything to do with the player. Invisible walls prevent the player from entering the passage or attempting to unlock the vault.

You can't cut in line, but you can kill this person to get into the passage. In Aceland, the player's not so much a hero as they are a person who never has to suffer any consequences.

The bank's basement is a normally dark room, filled with various creatures, keys, and multiple exits.

The scroll blatantly hints at which passage to try to get to, with the others leading to sections of the bank that are dead ends. There's not a lot to say about the combat here. It's just a few enemies scattered about in darkness. Nothing too difficult given how little the player can see. The board is plenty fair.

The correct exit leads to a rather tiny invisible maze, hence the message about having fun.

The transporter leads to the back of the vault, where there's a second white key to the tower, as well as a "disintergrater" which causes the green objects waiting in line to all be destroyed. From here the player needs to backtrack to exit the bank.

The big red section of the bank is actually a maze made out of fake walls which can be used to gain access to the vault and collect as many gems as the player is willing to wait for to be duplicated into the vault. Aceland does a pretty solid job at giving the player ample resources, so it's not really necessary, but it does mean a source of infinite healing, and the gems can be spent on ammo and torches for an infinite number of them as well.

The last building in the Trala is the church, where the player can exchange their score for health. I don't think high scores were ever really much of a focus with ZZT, but I do like how maximizing your score involves avoiding healing. Or at least it would, if not for infinite score and health giving gems in the bank vault.

I headed west of the city to the tower gates, a dangerous board full of spinning guns that rain bullets down on the player with several creatures roaming the board as well. The white doors are here, and any keys that you've collected are consumed by just entering the board rather than touching the doors themselves. Since the path is still blocked off, I turned around and headed in the opposite direction.

East of the city is the forest, which is broken up into a few different segments, the first of which is a simple puzzle of lining up boulders to get the pushers to open up the next section.

The player will have to push some boulders off to the side as well in order to actually get enough clearance to go inside.

The talking trees pretty much ignore the player, but if you bug them too many times...

They start shooting in all directions! So, please leave these trees alone.

The weird "turn it off" button can turn the pushers into gems, which is good since it's easy to trap yourself in this area otherwise if you didn't push enough boulders out of the way to have an exit. I actually reloaded a save since I thought I had accidentally trapped myself and the button's purpose wasn't readily apparent.

The eastern path in the forest leads to even more forest. I like the weird hybrid of art and gameplay here.

It's pretty easy to move through the forest in a way that doesn't release any of the lions. After defeating the rest of the enemies it's safe to head north to the "Fortress of doom" the sign helpfully guides the player to.

I really enjoy how this board looks. It's just a very large, imposing fort.

It has very poor security.

The fortress is a pretty large section of the game with quite a bit going on. The left area of the board features an escaped prisoner being chased by a guard, with the two yelling at each other for a bit. Meanwhile, in the dinner hall a cook serves everybody dinner, and gets fed up with their reactions and calls it quits.

All of this is going on while the player is shooting at creatures and collecting a red key to get into the castle's basement. Aceland has a lot of basements now that I think about it.

As you'd expect, the basement is dark. This one has several passages, but is structured very linearly.

The passage takes the player to the hallway, which takes them to the basement again, which takes them to the hallway, which takes them to the basement yet again.

From the bottom right corner of the basement it's possible to get into this area with the prison chase.

The guard is not happy with us being there and starts shooting and following the player around. The prisoner didn't seem to do anything else, and the button to the prison itself wouldn't activate as well. I figured I was missing something and would have to return later.

Exploring the rest of the basement lead to this guard. None of the options have any lasting effect other than telling the guard something happened to the king, which brings up a second prompt.

The guard considers dental injuries to be pretty minor.

Oddly, the correct answer is the one about the royal assets, which has nothing to do with something bad happening to the king.

I already had a purple key from the forest I had yet to use, so I had to open the door and then pick up the one the guard gave me to replace it.

The treasury is filled with all sorts of items, but unlike the bank vault, can't be accessed in any way.

There are also some cats here! But most importantly is the paragraph mark object which is in fact...

The microwave oven required to defeat Mugerlock!

It can also be used to kill basically any object in the game by touching them!

This includes the cats ;_;

But oddly, not the guard chasing the prisoner.

Basically at this point the player becomes a microwave murder machine.

Attempting to fry my roommate resulted in me getting some money.

My neighbor was not as lucky.

Nor was the gardener. I can't believe Prak put in this much effort into making nearly every object die if they're touched when you have the microwave.

Taking a break from microwave death, I decide to explore the other path in the forest.

Another board that looks to be half art, half gameplay. In order to get into the mountain cave, the player has to defeat two tiger boss enemies that use the same character ZZT uses for lions rather than tigers.

"You should stay away from the lions. Also you have to fight the lions. Also they're lions now, not tigers."

They do take a few hits to defeat, but there isn't much to worry about here. The board also has a time limit, but that can be reset by just leaving the board and re-entering, which probably won't be necessary.

Both of them give out keys, which I wasn't expecting. I figured it was a matter of finding the correct one to get the key from.

Of course, upon entering the cave, the player needs a second purple key anyway, so you do need to defeat both of the lion/tiger things.

The cave is dark and has some interesting design choices. There's a dead end path with just a few gems, and a giant centipede that guards nothing and has to be freed by the player. Of course, with the lights out the player likely won't see enough to make realize these things until they're already gone down those paths.

The upper path leads to a room that isn't dark, since it's a puzzle room. Like Town of ZZT's Rube Board, there are false hints to confuse the player, a type of puzzle design I have some pretty negative feelings towards.

Prak offers the player some sympathy though, with an object that can be used to skip the puzzle in exchange for losing out on gems and points.

Getting through turns out to be pretty simple, the player just needs to block the last pusher from closing the passage to the doors in the upper area. Then there's the classic 3 boulder puzzle that shows up constantly in ZZT games.

After that, the board becomes an action sequence, full of keys and creatures. The one tile wide chokepoints are pretty silly with how trivial it is to avoid getting hit by just firing well in advance.

The reward for finishing the room is health and points, along with a purple key and yet more supplies. Though I am dangerously low on torches by this point.

With a fresh purple key, it's possible to venture into the eastern corridor of the caves. It's dark and full of lions and bears, and a single tiger! This board looks very ugly to me, but you're normally seeing very little of it at one time. Maybe it's just an association of yellow normal walls with ugliness from years of bad ZZT games that don't do anything with the default border.

Thanks to cheating for the benefit of taking screenshots, I knew I could ignore that middle pocket there which was a nice little bonus.

The caves keep going, and it's pretty clear that I don't have enough torches. Aceland loves to dump ammo and gems on the player, but torches are far more scarce. I decided rather than get stuck in the dark that I'd turn back now and do some shopping.

It's a bit of a walk, but it's definitely needed. Aceland doesn't have forced purchases like The Lost Monkeys where the player can find themselves stuck, but using the microwave does cost gems (usually, some objects seem to forget to check). Again, infinite gems in the vault so no issues here.

The nice thing is I remembered that I could use the hidden world map to just jump directly to the part of the caves I turned around in.

Just like that, I'm back on track in the M Caves. Mineral? Mountain? More? I don't know what the M is supposed to be. Mechanically it plays out like the ugly yellow room from earlier, but the use of colors looks a lot nicer here to me.

A friendly unmicrowavable local warns us to not get lost. The next section is pretty cool in its design.

When the player enters the next room, they'll find themselves locked in. This maze involves hitting switches which change which paths will open for the player.

The yellow star here is a switch and opens the path to the next screen.

Some switches don't work immediately, and it's not exactly clear when a switch can or can't be

There are several paths and the player winds up running around, backtracking to the point where they'll be turning themselves around completely at times. It's confusing, but still ultimately linear enough that the player will only feel lost, and never really be lost.

Eventually the maze comes to an end, as does the darkness thanks to the red "light" in the top right corner. I like the stalactites and stalagmites in the art portions of the board.

The final room of the caves tries to look intimidating, but is pretty simply overall. The only real challenge is rushing through the spinning guns fast enough to get ahead of that red pusher which will block access to the rest of the board.

The bosses are your typical move/shoot randomly forever enemies, and take a few shots to to defeat and get their purple keys. As is often the case with ZZT enemies that shoot, they tend to shoot each other a good amount before the player can even get there. Other than that it's just more tigers, and running past a blink wall.

At the end of the cave is the yellow key to the tower. By this point, I should have had all the keys needed, but I still had one missing, and it was pretty clear something was missed in the fortress from earlier.

Oh, there was also this guy here for reasons unknown and whose message will never be heard. (He apparently tells the player that he left his microwave oven in the fortress treasury. I wonder if he appreciates the irony.)

The cave exits to the other side of the mountain, and though there's no bridge made out of text that says "bridge", the player can walk across the sky into the next mountain. Oversight? Secret? Who can say?

The next mountain's passage takes the player to the church. It's a strange warp, but one to be thankful for. Time to return to the fortress and figure out what's up with the prison and that locked door!

For whatever reason, the object cooperated this time and I was able to gain access to the prison.

The prison contains the usual assortment of prisoners, "Big man Jim", "Slippy", "Jack the Tricker", "Retard"... Ok then. Let's just be done with this board.

The green button releases all the prisoners. Most of them run to freedom, but a few stick around.

A FATAL MISTAKE.

None of the other prisoners can actually be killed. (I am very thankful for this.)

The Squeeler will tell the player about the secret entrance to the bank's vault in case the player hasn't found it themselves. Jack the Tricker points out that if the player kills the king, they can rule Aceland. That's all there is to the prison, and the player can actually opt to not release everybody.

Below the prison is the soldier's quarters, a series of small rooms with a lot of locked doors and a big pile of keys.

An early case of somebody sleeping saying "ZZT" instead of "ZZZ" occurs here. The guard in the top left explains that this sleeping person has the cyan key, so the player needs to find a way to wake him up.

The obvious solution does not work. Talking to the other guards results in microwave death.

The music note in the top right corner plays a tune and wakes the soldier up, solving the sleeping soldier puzzle as the soldier happily hands the player the key to the throne room that they're looking for.

The king is surrounded by his subjects and is making royal proclamations.

Excluding the sacrificial killings, it's a pretty good platform.

Alas, the king is pretty hard of hearing.

The king is protected by an invisible wall, so no ruling Aceland for us.

Of course, the real purpose of the throne room is to pick up the last white key. The two passages in the throne room warp the player directly outside the fortress as well making for a quick escape after killing everybody inside.

The king's speech ends with the "Blah blah blah" due to a typo. An amazing detail is that last message is meant to loop forever, but only if there's still a living subject to cheer for the king's newest decree. It's a shame that it doesn't work because it would have been an excellent touch.

Now it's time to head into the tower and defeat Mugerlock.

Which involves zapping past all the doors due to programming errors!

Honestly I can't believe how many games exhibit issues with code that gets executed too many or too few times. It's not really a bug I really saw much of with ZZT until I began writing about it. In this case, the doors check if the player has the flag set for their key and disappears if they do. It doesn't make this check when the player touches a door, and it doesn't loop the check for the flag, which means if you enter this board without all the keys, you have to ?ZAP your way through since the check only ever happens once.

So if you happen to play Aceland yourself, don't go west of the city until you have all the keys!

The tower entrance is guarded by a boss that can only be defeated with the microwave. Talking to the person or shooting the boss will get him to tell you the solution.

A block of ice blocks the door to the tower and needs to be microwaved to proceed. The boss can be ignored entirely if the player wishes to do so.

More objects attack the player in the tower, they can be microwaved or shot at. This means they'll mostly shoot each other. ZZT's bullets do track whether they're been shot by a player, creature, or object, but there's no way to distinguish in code what type shot something, which makes this scenario all too common.

A large supply of ammo is the reward, but the game gives the player so much ammunition that they can just run right past it without worry.

The next floor features bullet-proof and microwave-proof bats. It doesn't take long for an opening to form that the player can run through. The second half contains tigers that will likely also be ignored by this point.

The fourth floor is split in half. Some lions, as well as the lion bosses from outside the mountains earlier appear here. This time only one of them drops a purple key as only one key is needed to proceed.

The passage leads to the top of the tower, where one might expect to confront Mugerlock, but instead the only thing around is a passage to begin descending the tower from the other side.

The player has to solve a slider puzzle in order to proceed, and despite most of the sliders being cruft to distract the player, it took me a few attempts to get it down right. (Even with the hint on how to solve it no less!)

Mugerlock makes his first appearance, laughing at the player, throwing a star at them, and disappearing. So much for being microwaved.

The next floor down is the first fight with Mugerlock. He needs to be shot a few times, or just touched once to teleport away again and open the path to the next board. He's just your typical run and shoot ZZT boss like all the others in Aceland, just leaning more heavily towards shooting.

The player gets a ride via conveyors to the next Mugerlock encounter. Here Mugerlock watches while the player is forced to fight an invisible enemy.

He takes even more shots than his health messages indicate, and doesn't actually need to be microwaved. Microwaving him counts as three shots and can cause him to become invincible if you mix bullets and microwaves in such a way that he stops responding to being shot. Once he's defeated, the player can proceed to the ending.

Did you know there's a Princess ZZT? Also she needed to be rescued.

The ending is just a chance to talk to some of the game's characters one last time (without microwaving any of them).

There's really not much to say here. Aceland doesn't exactly have strongly defined characters.

There's actually a bit of a postgame sequence! A small demo of the game's sequel, "Acecaves". There is a version of Acecaves that was released, but it's incomplete.

There are a few more boards of these caves, but they're all just narrow corridors with stock enemies and linewalls. It's really lacking in the charm that Aceland itself has.

The last board is a beach with more enemies. There are some bonus gems if the player has extra keys (I have no idea what my blue key is for.)

Poor kid needed his parents' permission to register his shareware so he didn't want to burden others with having to ask their parents for money to register his.

The game doesn't end with a game over, but with an object turning into a passage, which can only lead to one possible board.

Back to the title screen! And its passage leads back to your home at the start of the game. You'll have to get yourself killed to end the game and submit a high score. The only way out of Aceland is through death.

Final Thoughts

Aceland is really something else. It feels like the quintessential game where you just do things for the sake of doing them. The story is barebones, with the player's sole motivation for defeating Mugerlock being that a sign in the middle of the road told them to. Everything in it feels so meaningless as if any questioning on why the player is going somewhere or doing something is only answered with a simple "because".

And yet, its opportunity to explore such a video game typical world ends up ultimately being a lot of fun. Aceland is a very traditional ZZT game about getting keys, shooting lions, and talking with NPCs who feel far more like props than people. The same could be said of Town of ZZT really.

Where Aceland shines, is in its ability to somehow transfix the player despite its inanities. Once the player gets that microwave oven and realizes that nearly every object in the game will die to it, it becomes this absolutely bizarre game less about exploring environments and more about exploring interactions. Who will live? Why? What will they say when they're fried? It's all very juvenile, but it makes the person playing want to see things through.

Aceland is a game about being labeled a hero and escaping consequences because of it, and it does this without a hint of irony. The game never comments on the player's actions. Mugerlock doesn't actually do anything, and there's no reason you can't just interpret the player themselves as being the antagonist. It's a playground where the player gets to do whatever they like, whether that be microwaving cats, freeing prisoners, or shooting evil wizards.

I had a lot of fun playing through Aceland (though the caves dragged on a bit). It feels like a natural evolution of the formula provided in ZZT's original worlds, and is definitely one anybody who enjoys ZZT games needs to at least give a try.