Where can I get Virus 302 Special Edition?

Virus 302 Special Edition 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.

Virus 302 Special Edition

For those of you just joining us, earlier this month I streamed Virus 302, my first released ZZT game. I made it when I was 10 and being 10 was not exactly experienced in good game design. It was a very bad game with a very nonsensical plot, but good for some laughs in a modern context.

My original plan was to stream the Special Edition as well, but I opted to write about it directly instead. V302:SE was made when I was 13 years old. I knew it would still be bad, and figured I'd be harsher on it since I would imagine my abilities with ZZT would have improved a lot, and I'd have a better sense of design sensibilities, but I have to say, it's honestly worse. Like, I genuinely question what made me think I should release it. There's plenty to go over here, and you may want to compare and contrast against the original Virus 302 using the Museum file viewer.

Or if you're really feeling daring, the live playthrough is on YouTube .

The game's title screen is a mess to begin with. Only half of the "V" has depth added to it for some reason, and the other letters look very blocky as the shading runs into more of the letters themselves.

The "2" mostly looks like a "2" though, which is more than can be said about the original game.

The game itself opens just as the original with the player in his house. It looks a lot nicer visually, using a generic horizon fade for the background, and liberal use of STK graphics.

This is the first example of quality writing the game offers.

The computer lets you do all the things one would do on an actual computer in 2002. Read its system specs, go on the Internet, or play ZZT.

Why, it even has the specs of the family computer the game was created on.

You can use the Internet to instantly learn a skill. This is mandatory as you can't leave your house until you've eaten some food.

And of course ZZT works flawlessly.

*joke about vegetables in the toilet*

I'm not sure if I was going for humor here or if I was just too lazy to add in some more furniture. Judging by the general effort displayed throughout V302:SE, I'm guessing the latter.

This self-deprecation feels like a tumblr meme post. Once you eat food, the white walls around your door go away and the player is free to leave the house.

Thankfully, if you don't know how to cook there's just no option to make something to eat. This game would've been made when I was addicted to The Sims, so I'm surprised you can't burn the house down and die.

Outside, in the Town of ZZT, there's another horizon gradient and buildings placed in such a way that they appear to be floating in the air given the perspective.

The original game had you learn about the world being in danger from a news report on the tv. Instead it's just another story in the newspaper. This is all the motivation you really get, and the player character openly admits that he's on his quest just for the sake of there being a game.

Without those car keys though, the player won't be going anywhere anytime soon. There's another building that can be entered at least, though it's blocked by two guards.

Oh.

"Wow, the mayor's house sure looks familiar!" I thought to myself while playing this.

It's weird how I'm on the same wavelength with myself. All the doors in the mayor's house are locked (even the bathroom!), forcing the player to speak with the mayor.

"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal."

The player is then taken to a unique dueling minigame where you and the mayor take turns slapping each other with gloves.

The engine is pretty simple, the arrows move back and forth and you press a button to stop it and see how much damage you do. The mayor does the same thing. If you manage to hit for 6 damage the text appears in colors to signify the extra damage.

The arrow object moves fast, but there's a lot of room for error with how much health you have.

The player is dumped back into the mayor's house, and this time can unlock the door to the closet and pick up a pistol and some ammo. This sounds useful, but without any car keys there's no way to leave town.

Oh.

Ok, I'll accept using some tiny part of a pistol as a makeshift lockpick to break into your car, but that won't cut it for the ignition.

So here's the world map! The original game has a "teleportation station" which was just a series of passages, so even this work of art is a step up, but I'm amazed that most of the locations haven't even attempted to be drawn.

The player is given a bit of freedom as for where to go:

1. Pawn Shop
2. Town
3. Cavern
4. Old Yass Plains
5. Security Booth
6. Clock Tower

And you couldn't tell what any of those places were just by looking on the world map.

My first stop is the Pawn shop, where to save objects I used blink wall rays to make the windows. Except then in the center I used an actual blink wall instead of an object, so parts of the windows flicker on and off.

The pawn shop is closed though, so it's immediately time to turn around.

Speaking of time, the clock tower is this ugly brown building. It's also one of those digital clock towers you may have heard of.

There's a small carving that gives the player five gems, so there's some benefit in coming here at least.

The Old Yass Plains are just that, the Yass Plains section from the old game. I don't know why I kept this content.

THIS IS COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTEXT FOR THE PLAYER.

There are two paths the player needs to take if they want to get an optional bonus. The south path is full of ruffians.

The good ruffian gives some supplies, and one of the red keys to get the area's reward if they're willing to put up with this.

The north path contains lions, and this "troll" who just moves around and shoots randomly. You might think it's a dead end, but if you go north on exactly one tile, you can proceed to the next room! Wow!

That next room is a maze. In the original game the player has to navigate along an invisible path of fake walls, but here an object mercifully reveals the path automatically. So clearly I was aware that this sort of thing was not fun, but kept it in anyway.

So here the player reaches the boss of the Old Yass Plains, the Anti-Virus Hologram. Except the player has no idea who this character is, unlike in the original where by now they'd know him as the villain.

He runs around and shoots, and sometimes throws stars, but thankfully not so many that the fight becomes impossible.

The reward for the area is a bunch of gems, but the true benefit is that finishing the plains advances the game's clock.

Now that lunchtime is over, the pawn shop is open. Or, at least it would be, but the code tries to jump to a label called "unlock". Unlock is a reserved word in ZZT-OOP since it's a command, and so the game never jumps to the label and I had to cheat to enter.

The pawn shop, like all pawn shops is completely empty of stock on the floor, but loaded with bushes and a drinking fountain.

I don't recall which game I got this drinking fountain mechanic from, but I liked it then and I liked it now. You can drink as often as you like, and you gain one health for doing so, but it pops up a message requiring the player to have to hit enter to be able to drink again. If the player wants to invest time in getting free health, they can.

Well, it's a good mechanic as a little easter egg sort of thing. If the player finds themselves running into a drinking fountain in order to have a chance at survival, it would be pretty garbage to rely on.

The pawn shop only sells a shotgun and a weapon permit. You can't just buy an AK-47 in this world. I pick up both of them because better weapons can only make the game go faster. Afterwards, it's back to the world map.

The security checkpoint continues the trend of being a place to go without anything to do. The only way in is if you work there, which the play does not.

Good lord this is some "written by a 13 year old" writing if I ever saw it. Suddenly we have this very serious tone about this very scary cave. This board is probably the game's high point graphically.

lmao

The cavern is a large room full of bat enemies that wander aimlessly and will bite you if you get next to them. The gameplay is really straightforward here and the overwrought cave intro is pretty funny in comparison to the actual cave being just a gray room with some bats.

But wait! Up ahead on the next board, it's the mark of a true ZZTer, it's an RPG battle!

Despite thinking these engines were the coolest as a kid, I immediately downplay it as a standard affair, and mention how you might get bored so there's some music to listen to. First off, yes, you will get bored during all the many RPG battles this game has. Secondly, there is no music to choose from.

There's a lot to see on this board. It's heavily inspired by Final Fantasy 7, including limit breaks. The timers for you and the enemy slowly fill up. When yours fills, a menu pops up letting you choose if you want to attack, use an item, or defend. There is no reason to ever defend, and the player won't have any healing items available at this point, so instead you just pick attack until you win.

The screen shows your weapon, and reveals all four that are available at some point in the game. That star in the middle surrounded by water, boulders, and fake walls, is the system's random number generator. When you roll for damage, the object in the center shoots in a random direction and hits one of the objects which represent 1, 2, 3, or 4 damage.

Lastly is the limit break meter, which should fill as you take damage like in Final Fantasy 7, but in nearly all of this games battles, doesn't actually fill up ever.

The reward for defeating the spider is some gems, and a uniform you steal from a corpse so it'll look like you work at the security booth.

Now disguised, the guards let the player go inside.

The checkpoint is pretty empty, with nothing more than a red carpet. A helpful computer monitor informs the player that there will be instant game overs coming up if they aren't careful.

The player also got the guard's ID card from the cave, but has yet to read the data off of it. The reality is that you're supposed to go back to the player's house and use the scanner to get the information needed. Of course, the passage to leave the security checkpoint mistakenly links to the same board so I'm stuck here and had to look up the information in the editor!

Everybody's getting their ID cards renewed, and none of them noticed this one desk with no line at all. Heck, some are even waiting at empty desks.

All of the answers are directly given to the player if they do figure out how to scan the ID card. The alternate ID is listed as "Square Clock Wise", which I thought was a trick to mean the answer is "78963214" (a square on a keyboard's number pad), but the game actually accepts both the number and the phrase as correct answers.

With the ID card updated, the player can explore the rest of the checkpoint, which consists of an empty room with stairs. Another guard believes you to be one of the generals, and that they're under attack.

So far this game has had a dueling engine, a traditional RPG battle engine, so I guess some sort of minigame where you direct a bunch of troops in order to win a battle would be reasonable to expect. Maybe set tactics or just placement, and do so in a way that the enemy forces get outgunned.

Ha ha just kidding. You win! Programming is hard.

The player is the unceremoniously dumped into the second half of the game's world map. The new locations are the City of ZZT, the red plains, and the forest of ZZT. The map mechanic is pretty pointless since the rest of the game is strictly linear. There aren't even passages for the other areas.

I also want to point out that we're now halfway through this game, and so far the villain has not been revealed, explained, or hinted at in any way other than the content taken directly from the original game in an area the player is told is optional.

I got a laugh in my stream of the original Virus 302's City of ZZT which consisted of three buildings. The remake is true to its roots, again with a city of three buildings.

The first large building is a weapons dealer who will sell you a shotgun or an illegal AK-47. The weird "What can I get now" choice only shows up when you have a weapons permit purchased from the pawn shop which lets you buy the AK without a bribe attached.

The second building sells items. It's possible to buy a first aid kit, or a larger medkit here. These don't increase your health directly, but instead are used in the RPG fights throughout the game as healing there. You can only carry one of each of these due to ZZT's flag system and limits making it a huge pain to have a custom counter. What other RPGs often did instead, was use torches to represent healing items and avoid all the micromanagement of code.

The last building can actually be entered. It's the publishing offices of the Daily OOP newspaper. Nine floors of stuff to check out.

As soon as you step onto the second floor, the bullets start flying. I assume the thing in the corner is supposed to be a printing press.

Such language. In order to proceed you need to find the enemy which has the key to the next floor on them and kill them. Except if they don't die within the first few seconds, they'll become invincible due to a bug in the code!

The game tries to be smart and have the weapon you're carrying work outside of RPG battles as well, so the game reduces the number of shots these enemies take if you have better weapons. Unfortunately, it does this in a loop, which eventually means the enemies won't react to being shot at all and can no longer be killed! Good. Great.

Haha did you think the content that was implied would actually exist? Of course not. V302:SE constantly tells you about things that aren't in the game, and always in a way where if they weren't mentioned in the first place, the player wouldn't care.

At least

The second fight is with Anti-Virus. There's still no answer to who he is, what he's doing, how he's doing it, why he's doing it, or anything else, but at least there's a name and the knowledge that he's evil and has to be stopped.

The fight plays out just like the spider fight. Also despite having purchased the AK-47, I appear to not have it. Whether it's a bug with the purchase or with the RPG engine, it doesn't really matter because you're still in no danger of dying.

After reducing his health enough, Anti-Virus runs away. The game continues to call attention to the complete lack of motivation for the player.

The subway is protected by several guards. The player can just buy a ticket and board the train, or alternatively the player can pick a fight and murder some people to save a few bucks.

The fight plays out just like the previous ones, but this time there are two targets. In order to compensate for essentially doubling the difficulty, the time it takes for the guards to be ready to attack is also doubled. At the very least, the player doesn't have to worry about getting overwhelmed and relying on good RNG to be able to win fights.

The limit break meter here starts partially filled, but again, it doesn't go up at all in the fight.

I opted to target the second guard, and upon defeating him, the game acted as if both has been killed. A convenient bug if ever there was one. For beating them the player gets a bunch of stuff as well.

After defeating the guards or just buying a ticket and boarding the subway, the player is dropped off in the middle of the _new_ Yass Plains. This time the green fakes have dark green backgrounds, and there's a sunset background.

Instead of a pile of lions and ruffians, there's a pile of objects. A lot of them shoot each other. Just like in the newspaper office, the enemies eventually become invincible, so the player should just run past them.

The next screen builds up stronger enemies who also become invincible so it doesn't exactly matter. I feel like there's half of a sentence missing around the "Now even stronger an incredibly strong person." line.

After a few more screens of enemies to just run right past, bypassing any gameplay, the player reaches Anti-Virus again.

The next fight is set up with this split dialog depending on whether or not the player has an AK-47. Again, despite having bought one, I did not get the dialog indicating that I had.

Needless to say, the fight is just like the one with the two guards. It also suffers from the bug of beating one enemy causing the fight to be considered a win.

And then this happens. It's really funny because the exact same bug happens after this fight in the original game. The dialog has an unknown character speak and so the line of code begins "???:" ZZT sees the first character is a question mark and thinks it's a shortcut for #try, a command to move in a direction but only if not blocked in that direction.

Upon ?ZAP cheating my way to the exit, an invisible object to prevent such a thing is set off, spamming a message about cheating and giving me a game over. Thankfully it's defeated by just zapping around to the passage from the side rather than through the intended route.

The original game's teleporter system means you always know where you're heading after finishing an area, but the special edition just flings you from one place to the next. The world map system really should've stayed in place just for the sake of pacing.

The town is of course so destroyed that I didn't even have to draw anything. How fortunate. It's a shame too since the original game's ruined town is at least a bit visually interesting with messes of breakable walls as crumbled buildings. This is such a cop-out of having to attempt any graphics that are the least bit complex.

Oh by the way the protagonist has a girl who is a friend but not a girlfriend named Jen and he is very glad to see this woman who has never been mentioned in the slightest. I'm thankful she didn't get turned into a damsel in distress character and instead has a personality more aligned with the Doom marine's. Her appearance is just as abrupt in the original, but the original at least has a cast of characters on its title screen. The special edition really offers zero reason for her to exist until it decides she should now.

Correction: If the victory dialog triggered properly, Jen being the sole survivor of the town would have been revealed and been the motivation for the player to go there.

The evil General Megabyte shows up for the next boss battle. Jen gets to fight with a shotgun of her own, but is unable to use other weapons. The general has so much health that the bar wraps around to a second line, but with two attacks per round, the fights only get faster. They're also even easier, as now the enemy will randomly pick a target as well, so damage will get spread between each character as opposing to choosing a target and focusing on them.

Eventually the general uses this special magic attack and blue particles appear. Then the particles don't go away. Since the code hangs here, nobody takes any damage from the attack. It also prevents the message revealing the attack being called "Windows blue screen of death!" from showing up, which is an absolute shame.

Jen means business. Again, the next location to visit is revealed. Alas it's all a trick!

The red plains are just like the Yass plains, except red. The enemies make themselves invincible and so the player must run.

This game was so obviously not playtested at all, it's kind of incredible to me. You're supposed to get a bunch of dialog with that very hard to see red smiley face on the far right all while fighting these guards that are supposed to be vulnerable.

Because Jen is a girl, she wants to fight the other girl by herself. They are women. The player gets the agency here and decides if Jen will fight alone or not, and your answer determines if the boss fight is 2v1 or 1v1.

I opted to let her fight alone since I was sure there'd be some long term benefit for a more difficult fight, and it's not like the fights in this game are difficult to begin with.

The fight plays out just like any other, but there doesn't seem to be any reward for doing things the hard way. It turns out that if you have an AK-47, you don't get a reward? However if you don't, you're given the laser weapon.

The game is just trying to punish me at this point.

Hey, we're in the Forest of ZZT now. There was nothing in the game telling us to go here. No bugged dialog or anything. The forest is just a big open area filled with the same enemies seen throughout the rest of the game.

For whatever reason, they seem to actually die properly! Whichever one is in charge of opening the door get caught by friendly fire, so even though the objects can be killed for once, it's still ideal to just run past them.

Look at all that blood!

Melissa virus from the original game makes an appearance to try and show that she's not obsolete. This is the start of what's pretty much a boss rush, it's RPG battles all the way down from here.

There is absolutely nothing to note about the fight.

Missed opportunity to have the viruses start repeat the intruder line.

This game came out in 2002, a 12 gig drive was pretty modest by that point. I mean the game explicitly points out your own computer's drive being 40 gigs.

Gigabyte keeps his broken blue screen attack. The only thing different is his health. You can see just how little damage he managed to inflict despite it.

The computer references don't stop.

You then go up against Majestic for the final time. She has less health than the general. As a girl, she is not strong like man.

In a sudden twist, the music selection that was mentioned in the very first battle finally shows up for the penultimate one. All the songs are taken from WiL's "#play" without permission (but with credit at least).

Be cautious of which anti-virus software you run.

The final fight of the game is just. like. every. single. other. fight.

Again there's no actual threat due to the extremely generous delay between Anti-Virus's attacks. What is worth noting, is that the last ricochet is positioned incorrectly. The bullet will bounce back and forth instead of being deflected upwards, resulting in the final battle being unwinnable without cheating! A fitting end.

Just like the original, the game sets itself up for a sequel which never happened. The credits don't mention WiL's music at all.

The testers text is facetious at least, or at least the typos are.

GGI is Global Gaming Interactive, the company name my local friends and I decided we'd release our ZZT games under.

The game closes with ads for other games (for the ZZT clone ZIG). Sam Spade's selling point being more Virus 302 SE battles is not a particularly good one.

Final Thoughts

I'm still genuinely in shock at just how bad this is. I can maybe believe at 13 thinking "This is definitely gameplay people will love", but I can't get over how incredibly buggy it is, and how many of those bugs would have been caught if there was any testing. This playthrough must actually have been the first time I actually played the game all the way through.

The graphics are a step up only in the sense that there are more colors to use rather than using color effectively. The game's action sequences, even if most of them weren't broken to pieces, would be just as uninspired as the old game's lions and tigers. The RPG battles are too easy, too slow, and too repetitive.

The story was nonsense in the original, and continues be the same. The only real changes are to some characters names to make them more timely. Characters in the special edition still show up out of nowhere, have relations which the player is expected to take on blind faith, and have no real motivation beyond following the script of the original game.

I still think for me personally, this is a really neat time capsule. The fact that it's a remake rather than an original creation makes it a great way to compare what I thought a good ZZT game was at 13. The answer appears to be skyline fades, RPG battles with limit breaks, and obtuse puzzles and secrets.

This may be the worst special edition since Star Wars (ha ha), but it's not taking something good and egotistically saying "But I can do better this time". It's taking what is still very bad source material, and somehow managing to turn it into something even less appealing. I don't believe anybody has ever actually played this, and I hope they haven't. It's just plain unplayable.

Clearly I need to remake it again. I can do better this time...