ZapM Reviews

Jeff Lait

It was played under Debian.

The version of ZapM was around 0.6.2.

This game is far from complete, and definitely not well balanced, but
I think/hope it's reached a certain fun-to-play stage. And after
reading that earlier thread about appropriate release times, I've
decided I might as well find out sooner than later if my game sucks.

Well, I’m afraid to say it doesn’t suck :> If you were looking for an excuse to quit development, you’re not getting it from me.

I only had time to play a couple of games, but it pulled me in. The pace is fast and fun. You have managed to build a sci-fi nethack without any of the usual cop-outs. Usually one would just say scrolls==disks and be done. But, you have tweaked the stuff so it all feels internally consistent.

You have also shown infinite evil in your RNG, which gave my poor space marine a pair of buggy peril sensitive sunglasses and a buggy cortext crossover. The cruelty of that last device defies description. I am in awe.

So, please give it a whirl if you have a Mac or a Linux box:

Those on Windows boxes can do what I do, and run VMWare. That being said, my Fedora install didn’t want to run it due to some C runtime library problem. I had to run it under Debian.

http://www.zapm.org

...and let me know what you think!

Keep up the good work! Wish I had infinite time so I could play it enough to give you some real feedback. Sadly, I’m chained to the iterative development process you know so well trying improve my own roguelike.