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- Present Time Map
Trizbort map of Present Time in T-Zero
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Contains T-ZERO.EXE
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Estimated play time: 11 hours (based on 1 vote)
Members voted for the following times for this game:
- 11 hours — Rovarsson
About the Story
PROLOGUE
A dream came to you as you tossed uneasily upon an unfamiliar bed. In your dream, a time-worn figure waved a scythe in slow arcs across your sky-blue field of vision and picked, out of thin air, letters from a runic alphabet. The sky-writing from the scythe crystallized in icy trails as a new letter materialized with each sleeping breath your dream encompassed. When the message was complete, the entire sky was slivered with shining icicles that spelled in full:
"Somewhere scattered across ages and landscapes are six enticingly round objects that you must locate and somehow transport to progressively future time zones where they can be manipulated in a fashion that will right the troubled times."
As you deciphered the message, the icicles shattered in a brittle and sparkling avalanche. You tossed some more and awaited your awakening . . .
River Bed.
You are on the bed of a swiftly moving river.
You have in your possession:
A Compass.
A Journal Page.
A Pink Slip.
You cut a dashing figure in:
Khaki Fatigues.
Red Suspenders.
>>read pink slip
In dark pink script, the light pink slip officiously reads:
"Our project is too near completion to allow us to keep in our
employment a custodian who is prone to sweep subatomic particles
under the carpet along with the dust. Also, after repeated
warnings, you have approached the restricted areas once too
often. You may not enter the museum again--your personal
effects will be delivered to you."
The missive closes with "Counting down from ten" and is signed
with the name Count Zero followed by a flourish and a slashed zero.
In addition, a single word has been faintly outlined in bold
capital letters by an impression from light blue carbon paper.
However, with all that red upon red, the word is not readable in
the current light
>>read journal page
On the journal page you've scribbled the following cryptic
instructions:
Shadow the sun . . .
A spire to the sky at noon.
Into no man's land at nine.
Read in the red light at noon.
Transcribe from the violet light at nine.
Ratings and Reviews
| Average Rating: Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 4 |
3 Most Helpful Member Reviews
A literary buff's IF game, July 26, 2009*Mixing references to pop culture ("goo goo gjoob"), classic literature and adding a time-travel element on top of it all, T-Zero is a very difficult work of IF to classify. It's about what you might expect to get if you were to combine a well-schooled English teacher, a mad scientist, and a professional comedian.
The puzzles in T-Zero shine like polished gems - which is a good thing as they are the mainstay of the game. "Nord and Bert" aficionados will have a definite head-start over other players, as will serious bookworms and those who paid attention in their English classes.
Nuttiness aside, the game can also be great 'serious fun' for the thinking man (or woman) with the occasional action sequence to spruce things up. Waiting patiently for the right time to come at certain places will bring great rewards...as will outrunning a giant boulder Indiana Jones-style.
From the ingenious use of certain mirrors to navigating the fiendishly nasty topiary maze (which took me over a year to beat), this game is anything but a zero!
I started going through my wishlist on IFDB, and this game has been on their longer than any other, because it was so intimidating I put it off. I ended up playing the ifarchive version, which uses local browser storage for saves.
I played for a while, using in-game hints and getting < 20 points out of 365, then used a walkthrough and maps from several different sites, including CASA. Even then, it was difficult to follow and required solving some puzzles independently.
If you had to play just one IF game for a very long time and didn't have access to any other, but could talk to other people, this would be a great game, because it's designed for long-term group play.
Many factors make it large. First, it has a giant map with many diagonal connections and cycles in the graph structure, and doesn't list exits automatically (unless I missed a command to turn that on; I just used the EXITS command), and this giant map exists in multiple time periods at once.
Second, many of the puzzles rely on pun-based commands, requiring a leap of intuition that can't be solved with just brute force.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, many actions have long-delayed consequences, and many items are used in scenarios quite different from the ones they're found in.
None of these are bad game-design wise, but they mean that you will spend a great deal of time on this game in order to experience its content, while many current IF games are designed to be completed in one or two sessions with little 'friction', due to the multitude of competing games and other reasons.
The plotline is buried at first but becomes stronger and stronger, especially once time travel is allowed. If the author created the first areas first, it would explain why the game starts with a mishmash of silly things (including a tortoise and a hare on a Moebius strip a suspension bridge that suspends you). Later areas have strong thematic consistency, especially the future world. There are a few other threads of plot that weave through the game consistently, like the use of opiates to expand the mind and a meteorite that makes several appearances.
The game isn't mean; it increases difficulty in generally fair ways. Hints are provided in most rooms, and a helpful friend gives you more and more commands over time that help out in a meta way (I loved FIND [ITEM] because it moves you to that room, enabling fast travel).
This would be a great game for a let's play or other group-based activity, since finding the right phrasing is good.
I don't think I'll play it again, because I just struggle with its style of expansiveness, but I enjoyed my time with it and think many others would as well.
My favorite IF text adventure ever., August 10, 2015This game is full of literary allusion mixed with snark.
I play it every two years or so.
I actually registered it back in the day.
It's full of delightful word-play mixed with time travel.
It will work only under non-windozed DOS, it works fine in an emulator under FreeDOS.
It has the coolest maze (the Topiary) ever! Not your standard: "You are in a maze of twisty passages...."
There is an easter-egg type extra score awarded at one of the puzzles if your system thinks it is a leap year. Just sayin'
3 Off-Site Reviews
Baf's Guide
A peculiar game of wordplay and paradox, kind of like Nord and Bert crossed with Trinity under the direction of Douglas Hofstadter. The setting is a surreal land, dominated by a black obelisk that houses Count Zero's machinery of oppression. You must to put an end to his schemes through time travel. Many of the puzzles are more associative than logical, and in many cases rely on literary allusion. Lots of freedom, lots of good puzzles, one novel but mappable maze, a T. S. Eliot scene, a couple of drug references, and an approximate average of three or four puns per sentence (which, oddly, enhances the atmosphere). An irritating beep fanfare plays when your score increases. Allegedly, it can be disabled by the SOUND command, which, on my system, simply causes the program to break.
Notable nonstandard features include the commands "WHERE", which tells you the last location whre you saw an object or character, and "FIND", which puts you on autopilot bound for that location. These commands are not available from the beginning, but must be activated within the plot of the game. Normally, I would frown on such confusion of form and content, but it actually fits the self-referential tone of the work.
-- Carl Muckenhoupt
SPAG
T-Zero is an anomaly of IF. Released in 1991, after the heady Infocom days but before Inform and the renaissance of IF, T-Zero is a surprisingly modern game. Dennis Cunningham's puzzle-based work evokes a rich atmosphere in a land familiar and yet unknown. (Neil Yorke-Smith)
The plot goes from the mundane, to the prehistoric, to an Orwellian nightmare with landscapes that are as evocative as So Far's surreal worlds but held together more succinctly, with the common thread of slightly familiar settings that change notably over different time periods. (Francesco Bova)
See the full review
SynTax
The standard of writing is exquisite and the author has a turn of phrase which many text adventure writers would kill for. For example; if you try to cross the river in the wrong place you don't just get wet feet or drown or, worse, simply get the response, "You can't do that!" What does Cunningham come up with? "The rushing river runs in that direction, uncrossable, a rubicon of dreams." And, to describe a flock of terns flying above your head, how about, "They tirelessly twirl in a circular swirl."? Marvellous!
See the full review
Tags
Game Details
Current Version: 1.04
License: Shareware
Development System: Pascal
Baf's Guide ID: 205
IFID: Unknown
TUID: u8qqrwutdugkexpr
T-Zero on IFDB
Recommended Lists
T-Zero appears in the following Recommended Lists:Time Travelers by Walter Sandsquish
Players get to travel back and forth through their player-characters' time-lines all the time by using UNDO, RESTART, and RESTORE. So, it's only fair that player-characters sometimes get to move back and forth through a time-line also....
Rovarsson's Superlative Games by Rovarsson
Only supercalifragilisticexpialidocious games on this list.
Polls
The following polls include votes for T-Zero:Games about Time Travel by Estrong157
more specifically, games with time travel as a gameplay element.
A fine bit of homebrew by JonathanCR
Most games here are written with Inform, TADS, or other custom IF-writing languages. Some, however, are written in more standard and less specialised languages, such as C++, Java, or even BASIC. These "homebrew parsers" usually lack the...
Non-Infocom games of commercial era worth playing by tekket
What commercial games published between 1980-1993 other than those by Infocom do you think are worth playing?
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