BBS Nostalgia? Sign me up.
Last Zachtronics game? sadpanda
Yeah, I guess Zach’s going to be teaching computer science. I have to imagine he’ll find the time and motivation to make something here and there over the years, though.
I used to work with a Stanford computer science PhD that swore that anybody who was good at SpaceChem would be a good coder, that it was a great stealth teacher of computer science concepts. Seems like a great career choice for him to move into teaching.
I had no idea this is what they meant by “last game”.
I must I was a bit sad that this isn’t a puzzle articulated around navigating or setting up BBSes.
This looks great and bursting with the Zach-like trademark weirdness. I hope the students know they’re being taught by a god!
Probably worth pointing out that it’s also coming to Game Pass.
Well that was a rollercoaster - having just seen that this will be the last Zachtronics game (nooooo!) to finding out why (oh that’s actually a really awesome thing to do, I have nothing but respect for anyone choosing to teach). Nice that it’s on Gamepass, but I’ll be getting this on Steam as well I think, his games tend to have a long life and I’ll want to keep it around.
Or not.
“I just finished my first year of teaching and Last Call BBS hasn’t even been released yet! I was hoping that I’d really like teaching and stay with that for a few years, but I learned that’s definitely not the case and I’m having a hard time imagining anything other than games in my future, in some shape or form.”
Damn right Zach! People are stupid and disappointing! Come back to us :3
So beloved game dev continues developing games.
AKA, not news.
But no news is good news, especially in this case!
Game is now out!
Only played a few minutes, but very nostalgic for me. I can’t imagine I’m in a big peer group of people who frequented single-line BBS’s, traded ‘warez’, ran my own BBS, etc. For me though, this is nostalgia heaven. This was my teen years.
And on GamePass
Maybe thematically, but nothing looked like this on a BBS!
That Starfleet 2: Krellan Commander thing is more like what BBS stuff actually looked like.
Those are supposed to be downloadable games you run on the PC :)
Interesting… I might know that if I played early access games! ;)
I am excited for this one! They’re saying “1-2 months” for early access, which translates to 6-12 months minimum for a first-time dev, but since this is Zachtronics I wonder if maybe we can believe them…
Zachtronics early access periods are very short, and usually only result in minor changes (generally tuning the difficulty of puzzles).
I wonder if Zach had previous teaching experience? It sounds like the transition didn’t work out the way he expected. My guess is that he taught introductory level courses at a college or high school, that’s the fastest way to burn through your enthusiasm :P
Can somebody who has played it explain what the game (not just the concept) actually is? Is this really 8 different programming games, or one “main” programming game and seven irrelevant minigames. (Like the solitaire minigames in previous Zachtronics games, except more of them.)