To the best of my knowledge, Zig Zag is the only PC word game ever to attain vaporware status. QQP announced the game about a year and a half ago, and has been advertising fairly steadily ever since. This lag time may not be unusual for the industry anymore (Damn!), but we're talking about a word game here. This is not Wing Commander III; this is not The 11th Hour, and it's not Harvester. A while ago I began wondering why this word game was taking so long. Was QQP outfitting it with eye-popping SVGA graphics, 3D Studio rendered cut scenes, and a rockin' soundtrack? Nope. Zig Zag is, by today's multimedia standards, a remarkably bland game from strictly an audio-visual perspective. The game itself is quite good, but it could use a few megs worth of window dressing. Remember this moment folks, because it's not often that I say this. I'm very quick to criticize a product for having more to do with flashy presentation than quality gameplay, and now I'm saying just the reverse. (Just to reassure you, let me say that my head has not spun around 360 degrees, I have not recently urinated on the carpet, and I'm not vomiting up pea soup.)
Zig Zag is a well thought-out, enjoyable word game, but PC word games definitely have a niche audience. (Do you know anyone who recently spent $3000 on a multimedia PC just so they could look at all the cool fonts?) Serious fans of word games (i.e., regular readers or subscribers of Games magazine) are bound to love Zig Zag, but the game lacks the crossover appeal that could keep casual word gamers coming back for more. Flashy graphics and lots-o-sound may not have changed the gameplay a whit, but they might have kept the average gamer's attention a little longer.
The object of Zig Zag is to determine the puzzle's secret word by making guesses with words of your own. At the top of the screen is a string of blank boxes representing the mystery word, which can be from four to seven letters in length (depending on the difficulty level you select). Below the blank mystery word are spaces for ten guesses of various length, from one letter to one less than the number of letters in the mystery word. These guess spaces don't always start at the beginning of the word, either. For example, with a five-letter mystery word you might be trying to guess the three middle letters. At first this may sound hopelessly random, but it makes complete sense once you understand the game's scoring system. If a letter in one of your guesses is in the mystery word, but in a different place than it falls in your guess, you get 250 points for it. If you guess a letter in the exact place it falls in the mystery word, you get 1000 points. By carefully examining your guesses and their scores, you can deduce the mystery word by the process of elimination. Naturally, getting a high score is a secondary consideration.
If you tire of playing single games (as most people will after about 15 minutes), you can try your hand at one of the six quest games. The quest games put your on-screen persona in one corner of a grid of squares and challenges you to puzzle your way to the diagonally opposite corner. Of course, you do this by playing (and winning) games of Zig Zag. The number of squares on the "map" you move is governed by the size of the secret word you face. Some of the squares on the "map" have score multipliers, and "moving" through these squares can boost your score by many times--if you solve the puzzle, that is. These quest games (which all feature identical rules and differ only in map structure) are a mildly interesting addition, but they still amount to little more than a series of single games strung together.
What it all boils down to is this--if you're a die-hard word game fanatic, you'll find Zig Zag to be a challenging game with loads of replay value. If you don't live for word games, Zig Zag will entertain you for a few minutes and then leave you cold. Frankly, this game seems dreadfully out of place on the commercial market, although it would have made a good shareware product. But an entire CD for this game? Maybe if it were bundled with 10 or 20 more word games, but on its own Zig Zag is pretty skimpy fare.
