Z was such an odd one compared to everything else at the time. No harvesting, no base building, just territory flags and factories that build faster the more sectors you hold. Every match turned into a mad scramble where losing one flag could flip the whole map.
And the robots had real personality, with the cigar chomping commander and Allan and Brad slacking off in the cutscenes.
Steel Soldiers went much more traditional later, and I always felt the original’s idea never really got a proper successor. Did anyone here play it back then? What did you think of the time-as-resource design?
For anyone curious, there’s a free open-source 3D fan remake of it now, OpenZ: https://github.com/playopenz/OpenZ
I played it loads back in the day and loved it, I also picked it up recently with intent to play it but havent properly got around to it yet.
I didn’t realise there was a fan remake though, I’ll definitely be checking that out at some point!
Nice to hear from someone who played it back then! If you try the remake, tell us how it compares to your memories.
For some reason, I seem to have totally missed this one - I remember the Bitmap Brothers of course, the “Rock stars of the Computer Game world”.
I played a tonne of Xenon 1&2, Speedball 1&2 and Chaos Engine, but seem to have completely missed this one!
z (first one) was really a masterpiece rts for its time, very original concept of flags and terrirotires and great humor
I had a look at the wiki page for the Bitmap Brothers, and it looks like Z was only released on MS-DOS, and I probably still had an Atari ST or Amiga at that point, which might explain the gap.
they had also win 95 version for Z… later it was also ported to mobiles and modern pc on steam
I remember it fondly for the funny cutscenes and the game’s difficulty. Even though I always liked RTS games, I was never good at them. I never passed Z’s damn 16th level.
level 16 is featured in Openz… the trick is to win the early heavy tank vs heavy tank duel on the road between two forts
