Pazzman 4 - Rotter In Space (QBasic, incomplete)

Pazzman was a character my friend Karl and I invented at high school. We used to make “Pazzman magazines” where Pazzman did terrible things, and we’d laugh ourselves sick.

In 1998, I’d just started University, and I shared the Pazzman games with a few friends, and a couple of people really enjoyed it. I got started on a sequel!

You will need QBASIC.exe to run this game. I’ve not bundled it ‘cos I don’t know if that would be legal. QBasic runs just fine under DoxBox, even on a mac :-)

Download pazzman-4-qbasic.zip

My 90s games were pretty juvenile, I’ve tried to keep them as-is but for the sake of conscience, I’ve sanitised the language a bit.

I got super busy and I never finished Pazzman 4, and it was forgotten. But, this is going to sound weird, I always used to have dreams that I had an unfinished game, and when I found this, it was like a connection was restored in my brain. I don’t intend to finish it, but it’s nice to know that I did indeed have an unfinished adventure game I’d totally forgotten about!

The game is playable, and has some lengthy cutscenes. There are about 6 rooms. I’m not sure if it’s not completable, or if it’s just buggy, but I can’t beat it. Whilst clearly unfinished, the graphics were better than its predecessors, particularly in the cutscenes (although, some scenes in Pazzman 2 still look just as good to my eyes). The first Pazzman game has the weakest animation but is still the most coherent experience; Pazzman 2 was a bit “make it up as you go along” and Pazzman 4 was never finished…

What of Pazzman 3? Well, believe it or not, Pazz3D was a Wolfenstein 3d mod!

Pazzman 4 is definitely the best implementation of my QBasic adventure game engine, with a list of numbers to use items, but you still have to press “enter” after every command. A big part of me wants to remaster all of these games and do them “properly”! The code is far better quality - I had discovered that GOTO didn’t require line numbers but labels were available, which actually meant the subroutines had semantic meaning. Small steps!

Screenshots

In the intro cutscene, Pazzman is arrested just because everyone is sick of his antics

Even being blasted into space, Pazzman continues to be disagreeable

The alien mothership doesn’t intimidate Pazzman

I’d “mastered” perspective. Or so I thought!

Pazzman wrecks an alien spaceship