After D&D spent years on Robotack (a game they themselves admit disappeared quietly into the ZX81 ether), they took on a more ambitious challenge: bringing Williams’ 1982 arcade masterpiece Joust to the humble ZX81. One of them said it was impossible. The other smiled and did it anyway. Months later, Zoust was born — and it’s a delightful little miracle.
The original arcade Joust is famous for its wonderful, stubborn physics. Your ostrich has real momentum: it builds speed, resists turning, and feels like you’re piloting an armoured, grumpy bird. Master the inertia and it’s pure joy. Zoust takes a different, very ZX81 approach: your bird turns instantly with almost zero horizontal inertia. No more pinballing off walls — just direct, responsive control. It feels almost modern compared to the original’s weighty flight.
The trade-off? You’re noticeably slower horizontally than the enemies and you fall faster. So while they glide around gracefully, you’re flapping like mad on what feels like the heaviest ostrich in the kingdom. Because you can’t escape quickly horizontally or stop flapping without falling fast, you have to think more carefully about positioning and using the platforms to manoeuvre. This turns every fight into a frantic vertical scramble for height.
There’s only one enemy type, up to four on screen at once, eggs that hatch if you ignore them, and the Pterodactyl still shows up to ruin your day (the author proudly claims to have defeated it exactly once). The dreaded lava troll hand is absent, simply because the authors ran out of space.
Zoust doesn’t try to copy the arcade’s majestic physics. Instead, it gives you a lighter, more direct version perfectly suited to the machine. It’s less about taming momentum and more about constant flapping, quick height battles, and learning to live with the slowest bird in the sky. And you know what? It’s genuinely fun.
Both games are hard in their own way. Both feel fantastic when you nail that perfect lance strike from above. The arcade gives you a noble, physics-driven ostrich. Zoust gives you the underdog bird… and still lets you win.
So if you fancy some medieval aerial combat on 16K of pure British silicon, give Zoust a go. You might just fall in love with this plucky, slightly overweight ostrich.
Download, here
Source: https://csscgc2026.itch.io/zoust
