There is a game I remember playing quite a while ago.
I have only the vaguest recollections of the gameplay. It was a 2D, maybe faux-3D game, I played it with a mouse. There were sounds, lots of them, I think there might have been background music. It may have been some kind of a board game, or a puzzle game with multiple timed rounds. There were probably points. I remember matching up colourful 3D shapes (as in, some platonic solids, pyramid, cube, sphere) against each other. Or maybe the shapes represented pieces on the board. I am not sure. It may have been an educational game, and may have been included on a CD-ROM attached to a textbook for the computing class. It was rather cheesy, though I know it doesn’t really narrow it down.
There is, however, one distinct mechanic that I remember pretty clearly. At random times, in a random corner of the window, a button would appear for a short time (up to a second or so), depicting some kind of a human figure, and the “Toasty!” sound effect from Mortal Kombat would be heard (at a rather low sampling rate, 11 kHz or even 8 kHz; I remember pretty clearly how muffled it sounded); this mechanic was probably a direct reference to that game. I remember the figure as a kind of a sorcerer zapping a lightning from his wand, or maybe from his hands, but in retrospect it might have even been Dan Forden himself with a fancy background. If I managed to click this button before it disappeared, I heard a clapping sound clip and I entered a bonus challenge.
The name may have either started with a Z, or contained repeated occurrences of the Z letter. Based on how I remember it looking, it probably targetted Windows 3.x, and I think I might have actually played it a couple of times under that OS; I have definitely not played it under anything later than Windows 98 SE. It was already rather old by then.
Ring a bell?
