Resource centre for ZX Spectrum games
using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
Authors about their games
Andrew Broad about his MM games
Manic Miner 4 - Room descriptions
About Manic Miner: The Buddha of Suburbia
Manic Miner: The Buddha of Suburbia - Room descriptions
Manic Miner: The Hobbit - Room descriptions
About Manic Miner: Neighbours - Allana Truman
Manic Miner: Neighbours - Allana Truman - Room descriptions
About Manic Miner: Matthew Smith 2008 Remix
Manic Miner: Matthew Smith 2008 Remix - Room descriptions
About Manic Miner 4
[from the Readme included with the Special Edition of the game]
I developed the game on a Spectrum +2, using my own Manic Miner Screen Editor (also released on the Internet).
Manic Miner 4 is written for advanced Manic Miner players, and the screens are intended to be outstandingly difficult, as a challenge to the experts. It presupposes that you can play Manic Miner - the controls are exactly the same, but the gameplay is much tougher, featuring some horrendous combinations of nasties which it takes good timing and pixel-perfect jumping to get past!
Manic Miner 4 is also intended as an example of how far Manic Miner should be redefined for a sequel. Manic Miner 2 and Manic Miner 3 were a bit of a let-down in that the screens just looked like the original caverns gone wrong, with some of the platforms hacked up a bit but the graphics, positions of the nasties etc. unmodified. Manic Miner 4, on the other hand, has some genuinely new screens that are as novel as the Jet Set Willy rewrites currently doing the rounds on the Internet.
I have thoroughly play-tested the final version, and I certify that it /is/ possible to complete.
You can consider yourself to have passed Manic Miner 4 if you finish the game using infinite lives (POKE 35136,0) on a real Spectrum, or saving and loading snapshots on an emulator. If you cheat by using any other POKEs, or by using 6031769, you should consider yourself disqualified. ;-)
Manic Miner 4 - Room descriptions
[from the Readme included with the Special Edition of the game]
Manic Miner 4 has some interesting caverns, based on various strange ideas and inspiration from eclectic sources. Here's a room-by-room commentary:
ROOM 0: "The Divas Internet Shrine"
A tribute to the tennis-player Iva Majoli, of whom I am a big fan. That's Iva on the conveyor, hitting forehands and backhands - jump up and collect her tennis-balls! A nice, gentle opening screen.
ROOM 1: "Inside"
Named for David Bowie's Outside album. When I wrote this in 1996, I thought there was going to be a sequel called Inside, but that will be called Contamination (see Room 7). This screen is actually a tribute to Bob's house from Ian Pratt's Artificial Intelligence book - you have to go from room to room collecting the atlases and then, in true Miner Willy style, jump in the toilet!
ROOM 2: "The Challenge-Response System"
I'm not altogether sure what a challenge-response system is, it's something that was mentioned in "Segue - Nathan Adler" on David Bowie's Outside album! This screen was inspired by the film Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me, the scene where David Bowie is seen on video walking down a corridor! The growing and shrinking circles are my own way of adding to the surreal atmosphere. Take the ring and exit through the lift doors (you must enter this portal from the side, not from above).
ROOM 3: "Starting Fires"
Another Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me tribute, set in a log cabin where mysterious forces hang out. Collect the rings to open the door in the wall. Watch out for the fires that appear out of nowhere and walk across the screen with you! The title "Starting Fires" comes from the chorus of David Bowie's "Telling Lies" (but not the version on Earthling).
ROOM 4: "The Flapping Toilets"
A tribute to the loos in "Eugene's Lair" from Manic Miner 1. My little sister always used to refer to this cavern as "the flapping toilets", so here's a special screen devoted to them. Climb up among the lavatory pipes, avoid the flapping toilets, pull the chain to make the cistern come down, walk past the hanging turds and into the bowl. This is the first screen in Manic Miner 4 that I regard as a masterpiece, if you like that sort of thing! ;-)
ROOM 5: "Processing Plant (Version 2)"
This is one of three rooms from the original Manic Miner 1 that were changed when the second edition was issued by Software Projects. The idea of having it in Manic Miner 4 is that completists only need to get Manic Miner 4 and the first (Bug-Byte) edition of Manic Miner 1. This cavern demonstrates that much of Matthew Smith's inspiration for Manic Miner screens came from early 1980s arcade games, in this case Pacman. The difference from the first edition is that the graphics for the first static nasty and for the item have changed.
ROOM 6: "The Brothers Grimm"
One of my favourite rooms, a tribute to the unfriendly staff at a certain railway station ("Your switch card's over the limit! We can't be bothered ringing the bank for verification at 8am in the morning, we're trying to run a railway station! You've done this to me before, you had 'em queuing out the door!"). Collect the guard's batons from up on the platform, avoid the camouflaged manholes at the bottom of the screen, and dodge the ticket-sellers to catch the train! This requires smart timing and good jumping.
ROOM 7: "Contamination"
Named for David Bowie's forthcoming (I hope!) album, which still hasn't been released yet, this screen was written about someone I hate so much that he ought to be hanged (hence the gallows), but renamed because I didn't want to risk the possibility of getting sued for defamation of character! An adaptation of "Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast", flick the left switch to open a way through the curtain, and then, if you want a lot of bonus points, flick the right switch to hang the bastard! To get to the items, you'll have to jump off the left of the screen (from the second step down), razz it across the conveyor with precision jumping, and take care not to touch the rope!
If you get white blobs appearing on this screen, it is because of a bug in Manic Miner that 'contaminates' this section of memory when you jump off the top of a screen (as you have to do in Room 9) or fall off the bottom.
ROOM 8: "Students Union"
A simple but tricky screen, you have to keep jumping up and off the right of the screen until you get to the top. This requires precision jumping, often from right on the edge of the conveyors, and timing to avoid the papers (remember that when you jump /down/ onto a conveyor, you can hold yourself until it is the right time to go). The items in front of the doors of the union building are a red herring, as the portal is already flashing!
ROOM 9: "At the Sound of Sawing Wood"
Inspired by a quote from Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me, you have to collect the flashing apples around a cabin inhabited by monks from Jet Set Willy, much as Atlas had to do while Hercules held up the world, if I remember the Greek myth correctly. To get the apples buried in the earth, you'll have to jump off the top of the screen, avoiding the sun-god, before the wood drops away.
ROOM 10: "Let's Rock"
An obvious tennis tribute, in which you have to collect the balls that have been hit into the net. A peculiar exercise in spatial reasoning, to get across the net you have to straddle the top and bottom of the screen, blinded by chalk-dust. I had considerable difficulty naming this room, as I didn't want to go for an obvious title. "Let's Rock" is a rather saucy attempt at a pun - I don't know who Let is, but that's his rock in the bottom-left corner! ;-)
ROOM 11: "Purgundation"
Another room about the downfall of one of my enemies, again diplomatically renamed for the Internet release of Manic Miner 4. The battle-axes (no, they're not elephants' heads or whatever else you may have imagined!) are symbolic of her downfall, which you can bring about by flicking the switch on the right. An adaptation of "Return of the Alien Kong Beast" (cf. Room 7), and a very difficult one at that - it takes some very clever jumping indeed to flick that left switch!
"Purgundation" is a word I made up myself, to describe a certain way that food or drink goes bad if you start to eat it and then leave it, or if someone else has had their mouth on it! I thought it went well with "Contamination" as a title! ;-)
ROOM 12: "WARNING: Horrible"
The hardest screen in this, or perhaps any, Manic Miner game, featuring a wicked combination of the ugly amoebatrons from Jet Set Willy and nasty, headachey ice-lollies. Requires pixel-perfect jumping and frame-perfect timing. You don't have a lot of air, but that actually helps you to get the timing right! The jump over the yellow lolly is so hairy that it usually takes me at least three attempts at clearing it, hanging on the pause button!
ROOM 13: "A Hole in the Ocean"
Willy's poseidon adventure: collect the flashing items underwater, don't be mislead by the false portal, watch out for the seaweed (it crumbles faster than normal falling-away floor), and don't get stuck in the hole! If you manage all this, you then have a nerve-wracking trip across the sea ahead of you, avoiding the stabbing swords of Excalibur!
ROOM 14: "Dotty"
A bizarre screen in which you have to get to the portal at the left edge before the star crashes into the right end, which kills you! A surreal exploitation of the peculiarities of Manic Miner's collision-detection algorithm, it requires pixel-perfect jumping across near-invisible blocks (depending on your monitor), and there's not a second to lose!
ROOM 15: "Tales From A Parallel Universe"
A gem for aficionados of the ongoing Manic Miner series, it is partly a tribute to Manic Miner 3 and partly a tribute to "Central Cavern" in Manic Miner 1 (observant viewers will notice that this screen is "Central Cavern" laterally inverted). "Central Cavern" appeared in an unplayable form at the end of Jet Set Willy II where, just before you think you're going to hit the toilet in "The Bathroom", you suddenly wind up in "Central Cavern" and start jumping forever. The graphics and colours for this room were pinched from there, and sure enough, this room starts with a jump!
ROOM 16: "The Warehouse (Version 2)"
The second of three screens from Manic Miner 1 that differed when Software Projects issued the second edition (the difference is that the graphics for the vertical nasty have been changed to Software Projects' logo, an impossible triangle), and, appropriately for Manic Miner 4, one of the toughest Manic Miner screens to crack until you've got the timing right.
ROOM 17: "Amoebatrons' Revenge (Version 3)"
The third of three screens from Manic Miner 1 that differed when Software Projects issued the second edition (the difference, again, is that the graphics for the vertical nasty have been changed). I further modified it myself (hence Version 3) by adding an escalator, as I could see that Matthew Smith had intended to have one - look ever so closely at the corresponding floor in Manic Miner 1 and you'll see the third row down of pixels moving!
ROOM 18: "The Heimlich Manoeuvre"
A tribute to the phenomenon in tennis known as 'choking', where a player has a huge lead and looks like they're about to close out a match, but gets so nervous that they can't finish it off and end up losing (this screen was renamed to avoid reference to anyone in particular). It's all very well to be able to dodge the dreaded gremlins of doubt, collect the tears and get to the top, but can you make that last awful jump to the trophy or will you choke and fall right back down to the bottom? Chokers who play this on an emulator will probably cheat by making a snapshot when they get to the top ledge! ;-)
ROOM 19: "Red Room"
The grand finale, and a tribute to the red room in Twin Peaks. Although there are no moving nasties, it's full of invisible floors, walls and static nasties, so it's quite a challenge if you're going to finish Manic Miner 4! Collect the items and find a way to the golden chair - if you do, your reward will be an angel, unless you cheated by using level-skipping! Note that the air does not run out in this screen, even at the end (so the Spectrum locks up). This is intentional, as are the red blobs at the top that show through from Manic Miner's picture for "The Final Barrier", which is also the picture for the title-screen.
About Manic Miner: The Buddha of Suburbia
[from the Readme included with the Special Edition of the game]
As the title suggests, the concept for the game is based on David Bowie's soundtrack-album for the BBC2 adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's novel. However, only the back ten rooms are based on The Buddha Of Suburbia (a room for each track on the album), the first ten being a motley crew of early Manic Miner experiments, which turned out to be good enough to keep. This game was originally written in 1994, with no plans to release it on the Internet (which I had not heard of at the time), but in 1998 I hacked it slightly to bring it up to my current standards, and here it is! :-)
The Buddha Of Suburbia is a pretty impressive Manic Miner game, because it was written (on a real Spectrum +2) using my own Manic Miner Screen Editor, which is now released on the Internet. While MMSE did not quite have all the functionality then as it does now (notably the capability to edit vertical guardians), I was still able to create rooms which are radically different from the original caverns, unlike some MM rewrites I could mention! ;-) While most of the rooms are not as difficult as those in Manic Miner 4, they still provide the experienced Manic Miner player with an adequate challenge, especially due to the severe time-limits in the second half! :->
I have thoroughly play-tested the final version, and I certify that it /is/ possible to complete.
You can consider yourself to have passed Manic Miner: The Buddha Of Suburbia if you finish the game using infinite lives (POKE 35136,0) on a real Spectrum, or saving and loading snapshots on an emulator. If you cheat by using any other POKEs, or by using 6031769, you should consider yourself disqualified. ;-)
The Buddha of Suburbia - Room descriptions
[from the Readme included with the Special Edition of the game]
ROOM 0: "The Terminator"
Based on this awesome movie I once saw in which a robot which looked just like a man on the outside was sent back in time from 2029 to 1984 to destroy the leader of the resistance by killing his mother before he was born, this was (as far as I can remember) the first Manic Miner room I ever wrote, which was back in 1992 using an early prototype of my Manic Miner Screen Editor. In it, you have to get past the terminator (which has been stripped down to its metal endoskeleton after being blown up in a truck) to collect the dynamite stick from the high ledge. Watch out for the rapid falling-away floor! (This effect was unintentional, due to a bug in the graphic, but I liked it so I left it in :-) ).
ROOM 1: "Terminator 2 : Judgement Day"
A follow-up to the previous cavern, based on the film's sequel, which I renamed slightly to get rid of that awful Americanised spelling of 'judgement'! ;-) You have to dodge the morphing T1000 terminators (notice the clever way that the one on the left walks through a solid wall when it comes on - this was achieved by defining the wall graphic to be blank) and collect the two chips so that they can be destroyed. The cyan static nasties are arms ripped off from T800s like on the previous screen.
ROOM 2: "Andrew's Hall"
A grand chamber in honour of myself ( ;-) ), in which you have to avoid the giant spirit-level effort and collect the hanging droplets. I've given you a couple of tricky jumps over static nasties at the top, combined with a conveyor. No doubt this room would have been a compression of "Terminator 3 : Rise of the Machines" into 32 characters, had this game been written in 2003 rather than 1994! ;-)
ROOM 3: "The Off Licence"
A room in Jet Set Willy II, converted to the Manic Miner room-format! Unfortunately, I could only have five flashing cola-bottles, due to Manic Miner's limit on the number of items per room, and vertical guardians are not possible in Room 3.
ROOM 4: "Zane Zane Zane - Ouvre le Chien!"
A surreal, narrow cavern, named for the refrain that features on two David Bowie songs: "All The Madmen" and "Buddha Of Suburbia", featuring the robots from "Central Cavern" and a badly-drawn pterodactyl that behaves like Eugene Jarvis in the original Manic Miner. Don't be fooled by the floor that is animated and the conveyors that aren't!
ROOM 5: "Screen for Monica Seles"
A tribute to the greatest tennis-player of all time. I figured that if David Bowie could write a song called "Song for Bob Dylan", then I could do likewise for my heroine! This room was written in 1994, after the Stabbing (30th April 1993) and before the Comeback (29th July 1995). The screen, with its knives, rackets, nets and balls, symbolises my obsessive hope that she would return, at a time when it seemed increasingly likely that she would not. The portal represents the ladies's Wimbledon trophy - it has always been my biggest dream for Monica to one day hold it aloft!
ROOM 6: "Dalek Invasion"
A tribute to the wonderful creatures from Dr Who, encapsulated in giant pepperpots - I used to be one when I was a little boy! ;-) I saw the graphics on Teletext in low resolution, liked them, and decided to use them in a Manic Miner room. Cleverly designed so that you have to go along that tricky conveyor twice (or three times, depending on the route you take through the screen) to collect all the items and exit via the Tardis (my spellchecker didn't know the word "Tardis" - it suggested "turds" as a replacement! ;-) ).
ROOM 7: "["
A tribute to Room 47 in Jet Set Willy, using the ill-defined block-graphics from there to make a real room. The graphics for the saw and the bog are also ripped from Jet Set Willy. Also based on "Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast" - this time, flicking the left switch will /block/ your way!
ROOM 8: "The Girl From Tomorrow"
A tribute to a TV series that was shown in the late spring of 1993, about a girl called Alana from the year 3000 who gets hauled back to the 1990s. The items are transducers - amazing devices from the future, controlled by psychokinetic energy that allow she who wears it on the head to move objects around, heal wounds, zap people, etc. I've also added Maria's feet from Jet Set Willy to increase the sex-appeal. ;-> The portal-graphic is my logo from my Dalek days: the death-star from Star Wars!
ROOM 9: "Tomorrow's End"
A tribute to the follow-up series, in which Alana and her friends from 1990, Jenny and Petey, spent most of their time traipsing around in the year 2500 (a time when the world is devastated by greed, lack of natural resources, war and fear) in a failed attempt to prevent the northern hemisphere being wiped out :-( (although they /did/ save the southern hemisphere - it's an Australian series). Featuring Jet Set Willies, fast-crumbling floors and more transducers.
ROOM 10: "The BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA : suburbs"
This room marks the start of ten rooms corresponding to the ten tracks on David Bowie's album, The Buddha Of Suburbia. The first track is called "Buddha Of Suburbia", hence the capitalised part of the title. The subtitle "suburbs" is due to the fact that Hanif Kureishi's novel The Buddha Of Suburbia is in two parts, the first of which is called "In the Suburbs"
You have to collect the strange symbols from around Eva Kay's house, while avoiding the barrels (blagged from Jet Set Willy) and the kneeling Buddhists (I know they're crap graphics, but they were difficult to draw, and if you think those are bad, you should have seen them in the original 1994 version! ;-) ).
ROOM 11: "Sex And The Church"
The song, and hence this room, symbolises the union of the flesh and the spirit. Collect the flashing (in more ways than one ;-> ) statuettes, flick the left switch to unblock your way, and the right switch to down Maria (from Jet Set Willy). The horizontal guardian is a harmless shadow. There's an awkward jump at the top which requires you to walk the wrong way along the conveyor, and then suddenly stop dead and jump straight up!
ROOM 12: "South Horizon"
A fairly indescribable room which requires good timing and to see which blocks are which (e.g. there are floor blocks hidden in the wall). The weird bone efforts are again pinched from Jet Set Willy.
ROOM 13: "The Mysteries"
An easy room based on "Skylab Landing Bay", because I couldn't figure out how to make a difficult room out of it (but check out Room 13 of The Hobbit! :-> ). The only thing that makes it difficult at all is the tiny air-supply. The guardians are the boot graphic from Manic Miner, which explode into that weird platform at the end of that game (in The Buddha Of Suburbia, the Game Over sequence features the player being decapitated by a guillotine). The items are supposed to be palm-trees, inspired by a David Bowie quote between songs on the Santa Monica '72 live album that sounds like: "Plainty on the courtesy of a piece of palm-tree that I asked a lobster tail, and they sent me a palm-tree, piece of palm-tree..."
ROOM 14: "Bleed Like A Craze, Dad"
A pretty tough room, requiring good timing and accurate jumping under pressure, with the vertical guardians being solid 16x16-pixel blocks. It's almost as tough as trying to work out the lyrics to this bizarre rap song: "Easy come, come, coming back on the barley where the dead man walks on his right from the jice"?
ROOM 15: "Strangers When We Meet"
A surreal interpretation of the song which went on to be a hit single in 1995 (but in my opinion, the version on The Buddha Of Suburbia is far superior to the one on Outside, even though Outside is my favourite Bowie album). Featuring the flying pigs from Jet Set Willy, one of them swimming through a vat of blank floor. Can you spot the item?
ROOM 16: "Dead Against It"
Looking for all the world like a hunting-gallery with its moose-heads and the general atmosphere, this is the hardest room in the game, requiring pixel-perfect jumping, frame-perfect timing and nerves of steel (or judicious use of the pause-button) to collect the two items at the top-left of the screen, guarded by a fearsome horizontal guardian!
ROOM 17: "Untitled No. 1"
Ladders, levels and lollipops - yes, David really did write an untitled song (and peculiar, impressive-sounding lyrics it has too!). The items are placed over crumbling floor, to stop you from jumping up for them from the platform below, a failing of the original 1994 version!
ROOM 18: "Ian Fish, U.K. Heir"
Time is of the essence here, as I've combined a low air-supply with an air-sapping beam of light. At least I've had the decency to keep it still, by not having any horizontal guardians walking through it, but it'll still take most players several lives to clear this room! ;-)
ROOM 19: "The BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA : city"
On the album, this was simply a repeat of the title-track, featuring Lenny Kravitz on guitar but sounding almost identical nevertheless. This room is very different from Room 10 though, apart from reusing the Buddhist graphics; it features skyscrapers and another strange symbol (I can't remember what it's supposed to be! ;-) ). It's a really easy room, with the only real danger of death coming when you have to jump the red Buddhist at the bottom of the screen. Like the final room of Manic Miner 4, I've given you an infinite air-supply, causing the Spectrum to lock up when you complete the game. The subtitle "city" is due to the fact that Hanif Kureishi's novel The Buddha Of Suburbia is in two parts, the second of which is called "In the City"
The top half of the screen, which also appears on the title-screen, is supposed to vaguely resemble the background on the album-cover.
About Manic Miner: The Hobbit
[from the Readme included with the game, edited]
To celebrate the first year of the third millennium (or the last year of the second millennium, for those who prefer to count from one rather than zero), I release my long-awaited games Manic Miner: The Hobbit and Jet Set Willy: Lord of the Rings!
Manic Miner: The Hobbit is a redefinition of the rooms in Matthew Smith's classic Manic Miner, which I acknowledge as being the copyright of Bug-Byte (1983) - owned by Jester Interactive since 2001.
It is based on J.R.R. Tolkien's equally classic novel The Hobbit; I acknowledge the plot as being the copyright of George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd, 1951, 1975, 1979 and 1981.
My idea was that The Hobbit would map quite nicely to Manic Miner as the former has 19 chapters and the latter has 20 rooms, so there is a room for each chapter in the book (in the same order), plus a bonus room to bring it up to 20.
In MM:Hobbit, Miner Willy plays Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit who is persuaded by Gandalf the wizard to go on an adventure with a group of dwarves to win back the treasure stolen from them by Smaug the dragon.
MM:Hobbit is intended to appeal both to Spectrum fans and Tolkien fans. I therefore set out to make it only moderately difficult, but once again my notorious talent for writing difficult Manic Miner rooms has surfaced, and this game contains some of the best I have ever written! :-> So I decided to release an easy version of the game (HOB-LITE.TAP) alongside the definitive 'hard' version (HOBBIT.TAP). Good MM players should play the hard version first, and Hobbit-fans should play the easy version first! ;-)
I developed MM:Hobbit on a Spectrum +2, using my own Manic Miner Screen Editor (which is available for downloading from my website). I wrote MM:Hobbit between January and May 1998, reading a chapter a week and writing the corresponding room. I finished the rooms in May 1998. I returned to MM:Hobbit in October/November 1999 to edit the title screen, plug in the in-game music and make a few minor changes to the rooms. It was always my goal to release MM:Hobbit and JSW:LOTR together in January 2000.
Many thanks to Richard Hallas for rescuing this game from tape and converting it to emulator format for me!
I would also like to thank Richard Hallas for his music document, A Miner Triad (hosted on my website), which was a useful aid to redefining the in-game music of Manic Miner.
The in-game tune is different, depending whether it is the hard version (HOBBIT.TAP) or the easy version (HOB-LITE.TAP). Both tunes come from a triptych of Norwegian folk songs which I played in an orchestra when I was a teenager, but unfortunately I can't for the life of me remember what it was or who composed it, despite a sincere search for it on the Internet. All I remember is that the piece I /didn't/ use was called "Seterjentens Sřndag" (the dairy-maid's Sunday), and the piece I use for the hard version is called "Den Bakvendte Visa" (the wrong-way-round tune). I had to adapt "Den Bakvendte Visa" from 3:4 to 4:4 time (the in-game tune has to be exactly 64 notes of equal duration) by converting the two quavers at the end of each bar to crotchets.
Thanks to Morten Kielland for correcting the Norwegian spelling, and for telling me that "Den Bakvendte Visa" is a traditional Norwegian folk-song (the popular Norwegian artist Lillebjřrn Nilsen has included his version of the tune in several of his records).
To complete the game, you have to collect the colour-cycling items in each room, which makes the portal start flashing so that you can go through it to the next room. If you complete the final room, you've won (and thus earned the moral right to play JSW:LOTR), but it takes you back to the start room in case you want to continue and increase your score.
I have thoroughly play-tested both the hard version and the easy version, and I declare that it is possible to complete every room.
You can consider yourself to have passed Manic Miner: The Hobbit if you finish the game using infinite lives (POKE 35136,0) on a real Spectrum, or saving and loading snapshots on an emulator. If you cheat by using any other POKEs, or by using 6031769, you should consider yourself disqualified. ;-)
Manic Miner: The Hobbit - Room descriptions
[from the Readme included with the game]
Each Manic Miner room corresponds to a chapter in The Hobbit, plus there is a bonus room at the end. This section contains a detailed description of each room in MM:Hobbit. The description is based on the /hard/ version (HOBBIT.TAP), not the easy version (HOB-LITE.TAP, which has been made considerably easier and has had the quirky features taken out).
CHAPTER 1: "An Unexpected Party"
You begin in Bilbo Baggins's hobbit hole, on the night when the dwarves descend on him (thirteen of them in the book, but Manic Miner only allows four). You have to jump over the dwarves, collect their hoods and then go through the round green door to proceed on the adventure.
CHAPTER 2: "Roast Mutton"
Bilbo and the dwarves are waylaid by three trolls; this room is set in their clearing, with their fire burning and smoke wafting upwards. You need to get the key to open the trolls' cave. First jump up the fire on the left side, onto a platform in the trees. This is quite tricky as the fire is actually implemented as right-to-left conveyor-blocks. Then jump over the red troll and off the left of the screen. You can then jump up and get the key, but don't jump too high or you won't be able to get back down! Getting down is best accomplished by walking off the right edge of the screen, dropping down onto the platform where the red troll is, and jumping so that you land on the fire but miss the killer star. But, as they say in the Perl community, There's More Than One Way To Do It! :-)
CHAPTER 3: "A Short Rest"
Visit the Last Homely House in the valley of Rivendell and collect the runes. Not a difficult screen, but emphasis on "Short" as I've only given you a small air supply! You may be surprised at how rapidly the crumbling floor vanishes! (technically, it's because I left the graphic blank, and a blank row of pixels at the bottom of the graphic is Manic Miner's criterion for judging whether such floor has crumbled completely).
I added Elrond to this room (hard version only) in October 1999.
CHAPTER 4: "Over Hill and Under Hill"
You have now arrived at the Misty Mountains. You shelter from a thunderstorm in a small cave, but are waylaid by goblins. You must jump over them and try to escape through a lower passage, which is quite tough because ordinary floor, crumbling floor, wall and conveyors all look the same, and there are several wrong turns you could take! Again, the air supply is short and the crumbling floor crumbles rapidly, forcing you to rush!
Tip: If you keep moving to the right when the floor falls away, you'll find ridges to wait in before you drop down onto the goblins' swords!
CHAPTER 5: "Riddles in the Dark"
The lower passage leads to a lake where a creature called Gollum lives - that's him sailing up and down the middle of the screen in his boat. In the book, Bilbo had to answer Gollum's riddles to avoid being eaten before he could get out. Here, the riddle is how you solve this very puzzling screen. Basically, you must grab the ring, whereupon Gollum will start flashing and come down to block your path if you don't get out of the way in time, so you'd better time it so that you take the ring just as Gollum is at the top of the screen (note that this screen lives up to its name by being very dark, so you can't see what you're doing properly!). Then you have to jump over Gollum left-to-right from far enough back to avoid cracking your head on a snag in the ceiling, and escape through the lower gate, which is guarded by goblins.
Of all the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy screens I have ever played (prior to my next MM game, Ma jolie), this is the one that requires the most intelligence to solve, in addition to great manual dexterity. You will need to put your thinking-cap on and approach this one with a cool, calculating mind if you're ever going to get past it! You will need to think laterally, as the solution requires a non-obvious early step to remove a problem you will encounter later on. You will probably have to experiment several times before you hit on the idea for the solution - I certainly had to, and I wrote the damn thing! ;-)
CHAPTER 6: "Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire"
You have escaped through the lower gate to the other side of the Misty Mountains, but only to be attacked by a pack of wargs! You must collect the cones from the firtrees, avoiding the wargs and the fire on the ground (this requires some intelligent jumping) and then jump on the eagle to the right, which will carry you (literally, because it's implemented as left-to-right conveyor-blocks - take care not to fall off!) to the safety of its eyrie. The jump onto the eagle is tricky because it has to be right off the edge of the middle firtree, under the pressure of crumbling floor. Quite a difficult screen, but it's beyond none of you really, especially if you have had the perseverance to crack "Riddles in the Dark"! ;-)
CHAPTER 7: "Queer Lodgings"
An easier screen after the trials and tribulations of the two before, you now find yourself in Beorn's house. Collect the food from the table and jump up the ledges, avoiding the bears (excuse the terrible graphics with their wiggling bottoms). You can get out through the hole in the roof.
CHAPTER 8: "Flies and Spiders"
You have entered the forest of Mirkwood, which is infested by giant spiders. The dwarves have been captured, tied in knots and left hanging in bundles (the tiny shining objects at the top of the screen). Rescue them, and then leave Mirkwood through the Elvenking's gate. To complete this room also requires flicking the white switches at the top of the screen - I won't tell you which one does which or in what order you have to flick them, but if you've played "Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast" in Manic Miner, you should be able to work it out by case-based reasoning! :-)
CHAPTER 9: "Barrels Out of Bond"
In the book, Bilbo has to rescue the dwarves from the Elvenking's dungeons, which he does by sending them down a stream packed in barrels. This is a difficult concept to interpret for a Manic Miner screen, so the plot in this one is just to steal the chief guard's keys, avoiding the merrymaking elves, then go through the trapdoor and escape down the stream on foot, avoiding the barrel and exiting via the water-gate.
CHAPTER 10: "A Warm Welcome"
A really rather pointless chapter in which the dwarves and Bilbo arrive in Lake Town. So I've used my imagination to create a room in which you have to emerge from a lake and then leave for the Mountain through the clouds, avoiding lots of static obstacles along the way.
CHAPTER 11: "On the Doorstep"
In which Bilbo and the dwarves arrive at the Mountain where Smaug resides, and have to solve a puzzle to get in (finding the door). In this room, you have to solve a puzzle of a Manic Miner kind, which involves jumping through innocent-looking wall-blocks. The vertical guardians are supposed to be smoke-rings.
CHAPTER 12: "Inside Information"
In the book, Bilbo enters the dragon's lair (lit red with the glow of Smaug), where all the treasure is piled up, and manages to pinch a two-handled cup. Watch out, I've implemented the treasure pile as sticky conveyor-blocks (I believe this was the first MM/JSW room ever written that incorporates sticky conveyors!), and you'll have to flick the left switch to open a crack in the middle and the right switch to send Smaug flying out in a rage so you can escape!
CHAPTER 13: "Not at Home"
Now that the dragon has flown, Bilbo and the dwarves are free to raid the dragon's treasure-hoard and take all they can carry! This time, the treasure-pile is made up of 'off' conveyor-blocks. Note that the dwarves can collect items as well as you, because they are implemented as white horizontal guardians! The 'A' on the items is for Arkenstone, a precious gem that Bilbo stole in this chapter. It's very dark in here without the dragon's glow, so I've made the platforms invisible (how extremely naughty of me! :-> ). The luminous eyes are my own idea. I'm particularly pleased with the red bat graphic - it was difficult to draw, but it turned out much better than I expected! :-)
CHAPTER 14: "Fire and Water"
This is the chapter where the dragon gets slain (rather prematurely in my opinion, coming as it does only three-quarters of the way through, but that's Tolkien for you! ;-) ). In this room, Smaug comes down on Lake Town like a ton of bricks - I used even more guardians than "Skylab Landing Bay" in the original Manic Miner, and have them moving faster than the vertical guardians in any Manic Miner room previously written! You have to collect all the arrows (I blagged the graphic from Jet Set Willy II), and then fly up through the clouds and into the sun to escape! A dramatic, fast and furious room, the way to play it is with heavy use of the pause-button, and you can plan your moves like a chess-player once you've figured out the pattern of movement. It is possible to complete this room, with only a little air left!
CHAPTER 15: "The Gathering of the Clouds"
A fairly anticlimactic chapter, and hence a rather uninspired screen, in which Bilbo and the dwarves learn of the death of Smaug from a bird, but find themselves besieged on the Mountain when Bard, who slew the dragon in the previous chapter, stakes a claim on the treasure! In this room, you just have to collect some of the gold around Ravenhill to progress to the next stage. Featuring ultra-fast vertical guardians!
CHAPTER 16: "A Thief in the Night"
A straightforward room in which you as Bilbo have to take the Arkenstone stealthily to Bard to betray Thorin. Fast-crumbling floors, sticky conveyors and Elvish arrows spice up the room, and you may think it's impossible to get down to the bottom level until you realise there's an 'innocent-looking block' which you can jump through! (a bug in the game-engine that I exploit in several rooms).
CHAPTER 17: "The Clouds Burst"
The Battle of Five Armies - goblins, wargs, elves, men and dwarves - who, having heard of Smaug's death, are fighting over the treasure. Since Manic Miner does not allow five different guardian graphics in the same room, I just have goblins as the horizontal guardians (who patrol the bottom platform like in Jet Set Willy's "The Forgotten Abbey", made even harder by static nasties embedded in the floor) and super-fast thunderclouds as the vertical guardians - watch out on entering the room! It's the most spectacular, stunningly difficult room in this - and arguably any - Manic Miner game; it's cunningly designed so that you have to go round twice, making sure you leave enough crumbling floor (of which the eagles are made) on the first pass to make your exit on the second.
Jumping onto the top-right eagle is probably the toughest manoeuvre you'll ever have to make: your movement must be pixel-perfect and your timing has to be spot on - you'll need to do many experiments using the pause-button to work out how to get it just right, and you'll need nerves of steel to be able to pull it off at the end of a long, difficult screen! :->
CHAPTER 18: "The Return Journey"
The book dismisses this as a quick, easy trip home for Bilbo after his heroic exploits (and yours too if you have managed to get this far! ;-) ) up to this point, but this room is anything but! Obviously the whole journey is too much to get across in a single screen, so I decided to concentrate on Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains to create a breathtaking Tolkienesque landscape, featuring a return of the giant spiders (which are tough to jump over on account of the low 'ceiling') and vertical goblins (unfortunately I couldn't have them as fast as I would have liked due to shortage of vertical space!). It's just possible to collect the gold coins and complete the screen with a tiny bit of air left!
CHAPTER 19: "The Last Stage"
This chapter documents Bilbo's return to Bag End following a little holiday at Rivendell, but since the bonus room features Bag End, I did my own unorthodox interpretation of the road back home: a surreal screen of weird monsters (which also appear in We Pretty but originated here) and strange images, in which you have to collect the treasure chests and then exit via the Hobbiton mill - don't loiter or you'll run out of air! As in "On the Doorstep" and "A Thief in the Night", there's an 'innocent-looking block'.
BONUS ROOM: "There and Back Again"
To bring the game up to 20 rooms, I've added this extra room which represents Gandalf visiting Bilbo at Bag End at the very start of the book - make sure to jump at the very start of the screen or you'll crash headlong into Gandalf! There and Back Again is the subtitle of The Hobbit, and also the title of Bilbo's memoirs (referred to in the final chapter). This room was originally called "The Hobbit" and was going to be the first room rather than the last, but the rooms with hard-wired special effects (such as the Eugene, the Kong Beasts, switches and Skylabs) map better onto chapters of The Hobbit the way I /have/ done it, and if you complete this room you'll go back to the beginning! :-)
I added the smoke-rings in November 1999 (which I could only do after editing the title-screen/Room 19 picture, otherwise these guardians crash into the pixels of the original picture). It goes against my anti-smoking principles, but it does enhance the Tolkienesque atmosphere! ;-)
About Ma jolie
[from the Readme included with the game, edited]
Ma jolie is a redefinition of the rooms in Matthew Smith's classic Manic Miner, which I acknowledge as being the copyright of Bug-Byte (1983).
I developed the original edition on a Spectrum +2, using my own Manic Miner Screen Editor (also released on the Internet).
On the morning of 17th February 1999, I had a vivid dream about a new Manic Miner game. I was in a dark cavern, standing on a laminated platform of Crumbly and Fire-cells in the right half and vertical centre of the screen. I was aware of the cyan presence of Kari Krišníková (she of We Pretty and Goodnite Luddite fame). The dream was so vivid that I was able to recreate the room I'd seen, and of course, I had to create a new Manic Miner game to put it in!
I 'selesened' the game Ma jolie. The lower-case 'j' is important, because "Ma jolie" is a play on Iva Majoli's surname. It is also French for "My pretty", and thus a titular nod to We Pretty.
The game is similar in spirit to the Miner Willy games, but I wanted to being a certain We Pretty atmosphere to it as well - a sort of 'Willy meets Kari' game in a sense. It is not, however, part of the Kari Krišníková series per se - all of those will be Jet Set Willy games.
So, I worked on Ma jolie on and off for four years, between working on my PhD and on Goodnite Luddite! I wrote Rooms 0-2 and 4-5 in 1999, Rooms 3, 6-7, 10, 15 and 17 in 2000, Room 8 in early 2001, and Rooms 9, 11-14, 16 and 18-19 in the summer and autumn of 2002.
When I'm working on original MM/JSW projects as opposed to book-adaptations, etc.., most of my room-ideas go into JSW games, leaving the ones that entail Crumbly cells etc.. to go in a MM game such as Ma jolie. However, I never lost my natural ability for writing extremely tough MM rooms, and this game contains the most fiendishly difficult ever! :->
Ma jolie is written for advanced MM players, and the rooms are intended to be outstandingly difficult, as a challenge to the experts. It presupposes that you can play Manic Miner - the controls are exactly the same, but the gameplay is much tougher, requiring both manual dexterity (a need for pixel-perfect and time-frame-perfect accuracy of movement) and lateral thinking. Ma jolie liberally exploits all the quirky features in the game-engine - you need to know all the tricks if you want to get at all far!
Ma jolie was, at the time of its release, the hardest MM/JSW game ever written (I must admit that it has since been surpassed by Darth Melkor's Manic Scribbler), and the hardest that I ever intend to write! ;-) I just wanted to show, once and for all, how hard Manic Miner can get! You should not attempt to complete the game in one sitting if you value your sanity, and children should not participate in the playing of this game with laces in their shoes. Just remember that Manic Miner is deterministic, and that the pause-key is as much a control of this game as left, right and jump! ;-)
But there's an easier version called Ma jolite, which is less mentally distressing to play, and has a different tune! ;-)
You can consider yourself to have passed Ma jolie if you finish the game using infinite lives (POKE 35136,0) on a real Spectrum, or saving and loading snapshots on an emulator. If you cheat by using any other POKEs, or by using 6031769, you should consider yourself disqualified. ;-)
"The Hive of No Desire" [4], "The Mad Ramblings of Longbeard" [5] and "Heathen (The Rays)" [19] each have two different solutions (as described in the room-documentation), so an extra challenge is to complete these rooms in both ways.
I have thoroughly play-tested the final version, and I certify that it /is/ theoretically possible to complete. Unfortunately, there is an insidious bug in the MM game-engine whereby erroneous blocks sometimes appear at (0,1), (0,5) and (3,24) for the rest of the game (they only go away if you restart the game). I don't know what causes the Three-Blocks Bug, but I never completed the game on my real Spectrum without falling foul of this bug, which makes Rooms 16 and 18 in particular impossible to complete. Therefore, as a special concession, players on a real Spectrum may claim "room-completion" if they restart the game and teleport to the room they're up to. But you won't see the proper ending upon completing Room 19 if you do it this way, and thus cannot claim "game-completion".
Ma jolie - Room descriptions
[from the Readme included with the game]
I decided to release Ma jolie in twenty weekly instalments, each containing one room more than the previous, eventually starting on 1st January 2003 and finishing on 14th May 2003 to celebrate Manic Miner's china anniversary! :-) (I don't know the exact release-date in 1983).
0: "Kari Weeds Off The Stragglers" (1st January 2003)
This is the room that I wrote on 17th February 1999, after the dream I told you about. I wish I could have made the room less vivid(!), but instead I tried to find the happy medium between capturing the dream faithfully and getting in a lot of quirky features: the way you have to step back at the start to jump over the poisonous pansies (the 8x8 graphics in this room come from the original Manic Miner), the way you can stand 'on' the blocks in Row 0, jumping over a Fire-cell and landing inside a platform, jumping from four horizontal pixels under a Fire-cell, the old invisible-platforms trick, embedding Fire-cells in a conveyor-animation, and all the things Kari deserves for being such a good girl, honey [Shakira, "Underneath Your Clothes"].
1: "The Hot Room" (8th January 2003 - David Bowie's 56th birthday) )
A lateral inversion of "The Cold Room" from the original Manic Miner, with appropriate recolouring, and the pretty penguins from Jet Set Willy instead of the miserable-looking penguins from "The Cold Room".
A sneaky trick awaits those who fall to the bottom of the chimney after collecting the leftmost item. Prior to the Special Edition 2009, you had to go round again after doing this, but in the Special Edition 2009, you can't even do that!
2: "Majolica" (15th January 2003)
Another tribute to Iva Majoli, this is a very tricky puzzle-room that will also require precise use of the pause-key. You have to get rid of the Crumbly blocks in order to collect the earthenware items without falling to your death. You can stand on each Crumbly cell seven times, or jump onto it eight times (when it's down to two pixel-rows, you can stand on it once but jump onto it twice). You need to make a plan, and keep a careful count for each Crumbly cell.
3: "One Day, in Teletubbyland, ..." (22nd January 2003)
Teletubbies is a nursery-school programme that has also attracted a cult-following among adults with its surreal world of bright colours, English country-gardens and strange devices. Seeing how the four main characters (from left to right: Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, La-La and Po) all look the same but have differently-coloured fur, I just had to write a MM room! ;-) I wrote this room on 1st January 2000.
Another puzzle-room, involving the character-row shift when you jump off the sides of the screen, and Crumbly cells that you can only touch once (because their bottom two pixel-rows are blank) and that leave a yellow 'ghost' (the Air colour-attribute), and a sticky conveyor. The challenge is to work out from which angle to approach each item, to order your moves so as not to get rid of any Crumbly blocks you'll need to land on later, and to time it so that the Teletubbies don't collide with you. Mind you don't get trapped in the portal before you've collected all five items - the trick is to collect both items above the portal in one jump.
4: "The Hive of No Desire" (29th January 2003)
The title comes from a fake track-listing for David Bowie's sadly abandoned album 2.CONTAMINATION (the planned sequel to his 1995 album 1.OUTSIDE), as did "EBOLA JAZZ" in Goodnite Luddite. See http://oocities.com/andrewbroad/music/bowie/contamination/ for more information. The portal-graphic is the hive in a microcosm. I wrote this room on 31st December 1999.
You won't believe the amount of nastiness that can be packed into such a small playing-area! :-> This calls for pixel-perfect movement, which is the only reason I didn't replace Willy with Kari for this game! ;-)
Tip: emerge from the leftmost 'wall' of the hive at the fourth opportunity. The bee behaves like Eugene in the original Manic Miner, so you'd better get the bottom honey-comb last!
There is an alternative solution that entails taking the bottom honey-comb first, going straight up to the top, and finishing with a high dive into the portal. Experts should not be satisfied until they have solved it both ways.
5: "The Mad Ramblings of Longbeard" (5th February 2003)
Another title from the fake Contamination track-listing inspired this atmospheric room. The pirate-sprite was actually my first attempt at drawing the head of Tom Bombadil for Jet Set Willy: The Lord of the Rings back in 1999. The head was too long for Tom's body, but it's a great sprite in its own right, so I transferred it to Ma jolie (this was actually the second room I wrote for Ma jolie IIRC).
It's up to you whether you want to 'walk the plank' before or after you jump across the crumbling clouds, but beware: you'll fall to your death if you stand still on the clouds for even one time-frame, and it's incredibly difficult to walk right and then jump straight up - even with the pause-key. Also, there are hidden Earth-cells in the portal, so if you don't get the jump exactly right, you'll be forced to commit suicide.
Daniel Gromann has discovered an alternative solution to this room that entails jumping up off the top of the screen and being able to collect the top-right item without a need to cross the clouds above the ship first, and thus being free later to drop down for the item on the right edge of the ship. The exact details of this solution are difficult to discover, and I leave it as an exercise for the expert player, who should not feel satisfied until (s)he has completed the room in both ways! I didn't feel inclined either to eliminate or enforce this method for the Special Edition 2009; I merely applied the patch to allow you to jump off the top of the screen without corrupting Room 7.
6: "The Vatican" (12th February 2003)
A play on words of "The Vat" from the original Manic Miner, this room is notable for its innovative use of horizontal guardians (HGs) to create forcefields that you have to walk through, as in other games such as Starquake. Unfortunately, Sendy's where's woody (which was released /after/ this room was written) robs it of MM/JSW novelty (we came up with the idea independently of each other), as does my own Goodnite Luddite! ;-) At least it's a first for MM.
Collecting the items is a puzzle, with some of them being located in Crumbly cells. I like the way you get to jump over a Fire-cell and through a platform, and superb manual dexterity is required to collect the top-right item! This is the most enjoyable room in the game for me to play, as it entails fluid jumping through a delightful array of quirky features.
The portal-graphic was inspired by the large doors in the film The Devils, and prior to the Special Edition 2009, the Fire-cells were cyan inverted crosses - but in 2009, they struck me as blasphemous, so I replaced them with white regular crosses. I also edited the Conveyor-graphic, as I felt that it looked unattractive.
7: "Ape-Men with Metal Parts" (19th February 2003)
A reference to the lyrics of David Bowie's "segue - Ramona A. Stone" from 1.OUTSIDE, this room is both fun and frustrating! Packed with quirky features and fast-crumbling Crumbly cells, it again makes innovative use of HGs to create a new type of puzzle. It's a confusing room, in particular that it's often difficult to tell whether a cell is Crumbly or Fire!
The left half of the screen is the more dangerous, as you have to jump through an Innocent-Looking Block (ILB) on the run. It also features the delightful move of stopping on a conveyor and jumping straight up to flick the switch that opens the way to the right half.
The right half of the screen features an optional quest to flick the right switch and see a graphic depiction of the marital act! ;-> A clever jump from the conveyor is needed to access the bottom-right, and the items aren't as straightforward to collect as they look! ;-)
8: "The Dawn of Bacon-Sharing" (26th February 2003)
The title is a mondegreen of the line "That only they can share in" from David Bowie's "Soul Love" (from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars). The mondegreen comes from p.11 of the July 2000 issue of Q magazine. The guardians are Kari Krišníková from We Pretty.
The items are rashers of bacon. Of course, by the time I did the Special Edition 2009, I had eliminated bacon from my diet after it was shown to cause cancer, though I did not feel inclined to eliminate bacon from this game!
This is the toughest room of the game so far, requiring absolutely frame-perfect timing and pixel-perfect moving from the very start. Unlike in Jet Set Willy, the vertical guardians (VGs) kill you if they collide with an item (in demo-mode, this throws the music out of phase!).
First you must get under the upper white VG without losing a time-frame, and stand still on the conveyor until she is three pixels above you with her legs apart. Jump just before you reach the ladder to avoid the invisible Fire-cells on the other side of the screen.
Then you must go and stand on the embedded item to get rid of the Crumbly block so that you can go back round (jump through the ILB), jump up and collect it.
Finally, to get to the portal entails a quirky jump to land in the middle of the bottom-right ladder, followed by a precise jump under the lower white VG - you need to jump from the edge of the ladder when she is at the bottom of her path with one leg showing.
9: "GimmeGimmeGimmeAManAfterMidnight" (5th March 2003)
This is a tribute to the Abba song "Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)"
When I heard that song, it immediately reminded me of the sound Willy makes when he jumps against an Earth-cell two cells above his head! ;-) Thus I set out to make a room that Willy's crossing would resemble the riff as closely as possible. This is a very musical room also in that the Earth-cells and items are notes, and the portal a treble clef!
This room is tricky in that I have created hybrid Crumbly Earth-cells (by giving Earth the same colour-attribute as Crumbly). Before you jump through the ILB, you must clear the Crumbly Earth-cell you jump from, otherwise you won't be able to jump over the first pool.
The HGs take their sprites from Sendy's JSW128 game where's woody. They take their paths from "The Forgotten Abbey" in Jet Set Willy (shifted three characters to the left). They're tougher to pass, though, as you have to jump the deadly pools, the overhead Earth-cells can spoil your jumps over the guardians, and the platform above "erMidn" is actually a left conveyor! The key is learning how to move with the guardians, like a tennis-player whose opponent is spreading her! "Ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight? I always ask that of all my prey" [Prince, "Batdance"].
The top third of the room entails good turning and jumping under pressure, in order to collect the items without hitting the bloody thorn. And don't be caught out by the Crumbly Earth-cells behind the portal!
I enjoy playing this room - it's like a nice game of chess!
10: "Recurring Nightmare" (12th March 2003)
This is a remix of "P L A IS TO W G R OV E" from We Pretty, laterally inverted and with a darker colour-scheme. Since this is a Manic Miner room, you don't get to reregister your position after crossing the bottom half - this contributes to making it the hardest room in the game so far! :->
Tips:
* When jumping right over the shark, watch the cyan VG, not the shark.
* Jump under the magenta VG at the third opportunity, so that you will also be able to jump under the black-on-cyan VG.
* Don't forget to take the items in Column 31!
* To jump right over the cyan VG, stand on the middle of the cloud with your legs apart, and jump when the VG is two cells higher than you on its way down.
11: "Der Richter und sein Henker" (19th March 2003)
This is a tribute to Friedrich Dürrenmatt's novel Der Richter und sein Henker (The Judge and his Hangman), which I read for 'A' Level German. Two policemen (Bärlach and Tschanz) are trying to solve a murder-mystery, but Bärlach, the elder, is actually trying to get revenge on an old enemy (Gastmann), and is using his own unorthodox and extremely effective methods to achieve his ends.
This is actually an easier room than I intended it to be - only Manic Miner 4 difficulty, and a stroll in the park after "Recurring Nightmare"! ;-) The hardest bit is getting the item and the left switch above the green hangman - it's just a matter of good timing, though. Getting the Crumbly item under the blue hangman was meant to be much tougher, but I couldn't get the constraints on that part of the screen to 'add up' the way I wanted them to.
The Water-cells are stone steps, the conveyor is a river, the Fire-cells are swords and guns, the items are bullets (taken out of victims) in plastic bags, and the portal is the gallows-curtain. Though I admit my inspiration was sagging when it came to drawing the hangman-sprites, I am particularly proud of the judge-sprite, which I think has a Richard Hallas quality about it (cf. the wigs and TV-presenter in Join the Jet-Set!). Expect to see more of the judge in future games.
12: "Autostereographic Alien Invasion" (26th March 2003)
Autostereograms - those patterns of seemingly random dots in which you can see a hidden 3D image if you look /through/ them instead of looking /at/ them - were all the rage in 1994. I purchased several books of them, and indeed these inspired two Jet Set Willy rooms: "IF W IS HE S WE RE F IS HE S" in We Pretty, and "EATING & BEING EATEN" in Goodnite Luddite.
I aspired to write a Manic Miner room that would actually /be/ an autostereogram, and this was the best I managed to come up with. Although there is no hidden picture, if you look at two horizontally adjacent blocks, and then look /through/ the screen so that they come together, the various rows of blocks will appear to come out of the screen towards you, and the rows where the blocks are closer together will look nearer! :-)
Anyway, I'm particularly pleased with the graphics in this room: each cell-graphic is an alien, and I managed to use all eight colours. :-) The red Fire-cells take their graphic from "To the Kitchens Main Stairway" from Jet Set Willy, and the VG-sprites come from Goodnite Luddite. The HG-sprites are original, but I think they have a Matthew Smith quality about them. The animated green Conveyor-cells make innovative use of the conveyor-animation: I believe this is the first time that it's not the top and third pixel-rows that are animated - the vertical position of the conveyor-animation can be defined in pixels, not just characters.
This is one of the tougher rooms, requiring accurate movement and timing. Tips:
* You need to delay your jump over the red HG, to avoid crashing into the white VG. Use wisely the extra Crumbly cells in the passing-places.
* The white VG has two alternating phases of animation. One will kill you no matter how tightly you try to jump over it; the other will not.
13: "Verona No More" (2nd April 2003)
Another title from the fake Contamination track-listing (cf. Rooms 4 and 5). I didn't get round to researching Verona as thoroughly as I would have liked (but cf. the We Pretty diary), so I based it on Venice instead, which fits in with the "No More" bit I guess! ;-) I'm not sure if it's a bird's-eye view or a worm's-eye view, but the VGs are boats and the portal is the Bridge of Sighs. Contrary to what someone once said, this room does NOT depict a 9/11-style terrorist-attack!
It's a challenging room to complete, but not too distressing IMO, because you just have to crack one bit and then perfect the next. You don't really have to think on your feet to solve this room; it's not the nastiest 'Skylab' room I've ever written. There are invisible Crumbly cells to get along the top.
14: "Wiredlife" (9th April 2003)
Yet another title from the fake Contamination track-listing. My interpretation of the title was inspired by "Zipzone" in the brilliant Amstrad CPC platform-game Radzone (Mastertronic, 1986 - I might well do a JSW-adaptation one day!).
This is one of the toughest rooms in the game, not least because of the white-paper Air-cells! The first time that you crack it, you won't want to play it again any time soon! :->
First, you have to make your way along the bottom from left to right. This is most easily achieved with two precisely-controlled jumps followed by three 'free-wheeling' jumps. Then you have to jump up to the first storey, avoiding the Fire-cells!
The middle level is the most failsafe, because you know where the blue sticky conveyors are going to leave you. To get past the HGs, jump straight up when you see a tiny '+' sign. Then you have to climb up to the top, sneaking past the red VG, and [in the Special Editions] relieving the item of Crumbly so that it can be collected.
The top level is best tackled without the pause-key, using your natural sense of timing to jump the HGs, and jumping to see where you are without hitting the Fire-cells! The biggest danger is falling to your death at the end, and watch out for the fast-crumbling yellow Crumbly cell!
15: "Speed 4" (16th April 2003)
Speed is a very exciting movie in which a terrorist attaches to a bus a bomb that is activated when the speed exceeds 50 mph, and will be detonated when the speed goes back under 50 mph! The sequel-movie Speed 2 is a geriatric Poseidon-adventure. "Speed 3" is a Father Ted episode in which Dougal gets stuck on a milk-float that will blow up if the speed goes back under 4 mph. One scene in "Speed 3" entailed Ted having to move a stack of cardboard boxes out of the road.
And so Broadsoft presents "Speed 4", set in a car-factory. You must remove the eight Crumbly blocks from the bottom-right of the screen before the car crashes into them and kills you! For the Special Edition 2009, I have put Fire-cells under the items so that you cannot collect them yourself, but must leave it to the car to do so, which it does because it has white ink! This is Daniel Gromann's solution, and I liked it so much that I decided to enforce it.
Once you have cleared the boxes, the rest of the room is relatively easy, as long as you don't get fooled by the confusing layout of the boxes - some of which are Crumbly cells, and others Conveyor-cells. The green plant at the top-left is not what it looks like - otherwise the room would be impossible to complete! ;-)
16: "slime surfers & jissom monkeys" (23rd April 2003 - Daniela Hantuchová's 20th birthday)
Named for an episode of the TV-comedy Game On, this room was inspired by a quote from the agoraphobic Matthew Malone, when his psychologist Jason asked him to imagine the worst that could happen if he went outside at night:
"I'm walking along this pavement, and it's all slimy, and I can't keep my balance because the skunk pussies are biting at my toes. And the jissom monkeys and the slime surfers are dropping down their glittering ropes of mucus all over my face and hair. And I'm all sticky, and I'm all slimed up to the eyeballs, man! And there's all this black stuff oozing up between the cracks in the pavement, and I realise my feet are sinking in! And the whole pavement is just black slime: just a great pus-filled swamp, sucking me down... I can't breathe now! My mouth and nose are all choked up with this green stuff! And then I realise what all the slime is! It's made up of rotting bodies! And even though they're rotting, some of them are still alive! And this one reaches out its stinking, rotting talons, and plunges them into my eyeballs! AND I'M BLIND, MAN!! I'M BLIND AND DROWNING IN FILTHY BLACK PUS!!"
The sprites for both the HGs and the VGs were 'discovered' in Sendy's where's woody: see "ROOMS.JS2", Sprite-Page 164. The portal is Matthew Malone's front door, the Earth-cells are drainpipes, and the Water-cells are pavement.
I wrote the room with yellow-paper Air-cells, with the intention of changing them to white-paper Air-cells after my initial play-test. But the room is rock-hard anyway, and will probably take the best of us a good forty minutes to crack! So I left the Air-cells yellow, and left the other graphics with white paper to fit in with the 'dirty' nature of this room! ;->
Although this is the second-toughest room in the game to complete, it should not be too distressing if you keep track of what works and what doesn't work, so that you can get a little further each time (notwithstanding the lives you lose due to careless mistakes). I have made the following notes primarily to help myself - they are not precise, and subsequent points will not apply if you get the timing wrong. If you prefer to work it out for yourself, you might want to disregard them, but it does help to make notes as you go along when tackling such a complicated room as this.
* At the start: step onto the conveyor at the top-right when the monkeys are leaning slightly to the right.
* To cross the middle platform from left to right (first pass): step onto the conveyor at the middle-left when the magenta HG is moving right and two cells from its right-boundary, at the first opportunity.
* At the middle-right, you have to jump through the ILB once to clear the Crumbly block, then cross the middle platform back left and back right again so that you can jump through the ILB properly.
* To cross the middle platform from right to left: jump the red HG as it approaches the ILB, at the second opportunity.
* To cross the middle platform from left to right (second pass): jump the magenta HG as it approaches the ILB, at the second opportunity.
* To cross the bottom platform: jump the black HG as it approaches the right end, at the first opportunity.
* To cross the middle platform from left to right (third pass): jump the magenta HG as it approaches the ILB, at the first opportunity.
This is a classic room in terms of timing when to wait and when to go. So many MM/JSW rooms these days consist of a series of isolated challenges, but this one really revives the ancient art of *timing* from the original Manic Miner, and takes it to a new level.
17: "Eternal Flame (Conveyor Avatar)" (30th April 2003 - tenth anniversary of the stabbing of Monica Seles)
This is an MM-conversion of a JSW room by Iain Eddy from J4, used with permission from Geoff Eddy. The room is a tribute to The Bangles' "Eternal Flame", so my cover-version of the room can be thought of as a tribute to Atomic Kitten's cover-version of the song! ;-)
According to the J4 documentation, "Eternal Flame" was 'in its original incarnation almost impossible. It's now a bit easier, now that the "water" or "liquid" blocks aren't also conveyors'. So I decided to make them conveyors! (only one is animated, because if I stretched the conveyor-animation over all of the Conveyor-cells, the VGs would collide with it).
However, even this proved to be too easy by Ma jolie standards (especially as Manic Miner doesn't have arrows yet), so I added invisible fast-crumbling Crumbly cells, which you need to make use of to collect all of the arrows in the top-right, top-left and (hint) bottom-left of the room.
Once you've figured out how to use the Crumbly cells, though, this room is a breather after the previous room and before the next! :->
18: "Semi-Perilous Light" (7th May 2003)
I thought of calling this room "The Luminious Beam" (Björk, "All Neon Like" from Homogenic), or even "Heathen (The Rays)" [Room 19], but finally settled on a mondegreen of "semi-perilous lives" from Morrissey's "Maladjusted"
Not that you'll even notice the air-sapping beam - so distracted will you be by the room's other challenges - although it might just prove to be your Achilles-heel at the end!
The VG-sprites are supposed to be models of atomic structures, and were inspired by my distant memory of Wizball. The HGs were drawn in a stream of consciousness - I think they look like foeti (fetuses). The items are prisms (they let the light through when green, and reflect it by ninety degrees when magenta, cyan or yellow). The portal is a three-storey house. I leave both types of Fire-graphic to personal interpretation. :-)
This has to be the most mind-bogglingly difficult, traumatic MM/JSW room ever devised, and if you complete it under an hour and fifty minutes (I play-tested it starting at about 22:30 on 31st December 2002, and finished at 00:22 on 1st January 2003), then either you're a better player than I am, or you've had a lot of help from my tips here!
* Walk under the blue VG when its middle balls are slightly out - at the second opportunity (if you are in position as early as possible). Stand with your legs apart to jump the yellow and magenta HGs on the second pass.
* To cross the conveyor from left to right, jump into the Earth-cell. Set off when the tip of the magenta HG is aligned with the right edge of the middle overhead platform, and jump the HGs separately.
* Jump off the conveyor from two steps away from the edge, so as to catch the underside of the Earth-cell but miss the red VG (I love this manoeuvre, and for the Special Edition 2009, I have added an extra Earth-cell to enforce it after Daniel Gromann managed to bypass it).
* Jump over the yellow Fire-cell, which takes you slap through the conveyor! (the earliest you can do this is when you can see the toe of the yellow HG above the rightmost Conveyor-cell).
* The item to the left of the black Fire-cell is located in a Crumbly cell. You cannot jump across for the item to the left (even though you /could/ if this were Jet Set Willy) - it is accessible via an invisible ladder.
* To cross the bottom, wait two steps away from the third-leftmost yellow Fire-cell, and jump straight up over the red HG when it is exactly between the third and fourth Fire-cells. Then wait two time-frames to jump right over the black HG without clipping the cyan VG.
* Once you've collected all the items, you'll need to jump onto the conveyor from under the red VG, which is surely the most difficult move in MM/JSW history! You have to walk along the top row of Crumbly cells (the further to the right you start, the more margin for error you have) so that the red VG will be one cell below the Earth-cells with its middle balls slightly out when you jump, whilst also timing it correctly with respect to the guardians in that top-left section. Jump when you are standing in one cell-column, so as to land one step into the conveyor. If you do this at the first opportunity, you should clear the yellow HG by the skin of your teeth.
* Finally, no matter how short on air you are, do not try to jump under the white VG immediately after jumping the magenta HG (which goes left up to the Earth-cell, in case you haven't been keeping track).
19: "Heathen (The Rays)" (14th May 2003 - fifth anniversary of the death of Karolj Seles)
This is a tribute to the title-track of David Bowie's 2002 album Heathen, which has to be the ultimate song to close an album with! The words in the top half of the screen are the first four lines of the lyrics, and the font is from Journey's End (Mastertronic, 1985) - of which font the upper case was used in Goodnite Luddite. The portal is the cover-picture of the album, and the items are bare CDs. Red is the colour that our sun will turn at the (scientific) end of the world.
And when the sun is low,
And the rays high,
I can see it now,
I can feel it die.
I don't want to give too much away about this room, with it being the last in the game, and it's a stroll in the park anyway compared with "Semi-Perilous Light"! ;-)
The only quirky feature you might not have seen before is the Crumbly cell above the swastika. This is a direct steal from the final room of Ignacio Pérez Gil's Manic Miner 5: Los Peligros del LSD. I thought that room was impossible to complete until I realised the special trick needed to leave enough Crumbly for a second landing! :-) Anyway, if you take the item to the left of that Crumbly cell at the first opportunity, it will leave a single pixel-row of Crumbly to enable you to escape later, but if you leave that item until the end, it forces you to make a very awkward jump over the yellow HG early on! Experts should not be satisfied until they have solved it both ways!
About Manic Miner: Neighbours - Allana Truman
[from the Readme included with the game, edited]
Manic Miner: Neighbours - Allana Truman (MM:N-AT) is a redefinition of the rooms in Matthew Smith's classic Manic Miner, which I acknowledge as being the copyright of Bug-Byte (1983).
I developed the game using my own Manic Miner Screen Editor (also released on the Internet) under the RealSpectrum emulator. In fact I started writing it on my real Spectrum +2, which sadly I had to lay to rest on 13th April 2003 when the motor in the datacorder burned out. Luckily I had only written one room when this happened.
The game is based on the plots involving my favourite Neighbours character of all time, Allana Truman! Although she was only a guest-character on the Australian soap, she thrilled me with her pretty eyes and an intriguing air of mystique from her electric first appearance in November 2000 (as televised in the UK) to her emotional exit in April 2001, when she embarked on a trip around America with her boyfriend, Lance Wilkinson.
Allana and Lance are sci-fi geeks who met at a Star Trek convention. She made him perform seven labours to win her as his girlfriend. He succeeded, after many episodes of the anticipation of seeing Allana again! Then he learned that she lived with her mother, a widow who clung desperately to Allana as her primary source of support. He wanted to take Allana to America, but they first had to solve the problems of getting her mother to let go, and also of raising funds for the trip.
In this game, you play Lance Wilkinson. You have to perform seven labours to win Allana, and then solve the rest of the plot so that you and Allana can go to America.
MM:N-AT is written for advanced MM players, and the rooms are intended to be fairly difficult, as a challenge to the experts. It presupposes that you can play Manic Miner - the controls are exactly the same, but the gameplay is tougher, requiring both manual dexterity (a need for pixel-perfect and time-frame-perfect accuracy of movement) and lateral thinking. MM:N-AT liberally exploits all the quirky features in the game-engine - you need to know all the tricks if you want to get far!
I have thoroughly play-tested the final version, and I certify that it /is/ possible to complete.
You can consider yourself to have passed MM:N-AT if you finish the game using infinite lives (POKE 35136,0) on a real Spectrum, or saving and loading snapshots on an emulator. If you cheat by using any other POKEs, or by using the "6031769" teleport-cheat (POKE 33885,7), you should consider yourself disqualified. ;-)
Manic Miner: Neighbours - Allana Truman - Room descriptions
[from the Readme included with the Special Edition of the game]
0: "30 Ramsay Street"
This is a tribute to the first-ever Allana-episode of Neighbours, when she visited Lance Wilkinson at 30 Ramsay Street - the house he and Toadfish Rebecchi were renting from Lou Carpenter. The item-graphic is my attempt to draw the golden brooch Allana was wearing.
The left half of the room is the kitchen. You have to retrieve one item from the cupboards (you have to get rid of the crumbling floor before you can collect it), then jump over Allana on the kitchen-table (tip: jump onto the conveyor from below). To get back, you have to jump from the very edge of the protruding cupboard, in order to land inside the wall.
The right half of the room is the lounge. In order to get the middle item, and also to jump over Allana to get to the front door (the portal), you have to jump at wall-blocks so as to land exactly between on top of them and on the side of them, which takes you slap through them - an action which will henceforth be referred to as 'jumping through an ILB' (Innocent-Looking Block).
When my real Spectrum died, it took this one room with it to its grave. But I have remade it very faithfully, and even improved upon the original! :-)
It's quite a tough opening room, but it's very addictive and may well keep you coming back for more punishment! ;-)
1: "A Reel Challenge"
Lance's first labour was to retrieve the final episode of Kosmosis (an apparently fictitious sci-fi series from the 1960s) on old-fashioned tiller-tape, and convert it to video for Allana. He got the name of a collector from his local library, went to see this collector (the green man at the top of the screen) and persuaded him to lend him the tape. Lance said it was "a reel challenge"!
The vertical-guardian (VG) sprites are ripped from Paul Rhodes's JetSet Editor, and the portal is supposed to be a rotating door. To make it a bit more interesting, you have to collect not just one but five tiller-tapes.
When you stand on the bottom of the screen in columns 28 & 29, I expected this to make the crumbling-floor blocks in row 0 crumble (my original idea was to free an item up there so that you could collect it later), but instead it makes the corresponding pixels of the conveyor in row 8 crumble! This is an interesting quirky feature, so I left it in for purely aesthetic value.
Tips:
* To access the upper floor of the library you have to stop on the conveyor and jump straight up between the static nasties.
* To access the top row of stars, get to the leftmost star aligned with the library-roof. Then walk right into the path of the magenta VG, and turn left so that you're standing halfway onto the star. Then jump left onto the crumbling-floor block, and as soon as you land on it, hold right and jump straight up.
* Jumping down onto the lowest star is possible from either of the two stars aligned with the library-roof, but both require waiting until three of the VGs are in the correct phase relative to each other (snapshotting is highly recommended here!). From the right star, this happens when the air is under the space between "Reel" and "Challenge"
From the left star, this happens when the air is under "C" but it's a tighter jump. It's much more difficult than I meant to make it, but I'm too proud of the challenge I've created to water it down now! ;-)
* There's a screenshot of this room in the Photos section of the Allana Truman Yahoo! Group [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/allanatruman/], showing the position you need to be in to make the difficult jump.
2: "The Waterfall Nursing Home"
Lance's second labour was to get his photo taken with Jimmy Le Van, who played Captain O'Ryan in Kosmosis, and is now living in the Waterfall Nursing Home. Lance was refused admittance as he is not a relative of Jimmy Le Van, so he snuck in, and after a dash around the interior pursued by a rather incompetent security-guard, he found Jimmy outside and talked him into the photo.
This room recreates Lance's adventure in the nursing-home. You have to collect the cameras whilst avoiding the security-guards and the old folk, and dealing appropriately with the various ILBs and sticky conveyors.
Tips:
* To get the camera at reception, jump onto the desk to get rid of the crumbling floor, then jump into the desk from one step further back.
* If you get past the red VG at the earliest possible opportunity and make a tight jump over the black HG (just late enough to avoid crashing into the magenta VG), it will make the timing easier later on.
* After jumping through the ILB at the top left, you have to jump back onto the upper conveyor from a crumbling-floor block. This requires good manual dexterity and timing.
3: "A Cosmic Encyclopaedia"
The third labour was to make an (extremely low-budget) sci-fi film. Lance's first attempt was based on a rift in the space-time continuum, where Toadfish and Joel Samuels arrive on an alien planet to investigate a plinth (actually a step-ladder covered in tin foil) that was put there by a super-intelligent species as a cosmic encyclopaedia. This film is represented by the left half of this screen.
However, that idea was scrapped in favour of a "low-fi" film called Erinsborough Wives, in which robotic housewives (played by Felicity Scully aka Holly Valance) sold themselves as slaves to men so that they could kill them. In this room, the wives are played by Kari Krisníková with long hair and a chip implanted in her neck (she only faces left, but that was the price to pay for making this a Kong-Beast room - the Kong-Beast sprites are based on the spacesuit from Derrick Rowson's Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier).
I am very pleased with this room, as it turned out much better than I expected, and the green colour-scheme makes it very atmospheric. I would like to have called it "A Cosmic Encyclopaedia / Erinsborough Wives", but of course it wouldn't fit into 32 characters so I went for the cooler title.
The portal-graphic was 'discovered' in Steve Worek's Jet Set Emily: Baby On The Go by viewing the room-data as 16x16 graphics (Sprite-Page 247: Sprite 3). The item represents the model spaceship that Michelle Scully made for Lance out of an egg-carton, a couple of plates and a green transparent cup (Lance put the finished video inside it to give to Allana).
Tips:
* To get out of the plinth, stand facing left with your legs apart, jump straight up twice, fall one character, jump straight up again, walk left and as soon as you've passed the overhead static nasty, jump left twice to land in the niche in the far-right column.
* Then jump right when the cyan wife is just approaching her right-boundary, go right to the end of the conveyor and jump straight up over the cyan wife.
* Then jump left off the conveyor so as to fall two characters and land as far right as possible on the plinth. Keep walking right, stopping off to collect the two items (having rid them of crumbling floor).
* Jump over the green wife between the two overhead wall-blocks.
* Walk to the right end of the main conveyor, release the right-key for one time-frame so that you stop, and jump straight up for the item (I love this manouevre).
4: "Spread The Word"
Lance invited Allana to a candlelit dinner outside Number 30 to give her the video of Erinsborough Wives, but he fell asleep waiting, and when he woke up the video was gone, and a mysterious symbol had been burned into the grass using a blowtorch! The fourth labour was to discover the meaning of the symbol.
It turned out to be a combination of symbols found only on the tomb of the Great Pharoah Neferirkare, and in the catacombs of a Greek temple on the island of Crete - it meant that the Egyptians had "spread the word" - the answer to the riddle.
So I decided to set this room in an Egyptian pyramid. I've drawn the symbol as the portal-graphic (the upper symbol within the circle is meant to be an eye, but I couldn't draw it any clearer in 16x16 pixels). The vertical sprite (an iron maiden) comes from my 1999 JSW game We Pretty; the spider comes from my 2000 game Manic Miner: The Hobbit. I leave the item-graphic open to personal interpretation.
Tips:
* Do not jump over the white spider (which collects an item for you), but rather jump left in front of it so as to land just before the static nasty, and turn to face right on one leg.
* When the magenta spider is at its left-boundary, jump left over it, get the item, and jump right over the static nasty so as to land on the left edge of the conveyor.
* On the conveyor, jump up against the bottom of the overhead wall-block so as to fall safely in front of the yellow VG, and collect the bottom-right item.
* Wait to the left of the yellow VG until the yellow-on-blue VG is at the bottom, then jump onto the conveyor, and jump off the left edge of the conveyor so as to fall slap through the floor-platform to the left of the static nasty!
5: "V Prepare"
As the clue to his fifth labour, Lance received a silver tube (hence the item-graphic) containing a glossy blue and black piece of paper with "V Prepare" in large cyan letters. I designed this room to resemble that paper in terms of the colour-scheme.
V was a 1980s sci-fi series about an alien-invasion, so the task was to convince the world that UFOs exist. Lance 'persuaded' the not-at-all-unattractive journalist Libby Kennedy to write an article about UFOs for the Erinsborough News, using as 'evidence' a video of a flying saucer which he'd rigged up using a fishing-rod! I'm rather proud of my flying-saucer sprite.
The bottom half of this room is the Kennedy house: Libby answered the door wearing nothing but a bath-towel - and in this room, not even that! ;->
The red static nasty is a burglar-alarm, which the Kennedys installed after Darcy Tyler burgled their house to repay a gambling-debt in 2003, but which kept going off unprovoked!
Tips:
* When crossing the clouds from right to left, use both jumping and waiting on crumbling-floor to get the timing right. You have to turn back before jumping out from under the green saucer.
* You have to rid the leftmost item of its crumbling-floor block so that you will be able to jump up for it from below. You can either jump onto it and count out eight jumps, or jump onto it from standing halfway onto the leftmost cloud facing left on two legs, then jump off the very right edge of the item.
* Jump through the ILB to reach ground-level - it's safer than it looks.
* Floor, wall and conveyor all look alike. Jump out from under the leftmost burglar-alarm to land on a left-conveyor, then jump left into the wall over 'P' with your legs apart.
* Then walk right on the conveyor, and jump right with your legs apart from the space between 'V' and 'P', so as to land inside the wall beyond the middle burglar-alarm. Then jump right over 'e' with your legs apart to land inside another wall-block. Libby is best jumped over in the middle room of the house.
6: "Deliver Article to Home Planet"
Such was the message on Allana's next scroll, printed in yellow ink on glossy black, blue and magenta paper. "Full ceremonial dress essential," it added. So Lance made himself a costume based on Spacecops (the VG-sprite), with the intention of taking Libby's article to Allana's house as soon as the newspaper was delivered.
However, Lance's plans were thwarted when the article turned out to be "Heavens above! It's love!" Thanks to Libby reneging on their agreement, Allana thought Lance was making fun of UFOs rather than trying to convince the world they exist, and was most unsympathetic. Then Lance left a message on Allana's answering-machine telling her to be reasonable or it was over between them. Allana sent an apologetic letter, and this meant that Lance had passed the fifth and sixth labours.
In this room, you have to collect the newpapers (the item-graphic is based on a 16x16 newspaper-sprite from Booty, and it turned out much better than I thought would be possible in 8x8 pixels!), and take them across the stars from Earth to the magenta planet in the top-right of the screen. It's a lot of fun dodging the HGs (badly-drawn Toadfish), as they keep you scurrying left and right like a tennis-player whose opponent is spreading her! :-)
Tips:
* The bright yellow stars are floors. The dim yellow stars are fast crumbling floors. The screen is symmetrical such that each bright star on one side corresponds to a dim star on the other.
* Collect the two items on the right side first. To do so, jump off the right edge of the conveyor, jump right again immediately, and fall back down to Earth.
* Then collect the item at the bottom-left. Jump up left into the right side of the screen.
* Jump off the left edge of the conveyor, jump up onto the right item so as to land on its left edge, and immediately jump left. Fall onto the left item, and back down to Earth.
* Jump off the left edge of the conveyor again, stand on the right edge of the star above 'v', facing left in one character-column. When the leftmost VG is at its top boundary, jump left four times without stopping. Stand on the right edge of the star you're now on, and jump right twice into the flashing portal.
7: "Miron 41-30"
The seventh and final labour was to get a piece of the Miron 41-30, a decommissioned satellite that was about to crash in the vicinity of Burley Gap. Allana left Lance a video containing a superb parody of Princess Leia's holographic message in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, saying that the Miron 41-30 contained a life-force needed to keep her spirit alive.
So Lance, Toadfish and Joel went out into the bush, looking for a piece of the Miron 41-30. But they were thwarted by police who had closed the area, and by an electric fence that gave Lance the shock of his life when he peed on it! So they went home, faked a piece of Miron using some car-parts and a blowtorch, and Allana was none the wiser (until Lance confessed much later in their relationship).
This room is set in the bush, and you have to look closely to tell the wall-blocks from the static-nasty blocks! The second static nasty and spare are the electric fence, and the flashing blue floor and red crumbling-floor blocks symbolise the lights on the police-car. The portal represents Allana's video, the items are (faked) pieces of Miron 41-30, and the Skylabs are the satellite itself. This is the first Skylab room in MM-history to have horizontal guardians - usually avoided as they must share the last four frames of the exploding-Skylab sprite.
Tips:
* Immediately hold right and keep jumping over the static nasties as though you were on a right-conveyor. In true Matthew Smith style, I have tweaked the guardians' paths to allow this.
* Jump onto the conveyor when the magenta horizontal guardian (HG) has gone about one character left from its right-boundary. This allows you to jump over it in the fence to the right of the lone wall-block.
* Stand on the item in the middle of the fence so that you will be able to jump up for it (by stopping on the conveyor) when you go back down (via the ILB at the far right). This can be done before or after you get the items at the top.
* It is possible, though not necessary, to jump off the left edge of the screen and over the static nasty at the right edge.
* To complete the room you must traverse the conveyor again, and jump through the ILB into the flashing portal.
8: "Allana's Tinfoil-covered Lair"
A few days after Lance completed his seven labours, Allana invited him to her house (14 Rose Ave, Eden Hills). The interior was festooned with magenta tinfoil, flashing lights, and sci-fi accessories such as a lava-lamp, a white skull, a green vase and a flying saucer - on all of which this room's graphics are based (the yellow-on-red graphic represents the Flash-Gordonesque costume that Lance chose to wear to meet his "intergalactic goddess").
Allana greeted Lance by shining a large bright light at him (hence the solar power in this room), saying "Your reward will be plenty for us befitting the hardships you have endured." She then 'rewarded' him for each of the seven qualities that the labours were supposed to test, until the sun came up and he went home really chipper!
Tips:
* Take the bottom-right item first, to stop the beam shining along the bottom.
* Then take the top-right item, and wait at the right end of the conveyor until the blue Allana is under the crumbling-floor block before you set off to jump over her.
* Stand halfway onto the green floor-block above the white skull, facing left, and jump left twice as the red Allana emerges from the doorway. Fall through the two crumbling-floor blocks onto the green floor-block - you should be on the very right edge of these blocks, facing left - and jump left so as to land *inside* the wall-block under the doorway and be able to walk under the conveyor to collect the leftmost item.
* Stand above "e" in "cover" facing left with your legs apart, and jump left to land *inside* the conveyor and collect the rightmore item in the bottom row. Jump out and collect the leftmore item in symmetrical fashion (standing above "T"). Then stand above "i" in "foil" in one character-column facing right, jump straight up three times, and jump right from between the top pair of white skulls.
9: "Lou's Place"
Lou Carpenter's pub, chosen for a room because Allana went there with Lance a few times. Featuring yellow tables with candles in red glasses, red stools (no, they're not suffering from haemorrhoids! ;-) ), a green snooker-table, and not a drop of alcohol in sight (because it would violate my anti-drugs principles). The vertical sprite is Lou himself, and the item is Allana's driving-licence (from which we discovered that her legal name is Dorothy Truman, and that her date of birth is 16th November 1978).
This room breaks new ground with vertical guardians. The green VG is a speed 14, and to make it actually stop at the bottom of the playing area, its bottom-boundary is specified as six pixels under row 15! (a VG never actually pixel-reaches its specified bottom boundary in MM, due to the use of a 'lower-than-or-equals' comparison instead of a 'lower-than' comparison). This specified bottom boundary is why it knocks two blocks out of the top row, by the same logic by which the white VG causes two wall-blocks to appear white for the two time-frames it's at its bottom boundary).
Tips:
* You start in the portal, so immediately walk right.
* When you're halfway between the portal and the middle table, jump right to land on the left edge of the bottom table - this jump has to be pixel-perfect.
* Drop onto the bottom item - and walk off immediately because you'll need that crumbling-floor block later.
* Stand halfway above "'s", facing left, and jump straight up four times.
* Jump left - twice - from under the white Allana when she's behind you.
* Collect the two items and fall down to the bottom, where the bottom item should break your fall - collect it now.
* Follow the green Allana as close behind as possible, and when you emerge from under the wall, jump straight up over her.
* From halfway under the overhead floor-block, jump right so as to land *inside* a wall-block. Stand in one character-column and jump straight up twice.
* Wait in that position, and when the magenta VG is aligned with you (going up), with the blue VG just below its top boundary (going up), walk left two steps and wait one time-frame. The blue VG should now be at its top boundary, pursing its lips, the magenta VG with its eyes up. This is precisely the time-frame you need to jump left through the ILB.
* Visit the Photos section of either the Allana Truman Yahoo! Group or the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group to see a screenshot of the precise time-frame referred to in the previous tip.
* Stand on the bottom-right item to remove the crumbling-floor block, so that you can go down and jump up for it.
* Climb back up the floor-column - this time to the top - and wait in one character-column. When the magenta VG is aligned with you (going down) and the blue VG is just below its top boundary (going down), jump left to clear them both.
* To get the top-right item, jump right over both VGs when the magenta one is above you, the blue one below. Jump up onto the item, for it too is protected by a crumbling-floor block.
10: "Allana's Secrets"
Allana had warned Lance not to turn up at her house on spec, as her flatmates didn't like surprises. He got quite a shock when he turned up there two hours earlier than invited, to find out that she actually lived with her mother, Jeannie Truman! Allana had kept Lance and Jeannie secret from each other, because she was embarrassed at how co-dependent she and her mother were on each other since their father/husband had died. Allana would later reveal that she had suffered from an anxiety-based social-adjustment disorder when she was younger, while her mother had become practically and emotionally dependent on her. At the time, however, Allana told Lance that he had "wrecked everything" and she didn't want to see him any more.
This comparatively easy room is a variation of "Allana's Tinfoil-covered Lair" [8], without all the "silver stuff and flashing lights", but rather a normal living room with sofas, vases, and African violets that Jeannie (the Eugene - based on the Maria sprite from Jet Set Willy) would rotate on a daily basis as they couldn't survive indoors for long (as symbolised by the conveyor - I wanted to stretch the conveyor-animation to cover the right half of the screen, but Jeannie killed you when she collided with it). The items are pieces of cake, and the portal is the front door.
The room-title "Allana's Secrets" comes from Neighbours site erinsborough.com. I couldn't think how to get it across as a MM room, and on the other hand I couldn't think of a room-title for this room - so I killed two birds with one stone, after considering alternative room-titles such as "The Secret Life of Allana", "Split Personality", "Dorothy's Double Life", "Jeannie Truman" and even "EuJeannie's Lair"! ;-)
Tips:
* To get the items in the lower sofas, remove the crumbling-floor blocks so you can jump up for them from below. The crumbling floors can be removed from either side of the cyan/blue Allanas, depending on whether you prefer a tight turn or a mildly awkward jump.
* There's a hidden item in the portal which you can either leave till last or not, depending on whether you want to see Jeannie in colour-cycling mode!
* Go up on the right and cross the conveyor from right to left. Waiting under the wall (hold jump and right) is the easiest way to get the timing right.
* Jump through the ILB at the far left of the conveyor to get back down to ground level.
11: "The Coffee Shop"
Allana paid a few visits to the Coffee Shop (then run by Harold Bishop and his wife Madge) in her time, most notably just after she told Lance "don't come back" - he greeted her with flowers and told her he loved her.
I took an unorthodox approach to writing this room. Lacking initial inspiration for a screen-layout, I started by simply drawing a picture from coloured blocks, and only massaging it into a playable room when I put the tables in. The result is a Vidar-Eriksenesque pattern of colour-attributes, and a puzzle based on fast-crumbling floors and a column of conveyor-blocks. The static nasties are silver coffee-pots, and the items are cups and saucers.
This is a thinking person's room, where the series of moves has to be worked out using not just chronological backtracking but dependency-directed backtracking, as early mistakes may only catch up with you at the end, when you realise you've cut yourself off from some items or the portal. But once you know what you're doing, this room's bark is worse than its bite. And count yourself lucky I changed the background paper-colour from white to yellow because Room 18 has white-paper background! :->
Tips:
* To cross the bottom from right to left, stand still while the Allanas advance by one square, then take a no-hesitation approach to jumping over them, starting with the red and cyan together as the red Allana emerges from under the bottom-left table.
* Jump onto the conveyor (the blue counter) from the left, and jump off the far-right edge. As you land on the bottom-left table, jump left (i.e. straight up), and left again back onto the conveyor. Jump straight up twice and stop under the wall-block at the top of the conveyor.
* Cross the top from left to right: jump onto the top-left table and immediately jump straight up. Then keep holding right - jumping immediately after each of three falls - until you fall off the right edge of the top-right table and all the way down to the bottom-right corner.
* When crossing the bottom from right to left the second time, jump straight up over the red Allana to the right of the overhead static nasty, then take a no-hesitation approach to jumping over the other three.
* Jump onto the conveyor from the left, and jump off the far-right edge - but this time it has to be from one step back from the edge or you'll miss the items. Jump right immediately on hitting the bottom-left table; after collecting the item walk right until you fall, then simply keep jumping right until you reach the portal.
12: "Lassiter's Lake"
Another room which I designed by drawing a picture before worrying about how to make it playable, this is a scenic screen named for Jack Lassiter, who founded Lassiter's worldwide chain of hotels in the olden days. Lassiter's Complex (which includes Lou's Place [Room 9], the Coffee Shop [11] and Erinsborough Medical Centre [13] as well as Lassiter's Hotel, Restaurant and Shopping Arcade) is situated by Lassiter's Lake, which is surrounded by plenty of greenery and a gazebo. I included it in MM:N-AT because Allana went there once with Lance, and I was trying to base the remaining twelve rooms after the labours primarily on locations.
The Allana sprite for this room was generated by applying SPECSAISIE PunchHoles with the background pixel-pattern as the "x AND NOT y" mask to knock the on-pixels of the background out of the Allana-sprite so that the guardians don't collide with these pixels and kill you.
Tips:
* Start by crossing the top of the lake from left to right to collect the top item.
* Enter the lake by walking off the right edge of the screen (you can do this only once), and keep walking right until you are between the second and third static nasties in the top row of static nasties.
* Drop onto the item, relieve it of crumbling floor, and jump straight up onto the non-crumbling water-block.
* Jump left and drop down between the first and second static nasties. Stand halfway under the second static nasty (i.e. two steps away from the item) and jump right to collect the item.
* Stand on the second item to relieve it of crumbling floor (remembering that the pier is a right-conveyor).
* Standing in one character-column above "k", drop down one row and immediately jump right, and walk right over the static nasties; drop down between the two rightmost static nasties and collect the items.
* Jump (once) back up the remaining crumbling-floor column, and jump left to land between the second and third static nasties from the right. Drop down one row, and jump left to land between the third-rightmost static nasty and the jetty.
* Go and collect the last item; the portal is at the bottom of the lake, just to the right of "ke".
13: "Dr. Karl Kennedy's Surgery"
A brilliant conveyor-challenge, interacting with crumbling floors and guardians, this room had me yelling in frustration whilst enjoying every moment. :-)
Allana visited Dr. Kennedy to discuss her mother's health-problems, hence you play as Allana rather than Lance in this room (see TECHNICA.TXT for how I hacked the game-engine to do this).
The items are medical reports, the conveyor is the examining couch, the first static nasties are lamps, and EMC stands for Erinsborough Medical Centre. The skeleton sprite comes from Willy's Afterlife by Adban De Corcy, and is used with his permission.
Tips:
* Immediately walk left and jump up onto the far right edge of the crumbling-floor block before the yellow skeleton collides with it. Walk left onto the animated conveyor, completely removing said crumbling-floor block.
* Stop on the left end of the animated conveyor by releasing the left key for just one time-frame, and jump straight up to collect the item.
* Drop back onto the left end of the conveyor, and wait there until the green VG is at its bottom boundary. Jump off the very right edge of the animated conveyor onto the crumbling-floor block, and immediately jump left onto the blue floor.
* Jump right off the conveyor-block so as to miss the top conveyor and land on the blue platform beneath it. Jump left onto the conveyor-block, and left over the static nasties. Stop on the conveyor, and when it's safe to do so, jump right onto the conveyor-block (collecting the item), and once again jump onto the blue platform under the top conveyor. Stand on the item to relieve it of crumbling floor.
* Drop down onto the crumbling-floor block, walk left one step, and jump right for the item, making sure to leave enough crumbling floor to jump back onto it and to jump straight up so as to fall with the yellow skeleton to the right of you, so you can jump over it and access the right half of the screen.
* Wait on the bottom-right conveyor-block, and when the magenta and black VGs are both at their top boundaries, jump up and cross the crumbling platform without stopping, jump left onto the double conveyor-block and stop on it.
* To take the middle-right item, first relieve it of crumbling floor then, facing right with your legs apart above "g", jump right over the static nasty.
14: "Aubrey Sci-Fi Convention"
This room was inspired by a sci-fi convention at Aubrey <sp?> that Allana and Lance attended (though the convention itself wasn't televised). The screen is divided into several stalls, as I saw when there was a sci-fi convention in The Simpsons (Season 10, Episode AABF05: "Mayored to the Mob").
The graphics are based on sci-fi collectibles which I divided between this and Room 16. The floor and crumbling-floor graphics are based on a bookshelf from Number 30. The conveyor is based on a painted Star Trek plate, the static nasties on a sci-fi outfit (shirt and trousers), the items are unrolled sci-fi posters, and the portal is a framed picture.
I haven't changed the colour-scheme much from Manic Miner's original Room 14 ("The Bank"), as there was a gap of four months between designing the screen-layout and going back to edit the graphics, and I'd got used to the dark blue atmosphere.
The HG sprite is the letter from "The Bank", slightly modified so that the stamp and the address are positioned the way I think they should be. I found that the letter sprite works very well in this room, so I didn't want to replace it. The Kong-Beast/VG sprite originates from Goodnite Luddite (Broadsoft, 2002).
The conveyor-animation is a striking illustration that the rotating pixel-row is based on the conveyor block-graphic rather than varying according to the block-graphic it's over (as, I must admit, I expected when I placed it), and a rare example of lower pixel-rows than usual being animated.
It's also interesting that the white letter blocks the solar beam because it has the same colour-attribute as wall. It used to be bright white - the same colour-attribute as the player - which meant that you were docked air when the beam collided with it!
Tips:
*1. You start inside a wall. Jump right out of it to collect the first item.
*2. Time is very tight in this room. If you want to 'kill the Kong Beast', there's no time for waiting around until the guardians are aligned for a comfortable jump, nor for safety-jumps.
*3. The central item is protected by a crumbling-floor block which you must get rid of so that you will be able to jump up for it from below. This is best done by walking close behind the green letter as it sets off to the right. You'll need to save the adjacent crumbling-floor block for access to the right half of the screen (after collecting all the items in the left half and bottom section).
*4. To flick the left switch, jump straight up to the left of the red letter, and jump over it into the switch.
*5. Bottom section: jump through the ILB to land at the bottom-left. Jump through the crumbling-floor block as though it too were an ILB, and jump left on the conveyor so as to land *inside* the wall-block and be able to walk right along the conveyor and collect the two items in the obvious way (assuming that you relieved the central item of crumbling floor in Step *3).
*6. Right half: The top-right item is protected by crumbling-floor, so you have to jump on top of it in order to collect it.
*7. (Optional) To 'kill the Kong Beast': Stand in one character-column between the solar beam and the VG, facing right so that it doesn't sap your air-supply. Jump left over the yellow letter from inside the crumbling-floor layer, and flick the right switch. Drop down onto the wall-layer and jump right over the yellow letter from that level again. Walk left to minimise contact with the solar beam as you drop back down to the wall-layer and leave.
*8. Portal: Jump through the ILB to land at the bottom-right. Jump into the portal when you are aligned in one character-column with the pair of static nasties to the right of the portal.
15: "Where's Woody?"
This room was inspired by a Neighbours plotline unrelated to Allana. Not long before she and Lance left Neighbours, Steph Scully got a letter from her boyfriend Larry Woodhouse (Woody), who was in prison for receiving stolen goods. He was given a day-release with the Scully family, but one of his fellow inmates, a dangerous gangster named Kev Kelly, intimidated him into picking up stolen goods from a robbery.
Steph caught Woody red-handed, and persuaded him to go to the police. Kelly was charged, and Woody (who had now completed his prison-sentence) had to testify against him in court. Kelly swore revenge on Woody, and Woody had to go into witness-protection because the word on the street was that Kelly's friends on the outside were trying to kill Woody - notably a scraggly-haired, white-estate-car-driving henchman named Barry Burke.
Steph went to see Woody in secret - breaking his witness-protection - and was almost caught by Burke on the way. Steph and Woody couldn't bear being apart, so Woody left witness-protection, and he and Steph planned to move to a remote corner of Australia where they would be safe from Kelly's gang. They had to accelerate their plans upon learning that Kelly himself had escaped from prison, so they set off at once in Woody's car. Unfortunately, their departure did not go unnoticed by Burke.
They stopped at a petrol-station, where Woody proposed to Steph and she accepted. She went into the shop to get some food, and Woody was car-jacked by Burke, who put a gun to his head and ordered him to drive!
As Steph emerged from the shop, she saw Woody's car speeding off down the road and over a hill. She heard a loud screeching of tyres, an explosion, and saw a terrific plume of flame beyond the hilltop! This has to be my pick for greatest soap-moment of all time.
They found the remains of one body in the car-wreck, and assumed it was Woody. But a few months later, Woody turned up on Steph's doorstep, explaining that he had rolled out of the car before it exploded, and that he had let everyone believe he was dead because Kelly was still at large, but had just been killed in a hold-up. He tried to get back together with Steph, but his deception had mortally wounded their relationship, and he left Neighbours with his tail between his legs.
This room represents the road that Woody's car took, featuring the crashing car as both Skylabs and jerky HGs, with foliage from Jet Set Willy: The Lord of the Rings (Broadsoft, 2000). The petrol-station is at the bottom-right of the screen; at the bottom-left is the hill, and the portal represents the hospital where Steph was taken (physically unhurt, but in deep shock) after partially witnessing the accident.
The line "Where's Woody?" was used at least three times in Neighbours; it is also, of course, a titular nod to Sendy's JSW128 game where's woody.
Tips:
*1. Mind the green static nasties which are well-camouflaged by the floor-blocks.
*2. After jumping over the yellow HG, jump off the very left edge of that platform to collect the item and land to the left of the magenta HG.
*3. Note that the platforms under the magenta and cyan HGs consist of conveyor-blocks with a wall-block (which looks the same) at the left end.
*4. Jump onto the crumbling-floor block so as to straddle the left edge of the screen; jump straight up, hold right+jump as you land so as to jump straight up again. Walk right into columns 0 & 1 - it should look like you are standing in rows 0 & 1, but you're not. Press jump so that you really are, then you can walk right to collect the other item in row 0, and walk left off the screen so that you reappear at the top-right of the screen.
*5. Press jump to drop down onto the top-right road-platform when the Skylab is in its rightmost column. Again jump over the magenta HG from above, and let the conveyor carry you to the wall-block at the left end of the platform.
*6. Stand on the very left edge of the magenta HG's platform, facing right, and jump right twice to land on the wall-block at the left end of the cyan HG's platform, where you can wait in total safety.
*7. Jump onto the green lower platform under the magenta HG, and stand on the item to relieve it of crumbling floor (I wanted to protect the top-right item in this way too, but would have had to remove the yellow HG to make the room completable). Return to the left end of the cyan HG's platform.
*8. Wait until the yellow HG is at its left boundary exactly as the cyan HG is at its right boundary, and jump over the cyan HG in the next cycle after that. You should just miss the Skylab as you land at the right end of the platform. IF YOU GET THE TIMING WRONG HERE, IT WON'T BE POSSIBLE TO JUMP OVER THE WHITE HG WHEN YOU REACH THE BOTTOM.
*9. Jump off the right edge of the short road-platform so as to land on the roof of the petrol-station, and let the conveyor do the rest. If you did Step *8 correctly, the white HG will be going left as you approach it, allowing you to jump over it without hitting the static nasty, and if you relieved the bottom-left item of crumbling floor (Step *7), you should enjoy a straightforward trip to the portal.
16: "Sci-Fi Collectibles"
Allana and Lance decided to sell their sci-fi collections in order to raise funds for their trip to America. However, they were disappointed when the value of their combined collection turned out to be only $300.
My idea for this room was to have a random scattering of blocks which wouldn't really look like a room at all (in particular, it lacks the usual two walls and floor of most MM caverns), but would disorient the player.
What I've ended up with is a rather more structured screen-layout than I'd imagined, chock full of quirky features, and puzzles involving crumbling floors and invisible blocks, under mildly awkward pressure from some pseudo-3D guardians. It's a prime example of a "which way do I go now?" room. The atmosphere is somewhat reminiscent of Booty (a classic platform-game), and it's a lot of fun to play if (as usual in Broadsoft games) you don't mind using the pause-button.
The floor, conveyor, crumbling-floor and item graphics are all variants of crystal-ball-type objects that Allana and Lance had in their collection. The wall and portal graphics are based on square and hexagonal cardboard boxes. The cyan static nasty is a ray-gun (don't be fooled by the conveyor-animation!). The blue static nasty is three poster-tubes. The Eugene graphic is an action-figure moulded to a flat base. The HG is a spaceship consisting of three pieces which are attached to the base by thin rods.
Tips:
*1. Go right initially, jumping off the very right end of the starting platform so as to clear the ray-gun. Jump off the very right end of that platform too, stop on the magenta conveyor-block and jump straight up for the top item.
*2. Jump onto the green floor-block beneath the cyan HG so as to walk behind it as closely as possible, and jump off the right edge of the screen. Stand on the top-left item to relieve it of crumbling floor, then stand halfway off the top-left floor-block facing left, and jump through the ILB on the other side of the screen.
*3. Cross the top of the screen from right to left. This entails an accurate jump to avoid both the overhead wall-block and the blue static nasty. Stand halfway onto the green floor-block by the blue nasty, facing left, and jump left to land on the crumbling-floor blocks (this jump will collect the top-left item iff you relieved it of crumbling floor in Step *2).
*4. Drop down onto the lowest crumbling-floor block and jump right onto the central isolated floor-block (resisting the temptation to jump prematurely and hit the blue static nasty). Jump off the very right edge of this floor-block, use the pause-button to stand on the item for exactly seven time-frames to relieve it of crumbling floor, then jump straight up.
*5. To get from the starting platform to the bottom-right: Jump onto the top-right conveyor-block and let it dump you onto the wall-block. Stand on the middle of the wall-block facing right with your legs apart, and jump right so as to land on the lower floor-block (this will collect the item if you relieved it of crumbling floor in the natural course of Steps *2 and *3).
*6. Jump through the ILB (this will save you from falling too far) to land on the floor-block above the last 'l' in the room-title. Jump right twice to land on the rightmost floor-block. Jump off the left edge of this block to land on the floor-block above 's'. Jump off the very left edge of this block and DO NOT COLLECT THE ITEM.
*7. Stand on the middle floor-block above the first 'e', facing left with your legs apart, and jump over the conveyor-animated ray-guns so as to land inside the wall-block (this will collect the item iff you relieved it of crumbling floor in Step *4). Jump straight up onto the wall-block, stand halfway onto it facing right, and jump right to land back on the platform with what should be the last remaining item (DON'T COLLECT IT!).
*8. There's an invisible block above the item. Jump onto the item and stand on it for exactly seven time-frames to relieve it of crumbling floor, then jump straight up, for I have cleverly designed it so that you have to go back up to the top before you can get back down to the bottom. :-)
*9. Make your way back to the floor-block above the last 'l' (as per Steps *5 and *6). Wait until the Eugene (action-man) is near the top of the screen and jump left, collecting the last item (which you relieved of crumbling floor in Step *8). Stand on the right edge of the "ec" platform to avoid the conveyor-animated ray-guns as you jump left over the magenta HG.
*10. Instead of trying to jump directly onto the floor-block above the 'c' in "Sci" and getting killed by the blue static nasty, fall off the bottom of the screen to the left of 'C' to land on an invisible block near the top of the screen. Jump left onto another invisible block, and straight up onto an invisible block on the bottom above the first 'i'. Then you can safely jump left into the flashing portal (thanks to an invisible block above the 'R' in "AIR").
17: "Harold's Allotment"
Harold Bishop owns a small plot of land somewhere in the vicinity of Ramsay Street, which Lance and Allana offered to do some work on (Lance was a garden landscaper). It was here that Allana gave Lance a pendant (the item) she'd made out of the piece of 'Miron' Lance had given her for the seventh labour, and Lance confessed that he'd faked it.
This is quite a sunny, attractive room, enhanced by a wall-graphic which is 'corrupted' by the Block-Graphics Bug - if you look at it in an editor, you'll see that I actually just drew plain vertical lines - but I like the pattern so I didn't fix it.
The HG is the cobra from We Pretty (Broadsoft, 1999), modified by applying SPECSAISIE PunchHoles with the floor pixel-pattern as the "x AND NOT y" mask to knock the on-pixels of the floor out of the cobra-sprite so that the HGs don't collide with these pixels and kill you. The vertical guardian is of course Harold Bishop (even though he wasn't there himself), complete with glasses and wobbly chins.
I also considered adding Harold as a VG behind the counter in "The Coffee Shop" [11], but I thought it would be a case of "too many cooks spoil the broth", especially as I would have had to sacrifice the bidirectionality of the HGs in that room.
This room turned out much easier than I had intended. My original idea was that you would have to stand on the top items for exactly seven time-frames to relieve them of crumbling floor, then jump up into the portal - but of course this is impossible, as you have to go back down to collect the items thus relieved, and are then cut off from the portal because you used up the crumbling-floor blocks needed to reach it. So I had to come up with another way to reach the portal, which unavoidably releases the constraints on the items. ;-) The challenge for advanced players is to complete this room as efficiently as possible.
Tips:
* All the items are protected by crumbling floor.
* You can get under the white VG by walking left without stopping as soon as you begin.
* It's better to start with the left side, as you have to wait a long time for the cobra when starting on the right. Also, the bottom item is best approached from the left because the VGs are slower on that side.
* Take the top-left item first, thus landing on the middle platform between the white and red HGs. From this platform, either jump right if you prefer to do it the slow and easy way, or jump left if you prefer to do it the fast and difficult way.
* (The Easy, Inefficient Method) Jump right over the red VG and fall to the bottom, collecting the bottom item. This is inefficient because you have to go back for the middle-left item, so I have set the air-supply for this room such that you have to complete within eight time-frames of the earliest possible time (the air-supply is depleted by one pixel every eight time-frames) if you do it this way.
* (The Difficult, Efficient Method) Jump left over the white VG and collect the middle-left item, thus landing on the lower-left crumbling-floor platform. Jump past the white and red VGs to collect the bottom-item - it's extremely difficult to time this correctly on crumbling floor, but pull it off and you can rest on your laurels with ample air to finish the room.
* (The Easy, Efficient Method) Unfortunately (though not from your perspective, I suppose) I've now found a way to circumvent the difficult method without the tight air-supply associated with the easy method as described above. I'll leave this method for the cleverest players to discover...
* The only way to reach the portal after collecting the items is to jump up off the top of the screen, walk along the very bottom of the screen, and drop into the portal. If you look ever so carefully at the top row, you'll notice a one-pixel difference between the wall-blocks and the "spare" blocks up through which you can jump.
18: "Brain Busters"
The second way that Lance and Allana tried to raise funds for their trip to America was to enter Lance in a radio quiz-show called Brain Busters. Each week, Lance had to answer five sci-fi questions. Answer all five correctly and he'd double the amount of money he'd won so far. Get one wrong and he'd lose all the money he'd won so far. Each week when he answered all five correctly, he'd have to choose between sticking with the money he'd won so far, or going back next week to play for double or nothing.
Lance kept playing until he'd won $4000 - more than enough to go to America. But then the organisers actually gave him the answers to next week's quiz, because Lance was such a ratings-winner that they wanted to rig it so he kept playing! Lance agreed to come back next week and play for $8000, but Allana said it was over between them if he went ahead with the scam. So it wasn't so much "Brain Busters" as "The Money or the Girl".
Lance did play on and win $8000, but - to Allana's surprise as much as anyone else's - he immediately announced, on air, that he didn't want to travel the world on stolen money from a rigged quiz-show. So he saved his relationship with Allana, but lost all his winnings.
The zig-zag pixel-patterns and colour-scheme of this room are based on the artwork from the Brain Busters studio. The items are pairs of antennae that Allana made for Lance to wear on his head during the Brain Busters sessions. The HGs are radios. The VG is the host of Brain Busters - Glen Goldman - wearing a pair of headphones.
It's a tough room, featuring a variety of challenges with a white-paper background, but hardly a brain-buster next to some of the rooms in my previous MM game Ma jolie! ;-)
Tips:
*1. The bottom-right is a good place to start. Stand halfway between 'e' and 'r', and jump right so as to land past the black static nasty whilst avoiding the cyan static nasty overhead. Jump right onto the item and relieve it of crumbling floor.
*2. Curl up into the bottom-left corner of the corridor, standing in one character-column facing right to avoid Glen Goldman. Jump right to land *inside* the wall-block above 't'. Walk right, into the magenta floor, and stand above 'r' with your legs apart. Jump right (over the radio) so as to land in the floor beyond the first black static nasty. Jump likewise over the second black static nasty to collect the bottom-right item.
*3. Although the bottom-left item can be collected in symmetrical fashion, we'll come back for it when we take a shortcut later on (in Steps *9 and *10, to be precise).
*4. Now do the middle-right. Stop on the conveyor between the two overhead static nasties, and jump straight up for the item. A natural sense of the speed at which you walk is key to a successful escape; it may help to watch the conveyor or the overhead HG.
*5. We'll get the item in the middle-left when we take the aforementioned shortcut later on.
*6. Beware the tight jump in getting from the middle storey to the top storey!
*7. Do the top-right now if the timing is propitious. You'll have to come back up from below if you do the top-left first, but we're going to do that anyway.
*8. To collect the top-right item, wait until the red radio is at its left boundary, and follow it so closely that when you jump it (hitting your head on the overhead wall), you will land directly on the item before the conveyor takes you back left.
*9. Cross the top-left by repeatedly jumping left, trying to leave as much crumbling floor as possible because you'll have to do this again at the end! Time it so that you jump the green radio near the left end so it won't get you from behind. Fall through the two leftmost crumbling-floor blocks to collect the middle-left item.
*10. Then drop down into the bottom-left from the two crumbling-floor blocks to the left of the two cyan static nasties. Relieve the bottom-left item of crumbling floor, then go and collect it like you did the bottom-right item in Step *2.
*11. Return to the top-left and repeat Step *9, but this time jump over the gap of two character-spaces that you should have left when you fell through the floor at the end of Step *9, and you should land in the invisible portal.
19: "Ningwaar!"
Allana and Lance finally left Neighbours after her mother gave Allana some money that her father had left to her. Their final scene was the usual emotional farewell, leaving Ramsay Street in a taxi (the portal-graphic).
The second static nasty is Lance's hand waving goodbye (shouting "Ningwaar!", which is possibly a word from one of Star Trek's conlangs). The horizontal guardian is the Toadfish sprite from "Deliver Article to Home Planet" [6], and how could I finish writing the game without including a VG-sprite of Allana's face? :-)
Allana and Lance had one last crisis before they left, as they lost the plane-tickets (they turned up - in a greatly transmuted state - in Allana's washing-machine; luckily the ticket-office was willing to reprint them) - so in this room, you have to hunt for five invisible items.
Tips:
* I've very kindly adjusted the start-positions of the guardians so that this room can be completed with very little waiting if you take the most efficient route.
* Memorising the score at the start of a life in this room (InitialScore) can be helpful for keeping track of how many of the items you have collected; the item-collection sound is also helpful! :-)
*1. One item is hidden in the title-screen picture, but it's much easier than it looks. Walk right at the start, and as soon as you land on the top red step, jump right twice (the cyan-on-black blocks are right-conveyors). Then simply keep walking right until you reemerge on top of the wall at the left - this will have relieved the item of crumbling floor so that you can jump up for it later (in Step *3).
*2. Wait at the right edge of the bottom red step with your legs apart, jump right over Allana, and jump immediately right off the crumbling-floor block (flower) so as to land on the upper conveyor (with blue Toadie).
*3. Jump right over the three plants in the middle of the upper conveyor - this jump will also take you over blue Toadie if you're on time. Wait on the wall to the right of the conveyor, and set off to the left as blue Toadie is going right above 'g'. Stop on the conveyor to the right of the waving-hand nasty, and jump straight up to collect the item you relieved of crumbling floor in Step *1 - preferably with blue Toadie passing under you on this jump.
{Score == InitialScore + 100}
*4. Go back to the wall to the right of the upper conveyor, then cross it fully from right to left - this time walking as close behind blue Toadie as you dare. When you drop onto the crumbling-floor block, immediately walk right off it - there should be one single pixel-row remaining, which you'll need to get back up on the upper conveyor later (in Step *11).
* Don't be fooled by the nasty-looking blocks embedded in the lower conveyor - they are harmless Spare blocks, trying to trick you into jumping in the wrong place.
*5. Proceed immediately along the lower conveyor, jumping twice against the bottom of the overhead wall-block (or once against the side) to get the timing right. Jump right over yellow Toadie and collect the invisible item in the crook of the wall.
{Score == InitialScore + 200}
*6. Jump left over yellow Toadie, and jump left so that you hit your head against the very right edge of the overhead wall-block, collecting an invisible item and landing on the conveyor in one character-column. Wait in this position until it is safe (with respect to blue Toadie above) to jump right over yellow Toadie once more.
{Score == InitialScore + 300}
*7. If your timing is correct, Allana should be near her top boundary as you reach the right end of the lower conveyor again. Immediately set off left.
*8. If your timing is correct, you should be walking close behind magenta Toadie. Jump left when you're exactly aligned in one character-column with the red plant, so as to land on the very right edge of the raised conveyor-block, and immediately jump left over the green plant and under Allana's chin.
*9. Remove the crumbling-floor block under the red steps by jumping onto the left side of the block and walking right to avoid being killed by the green plant below.
*10. Jump left over that green plant so as to collect the invisible items to the right of it, and under the leftmost wall-column, in the same jump.
{Score == InitialScore + 500; Portal flashing}
*11. If you've done the room correctly, there will be one pixel-row of crumbling floor remaining to allow access to the upper conveyor (with blue Toadie) again. This time you have to jump /under/ Allana. If you haven't enabled the "6031769" teleport-cheat, the portal will turn into a lovely reward.
About Manic Miner: Matthew Smith 2008 Remix
[from the Readme included with the game]
Manic Miner: Matthew Smith 2008 Remix is a minor variant of Matthew Smith's classic Manic Miner, which I acknowledge as being the copyright of Bug-Byte (1983). It also uses a few graphics from the second edition of Manic Miner (Copyright Software Projects 1983) - as detailed below - and the item-collection sound from Jet Set Willy (Copyright Software Projecs 1984).
Manic Miner: Matthew Smith 2008 Remix was inspired by an interview with Matthew Smith in the Load 48 issue of Retro Gamer magazine, published in February 2008, in which he commentated on each of the caverns in Manic Miner - including how he would have done things differently.
So I decided to take these comments on board as far as possible within the limitations of the original Manic Miner game-engine, and also make some minor changes of my own while I was at it. I wanted to show off the unused cell-graphics in each cavern by putting some in, bring each room up to the maximum five items, and force you to do things that Matthew Smith clearly intended but didn't enforce, or things you might not otherwise have thought of trying in the original Manic Miner caverns.
The rooms in this variant are harder than the original caverns, but not as hard as my own MM/JSW rooms, and certainly not as quirky! I have used the trick of embedding items in Crumbly cells in many places - you have to get rid of the Crumbly before you can collect the item - as it is an excellent way to protect items from being jumped up for from below.
I wrote this game in less than a day. I had been intending to do it for months, and finally got around to it on 30th December 2008.
I have thoroughly playtested the final version, and I certify that it /is/ possible to complete.
You can consider yourself to have passed Manic Miner: Matthew Smith 2008 Remix if you finish the game using infinite lives (POKE 35136,0) on a real Spectrum, or saving and loading snapshots on an emulator. If you cheat by using any other POKEs, or by using the "6031769" teleport-cheat (POKE 33885,7), you should consider yourself disqualified. ;-)
Manic Miner: Matthew Smith 2008 Remix - Room descriptions
[from the Readme included with the game]
[0] "Central Cavern"
Matthew Smith said he intended the jump from the conveyor to the second-highest platform as a "difficult jump... but I put in a safety net." So I have Aired out the lower platform to enforce the difficult jump. :->
[1] "The Cold Room"
Matthew Smith said he was "thinking about tweaking a pixel. I'm not sure if it would be better light or dark. I must have tried it both ways back then." I believe he was referring to a pixel in the item-graphic, so I have made my best guess as to which one, and toggled it.
I have also added two Crumbly cells to the chimney, knowing that it's okay to embed an item in a Crumbly cell as long as the player /can/ make it crumble.
I have moved that item down to a lower row, forcing the player to go down the chimney rather than jumping out at the top and falling down into the portal. In fact, I have placed the item low enough to make the player feel (s)he can jump up for it from the bottom - you cannot collect it that way because it's embedded in a Crumbly cell.
I have moved the top-left item to force you to walk on a platform you otherwise wouldn't have to, and added some Fire 2 cells to make the top left a bit more interesting.
There are no Fire 1 cells in this room, so I have added some to show the graphic. The double Fire-cells under the top-right item are to stop you jumping up for it from below.
[2] "The Menagerie"
Matthew Smith admitted it was "a bit lame" to have only two kinds of animal. "There should be at least three before you call it a menagerie!" So I have edited the Fire 1 cell-type (originally a poisonous pansy, as in "Central Cavern" to look like a snake, and put some Fire 1 cells in the room. In the process, I have forced you to jump up the leftmost spider's thread, which is actually three Water 2 cells.
[3] "Abandoned Uranium Workings"
Once again, there are no Fire 1 cells in this room, so I have added some, and of course I couldn't resist forcing you to interact with the seals - in both directions! :-> This is enforced using a Crumbly cell that you need to save for a difficult jump later. After all, Matthew Smith described it as "a room full of difficult jumps", yet the original does not require any pixel-perfect jumps, so I have removed several Water-cells to make them pixel-perfect.
[4] "Eugene's Lair"
Matthew Smith said the items are supposed to be stacks of credit-cards. "I had a choice of putting in a line to show they're stacked," he said, so I have attempted to do so - I found it much more difficult than it sounds, especially within the limitations of 8x8 pixels.
I also added a couple of Fire 2 cells to make the top-left a bit more interesting, and started you at the bottom-right so that you have to go up to the top-left (to collect an item that has moved) as well as down from there!
[5] "Pac-Man"
Matthew Smith said the pacmen have legs because they have a diameter of 10 pixels - the maximum width for smooth horizontal
guardians. So I thought it would be interesting to see what they look like without legs, and to rename the cavern for the arcade-game that inspired it.
I've also changed the pixel-patterns for Fire 1 and Item to those from the Software Projects edition of Manic Miner.
The interview mentioned "traversing along platforms with restricted headroom", but it's not really restricted because most of it is Water-cells. Matthew Smith said "I usually tried to get you to go across the screen as many times as possible," but that's not really true of the original. So I've made a few changes in light of these two comments...
There are no Crumbly cells in the original, so I've added some, cleverly designed to make you pay on the second crossing for mistakes on the first crossing.
I have moved the bottom-right item down, forcing you to jump over the bottom-right pacman. There's an innocent-looking block (ILB) to be jumped through - it isn't necessary, because I didn't think it appropriate to make this game overly quirky, but it could save either time or a tight jump over that pacman!
[6] "The Vat"
I have embedded all the items in Crumbly cells, which may surprise a player who tries to jump for the bottom-left item from below. I have moved one item to the left half for a quirky challenge: you have to get rid of the Crumbly cell first, then jump down onto the Earth-cells so that you can jump up for the item from below.
I've added a few Fire 1 cells, because there are none in the original, and to increase the challenge of the left half.
[7] "Donkey Kong"
Matthew Smith said, "I should have put hammers in and it would have been a complete tribute to Donkey Kong." So I have redrawn the item-graphic as a hammer, and changed the title accordingly.
Matthew Smith said flicking the second switch was optional on purpose rather than an oversight. "You don't have to kill the monkey, man!" So I have added a fifth item to force you to at least to go up there, as you have to liberate it from a Crumbly cell before you can jump for it. I have also added some Water-cells that force you to squeeze past the cyan barrel on your way down.
I have added some more Crumbly cells, primarily to make them visible, and an extra Fire 1 cell to make it trickier to escape after collecting the bottom-right item.
[8] "Wacky Amoebatrons"
This is supposed to be a test of what shapes you can clear, and Matthew Smith originally wanted to make the tall, thin sticks to go up and down so that you had to jump over them at the correct time. Of course this can't really be done properly in Manic Miner, because all horizontal guardians in a room have to use the same sprite. It could be implemented in Jet Set Willy using two guardians, but I was unwilling to upgrade this game to JSW64 just for that, so instead I have moved the horizontal guardians up one cell-row, chopping off the wheels and having the sticks vary in height instead.
The article says: 'It's also the first level to undergo a change when Manic Miner was re-released through Software Projects. "Yeah, the amoebatrons were originally the Bug-Byte logo, so I changed them when I left. Didn't need any legal advice on that one!"
In fact there are no changes between the Bug-Byte and Software Projects editions of "Wacky Amoebatrons", but ironically, the jellyfish in "Amoebatrons' Revenge" [17] were changed in the Software Projects edition to a sprite that resembles the Bug-Byte logo much more closely than the vertical sprites in "Wacky Amoebatrons"! So for this remix, I decided to change the vertical sprites in "Wacky Amoebatrons" to those in the Software Projects edition of "Amoebatrons' Revenge".
I have also added some instances of unused cell-types - Crumbly, Fire 1 and Fire 2 - removed some Water-cells to enforce the difficult jumps, and added four more items.
I admit being cruel with my placement of Crumbly cells here - the top-left crumbling platform requires you to jump onto it, and walk right before you jump left, so as to avoid the Fire 2 cell by the portal!
[9] "The Ewoks of Endor"
I have renamed this cavern to make the Star Wars influence a bit more explicit (Manic Miner being released in 1983 - the same year as Return Of The Jedi).
I have also added some Fire 1 cells and a conveyor, both of which were absent from the original. I have moved one of the items, forcing you to jump over the red Ewok - and that item is Crumbly-protected. I have started you at the bottom-middle, forcing you to go up as well as down the left half, and giving you a choice of which half to do first.
[10] "Attack of the Mutant Telephones"
I have tweaked this cavern to make you cross it clockwise rather than anticlockwise, by making the jump over the magenta telephone one-way, and allowing you to jump up to the portal after collecting the top-left item.
[11] "Return of the Alien Kong Beast"
I have extended the middle-left wall to protect the top item from premature collection, and removed four Water-cells from the bottom-left to enforce the clever jump from the platform in row 9 to the Water-cell at (6,10). I have moved the item from the Kong-shaft to somewhere more meaningful.
[12] "Ore Refinery"
I have blocked the left ladder and added a couple on the right, so that you have to ascend the cavern platform by platform rather than simply climbing the left ladder and jumping onto the top platform.
I have filled the gaps in the platforms with Crumbly cells to protect the items from being jumped up for from below, and added some Fire-cells (the Fire 1 pixel-pattern is corrupted by the Cell-Graphics Bug).
[13] "Skylab Landing Bay"
I have replaced the Water-cells in the non-Skylab columns with Crumbly cells, so that it's clearer which they are but you cannot wait in them. I have moved the rightmost item to force you to jump onto the rightmost platform, and added an extra item inside the portal - just to show you that you can do that. The black cell near the bottom-left is a Fire-cell: to ensure that you jump onto the leftmost platform but do not fall off it!
[14] "The Bank"
I have to say that this is the most underdeveloped room in
the original Manic Miner: it doesn't force you to go up the left-hand side to the portal, it doesn't force you to do the difficult jumps needed to jump up for the top-right item, and it doesn't force you to jump over the cheque. All these flaws can be fixed simply by removing the trellis, as I have in this version.
I have embedded the leftmost item in a Crumbly cell, to prevent you simply jumping up for it from below.
There are two hidden items in the room-definition, as the fourth item has a colour-attribute of 255, which terminates the sequence. So I have undeleted these items.
[15] "Flag Bugs"
'"I'd run out of names. Or maybe I was thinking in hexadecimal and thought it didn't need one," says Matt. And what are those enemies? "Flag bugs! In the code. If flag bug equals..."'
I have put Water-cells in the portal to stop you simply dropping down to collect the item, although it does remove the need for a jump over the portal to collect the top-left item. I think it is more important to force the player to jump over the yellow flag-bug, which is obviously the route that Matthew Smith intended.
I have added Fire 2 cells in the top row, just to show them. The Water 2 cells that I put in the portal actually look like switches, so it doesn't make much sense to make them visible.
There is a hidden item in the room-definition, as the fifth item has a colour-attribute of 255, which terminates the sequence. So I have undeleted this item.
[16] "The Data Warehouse"
As a computer-scientist, I've always wanted to write a variant of The Warehouse with this title!
I have started you at the bottom-left, forcing you to cross the bottom of the screen and work your way towards the top left. The portal is also at the bottom-left, forcing you to cross the bottom in both directions. I had to change the bottom row of Crumbly cells to Water to stop you dropping down to the bottom, which makes it easier in some ways.
I have embedded the items in Crumbly cells, which makes the second-leftmost trickier to collect, and the top-right impossible if I didn't remove the Fire-cell above it.
I have changed the vertical sprite from the lawn-mower thresher of the Bug-Byte edition to the impossible triangle of the Software Projects edition (i.e. the Software Projects logo), as mentioned in the article.
[17] "War of the Worlds"
Paul Drury suggested that the vertical sprites resembled the invaders from War Of The Worlds. Matthew Smith's response: "I thought they were jellyfish but yeah, maybe they have evolved into a higher life form."
Because of this, I decided against replacing the vertical sprites with those of the Software Projects edition of "Amoebatrons' Revenge", which already appear in this game's variant of "Wacky Amoebatrons" [8].
I have replaced the conveyor-animated Water-cells with an actual conveyor, just as I did in the Manic Miner 4 variant of this cavern. I have altered the horizontal guardians and their sprites, tightened up the difficult jumps, and populated the cavern with some Crumbly, Fire 1 and Fire 2 cells, just as I did in "Wacky Amoebatrons".
[18] "Solar Power Generator"
I have added some Crumbly, Fire 1 and Fire 2 cells, and two more items. There isn't enough air to complete this cavern with solar power, so I have skipped over the code that saps your air-supply:
#8D88: JR #8DA5
#8D88: 18 1B 00 00 00 00 00 00
#8D90: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
[19] "The Final Barrier"
I have changed Water-cells to Crumbly cells, and added some Fire 2 cells.