Resource centre for ZX Spectrum games
using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
Archive of the
Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group
messages
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Message: 3373
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 21/02/2003
Subject: Farewell Dan Richardson / Soul Miner
I am sorry to hear that Dan Richardson has retired without even
finishing Demons.
Demons goes down in history as one of the Great Lost JSW Games, along
with Vidar Eriksen's Maria vs. Some Bastards, Equinox Tetrachloride's
JSW 96 Remix (I recently emailed him, and may have made /a little/
progress towards persuading him to complete it), and Philip Bee's JSW
(again) (not officially abandoned, but has been 99% complete for
three or four years now, without ever being gamma-released). And who
could forget about Matthew Smith's abandoned game Willy Meets The
Taxman?
I've explored the final Demons demo under the MacSpectacle emulator,
and it's very definitely one of the better JSW games. Visually
attractive, and with several ILBs! :-)
I haven't played the demos of The Journey Home - Chapter One: New
York and The Megatree, as I cannot handle 128K Z80 files (at some
point I might look into extending SPECSAISIE to do such).
I recently typed Edward Martland's Soul Miner into my real Spectrum,
and it is one of the best JSW games I have ever seen. It's very
visually attractive and atmospheric, has more quirky features than
most, and the many teleporters give it a unique feel geographically.
The only thing I don't like about Soul Miner is that it has a lot of
one-way exits, which can be very frustrating. When I come to write a
game with a lot of teleporters, I will always provide backpointers as
in "Sprung A Leak"/"The Room With No Aim".
Now that I have essentially finished my PhD thesis, I'm typing four
kilobyte-blocks of JSW per day into my real Spectrum. This is
beginning to turn the screw on the recent high release-rate - Soul
Miner only took me two weeks, for example. Only Willy the Rogue, ZX
Willy the Bug Slayer, Jet Set Emily: Baby On The Go, Frosya Lite
Version, Still Stealin', JET SET WILLY 5: ZX HEROES, JSW:FTB and Mr
Top Hat to go! ;-)
--
Andrew Broad
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/
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