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
|
|
|
|
|
Message: 4599
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 16/11/2004
Subject: ANNOUNCE: Manic Miner: Neighbours - Allana Truman
Happy 26th birthday Allana!
Today I release my new game, Manic Miner: Neighbours - Allana Truman
(MM:N-AT), a tribute to my favourite character ever to grace the
great Australian soap-opera, and a playable visual interpretation of
the plotlines involving her and boyfriend Lance Wilkinson. The game
also serves as a more general patch-study of Neighbours as it was in
2001.
It's an `oldskool' platform-game for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum,
emulators for which are freely downloadable from the Internet:
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
It's based on the game-engine from Matthew Smith's classic game from
1983, Manic Miner, where you have to collect up to five items from
each level before advancing to the next, whilst avoiding various
deadly hazards and solving physical puzzles. The basic controls are
left, right, jump... and pause!
[ http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/ ]
I consider MM:N-AT to be the best of the five Manic Miner games I've
written, as it features such brilliant rooms (IMHO) as "Spread The
Word", "Dr. Karl Kennedy's Surgery" and "Sci-Fi Collectibles". It's
not as mind-bogglingly difficult as my previous Manic Miner game Ma
jolie, as I set out with the goal of making it fun to play.
But it's certainly tough by ordinary standards, so I have included
an EASY VERSION of the game which reduces the need for saving memory-
snapshots every few seconds, whilst retaining most of the quirky
features such as jumping through innocent-looking wall-blocks and
having to relieve items of crumbling floor, and fun manoeuvres such
as stopping on a conveyor so that you can jump straight up.
[ http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/features.html ]
MM:N-AT is the most visually inspired of my Manic Miner and Jet Set
Willy games to date, as I have explored the idea of designing some
of the rooms as playable pictures - "The Coffee Shop"
and "Lassiter's Lake" being prime examples.
MM:N-AT implements significant modifications to the Manic Miner game-
engine, all of which are documented so that competent Spectrum-
hackers will be able to reuse them:
1. It's the first new game to incorporate John Elliott's patch which
allows any room in a MM game to have vertical guardians, Eugene,
Kong Beasts and switches, Skylabs, and solar power.
2. I have transferred the Jet Set Willy item-collection sound to the
Manic Miner game-engine.
3. You play as a different character in "Dr. Karl Kennedy's Surgery"
(like in "The Nightmare Room" of Jet Set Willy).
4. I have fixed the bug which tramples over memory (notably Room 7)
when you fall off the bottom of the screen or jump up off the top.
5. The in-game tune is played at half-speed.
6. I have fixed an undesirable feature in colouring vertical
guardians (their colour-attributes are no longer ORed with the
background colour-attribute).
7. I have altered the end-of-game swordfish-routine so that the
player no longer appears above the portal, and his legs are erased
properly from under the portal (i.e. to the left as well as directly
below).
MM:N-AT is available now for downloading from my website:
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/download/
Changes since the 13th November beta:
1. Edited README.TXT to say that I have uploaded screenshots of MM:N-
AT (12 rooms) to the Photos section of this Group, and screenshots
of all 20 rooms plus the title-screen and loading-screen to the
Photos section of the allanatruman Yahoo! Group. Added references to
these screenshots in Tips for "A Reel Challenge" [1] and "Lou's
Place" [9].
2. Edited TECHNICA.TXT to add instructions on /how/ to reuse my
patches in your own Manic Miner games.
3. Added something extra for hackers to discover 8-)
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/download/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manicminerandjetsetwilly/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/allanatruman/
P.S. I've also reissued my Jet Set Willy game 1.WE PRETTY after
discovering that the 7th July 2003 version had the README.TXT for
2.GOODNITE LUDDITE! :-O
|
|
|