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: 4627
Author: ewgf3
Date: 27/12/2004
Subject: Unbelievable (read and be disgusted)...
Following a link I found on WOS's (World of Spectrum) message board,
I found a review (ha ha) of Manic Miner, by Jeff Minter (so WOS has
it). I say review, as it's basically just a vicious (and largely
untrue) attack both on the ZX Spectrum and Manic Miner. Regarding the
Spectrum, he claims:
"The Speccy never had a decent keyboard (rubber keys or those nasty
plasticky square Amstrad-style keys, never a proper, recognisably
keyboard-like keyboard, with proper keys and everything, like us
decent Commodore folk were used to), or any sound effects to speak of"
Erm, the original 48K keyboard was great for game, though admittedly
not for word processing, whilst the +2/+3 had great keyboards. And as
for sound, alright so early 48K games were often lacking, but later
48K stuff and most 128K stuff were fine.
"We [Commodore 64 owners]had hardware scroll, they had a poor Z80
busting a gut just to shovel stuff around on the screen and you
could forget about frame sync. We had hardware sprites, and they had
flickery things that changed colour at odd times in big square
blocks."
True, the Spectrum never hard either hardware scrolling, or hardware
sprites, but we had great games with scrolling, and superb sprite
games. And as for bug square blocks, what about the C64's huge pixels?
And didn't we have frame sync? Well, granted JSW and MM didn't, but
most games released after 19484/85 did.
Since I don't want to spend all night repeating his mindless drivel,
I'll just quote the following line from his "review" of Manic Miner:
"If ever there were a set-piece illustrating how not to design a
game, Manic Miner was it."
Just read the "review" at
http://www.wayoftherodent.com/reviews/rev_manicminer.htm
if you can stomach it. And if anyone can name me a better C64
platform game than Manic Miner then please post here. I'm not saying
there isn't one, just that I've never seen it, and I've spent years
downloading and playing platform games for most 8-bit emulators,
including the C64 (have you seen Ghosts 'n' Goblins on the C64 - it's
brilliant, though not as good as Manic Miner).
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