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Message: 5120
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 20/11/2005
Subject: Sendy and Daniel's Mind Control: Andrew's first playtest
I'm under halfway through playtesting Mind Control, but since it
will probably be at least a week before I resume, I'll comment on
the rooms I have visited so far.
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The Praise
----------
The game contains some excellent rooms (as detailed below), and I'm
very impressed with the exploitation of quirky features, and the
thoughtful way the blocks are arranged in general.
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The Criticism
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The biggest problem I have with this game is its geography. It has a
huge branching-factor (many rooms having two or more exits whose
destinations aren't just dead ends), and what makes this so
frustrating is the number of one-way exits.
It's not a good feeling to be playing a room and, after saving a
snapshot and checking out all the exits, being forced to make a
choice that makes me think "how the hell am I going to get back here
to follow the other path?"
And I get this feeling time after time when playing Mind Control.
It's an awful lot to push on my mental stack, and although I'm
nowhere near the final stages of item-completion yet, I don't relish
the prospect of having to revisit done-and-dusted paths over and
over again (or even trying to find the start of these paths again)
to track down the last few missing items.
(SPECSAISIE ItemsJSW tells you which items remain to be collected in
a given 48K JSW snapshot, but since SPECSAISIE currently lacks a
model of 128K memory, although it can enumerate the uncollected
items in a JSW128 game it cannot tell you which rooms they are in -
not even the room-numbers, since it treats the item-table exactly as
though it were a JSW48 item-table.)
I guess there's not much that could be done - or should be done -
to the map at this stage of development, but perhaps you [Daniel]
could review all the one-way exits in terms of wanting to make the
game more navigation-friendly?
The fact that it's such a *large* game exacerbates the geography-
problem. I'm not really keen on the idea of JSW games having more
than 64 rooms anyway - with so many MM/JSW games, and so little time
in my life to play them, I prefer JSW in smaller doses.
The average 64-room JSW game takes me between one and two hours to
complete, but my current playtest of Mind Control - which isn't even
half-complete - has already taken me three hours (not including the
time it's taken me to write this message whilst looking at the rooms
I visited in JSWED).
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Room-by-Room Comments
---------------------
I'm not going to comment on every room, but I will no doubt comment
on some other rooms when I have completed my playtest.
[1] "Sky Landing": A surreal, even We-Prettyish room. But please
could we have some Fire-cells in the top or bottom row, as it's
rather easy to fall to infinite death in the room below?
_____In particular, a JSW player should be able to fall off the
bottom of the screen from a height of four (or fewer) character-rows
without expecting an infinite-death scenario.
[7] "Coming Down": A nice room, reminiscent of "Rampant" in _JSW
(again)_ and "The Slippery Slip" in Party Willy, but there's a nasty
infinite-death scenario if you walk in after collecting the item
in "Two Signs and a Vision" [27].
_____A JSW player should never encounter infinite death by *walking*
out of a screen - even if they should have seen the hazard on their
way in just a few moments before.
[16] "Skylab Recuperation Bay": A really cool room-idea, to refer to
a Manic Miner character like this. :-)
[17] "... nor this!!!": If you enter this room at the top-left, you
can walk back left through the wall into an infinite-death scenario
in [95] - and it is my natural instinct to do so, rather than take
the one-way exit into this room.
_____Replacing the two Earth-cells at (1,0) and (2,0) with Fire-
cells would force the player to walk right into this room to avoid
being killed repeatedly on entry, and would eliminate the above IDS.
But the bigger question is: why make this a one-way exit at all?
[20] "A Decrepit Passageway": Just wanted to praise the difficulty
of retrieving the top-left item from the red crab without
sacrificing a life - it took me longer than usual to conclude that
this was possible! The middle item can easily fool you into losing a
life, too! :-)
[24] "... and wound up here!": Aww, where's the fall-without-dying
POKE gone? :-( I realise this is as much a criticism of JSWED/JSW128
as of Mind Control, but there's not much point in having superjump
without fall-any-height.
_____I miss the cool falling-sequence from _space doubt_, and if I
ever get around to writing a JSW game based on _Home and Away_, I
plan to call the start-room "The Last Shower" that the older
characters keep saying they didn't come down in!
[25] "A Ruined Lookout": A prime example of an attractive colour-
scheme, as blue on black so often is. And it's cool to see a fake
item, like I read about on this Group just a few days ago! :-)
_____But, when coming up from [110], I omitted to take the leftmost
item before leaving this room, and I'll have to pay for this mistake
later in my playtest, much to my frustration. Please could we have a
workaround, such as an Earth-cell at (9,9) - or better still a two-
way-exit from [110]?
[26] "The Marooning": It's cool to see a new starting-sequence, even
if it does look a little artificial (a patch would do it better -
not that I'd bother to make the effort myself, but I'm reminded of
the brilliant patch-vector in _Willy Takes a Trip_: "The Garden of
Forbidden Fruits").
[30] "Wow! It's so hot in here!!!": Must be something in the
atmosphere? ;-) Some nice features in this room, and a classic
example of needing to get your timing right on the conveyor.
[37] "The Underground Pyramid": An atmospheric room, reminiscent of
a screen in the Amstrad CPC game _Roland in Time_, this type of
challenge is rare in MM/JSW games. But I don't think you intended
the ILB at the bottom-left, which dumps you to infinite death in
[105].
[39] "Rope Defect": Only an expert will conclude that it's possible
to jump onto the rope from the bottom-left, but this game is
targeted at expert players... isn't it? :-)
[44] "A Nightmarish Walk in the Clouds": A very well-put-together
challenging room, even if - with Water and Fire looking completely
alike - it is a little frustrating to hear the `glint' of a lost
life every five seconds!*
_____In a case such as this, I would tend to make the two cell-types
look slightly different, like the smiling and frowning faces in We
Pretty's "TH E CAR ROT OF REF LEC T I O N".
---
* using instant snapshots: I don't know about other emulators, but
RealSpectrum allows you to press Alt+ScrollLock to save one snapshot
in its own memory, and ScrollLock to reload it (without the hassle
of typing filenames), which adds a whole new dimension to Spectrum
gaming.
[46] "Clouds over the Plain. No Rain": If you try to jump up into
the room above, via the invisible rope, you encounter either
infinite death or getting `hanged' on the rope (infinitely stuck
between the two rooms).
[47] "Outside the Castle Tower": A very attractive and atmospheric
screen, marred only by the BRIGHTness of the Fire-cells which makes
them look garish (ditto re. [48, 59]).
[49] "The Rugged Mountain Top": It's great to see some quirky
features so early in the game, although it's rather unfair to embed
a Ramp-cell amongst the identical-looking Fire-cells to hide the
fact that you can jump off the right-hand edge of the screen (I
spotted the Ramp-cell when I lost a life, so I went that way first -
in fact I have yet to go down from this room, as I'm sure everyone
else will have done on their first go!).
[51] "Back to Life, Back to Reality": Vicious! The three rightmost
guardians, combined with the rightmost static nasty, provide a level
of sadism usually seen only in Broadsoft games - especially when, if
you came from the left, you have to turn back immediately after
exiting right! (see next)
[52] "Everywhere But in the Water": I first entered this screen via
the room-path [98 up, 12 right, 51 right], but had to turn back due
to a nasty encounter with the black fish at the left edge of the
screen.
[55] "The heat has melted the snow": I like the wolf(?) sprite, and
the way you have to jump through an overhead wall-block to collect
the item it guards from below. I also like the way you have to turn
and stand in one character-column to jump for the leftmost item.
[59] "Climbing up the Castle Tower": Trying to jump for the upper
item is a prime example of where it looks like you should be able to
make a certain manoeuvre in JSW, but you can't.
[62] "Snow Problem": A vast improvement on the version of this room
that I saw in _The Unlucky Seven_. Another fake item, and I must
admit that even /I/ jumped on top of, instead of /through/ the ILB
to collect the item above it! :-o This game really does contain
some great examples of using items to lure players to their deaths.
[63] "Be careful what you choose!": It's unfair for a JSW player to
encounter infinite death by falling off the bottom of the screen
from a height of four (or fewer) character-rows - especially from
just *one* character-row!
_____I would eliminate the infinite death and rename this room to
something more appropriate (I don't approve of playing-hints in room-
names anyway).
[67] "The Frustration Machine": This room isn't frustrating - it's
delightful! Apart from its contributions to the general geography-
problem, that is.
_____I particularly like the way you get to walk through the
forcefields at the top-right - the only situation I've seen where
holding the jump-key as you walk under a wall (as distinct from
stopping on a conveyor as in "The Final Barrier" or "Tree Root") is
actually useful.
[70] "The Elusive Passage": When entering at the bottom-left, you
have to try to jump over the shaft (which any good JSW player knows
is impossible) in order to be caught by the rope in the room below.
_____If you just fall down the left-hand side of the shaft (which
looks like the safer option on the grounds that you're walking
rather than jumping into an unfamiliar room), you encounter infinite
death in the room below.
[73] "Crazy Milk Drink!": The geography-problem is probably at its
worst in this and its adjacent rooms. I confess I swore out loud
when I exited at the lower left, and came back only to find that the
lower section of this room cannot be crossed from left to right.
Luckily I was able to undo this mistake with a recent file-snapshot
(as opposed to instant snapshot - see footnote at [44]).
[91] "The Elusive Passage continues": A delightfully quirky room to
traverse - except that it's possible to hang yourself on the rope
(cf. [46]).
[97] "Scary Dungeon": Atmospheric and fun to play, this is the best
example of a ramp-conveyor (as well as a conveyor-ramp) I've ever
seen. I almost always write off ramp-conveyors as an ugly construct
when writing my own rooms, but here it works well.
[98] "Yes! Willy's a lucky bastard!!!": Are you aware that it's
possible to take the bottom-right exit? This sets you on the
following bizarre room-path: [right to 113, left to 6, right to 2,
left to 6].
_____And if you jump through the overhead wall-block at (0,0), you
can then walk left out of [12], which wraps back to [12].
[108] "The Haunted Log Cabin": Quite possibly the best room without
guardians ever written, this room is very cunning in its use of
quirky features, not to mention visually attractive with its non-
blank Air-cells.
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Replies
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Daniel wrote:
>This is a really cool reinterpretation of Willy's toilet-run! :-)
> The Story
>
> Alas, Willy hasn't collected all of the shining items yet, and he
> doesn't have the energy necessary to run fast enough to enter the
> launching pad.
> The gameAny particular order? ;-) (Seriously, the geography makes it very
>
> You need to visit all of the rooms in order to complete the game
> successfully.
difficult to find an efficient route.)
> Notable featuresQuirky features relating to superjump have barely been explored at
>
> The room "A Doubly Problematic Stairway" (034) exploits some
> interesting quirky features relating to the superjump. I barely
> touched the subject, but I have the feeling that it's a large new
> field (or has someone explored it extensively before?) because the
> superjump seems to modify significantly the way quirky features
> relating to jumping through blocks work.
all, TTBOMK, outside of this room.
I've avoided ever using superjump in my games due to its nasty side-
effects, namely that you can become misaligned with the platforms
and fall off the bottom of the screen all too easily (glad to see
this game not having this problem, unlike some games based on
earlier hacklevels of JSW128 where the superjump-rooms are ruined by
this bug).
> I believe that the final sequence is very nice and worthI hope I manage to do so `honestly' rather than resorting to runtime
> struggling to reach.
POKE 34271,2 ;-)
> A special request towards the native English speakers do let meYour English is excellent, even by native standards.
> know if there are any problems or imperfections in the room names
> or the scrolling message! I will be very glad to correct them :-)
One minor quibble is that the room-names are not entirely consistent
in their usage of upper/lower case: for example, the nouns and
adjectives in this game's room-names usually start with a capital
letter, while the prepositions and articles usually start with a
lower-case letter, but there are exceptions (it seems that the room-
names containing a verb resort to sentence-case for some reason).
Of course, in a game which reuses many existing rooms, you may feel
you wish to copy the room-names exactly, but since you've already
modified the rooms in other ways...
I also think the capital B in "Everywhere But in the Water" looks
inconsistent with your convention for upper/lower case.
In the scrolly, it says "128k JSW engine". I take issue with this on
two grounds:
1. Although some computer-scientists do use 'k' for "kilobyte" (1024
bytes), it's more standard to use capital 'K' (or even 'KB', though
not in Spectrum-circles), since little 'k' is a common abbreviation
of kilo- (1000).
2. "128K JSW engine" could mean JSW128 or JSW64. So I suggest you
change it to "JSW128 engine".
Thanks for mentioning me in the scrolly! :-) But the scrolly
contains two sentences giving credits for graphics, with some
overlap.
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
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