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Message: 5350

Author: andrewbroad

Date: 26/12/2005

Subject: Re: Mind Control (and ZX Heroes)

 

Daniel wrote:

I have tried designing various types of helmet for Willy. I was
quite pleased with them aesthetically, but I am afraid that the
additional pixels would make certain places in the game
impossible to pass (like the right-hand side red guardian in
"Magic in a Quiet Countryside" while passing the room from left to
right). So introducing a helmet would entail the necessity to:
- play-test the game thoroughly;
- modify the possible problematic places.

I had a similar issue in my MM game _Ma jolie_. If I remember
rightly, I wanted to replace Willy with Kari Krišniková, but found
that this made "The Hive of No Desire" not item-completable. For
although Kari is much thinner than Miner Willy, her long hair tends
to get in the way.

Not wanting to compromise the guardians in "The Hive of No Desire",
I kept Willy as the playing character, but replaced him with Kari in
the easy variant, _Ma jolite_.

Thank you also for the explanation about the items in "Dangerous
Rapids" and "The Underground River". I know what you mean, now. I
haven't playtested it yet, but it looks like it's going to increase
the challenge significantly, because since the player will be on
the conveyor, he/she will have to get the jump exactly right the
first time, otherwise they will have to go back through several
rooms to try again.

Or, more realistically, sacrifice a life or load a snapshot.

I bet you have completed "Party Willy" JSW128 version! :-)

Of course! :-o Although I didn't record the toilet-time in my
personal list of toilet-times, because it hadn't been released yet.

In fact there is one other JSW128 game I have completed: Jet Set
Willy 5: ZX Heroes (toilet-time 9:39am).

Which reminds me: I know for a fact that the latest gamma-release of
ZX Heroes is *NOT* Igor's latest alpha-revision! When are we going
to see the long-awaited rerelease?

/You/ have evidently coped with "The Devil's Workshop", Andrew, but
just a tip for those who will follow in your footsteps: jumping
over the red guardian on the ramp requires just this, a jump
straight up.

I did it by hiding under the ramp:
BBBBBB......
.BBBBBB.....
*.BBBBBB....
...BBBBBB...
|$|.BBBBBB..
.....BBBBBB.
......BBBBBB

Look who's talking! The author who makes the player go TWICE
through "The Passage of the Marshes" (55) in "Jet Set Willy: Lord
of the Rings"!

Only necessary if you're playing the easy version and you go right
first at "The Breaking of the Fellowship" (making it necessary to
teleport back there (not possible in the hard version) and return to
Mordor later).

Incidentally, speaking about fairness in JSW games, Andrew, you
admit in the text file accompanying "JSW: LOTR", concerning the
room "The Breaking of the Fellowship" (25):

"As the player, you have to decide whether to go left now, or
whether to turn right and make for Mordor immediately. If you make
the wrong choice, the quest will be irreversibly doomed to
failure".

I would say that this breaks the (as yet inexistent rule): "A JSW
player should never have to face blind choices, which may make the
game impossible to complete". What do you say? :-)

In general I wholeheartedly agree with this rule, but I stand by the
decision I made in this rare instance. The idea being that it was
okay to make the player start over after completing two thirds of
the game with a mistake that (s)he would surely never make twice.

And JSW:LOTR was released at a time when there were only 26 gamma-
released Spectrum MM/JSW products - not 73 as there are today! ;-)

(Re. cell-coordinates)

By the way, Andrew, why do you put the vertical value first and the
horizontal second? For me the most natural convention would be
(x,y) where "x" is the horizontal value and "y" – the vertical
value. And I would also start counting from the lower left-hand
corner.

In Spectrum BASIC, "PRINT AT y,x;" positions the character-cursor at
Row y and Column x, with "AT 0,0" being the top-left character-
square.

So I decided to adopt Spectrum BASIC's convention (except that I
enclose the coordinates in parentheses, as I was taught in secondary-
school maths.) rather than your suggestion (which I was also taught
in secondary-school maths., in the context of graphs which plot one
continuous variable against another).

Counting the rows from the top down makes sense because this is the
order in which they are stored in the Spectrum's video-RAM (ditto
re. JSW's screen-buffers and room-format).

JSW CK uses the (y,x) convention when printing cell-coordinates as
you move the cursor around, and I hope that JSWED will soon follow
suit.

(Re. "The Devil's Workshop")

The name of the room was inspired by "Satan's Shed" (023) from "We
Pretty" - Andrew, please forgive not keeping the original spelling
of your room's name! - but I always pronounce it this way in my
thoughts :-) .

You mean in your thoughts you /spell/ it as "Satan's Shed" rather
than "S A T AN S S H ED"? (I decided to use only
capital letters and spaces, and the solecistic spacing was inspired
by David Bowie's 1997 album EART HL I NG).

I wonder how in your thoughts you spell (and pronounce)
"THENEARLYINGONESERRED", "KHEN HAUS KA RI CZUCHS ENN EGG"
and "KIANO TF OR ALL THEE GGSIN SLOVA"...

However, I wouldn't really set the 64 rooms limit as a sort of
"magic" number.

I do exactly this in my own JSW games, apart from Party Willy where
my initial shortlist came to 68 essential rooms (hence my decision
to make 128), and possibly the Narnia and Star Wars games that I
plan to write in the future.

So I'll always start by composing a list of room-ideas, then select:
* JSW48 or JSW64:{X,Y,Z,[} if I have fewer than 65 room-ideas;
* JSW64:{V,W} if I have between 65 and 128 room-ideas;
* JSW128 if (God forbid) I have more than 128 room-ideas!

My next JSW game, 3.AFRIKAAN, has to be JSW48 because I always
intended the Kari Krišníková games to be JSW48, and I still stand by
that decision in the light of JSW64. Currently I have 53 "definite"
room-ideas, and 34+n "maybe" room-ideas (where n is the number of
rooms in a maze of twisty little passages, yet to be decided).

I have no idea whether some of the unused room-ideas will one day
end up in a fourth Kari Krišníková game. To be honest, my
inspiration for the Kari Krišníková series is becoming laboured,
partly because I'm no longer having the kind of dreams that inspired
We Pretty and Goodnite Luddite, and partly because I'm having
difficulty planning the Afrikaan diary as an original, coherent
story rather than a mish-mash of weakly-related plotlines that
infringe any number of copyrights.

I didn't know Paracetamol was helpful in struggling with MM/JSW
challenges :-) . Are there any other substances worth
recommending? :-) (any suggestions, DrUnKeN mAsTeR!!! ? :-) )

Only inasmuch as it is an effective cure for headaches. I certainly
wouldn't condone the use of non-medicinal drugs (legal or otherwise).

This has been the case so far with my playing "MM: Ma jolie" – I've
been stuck in the third room ("Majolica"), and I still have no idea
how to pass it (see details in message # 4859 of August 6, 2005,
point g). Can someone help, please???

See Message 3594.

So how come you haven't completed more JSW128 games? :-)

Before my real Spectrum died, I didn't really fancy the idea of
getting far into a JSW128 game only to have it crash on me or meet
an infinite-death scenario, and the best Spectrum-emulator I could
find for my Mac - MacSpectacle 1.8.2 - didn't support JSW128.

My real Spectrum and the Mac both died in 2003, then I got my PC and
installed RealSpectrum. I began playing through MM/JSW games in
chronological order, but am still only up to 1998 after almost two
whole years of distractions kept me from my Sunday-afternoon gamma-
playing routine (a routine I intend to resume when I have finished
my current backlog of beta-testing duties).

And no JSW128 games were released until 2000, except the original
JSW128 whose first gamma-release appears to have been in February
1996. I intend to play the latest revision of the original JSW128
(Version 0.04 Hacklevel 7) after I have played the recently-
discovered JSW games from the 1980s: Spaceman Willy and Dr. Jet Set
Willy.

I've been using Vaggelis Kapartzianis's ZX32 most of the time. I
should try RealSpectrum one day, though, because it must be very
good if you like it so much :-) .

I've been intending to try SPIN for ages (not Spectaculator, because
I dislike shareware), and perhaps I should try ZX32 too, since both
you and Sendy use it. :-)

But do these emulators have the features I love so much in
RealSpectrum?
1. the ability to save a snapshot in memory by just pressing
Alt+ScrollLock, and to reload it by pressing ScrollLock;
2. maximum speed simply by holding down the ` key until that pesky
slow guardian has moved out of the way;
3. full-screen mode with NOTHING on the screen that you wouldn't see
on a real Spectrum (except that the graphics are perfectly sharp...
sometimes /too/ perfect, as in MM4's "Dotty" or JSW:LOTR's "A Knife
in the Dark", where the cell-graphics /didn't/ look identical on a
TV-screen).

Well, my humble suggestion would be: give a little bit more
priority to JSW over tennis :-) . I wouldn't dare advise you to
give up tennis altogether (I have no right to interfere with your
life /that much/, have I? :-) ), but why not relax tennis a bit,
and do more MM/JSW instead? :-)

I had, in fact, come to this conclusion before you suggested it. I
never know how much time I'll have for MM/JSW in the rest of my
life, so I intend to make the most of it while I can.

My passion for MM/JSW has really reignited during tennis's off-
season, as has the activity in this Group. I have no desire to put
MM/JSW back on the backburner when the 2006 tennis-season starts.

--
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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