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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 5471
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 05/02/2006
Subject: JSW64:BBC - Andrew's first playtest
How to get SPECSAISIE to list the items remaining in a JSW64
snapshot:
* for the 128-room variants {V,W} use
"java ItemsJSW128 -c PLAYTEST.SNA";
* for the 64-room variants {X,Y,Z,[} use
"java ItemsJSW -c PLAYTEST.SNA" (it won't get the room-names right -
you have to go by the room-numbers).
Today I playtested MM and JSW1 of JSW64:BBC. I plan to playtest JSW2
next week.
MM is not completable, because of a bug in "Return of the Alien Kong
Beast".
JSW1 is not completable, because of problems in "Rescue
Esmerelda", "Emergency Generator", "Inside the Megatrunk" and "Under
the Drive".
=========================
JSW64{Y}: BBC Manic Miner
=========================
The first 18 rooms are essentially the same as the original Spectrum
MM, apart from the font, the colour-schemes, minor differences to
the pixel-patterns and screen-layouts (e.g. the lack of Fire-2 cells
at the top of the Kong-Beast rooms), and that the rooms are numbered
from [1] to [20] rather than [0] to [19] (leaving [0] and [21-63]
blank).
I'm impressed by how the game-engine has been hacked to change the
ink-colours of Willy (which matches the text-colour) and of the
items (whose colour-cycle is now only 3 time-frames), and to vary
these colours from room to room.
Is the BBC Micro only capable of displaying 4 colours at any one
time?
----------------------
Room-specific comments
----------------------
[9] "Wacky Amoebatrons": JSWED says there are two items at (1,16),
but one of them is autocollected after one time-frame - presumably
when the other item has yellow ink, the same as Willy?
Ditto re. "Amoebatrons' Revenge" [18].
[12] "Return of the Alien Kong Beast": the first switch alters the
right boundary of the wrong guardian, causing it to crash into a
platform and kill you (it seems that the code is hard-wired to
change Guardian 5). It is therefore not possible to pass this room
and complete the game.
[19] "The Meteor Storm": a new room to Spectrum-users, featuring
force-fields and Skylabs-that-don't-follow-the-regular-pattern! It's
always cool to see a novel use of patch-vectors.
[20] "The Final Barrier": old title, new room! It looks like there
are two different ways of completing this room until you realise
that the wrong way forces you to go back over crumbling cells that
are no longer there, while the right way entails a tight jump under
a horizontal guardian - two simple but underused tricks.
=============================
JSW64{X}: BBC Jet Set Willy 1
=============================
Again, it's essentially just Spectrum JSW with different colour-
schemes and room-numbers [1-60]. The screen-layouts are almost
identical to Spectrum JSW, but it looks like the guardians have been
placed by hand - resulting in some collisions! (which don't kill you
in BBC JSW).
----------------------
Room-specific comments
----------------------
[1] "Watch Tower": if you jump up off the top of the screen, you go
not to "The Off Licence" but to "Ballroom East" [38], where there's
a distinct possibility that you'll land under the rightmost
amoebatron and suffer infinite death.
[6] "I'm sure I've seen this before": the bird and the leftmost VG
present a much tighter challenge than in Spectrum JSW!
[7] "Rescue Esmerelda": the low-flying bird presents two problems:
1. If you jump in from the left, collecting the item in "I'm sure
I've seen this before", the bird collides with you unless you stood
far enough back to jump - an infinite-death scenario which, while it
would be fair for an unfamiliar room, isn't a risk in Spectrum JSW.
2. The bird collides with the leftmost VG before it is possible to
pass this room! This makes the game not item-completable.
[11] "The Attic": an arrow collides with the head of the Chinese
dragon, killing you, although you do have time to pass the room
before this happens.
[13] "Emergency Generator": there are 6 invisible items embedded in
the holes in the Earth, making the game not item-completable.
[17] "Orangery": the arrow collides with the white-ink ramp, killing
you. It's possible to pass this room by reentering from the bottom,
but it happened to me just after collecting the item at the bottom-
left, forcing me to sacrifice a life.
[20] "Top Landing": the leftmost VG kills you on the toilet-run,
unless you hold down the right-key until it's safe to go.
[21] "The Bathroom": the toilet doesn't consume you at the end of
the toilet-run! This is because although the toilet is displayed in
Room 21, Willy is detected to hit it in Room 33. POKE 38280,21 fixes
this problem (cf. Message 3854).
[30] "East Wall Base": that amoebatron is wicked-fast! But just
possible to pass (at least in the Spectrum backport).
[33] "Cold Store": infinite death if you enter on the upper
penguin's ledge.
[44] "Inside the Megatrunk": the upper bird collides with the
central VG. This makes the room uncrossable from bottom to top, and
unpassable if you enter from the left or right. This makes the game
not item-completable.
[45] "Cuckoo's Nest: there's ever such a nasty IDS if you take the
shallow drop off the right edge of the nest! This is not an issue in
BBC JSW itself, where you cannot jump into the foot of a ramp as you
can in Spectrum JSW.
[48] "The Beach": the rope collides with the top-left Earth-cell,
picking up Willy from wherever he is on the screen at that time. Not
a critical error, but certainly not faithful to BBC JSW either!
[50] "The Wine Cellar": the yellow monk collects two items for you.
Which reminds me: I recently had a dream about a white plastic robot
that bore a striking resemblance to the monks in JSW! For years I
thought they were altar-boys wearing caps, until someone on the
Internet said they were monks, and I realised I was looking at
shaven hair and long noses! ;-)
[51] "The Forgotten Abbey": I like the way you get to jump two monks
at once! :-)
[54] "At the Foot of the Megatree": the rightmost VG collides with
the saw, killing you, although it is possible to cross the room
before this happens.
[59] "Under the Drive": the combination of the dalek and a certain
Earth-cell makes an infinite-death scenario when you enter on the
conveyor. The simplest solution would be to move the dalek's start-
position one cell to the left. As it stands, this room makes the
game not Maria-completable.
P.S. The files mmtech.txt and jswtech.txt (referred to in
README.txt) seem to be missing.
P.P.S. I have installed BeebEm, and am now rediscovering the
masochistic joys of Magic Mushrooms (a platform-game with a built-in
room-editor!), Frak and Contraption for the first time since I left
primary school in 1987! :-)
P.P.P.S. I had the man who designed the BBC Micro as a lecturer when
I was at university:
http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/apt/people/sfurber/
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
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