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Message: 5551

Author: Alexandra

Date: 22/02/2006

Subject: Re: Ultimate Manic Miner: Andrew's first impressions

 

One downside of UMM (and, I guess, of JSW64) is the uncertainty.
Because there are so many cell-classes, it's hard to know what to
expect in terms of cell-behaviour, whether something is a guardian
or not, whether it is stand-onable or not.

I attribute this more to that fact that Igor was deliberately
stretching the medium about as far as it can go. Consistency can be
maintained even in [ mode of JSW64, it is just somewhat limiting. And
I was killed by much less scenery in UMM than in, say, MvsB.

Wondering what is going to kill you is also a patent part of 8-bit
platform games, I can remember playing Odd Job Eddie back in the 80's
and wondering if certain tiles would kill me (I didn't pick up that
all the deadly blocks are cyan, and all the solid objects are yellow
back then).

UMM also involves a small amount of trial and error in it's gameplay,
making it a little like Rick Dangerous in places (hence my idea about
the boulder chasing you). Normally I'm against trial and error but in
this kind of frantic and chaotic game it's somehow forgivable. I'm
even tempted to use a little myself.

The other downside of UMM is the lack of items, most of which seem
to be hidden inside portals, or to be extra-life items (not
necessary to fulfill the ending-condition if the sole aim is to
escape?). So I guess I'll miss the joy of being able to tick off
rooms as I clear them of items.

That's an idea I've been toying with myself, though this can be
partially rectified by having a lot of doors which open upon
collection of the items. You could even have the door and some of the
items in a Promised Land to break the challenge up.

"THE COLD ROOM" - There's a small bug here I think, when I cross
the LAST bubble on the coolant river, if I cross the hump of the
bubble without holding down jump, I seem to die. This may be a new
quirky feature involving ramps butted up to each other over fire
blocks.

In the explanation that follows, when I refer to Willy being in a
column, I mean the LEFT cell-column of his sprite.

---||||
.....>.
.......
../BBBBBB/BBBBBB.
*******
ABCDEFG

Willy gets killed if he walks from column D to column C without
holding jump.

This is because the / ramp in column E is trying to dump him down
onto the Fire-cells, while the BBBBBB ramp in column D is trying to pull
him up.

Ramp D takes precedence in terms of the pixel-row at which Willy is
drawn, but Ramp E takes precedence in terms of moving him down a
cell-row when he walks off the left edge of the / ramp in column E.

It doesn't happen when Willy walks from column F to column E because
there's no / ramp in column G.

It's weird how Willy reacts to adjacent ropes. I might try making a
room full of alternating ramps to see if any puzzle potential is apparent.

As a side note, although I should be preparing Manic Person for
release, I have been designing my own central character sprite for use
in certain future games, she's turned out pretty good, but I might
need to post a demo of her and ask advice from the artists on how best
to tweak her. She's almost perfect, but I'm not sure if something
could be marginally improved.

The artists in the group have also inspired me to start going through
DeathTV 64 and improve the graphics any way I can see how, which has
yielded some nice results :)

Sendy

 

 

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