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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 5673
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 05/03/2006
Subject: Dr. Jet Set Willy - Andrew's review
Today I played Dr. Jet Set Willy, the recently-discovered R.D. Foord
Software JSW game from 1986. Obviously inspired by Dr. Who, the name
Dr. Willy would have been better, and in terms of it being filed
under 'D' rather than 'J' on the TZX Vault, _Jet Set Willy: Dr.
Willy_ would have been better still (also, Spaceman Willy is filed
under 'S' instead of 'J').
Dr. JSW is a very... erm... early JSW game with just 21 rooms, and I
completed it with a Manic-Minerish toilet-time of 7:41am.
Only ten of the rooms have proper titles, but they all include the
room-number in the title, which is nice (nowadays, of course, we
have John Elliott's room-number patch, although it doesn't work for
JSW64 games).
It looks like an abandoned game, as though R.D. Foord intended to do
more work on it (maybe (s)he did, and the version on the Internet
isn't the final revision?). "Rm22" in particular looks unfinishe
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The game as it stands is impossible to complete, due to a VG
colliding with an arrow in "Rm41". I have published pokes to fix
this on my "Bugs in Specific JSW Games" web-page:
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/bugsi.html
I have also updated "The Bugs in JSW":
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/bugs.html
____________________________________________________________________
As a JSW-lover myself (in the sense defined by Daniel Gromann in
Message 5625), I certainly enjoyed playing it. It has some nice
original graphics as well as imports from MM/JSW/JSW2 and Booty,
and "Rm 54 ""Snack Bar""" presents a classical challenge of timing a
conveyor-walk to avoid VGs, while the middle third of "Rm 28 ""The
Landing""" is a simple pleasure in playability-terms.
Most of the game is a very basic challenge, though - simple jumps
over isolated guardians and that sort of thing.
Some specific design-flaws:
"Rm 20 ""To Hell & Back""": You have to sacrifice a life to collect
the central item.
"Rm42": You have to jump off the right edge of the screen from the
conveyor to reach the upper ledges of "Rm41" - taking the bottom-
right exit means a detour of four room-exits.
_____The room [48] above is blank, so if you go up on the rope, you
fall back and get hanged - a flaw which could have been avoided by
setting this room's up-exit to itself (the game-engine detects this
and doesn't let you climb the rope that far, although you can
still /jump/ up off the rope, which in this case would result in
infinite death).
"Rm41": Right and Down are one-way exits, requiring a detour of
around ten room-exits to get back here (likely if you came in
from "Rm42" the wrong way and don't save a snapshot).
"Room No.56.": After collecting the top-left item, you are forced to
jump up into "Rm55" (unless you prefer to sacrifice a life). If this
jump isn't from near the right edge of the Water-cell, you fall back
to infinite death in this room (through a gap which exists for the
sake of a VG's bottom-boundary).
The product "Dr. Jet Set Willy Microdrive Tape" on the TZX Vault has
two TZX files containing lots of little Spectrum-files; the third
Spectrum-file on Side A is "dr.jsw" (CODE 32768,32768), which is a
data-identical copy of "jsw1" on Dr. Jet Set Willy.tzx.
Also, "Jet Set Willy (R D Foord Software)" contains 3 rooms which
are early brick versions of [28,33,34] from Dr. JSW.
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
P.S. I must investigate JSWED 2.3.0 before I can start
Advanced MM/JSW Trainer. I hope to do both in the coming week.
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