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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 5793
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 09/04/2006
Subject: Death TV v0.3... Andrew's first playtest
I didn't get very far, owing to my research on relocatable patches
so that I could apply the RoomNo patch, but I believe I have
explored all the rooms that are reachable when you start in "water
world" [47] as per Message 5755, i.e. (in order of visitation)
[47,62,61,63,45,46,48,49,50].
I didn't feel any need at all to use emulator-acceleration in the
rooms that I've played so far, and I also found it easier to predict
cell-behaviour than in the other JSW64 games that I have criticised
on this point, with the exception of the patterned Air-cells.
What I don't like is that many rooms have the same title,
e.g. "water world". This is what made it so important to get the
RoomNo patch working for this game, because I like to tick off the
rooms on a printout of room-numbers and room-names as I clear each
room of items.
(Since SPECSAISIE RoomsJSW64 doesn't exist yet, I generated the room-
list by exporting all the rooms as XML, using "grep title DTV.XML",
then typing all the room-numbers by hand - I did try twice to import
DTV.XML into a JSW128 game, but JSWED just went into "(Not
responding)" mode.)
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Room-specific comments
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[47] "water world": For the JSW-expert who is unfamiliar with JSW64
guardians, this works well as the start-room because it showcases
switches, triggers and opening walls.
[48] "water world": The red umbrella is slow and tedious to wait
for as you cross the bottom of the screen in both directions; I
suggest either speeding it up or changing its start-position so that
you don't have to wait.
The bubbles that are the Water-cells in this and other rooms would
look more attractive to me if they were perfectly round, like the
ones in Jet Set Dizzy's "Bubble" [10] (Files/Broadsoft/js_dizzy.zip).
[49] "water world": A beautifully-constructed room, with the way
you have to stop on the conveyor to collect the bottom-right item
without losing a life, the well-aligned jumps you have to make
(including the two required to jump over the yellow crab), and good
use of the fall-without-dying POKE.
I take it the switches are purely aesthetic, and unrelated to
the problem I'm facing in the next room?
[50] "water world": There seems to be no way out of this room: a
guardian blocks the left-edge, you can't go down because of Fire-
cells in the top row (which also means you have to sacrifice two
lives to collect all the items), and if you go back into [49], you
are faced with a Fire-cell at head-height which cannot be jumped. I
therefore find this game to be not Maria-completable.
[62] "water world": How did you get the cyan penguin to keep
stopping and starting on its path? It's a remarkable effect!
I can find no way out of the cluster of rooms I've visited so far
(it looks as though you should be able to go down from [50], but you
can't).
I therefore intend to teleport to "Machine World" [33] - the room
you actually start off in v0.3... for my second playtest - or should
I remove the Fire-cells from the top of [50] so that I actually /can/
go down, like you can in the DTV2 taster of 13th May 2005?
Items collected 020 Time 7:19am
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
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