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Message: 5898

Author: Daniel

Date: 18/08/2006

Subject: The three most difficult MM games in existence

 

1. Andrew Broad wrote:

> I must admit that Manic Scribbler does my head in. I started to
> playtest it in January, got as far as "Surfing on chaos" [10], but
> every time I open my snapshot to continue, I think "which way?" and
> then "not today!" :-o

These words, coming from Andrew, are the highest possible praise of
the level of difficulty of "Manic Scribbler" that you can ever dream
of, Darth Melkor! :-)


2. Daniel wrote (concerning the sizes of RZX files):

> If the above assumption is correct, "Manic Scribbler" would have
> to be described as the most complicated game (233 KB),
> with "Neighbours - Allana Truman" coming second (206 KB) and "Ma
> jolie" coming third (158 KB). For comparison: "Manic Miner 4 SE" -
> 129 KB, "Manic Miner - The Hobbit" - 102 KB (!), "Manic Miner -
> 2000" - 131 KB and the original "Manic Miner" (played by a
> different person though) - 134 KB.

Andrew wrote:

> Sounds like someone lost a lot of lives! ;-)

The sizes of the RZX files quoted above are sizes of closed files,
with the rollback points removed (for those of you who may not have
followed the Group discussions closely, see Dunny's explanation in
message # 5631). The recordings show "perfect" walkthroughs, without
any lives lost. A good illustration of how many lives were indeed
lost in the process of making the recordings would be the size of the
open RZX files just before finishing the game and closing them, which
is, for my files:

MM: Neighbours - Allana Truman - 6,96 MB

Manic Scribbler - 6,21 MB

Ma jolie - 3,78 MB

MM: The Hobbit - 1,67 MB

Manic Miner 4 SE - 1,68 MB

and, for comparison:

Manic Miner - 2000 - 1,93 MB

Manic Miner 7 - 1,81 MB

MM: CSS - 1,68 MB

The above would decide "the most difficult game contest" in favour
of "Neighbours - Allana Truman". However, it is not very objective,
because while recording "Neighbours - AT", before doing each room I
referred to my snapshots saved back in March 2005 (all 233 of them!
:-) ) and also to Andrew's notes, and then started the recording. On
the contrary, while recording both "Manic Scribbler" and "Ma jolie",
I first played each room on a different emulator, and only started
recording it in ZX Spin when I was sure that I knew the exact route
and moves. So the "Neighbours - Allana Truman" recording came out
relatively bigger because I didn't have a dry run before each
room. Otherwise, "Manic Scribbler" might have been "the champion".


3. Andrew wrote:

> Aargh! I can't believe I let that one slip through the net! Perhaps
> a remix of "Wiredlife" is in order, if not a Special Edition of _Ma
> jolie_ :->

No, please, I think that a SE of "Ma jolie" is not /really/
necessary, the game is just fine as it is! :-) :-) :-)

Incidentally, it is interesting how one gets influenced by their own
routines. After creating the room "The Quirky Enclosure" in "Wily's
Hoard", I must have playtested it four or five times (between the
playtesting immediately after its creation and various playtests of
the whole game) and it seemed just perfect. And then suddenly - it
must have been my penultimate global playtest - I realised that if
somebody started from the left-hand side, they could collect the
bottom-right object without jumping through the ILB above and all the
related problems. And that was because I had always started playing
the room from the right-hand side and it somehow seemed obvious to me
that it had to be done that way. Fortunately, I just managed to spot
and close the loophole before releasing the final version of the
game, but it just goes to show how important playtesting by people
other than the author is :-) .


Daniel

 

 

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