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Message: 5900

Author: Daniel

Date: 19/08/2006

Subject: "Willy's Hoard"

 

1. Andrew Broad wrote:

> Firstly, I'd like to say how impressed I am with the technical
> innovations in Willy's Hoard. At first glance, it looks like the
> work of a seasoned Z80 machine-code programmer! :-)

You are extremely generous in your praise, Andrew, but I am afraid it
is much exaggerated :-( . I am merely an amateur, struggling with the
lack of knowledge of some very basic concepts :-) .


2. Andrew wrote:

> Secondly, the Quirky Spoiler PNG-file is an awesome effort - it
> must have taken endless hours!

It did, indeed, it was a lot of hard work, but I wanted to do it,
because I felt that if it was included in the game package, nobody
could ever criticise the game for exposing the player to illogical,
unexplainable challenges whose solutions had to be searched for
on "some obscure websites" :-) .


3. Andrew wrote:

> It's a controversial issue, whether Henry's Hoard should be
> recognised as a JSW48 game, considering how heavily it is based on
> the JSW game-engine and room-format.
>
> There are two main objections against recognising it as JSW:
>
> 1. It was never claimed to be a JSW game when it was released -
> unlike every single game in the JSW, JSW128 and JSW64 categories.
>
> 2. The file-formats are so complicated that I never got round to
> preparing the data-sheets to type Henry's Hoard into my real
> Spectrum. In fact, the current revision of SPECSAISIE doesn't even
> recognise HENRY85.TAP and HENRY86.TAP as valid TAP-files!

Just out of curiosity, how does "Henry's Hoard" compare with Erix-1
Mode games as far as the amount of modifications to the original game
engine is concerned?

Should Erix-1 mode games turn out to be more different from the
original JSW than "HH", it would be seem fair to include "HH" in the
JSW48 games category, with a separate type descriptor, wouldn't it?
(in spite of the intention of the original authors, which was
probably mainly motivated by legal issues, etc.).


4. Andrew wrote:

> The way I see it, increasing the number of rooms is just a single
> patch, and does not therefore warrant an elaborated type-
> descriptor. Having a symbol for every single patch would be a bit
> over the top...

I made my suggestion mainly because John Elliott recognises a "JGH
Mode" (http://www.seasip.demon.co.uk/Jsw/taxonomy.html). In fact he
also recognises an "Andrew Mode" whose main characteristic is "Sprite
set in room definition" :-) .

Having said this, I must say I agree with your argument that a result
of a single patch does not really merit to be considered a different
mode of the game engine. The only thing with "JGH Mode" is that it
makes the very significant difference of the possible number of
rooms - but still...


5. Concerning the problem of Biggs vs. Bigos

I would think that the in-game scrolly (consistent in all known
versions) is more reliable than outside sources (such as magazines).
It seems more probable that the Crash review author made a mistake
(probably later repeated by WoS) than that the author himself did not
spot the typo in the consecutive editions of the game. I did a search
in Google and there is an Andy Bigos who used to work at 3DLabs and
(if it's the same person) later on worked with Computer Artworks Ltd.
and co-programmed such games as "Evolva" (2000) and "The Thing"
(2002). It sounds like it could be our guy :-) . Unfortunately, I
coudn't find his e-mail address, and the only one I did find (from
the 3DLabs days) is not valid any longer.


Daniel

 

 

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