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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 6614
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 21/12/2009
Subject: UK TV-alert: Manic Miner on BBC 4
andrewbroad wrote:
>
> Games Britannia is a three-part series about popular games in
> Britain from the Iron Age to the Information Age.
>
>I guessed right! There are three mentions of Manic Miner in Games Britannia Part 3, "Joystick Generation", which covers gaming from Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s to the virtual-reality, social-networking computer-games of today.
> So I'm guessing that Manic Miner will appear in Part 3, and that
> it will be televised on Monday 21st December.
(1) One minute into the programme, there is a glimpse of Miner Willy getting killed in "Central Cavern" as presenter Benjamin Woolley talks about a world (of games) that's "sometimes extremely annoying".
(2) Nine minutes into the programme, there's a more detailed look at Manic Miner, as we see "Processing Plant", "The Menagerie", "The Cold Room" and "Abandoned Uranium Workings" on a 2x2 split screen.
Benjamin Woolley: "There couldn't be a better example than this: Manic Miner. It looks horrible, and sounds dreadful."
[Central Cavern]
Benjamin Woolley: "You're a miner, exploring a series of excavated coal-scenes, picking up treasure whilst avoiding a plethora of ever-more surreal moving objects."
[Eugene's Lair]
Charlie Brooker: "It was a really basic game, but it had a weird, Pythonesque sense of humour to it, which is a very British thing.
And a lot of those early British games did. When you died, you'd get squashed by a Pythonesque foot, which descended from the heavens and crushed you. I think that was what appealed to me: the weird humour of it."
[Processing Plant]
Benjamin Woolley: "When people first started to talk about the addictive quality of computer-games, Manic Miner was Exhibit A."
[Attack of the Mutant Telephones / The Endorian Forest]
"Although it looks crude by today's standards, the game was an instant sensation, and a landmark title for the ZX Spectrum."
(3) 46 minutes into the programme, Benjamin Woolley is talking about a game called _Little Big Planet_:
"Launched in 2008, it looks like a cuddly version of Manic Miner: a platform-game in which the player runs and jumps across a childlike landscape of building-blocks and poster-paint.
"But beneath the surface-layer of smothering cuteness lies a technological marvel: a powerful, elegant game-construction set that allows players not just to play the game, but to create new ones, which they can publish across the Internet, thus helping to build a bigger, better Little Big Planet."
He goes on to talk about the Little Big Planet community, whose members upload their levels to the Internet. The levels appear on a massive list, ordered by how many times each level has been played. It's extremely difficult for a LBP author to get a level on the front page of the list, as so many people are doing this that a new level is released every 27 seconds!
Games Britannia Part 3 is repeated on BBC Four at the following times:
* 2009:12:22 02:30 GMT
* 2009:12:31 00:20 GMT
For those in the UK, Games Britannia Part 3 is available on BBC iPlayer for the next 7 days:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pddc6
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://abroad.sqweebs.com/spectrum/mmjsw/
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