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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 6769
Author: jetsetdanny
Date: 14/05/2013
Subject: "Jet Set Willy X" - Daniel's review
Hello Everyone, after a long time!
I hope that it will still be possible to infuse some life into this Group after a long period of inactivity. And so, to try and go back to business as usual, I would like to offer my review of "Jet Set Willy X."
"Jet Set Willy X" is a game by Twibright Labs (Karel 'Clock' Kulhavy et al.) for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum heavily inspired by "Jet Set Willy." According to the information given by the author, it was written between 1993 and 1996 and released, after some final editing and tweaks, in 2006.
The game's home page is at http://ronja.twibright.com/jswx.php. A map of the game is available for download from http://maps.speccy.cz or WoS. My RZX walkthrough of the game, uploaded a few days ago, is available for download from the RZX Archive (www.rzxarchive.co.uk).
The differences from the original "Jet Set Willy," as described by the author of "Jet Set Willy X" on his website, are the following:
- There are no guardians, however there are places where you are probably going to swear even without them.
- The guy walks twice as fast, the animation is smooth 50Hz instead of 25Hz, the guy has twice as much positions and the sprites are a bit different.
- There are no ropes.
- There is a 2-channel tune instead of 1-channel.
- The guy can fall through a 1-character hole.
- The rooms are 20 chars high instead of 16.
- There are much more available different characters in one room.
- The attributes in the room are not used to encode meaning of the characters, they can be set arbitrarily.
- What happens after the game is completed is a bit more fun.
- The jump looks a bit different.
- When the guy enters a room from sideways, he doesn't start 1 character away from the edge, but at the edge.
- The kill and collect sounds are different.
- The kill and collect events generate an effect in the border.
- The main voice of the tune continues playing during the kill or collect sound.
- The initial scrolling of text is pixel-smooth.
- There are 69 rooms and over 390 items to collect.
I have to say that playing "Jet Set Willy X" seems a little weird at first, with the movement quite different from the classic JSW game engine (or JSW128 or JSW64), the strange jumps or falls through the 1-character holes and the general feeling that the game is playing very fast. It may be a good thing that I played the game after a very long time of not playing JSW games based on the classic game engines. However, you get used to it after a while and even start to appreciate the speed of the game, especially when you have to retrace your route over some already well-known terrain.
The absence of guardians and some of the names of the rooms make the game eerily reminiscent of "Willy's New Hat."
There are some nasty infinite-death scenarios, but of course saving snapshots or using the Rollback feature makes them not a big problem.
The map which I mentioned above is very helpful for the exploration of the game, since it cannot be loaded into JSWED. The layuout of the game is player-friendly, I would say, with very few places where you have to go over the same loops more than once in order to collect all the items.
You can complete the game after collecting 395 items. There are two more items you see in the game: one in "The west park" and one in "The map room," but I believe that neither of them can be collected and apparently it is not necessary for the completion of the game. Please correct me if I am wrong and these items can be collected after all.
Along the way you have to lose 6 lives, I believe, in order to collect some of the items. This happens in the following rooms:
- "The power plant" - I believe there is no way to get back safely after collecting the four items on the upper right-hand side;
- "The Midnight Abbey" - I believe you cannot get back safely after collecting the item on the lower right-hand side;
- "The abandoned warehouse" - I believe there is no way to get back safely after collecting the item in the sixth column from the left;
- "OH NO! A cave in my cellar!!" - I believe you need to lose three lives here - two to collect items after which you get killed immediately by Fire-cells and one to collect an item after which you either get killed by a Fire-cell or by falling from high (please see my RZX walkthrough for details).
Once again, please correct me if I am wrong and any of these items may be collected without losing a life.
The map was instrumental for me in discovering the existence of "The secret passage." Then it took me a while, however, to figure out how to reach two of the items there. Some jumps for items in some other rooms were also difficult to figure out.
All in all, playing "Jet Set Willy X" was a truly enjoyable experience and I think that this game enriches Willy's universe with its modified game engine and different gameplay.
This is as much as I would like to say about "Jet Set Willy X." If you are still into JSW and MM, do let it be known so as to encourage others, including Yours Truly!
Daniel
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