MA JOLIE (C) BROADSOFT 2003 ======== [Special Edition 2009] For the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Written by Andrew Broad http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/ Willy waits for just another day Drags his bones down Surbiton way Owns white togs and flickers grey Oh, he jumps away Once a time, he nearly might have been Miner Willy on a silver screen No one knew what he could do Except for me and you He jumps away He jumps away Don't forget to wear your hard hat Twinkle, twinkle, Miner Willy Watching all the mining robots How I wonder where you are Oh-hoh Sailing to Deserted Island Twinkle, twinkle, Jet Set Willy You were drunk but we had fun, boy How I wonder where you are Oh-hoh Willy knew there's never ever time Some of us will always stay behind Down the mine, it's always 1983 Jump through the ILB Oh-oh What's the matter with Willy? C'mon, let's go Jump away Oo-oo Don't forget to wear your hard hat Twinkle, twinkle, Miner Willy Watching all the mining robots How I wonder where you are Oh-hoh Sailing to Deserted Island Twinkle, twinkle, Jet Set Willy You were drunk but we had fun, boy How I wonder where you are Oh-hoh [parody of David Bowie, "Slip Away" from Heathen] ---------------------- Background Information ---------------------- On the morning of 17th February 1999, I had a vivid dream about a new Manic Miner game. I was in a dark cavern, standing on a laminated platform of Crumbly and Fire-cells in the right half and vertical centre of the screen. I was aware of the cyan presence of Kari Krišníková (she of We Pretty and Goodnite Luddite fame). The dream was so vivid that I was able to recreate the room I'd seen, and of course, I had to create a new Manic Miner game to put it in! I 'selesened' the game Ma jolie. The lower-case 'j' is important, because "Ma jolie" is a play on Iva Majoli's surname. It is also French for "My pretty", and thus a titular nod to We Pretty. The game is similar in spirit to the Miner Willy games, but I wanted to being a certain We Pretty atmosphere to it as well - a sort of 'Willy meets Kari' game in a sense. It is not, however, part of the Kari Krišníková series per se - all of those will be Jet Set Willy games. So, I worked on Ma jolie on and off for four years, between working on my PhD and on Goodnite Luddite! I wrote Rooms 0-2 and 4-5 in 1999, Rooms 3, 6-7, 10, 15 and 17 in 2000, Room 8 in early 2001, and Rooms 9, 11-14, 16 and 18-19 in the summer and autumn of 2002. When I'm working on original MM/JSW projects as opposed to book-adaptations, &c., most of my room-ideas go into JSW games, leaving the ones that entail Crumbly cells &c. to go in a MM game such as Ma jolie. However, I never lost my natural ability for writing extremely tough MM rooms, and this game contains the most fiendishly difficult ever! :-> But there's an easier version called Ma jolite, which is less mentally distressing to play, and has a different tune! ;-) -------- The Game -------- Ma jolie is a redefinition of the rooms in Matthew Smith's classic Manic Miner, which I acknowledge as being the copyright of Bug-Byte (1983). I developed the original edition on a Spectrum +2, using my own Manic Miner Screen Editor (also released on the Internet). Ma jolie is written for advanced MM players, and the rooms are intended to be outstandingly difficult, as a challenge to the experts. It presupposes that you can play Manic Miner - the controls are exactly the same, but the gameplay is much tougher, requiring both manual dexterity (a need for pixel-perfect and time-frame-perfect accuracy of movement) and lateral thinking. Ma jolie liberally exploits all the quirky features in the game-engine - you need to know all the tricks if you want to get at all far! Ma jolie was, at the time of its release, the hardest MM/JSW game ever written (I must admit that it has since been surpassed by Darth Melkor's Manic Scribbler), and the hardest that I ever intend to write! ;-) I just wanted to show, once and for all, how hard Manic Miner can get! You should not attempt to complete the game in one sitting if you value your sanity, and children should not participate in the playing of this game with laces in their shoes. Just remember that Manic Miner is deterministic, and that the pause-key is as much a control of this game as left, right and jump! ;-) You can consider yourself to have passed Ma jolie if you finish the game using infinite lives (POKE 35136,0) on a real Spectrum, or saving and loading snapshots on an emulator. If you cheat by using any other POKEs, or by using 6031769, you should consider yourself disqualified. ;-) "The Hive of No Desire" [4], "The Mad Ramblings of Longbeard" [5] and "Heathen (The Rays)" [19] each have two different solutions (as described in the room-documentation), so an extra challenge is to complete these rooms in both ways. I have thoroughly play-tested the final version, and I certify that it /is/ theoretically possible to complete. Unfortunately, there is an insidious bug in the MM game-engine whereby erroneous blocks sometimes appear at (0,1), (0,5) and (3,24) for the rest of the game (they only go away if you restart the game). I don't know what causes the Three-Blocks Bug, but I never completed the game on my real Spectrum without falling foul of this bug, which makes Rooms 16 and 18 in particular impossible to complete. Therefore, as a special concession, players on a real Spectrum may claim "room-completion" if they restart the game and teleport to the room they're up to. But you won't see the proper ending upon completing Room 19 if you do it this way, and thus cannot claim "game-completion". Members of the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manicminerandjetsetwilly/] can view exclusive screenshots in the Photos section. This game contains low-resolution, hand-drawn sexual images, which some may find offensive. These may be airbrushed out at the option of the user after the game has loaded and before it starts (at which point, a 'perfect' snapshot may be saved). ---------------- Acknowledgements ---------------- * Matthew Smith, for writing the original Manic Miner, and in particular for deciding on an unencrypted, perspicuous room-format! ;-) * My fellow MM/JSW authors, for general inspiration, and some specific tricks (sometimes unintended on their part, but deliberately exploited by me! ;-) ). * Richard Hallas for transferring Rooms 0, 1, 2 and 5 from audio cassette to emulator-format in December 1999. * Richard Hallas's document "A Miner Triad" was an invaluable aid to redefining the music. * The in-game tune of Ma jolie is the verse of "Slip Away" from David Bowie's 2002 album Heathen. * The in-game tune of Ma jolite is the chorus of "Dreaming Of You" by The Coral. * For the Special Edition 2006, I edited the title-screen tune to "Heathen (The Rays)" from David Bowie's 2002 album Heathen. * The font on the title-screen/Room 19 picture is from Part 1 of the Spectrum-game Journey's End (Mastertronic, 1985). The words are lyrics from "Heathen (The Rays)". * John Elliott, for his disassembly of MM, from which I worked out how to edit the end-of-game colour-attributes (see Appendix E of my Manic Miner Room Format). * Ma jolite was edited using Ramsoft's RealSpectrum emulator, following the death of my real Spectrum. * Daniel Gromann, for pointing out the loophole in "Wiredlife" [14] (you could simply climb the right ladder to the portal, bypassing the middle and top platforms) that prompted me to do the Special Edition 2006. * Daniel Gromann again, for pointing out that it is possible to jump up off the top of "The Mad Ramblings of Longbeard" [5], which writes erroneous blocks to "Ape-Men with Metal Parts" [7], and also that it is possible to complete "The Hot Room" [1] without having to go round again after collecting the leftmost item. These observations prompted me to do the Special Edition 2009, adding Fire-cells to enforce his solutions to "The Hot Room" and "Speed 4" [15], and an Earth-cell to stop the player bypassing a beloved manoeuvre in "Semi-Perilous Light" [18]. * The Special Editions 2006 and 2009 were prepared using John Elliott's JSWED (v2.3.1 and v2.3.2, respectively). -------------------- Loading-Instructions -------------------- To play Ma jolie, you need a Spectrum-emulator that is capable of loading TAP-files (I hope I'm right in thinking that the emulators you all use are capable of loading TAP-files, as I don't want to complicate matters by also releasing snapshot-files). To find an emulator for your particular computer, see the Emulators section of the comp.sys.sinclair FAQ [http://www.shadowmagic.org.uk/cssfaq/emulators/emulators.htm]. A TAP-file is an encoding of the files on a Spectrum-tape (as opposed to a snapshot-file, which is an encoding of the complete state of a Spectrum at the moment it was created). To load from a TAP-file, you have to issue a load-command to the emulated Spectrum (i.e. select Tape Loader or type LOAD "" (in 48K mode, press J for LOAD and SYMBOL-SHIFT+P for ")). You also have to open the TAP-file in the emulator (either before or after issuing the load-command). MA_JOLIE.TAP is Ma jolie: the standard hard version. MA_JOLITE.TAP is Ma jolite: the easy variant of Ma jolie. --------- The Rooms --------- I decided to release Ma jolie in twenty weekly instalments, each containing one room more than the previous, eventually starting on 1st January 2003 and finishing on 14th May 2003 to celebrate Manic Miner's china anniversary! :-) (I don't know the exact release-date in 1983). ROOM 0: "Kari Weeds Off The Stragglers" (1st January 2003). This is the room that I wrote on 17th February 1999, after the dream I told you about. I wish I could have made the room less vivid(!), but instead I tried to find the happy medium between capturing the dream faithfully and getting in a lot of quirky features: the way you have to step back at the start to jump over the poisonous pansies (the 8x8 graphics in this room come from the original Manic Miner), the way you can stand 'on' the blocks in Row 0, jumping over a Fire-cell and landing inside a platform, jumping from four horizontal pixels under a Fire-cell, the old invisible-platforms trick, embedding Fire-cells in a conveyor-animation, and all the things Kari deserves for being such a good girl, honey [Shakira, "Underneath Your Clothes"]. ROOM 1: "The Hot Room" (8th January 2003 - David Bowie's 56th birthday). A lateral inversion of "The Cold Room" from the original Manic Miner, with appropriate recolouring, and the pretty penguins from Jet Set Willy instead of the miserable-looking penguins from "The Cold Room". A sneaky trick awaits those who fall to the bottom of the chimney after collecting the leftmost item. Prior to the Special Edition 2009, you had to go round again after doing this, but in the Special Edition 2009, you can't even do that! ROOM 2: "Majolica" (15th January 2003). Another tribute to Iva Majoli, this is a very tricky puzzle-room that will also require precise use of the pause-key. You have to get rid of the Crumbly blocks in order to collect the earthenware items without falling to your death. You can stand on each Crumbly cell seven times, or jump onto it eight times (when it's down to two pixel-rows, you can stand on it once but jump onto it twice). You need to make a plan, and keep a careful count for each Crumbly cell. ROOM 3: "One Day, in Teletubbyland, ..." (22nd January 2003). Teletubbies is a nursery-school programme that has also attracted a cult-following among adults with its surreal world of bright colours, English country-gardens and strange devices. Seeing how the four main characters (from left to right: Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, La-La and Po) all look the same but have differently-coloured fur, I just had to write a MM room! ;-) I wrote this room on 1st January 2000. Another puzzle-room, involving the character-row shift when you jump off the sides of the screen, and Crumbly cells that you can only touch once (because their bottom two pixel-rows are blank) and that leave a yellow 'ghost' (the Air colour-attribute), and a sticky conveyor. The challenge is to work out from which angle to approach each item, to order your moves so as not to get rid of any Crumbly blocks you'll need to land on later, and to time it so that the Teletubbies don't collide with you. Mind you don't get trapped in the portal before you've collected all five items - the trick is to collect both items above the portal in one jump. ROOM 4: "The Hive of No Desire" (29th January 2003). The title comes from a fake track-listing for David Bowie's sadly abandoned album 2.CONTAMINATION (the planned sequel to his 1995 album 1.OUTSIDE), as did "EBOLA JAZZ" in Goodnite Luddite. See http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/music/bowie/contamination/ for more information. The portal-graphic is the hive in a microcosm. I wrote this room on 31st December 1999. You won't believe the amount of nastiness that can be packed into such a small playing-area! :-> This calls for pixel-perfect movement, which is the only reason I didn't replace Willy with Kari for this game! ;-) Tip: emerge from the leftmost 'wall' of the hive at the fourth opportunity. The bee behaves like Eugene in the original Manic Miner, so you'd better get the bottom honey-comb last! There is an alternative solution that entails taking the bottom honey-comb first, going straight up to the top, and finishing with a high dive into the portal. Experts should not be satisfied until they have solved it both ways. ROOM 5: "The Mad Ramblings of Longbeard" (5th February 2003). Another title from the fake Contamination track-listing inspired this atmospheric room. The pirate-sprite was actually my first attempt at drawing the head of Tom Bombadil for Jet Set Willy: The Lord Of The Rings back in 1999. The head was too long for Tom's body, but it's a great sprite in its own right, so I transferred it to Ma jolie (this was actually the second room I wrote for Ma jolie IIRC). It's up to you whether you want to 'walk the plank' before or after you jump across the crumbling clouds, but beware: you'll fall to your death if you stand still on the clouds for even one time-frame, and it's incredibly difficult to walk right and then jump straight up - even with the pause-key. Also, there are hidden Earth-cells in the portal, so if you don't get the jump exactly right, you'll be forced to commit suicide. Daniel Gromann has discovered an alternative solution to this room that entails jumping up off the top of the screen and being able to collect the top-right item without a need to cross the clouds above the ship first, and thus being free later to drop down for the item on the right edge of the ship. The exact details of this solution are difficult to discover, and I leave it as an exercise for the expert player, who should not feel satisfied until (s)he has completed the room in both ways! I didn't feel inclined either to eliminate or enforce this method for the Special Edition 2009; I merely applied the patch to allow you to jump off the top of the screen without corrupting Room 7. ROOM 6: "The Vatican" (12th February 2003). A play on words of "The Vat" from the original Manic Miner, this room is notable for its innovative use of horizontal guardians (HGs) to create forcefields that you have to walk through, as in other games such as Starquake. Unfortunately, Sendy's where's woody (which was released /after/ this room was written) robs it of MM/JSW novelty (we came up with the idea independently of each other), as does my own Goodnite Luddite! ;-) At least it's a first for MM. Collecting the items is a puzzle, with some of them being located in Crumbly cells. I like the way you get to jump over a Fire-cell and through a platform, and superb manual dexterity is required to collect the top-right item! This is the most enjoyable room in the game for me to play, as it entails fluid jumping through a delightful array of quirky features. The portal-graphic was inspired by the large doors in the film The Devils, and prior to the Special Edition 2009, the Fire-cells were cyan inverted crosses - but in 2009, they struck me as blasphemous, so I replaced them with white regular crosses. I also edited the Conveyor-graphic, as I felt that it looked unattractive. ROOM 7: "Ape-Men with Metal Parts" (19th February 2003). A reference to the lyrics of David Bowie's "segue - Ramona A. Stone" from 1.OUTSIDE, this room is both fun and frustrating! Packed with quirky features and fast-crumbling Crumbly cells, it again makes innovative use of HGs to create a new type of puzzle. It's a confusing room, in particular that it's often difficult to tell whether a cell is Crumbly or Fire! The left half of the screen is the more dangerous, as you have to jump through an Innocent-Looking Block (ILB) on the run. It also features the delightful move of stopping on a conveyor and jumping straight up to flick the switch that opens the way to the right half. The right half of the screen features an optional quest to flick the right switch and see a graphic depiction of the marital act! ;-> A clever jump from the conveyor is needed to access the bottom-right, and the items aren't as straightforward to collect as they look! ;-) ROOM 8: "The Dawn of Bacon-Sharing" (26th February 2003). The title is a mondegreen of the line "That only they can share in" from David Bowie's "Soul Love" (from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars). The mondegreen comes from p.11 of the July 2000 issue of Q magazine. The guardians are Kari Krišníková from We Pretty. The items are rashers of bacon. Of course, by the time I did the Special Edition 2009, I had eliminated bacon from my diet after it was shown to cause cancer, though I did not feel inclined to eliminate bacon from this game! This is the toughest room of the game so far, requiring absolutely frame-perfect timing and pixel-perfect moving from the very start. Unlike in Jet Set Willy, the vertical guardians (VGs) kill you if they collide with an item (in demo-mode, this throws the music out of phase!). First you must get under the upper white VG without losing a time-frame, and stand still on the conveyor until she is three pixels above you with her legs apart. Jump just before you reach the ladder to avoid the invisible Fire-cells on the other side of the screen. Then you must go and stand on the embedded item to get rid of the Crumbly block so that you can go back round (jump through the ILB), jump up and collect it. Finally, to get to the portal entails a quirky jump to land in the middle of the bottom-right ladder, followed by a precise jump under the lower white VG - you need to jump from the edge of the ladder when she is at the bottom of her path with one leg showing. ROOM 9: "GimmeGimmeGimmeAManAfterMidnight" (5th March 2003). This is a tribute to the Abba song "Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)". When I heard that song, it immediately reminded me of the sound Willy makes when he jumps against an Earth-cell two cells above his head! ;-) Thus I set out to make a room that Willy's crossing would resemble the riff as closely as possible. This is a very musical room also in that the Earth-cells and items are notes, and the portal a treble clef! This room is tricky in that I have created hybrid Crumbly Earth-cells (by giving Earth the same colour-attribute as Crumbly). Before you jump through the ILB, you must clear the Crumbly Earth-cell you jump from, otherwise you won't be able to jump over the first pool. The HGs take their sprites from Sendy's JSW128 game where's woody. They take their paths from "The Forgotten Abbey" in Jet Set Willy (shifted three characters to the left). They're tougher to pass, though, as you have to jump the deadly pools, the overhead Earth-cells can spoil your jumps over the guardians, and the platform above "erMidn" is actually a left conveyor! The key is learning how to move with the guardians, like a tennis-player whose opponent is spreading her! "Ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight? I always ask that of all my prey" [Prince, "Batdance"]. The top third of the room entails good turning and jumping under pressure, in order to collect the items without hitting the bloody thorn. And don't be caught out by the Crumbly Earth-cells behind the portal! I enjoy playing this room - it's like a nice game of chess! ROOM 10: "Recurring Nightmare" (12th March 2003). This is a remix of "P L A IS TO W G R OV E" from We Pretty, laterally inverted and with a darker colour-scheme. Since this is a Manic Miner room, you don't get to reregister your position after crossing the bottom half - this contributes to making it the hardest room in the game so far! :-> Tips: * When jumping right over the shark, watch the cyan VG, not the shark. * Jump under the magenta VG at the third opportunity, so that you will also be able to jump under the black-on-cyan VG. * Don't forget to take the items in Column 31! * To jump right over the cyan VG, stand on the middle of the cloud with your legs apart, and jump when the VG is two cells higher than you on its way down. ROOM 11: "Der Richter und sein Henker" (19th March 2003). This is a tribute to Friedrich Dürrenmatt's novel Der Richter und sein Henker (The Judge and his Hangman), which I read for 'A' Level German. Two policemen (Bärlach and Tschanz) are trying to solve a murder-mystery, but Bärlach, the elder, is actually trying to get revenge on an old enemy (Gastmann), and is using his own unorthodox and extremely effective methods to achieve his ends. This is actually an easier room than I intended it to be - only Manic Miner 4 difficulty, and a stroll in the park after "Recurring Nightmare"! ;-) The hardest bit is getting the item and the left switch above the green hangman - it's just a matter of good timing, though. Getting the Crumbly item under the blue hangman was meant to be much tougher, but I couldn't get the constraints on that part of the screen to 'add up' the way I wanted them to. The Water-cells are stone steps, the conveyor is a river, the Fire-cells are swords and guns, the items are bullets (taken out of victims) in plastic bags, and the portal is the gallows-curtain. Though I admit my inspiration was sagging when it came to drawing the hangman-sprites, I am particularly proud of the judge-sprite, which I think has a Richard Hallas quality about it (cf. the wigs and TV-presenter in Join The Jet-Set!). Expect to see more of the judge in future games. ROOM 12: "Autostereographic Alien Invasion" (26th March 2003). Autostereograms - those patterns of seemingly random dots in which you can see a hidden 3D image if you look /through/ them instead of looking /at/ them - were all the rage in 1994. I purchased several books of them, and indeed these inspired two Jet Set Willy rooms: "IF W IS HE S WE RE F IS HE S" in We Pretty, and "EATING & BEING EATEN" in Goodnite Luddite. I aspired to write a Manic Miner room that would actually /be/ an autostereogram, and this was the best I managed to come up with. Although there is no hidden picture, if you look at two horizontally adjacent blocks, and then look /through/ the screen so that they come together, the various rows of blocks will appear to come out of the screen towards you, and the rows where the blocks are closer together will look nearer! :-) Anyway, I'm particularly pleased with the graphics in this room: each cell-graphic is an alien, and I managed to use all eight colours. :-) The red Fire-cells take their graphic from "To the Kitchens Main Stairway" from Jet Set Willy, and the VG-sprites come from Goodnite Luddite. The HG-sprites are original, but I think they have a Matthew Smith quality about them. The animated green Conveyor-cells make innovative use of the conveyor-animation: I believe this is the first time that it's not the top and third pixel-rows that are animated - the vertical position of the conveyor-animation can be defined in pixels, not just characters. This is one of the tougher rooms, requiring accurate movement and timing. Tips: * You need to delay your jump over the red HG, to avoid crashing into the white VG. Use wisely the extra Crumbly cells in the passing-places. * The white VG has two alternating phases of animation. One will kill you no matter how tightly you try to jump over it; the other will not. ROOM 13: "Verona No More" (2nd April 2003). Another title from the fake Contamination track-listing (cf. Rooms 4 and 5). I didn't get round to researching Verona as thoroughly as I would have liked (but cf. the We Pretty diary), so I based it on Venice instead, which fits in with the "No More" bit I guess! ;-) I'm not sure if it's a bird's-eye view or a worm's-eye view, but the VGs are boats and the portal is the Bridge of Sighs. Contrary to what someone once said, this room does NOT depict a 9/11-style terrorist-attack! It's a challenging room to complete, but not too distressing IMO, because you just have to crack one bit and then perfect the next. You don't really have to think on your feet to solve this room; it's not the nastiest 'Skylab' room I've ever written. There are invisible Crumbly cells to get along the top. ROOM 14: "Wiredlife" (9th April 2003). Yet another title from the fake Contamination track-listing. My interpretation of the title was inspired by "Zipzone" in the brilliant Amstrad CPC platform-game Radzone (Mastertronic, 1986 - I might well do a JSW-adaptation one day!). This is one of the toughest rooms in the game, not least because of the white-paper Air-cells! The first time that you crack it, you won't want to play it again any time soon! :-> First, you have to make your way along the bottom from left to right. This is most easily achieved with two precisely-controlled jumps followed by three 'free-wheeling' jumps. Then you have to jump up to the first storey, avoiding the Fire-cells! The middle level is the most failsafe, because you know where the blue sticky conveyors are going to leave you. To get past the HGs, jump straight up when you see a tiny '+' sign. Then you have to climb up to the top, sneaking past the red VG, and [in the Special Editions] relieving the item of Crumbly so that it can be collected. The top level is best tackled without the pause-key, using your natural sense of timing to jump the HGs, and jumping to see where you are without hitting the Fire-cells! The biggest danger is falling to your death at the end, and watch out for the fast-crumbling yellow Crumbly cell! ROOM 15: "Speed 4" (16th April 2003). Speed is a very exciting movie in which a terrorist attaches to a bus a bomb that is activated when the speed exceeds 50 mph, and will be detonated when the speed goes back under 50 mph! The sequel-movie Speed 2 is a geriatric Poseidon-adventure. "Speed 3" is a Father Ted episode in which Dougal gets stuck on a milk-float that will blow up if the speed goes back under 4 mph. One scene in "Speed 3" entailed Ted having to move a stack of cardboard boxes out of the road. And so Broadsoft presents "Speed 4", set in a car-factory. You must remove the eight Crumbly blocks from the bottom-right of the screen before the car crashes into them and kills you! For the Special Edition 2009, I have put Fire-cells under the items so that you cannot collect them yourself, but must leave it to the car to do so, which it does because it has white ink! This is Daniel Gromann's solution, and I liked it so much that I decided to enforce it. Once you have cleared the boxes, the rest of the room is relatively easy, as long as you don't get fooled by the confusing layout of the boxes - some of which are Crumbly cells, and others Conveyor-cells. The green plant at the top-left is not what it looks like - otherwise the room would be impossible to complete! ;-) ROOM 16: "slime surfers & jissom monkeys" (23rd April 2003 - Daniela Hantuchová's 20th birthday). Named for an episode of the TV-comedy Game On, this room was inspired by a quote from the agoraphobic Matthew Malone, when his psychologist Jason asked him to imagine the worst that could happen if he went outside at night: "I'm walking along this pavement, and it's all slimy, and I can't keep my balance because the skunk pussies are biting at my toes. And the jissom monkeys and the slime surfers are dropping down their glittering ropes of mucus all over my face and hair. And I'm all sticky, and I'm all slimed up to the eyeballs, man! And there's all this black stuff oozing up between the cracks in the pavement, and I realise my feet are sinking in! And the whole pavement is just black slime: just a great pus-filled swamp, sucking me down... I can't breathe now! My mouth and nose are all choked up with this green stuff! And then I realise what all the slime is! It's made up of rotting bodies! And even though they're rotting, some of them are still alive! And this one reaches out its stinking, rotting talons, and plunges them into my eyeballs! AND I'M BLIND, MAN!! I'M BLIND AND DROWNING IN FILTHY BLACK PUS!!" The sprites for both the HGs and the VGs were 'discovered' in Sendy's where's woody: see "ROOMS.JS2", Sprite-Page 164. The portal is Matthew Malone's front door, the Earth-cells are drainpipes, and the Water-cells are pavement. I wrote the room with yellow-paper Air-cells, with the intention of changing them to white-paper Air-cells after my initial play-test. But the room is rock-hard anyway, and will probably take the best of us a good forty minutes to crack! So I left the Air-cells yellow, and left the other graphics with white paper to fit in with the 'dirty' nature of this room! ;-> Although this is the second-toughest room in the game to complete, it should not be too distressing if you keep track of what works and what doesn't work, so that you can get a little further each time (notwithstanding the lives you lose due to careless mistakes). I have made the following notes primarily to help myself - they are not precise, and subsequent points will not apply if you get the timing wrong. If you prefer to work it out for yourself, you might want to disregard them, but it does help to make notes as you go along when tackling such a complicated room as this. * At the start: step onto the conveyor at the top-right when the monkeys are leaning slightly to the right. * To cross the middle platform from left to right (first pass): step onto the conveyor at the middle-left when the magenta HG is moving right and two cells from its right-boundary, at the first opportunity. * At the middle-right, you have to jump through the ILB once to clear the Crumbly block, then cross the middle platform back left and back right again so that you can jump through the ILB properly. * To cross the middle platform from right to left: jump the red HG as it approaches the ILB, at the second opportunity. * To cross the middle platform from left to right (second pass): jump the magenta HG as it approaches the ILB, at the second opportunity. * To cross the bottom platform: jump the black HG as it approaches the right end, at the first opportunity. * To cross the middle platform from left to right (third pass): jump the magenta HG as it approaches the ILB, at the first opportunity. This is a classic room in terms of timing when to wait and when to go. So many MM/JSW rooms these days consist of a series of isolated challenges, but this one really revives the ancient art of *timing* from the original Manic Miner, and takes it to a new level. ROOM 17: "Eternal Flame (Conveyor Avatar)" (30th April 2003 - tenth anniversary of the stabbing of Monica Seles). This is an MM-conversion of a JSW room by Iain Eddy from J4, used with permission from Geoff Eddy. The room is a tribute to The Bangles' "Eternal Flame", so my cover-version of the room can be thought of as a tribute to Atomic Kitten's cover-version of the song! ;-) According to the J4 documentation, "Eternal Flame" was 'in its original incarnation almost impossible. It's now a bit easier, now that the "water" or "liquid" blocks aren't also conveyors'. So I decided to make them conveyors! (only one is animated, because if I stretched the conveyor-animation over all of the Conveyor-cells, the VGs would collide with it). However, even this proved to be too easy by Ma jolie standards (especially as Manic Miner doesn't have arrows yet), so I added invisible fast-crumbling Crumbly cells, which you need to make use of to collect all of the arrows in the top-right, top-left and (hint) bottom-left of the room. Once you've figured out how to use the Crumbly cells, though, this room is a breather after the previous room and before the next! :-> ROOM 18: "Semi-Perilous Light" (7th May 2003). I thought of calling this room "The Luminious Beam" (Björk, "All Neon Like" from Homogenic), or even "Heathen (The Rays)" [Room 19], but finally settled on a mondegreen of "semi-perilous lives" from Morrissey's "Maladjusted". Not that you'll even notice the air-sapping beam - so distracted will you be by the room's other challenges - although it might just prove to be your Achilles-heel at the end! The VG-sprites are supposed to be models of atomic structures, and were inspired by my distant memory of Wizball. The HGs were drawn in a stream of consciousness - I think they look like foeti (fetuses). The items are prisms (they let the light through when green, and reflect it by ninety degrees when magenta, cyan or yellow). The portal is a three-storey house. I leave both types of Fire-graphic to personal interpretation. :-) This has to be the most mind-bogglingly difficult, traumatic MM/JSW room ever devised, and if you complete it under an hour and fifty minutes (I play-tested it starting at about 22:30 on 31st December 2002, and finished at 00:22 on 1st January 2003), then either you're a better player than I am, or you've had a lot of help from my tips here! * Walk under the blue VG when its middle balls are slightly out - at the second opportunity (if you are in position as early as possible). Stand with your legs apart to jump the yellow and magenta HGs on the second pass. * To cross the conveyor from left to right, jump into the Earth-cell. Set off when the tip of the magenta HG is aligned with the right edge of the middle overhead platform, and jump the HGs separately. * Jump off the conveyor from two steps away from the edge, so as to catch the underside of the Earth-cell but miss the red VG (I love this manoeuvre, and for the Special Edition 2009, I have added an extra Earth-cell to enforce it after Daniel Gromann managed to bypass it). * Jump over the yellow Fire-cell, which takes you slap through the conveyor! (the earliest you can do this is when you can see the toe of the yellow HG above the rightmost Conveyor-cell). * The item to the left of the black Fire-cell is located in a Crumbly cell. You cannot jump across for the item to the left (even though you /could/ if this were Jet Set Willy) - it is accessible via an invisible ladder. * To cross the bottom, wait two steps away from the third-leftmost yellow Fire-cell, and jump straight up over the red HG when it is exactly between the third and fourth Fire-cells. Then wait two time-frames to jump right over the black HG without clipping the cyan VG. * Once you've collected all the items, you'll need to jump onto the conveyor from under the red VG, which is surely the most difficult move in MM/JSW history! You have to walk along the top row of Crumbly cells (the further to the right you start, the more margin for error you have) so that the red VG will be one cell below the Earth-cells with its middle balls slightly out when you jump, whilst also timing it correctly with respect to the guardians in that top-left section. Jump when you are standing in one cell-column, so as to land one step into the conveyor. If you do this at the first opportunity, you should clear the yellow HG by the skin of your teeth. * Finally, no matter how short on air you are, do not try to jump under the white VG immediately after jumping the magenta HG (which goes left up to the Earth-cell, in case you haven't been keeping track). ROOM 19: "Heathen (The Rays)" (14th May 2003 - fifth anniversary of the death of Karolj Seles). This is a tribute to the title-track of David Bowie's 2002 album Heathen, which has to be the ultimate song to close an album with! The words in the top half of the screen are the first four lines of the lyrics, and the font is from Journey's End (Mastertronic, 1985) - of which font the upper case was used in Goodnite Luddite. The portal is the cover-picture of the album, and the items are bare CDs. Red is the colour that our sun will turn at the (scientific) end of the world. And when the sun is low, And the rays high, I can see it now, I can feel it die. I don't want to give too much away about this room, with it being the last in the game, and it's a stroll in the park anyway compared with "Semi-Perilous Light"! ;-) The only quirky feature you might not have seen before is the Crumbly cell above the swastika. This is a direct steal from the final room of Ignacio Pérez Gil's Manic Miner 5: Los Peligros del LSD. I thought that room was impossible to complete until I realised the special trick needed to leave enough Crumbly for a second landing! :-) Anyway, if you take the item to the left of that Crumbly cell at the first opportunity, it will leave a single pixel-row of Crumbly to enable you to escape later, but if you leave that item until the end, it forces you to make a very awkward jump over the yellow HG early on! Experts should not be satisfied until they have solved it both ways! -------- Internet -------- I currently have a website at http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/. Some relevant pages within this website are: * http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/ Top-level index of my Spectrum-pages. * http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/ My Manic Miner/Jet Set Willy pages, including a list of Spectrum MM/JSW games (which I try to maintain as complete and up-to-date as possible - please inform me of any I have missed), various other MM/JSW documents, and links to other MM/JSW websites. * http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/download/ My Download page. Currently contains my other games, my Manic Miner Screen Editor, my Jet Set Willy Construction Kit and my Java toolkit SPECSAISIE. Also has previews of forthcoming software (mostly MM/JSW games). I founded a Yahoo! Group for Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. Its URI is:- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manicminerandjetsetwilly/ It includes a message-board for discussing MM/JSW (with options for receiving and sending messages by email), Files and Photos (i.e. screenshots) sections that members can upload to, Links and Calendar. Anyone can visit the Group and look around its public areas, but for full privileges, you have to join the Group as a member. This prerequires signing up for a Yahoo! account, which you can do, free of charge, over the Web. I encourage all members of the MM/JSW community to join this Group. I recommend the comp.sys.sinclair USENET newsgroup as a place for discussing MM/JSW and other Spectrum-related topics. It's worth at least browsing through the headers each week. The newsgroup is archived at http://groups.google.com/ for those who don't have access to a news-server - in fact, it's worth surfing there even if you do, as not all news-servers receive all newsgroup-postings! The World Of Spectrum fora [http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/] are worth browsing through on a regular basis, particularly the Games forum (this is something I do on a weekly basis). ---------------- Copyright-Notice ---------------- Ma jolie is, of course, my copyright, but I don't mind you putting it on your own website or redistributing it otherwise, provided that no money is charged, and that you acknowledge that it is the copyright of Broadsoft (2003). This document must be included with all copies of the game. Modifications are discouraged but not forbidden, and you should state specifically what you have modified. I don't mind you reusing some of the rooms, graphics, &c. in your own games, or converting the game to another computer (e.g. for MM-PC). However, the accompanying documentation must state that the reused material is the copyright of Broadsoft - failure to do so may be construed as plagiarism. I would like the documentation to be quite specific about this, e.g. "Graphic X in Room Y was taken from Ma jolie", or whatever. Please let me know if you do rerelease Ma jolie or reuse bits of it - it's not that I'd be likely to object; I'd just be very interested to know what follows from my releasing it! ---------------- Revision-History ---------------- 1st January - 14th May 2003: Initial release of Ma jolie on the Internet, in twenty weekly instalments as detailed above. 12th August 2003 (Iva Majoli's 26th birthday): Ma jolie uploaded to my new website and Ma jolite released. This README.TXT was updated accordingly; MA_JOLIE.TAP was completely unchanged. 9th September 2006 (wedding of Iva Majoli and Stipe Maric): Special Edition 2006 released. There are four changes to the game: 1. "Wiredlife" [14] had a loophole in the original edition whereby you could simply climb the right ladder to the portal, bypassing the middle and top platforms. I rectified this by moving the top item to the left ladder, where it is protected by a Crumbly cell so that you have to traverse both the middle platform and the top platform. 2. I patched Ma jolite to make the Jet Set Willy item-collection sound - and only Ma jolite, on the grounds that it may make it easier if you can hear the items. This patch originates from my 2004 game Manic Miner: Neighbours - Allana Truman. 3. I edited the title-screen tune (see Acknowledgements). (I learned how to do this for MM in 2004, and Manic Miner: Neighbours - Allana Truman was the first MM mod with an edited title-screen tune.) 4. I edited the Ma jolite title-screen picture to add a missing accent to "KRIŠNÍKOVÁ". 17th February 2009 (tenth anniversary of the dream that inspired Ma jolie, and of writing the first room): Special Edition 2009 released: 1. I have applied to Ma jolie and Ma jolite the patch from Manic Miner: Neighbours - Allana Truman that fixes the bug that corrupts Room 7 when you jump up off the top of the screen. I have used the variant of the patch that does NOT override the player's sprite in Room 13: >>> #9297: 06 #9298: 10 CD 6A 93 #936A: 5F 16 82 DD 7D FE #9370: E1 D8 ED 44 CB 3F 47 C9 <<< 2. I have changed a couple of cells in "The Hot Room" [1] so that instead of being able to complete the room by dropping to the bottom of the chimney and going round again, you are now forced to do it in the way that Daniel Gromann discovered, which is much more interesting and efficient! This change does not apply to Ma jolite. 3. I have edited a couple of cell-graphics in "The Vatican" [6] for both Ma jolie and Ma jolite, as detailed in the room-documentation. 4. I have put Fire-cells under the items in "Speed 4" [15], so that you are forced to do it in the Daniel Gromann way: leave it to the car to collect them! This change does not apply to Ma jolite. 5. I have added an Earth-cell to "Semi-Perilous Light" [18] to enforce my beloved manoeuvre of jumping up against the Earth-cell above the red VG so as to just avoid it. This change does not apply to Ma jolite. 6. I have updated the BASIC loaders, and removed the erroneous comma from Ma jolite's. 7. I have thoroughly proofread this README.TXT, and edited it accordingly.