About This File
Maria vs. Some Bastards is a beautiful game by Vidar Eriksen (Erix1). It uses a modified JSW48 game engine that has come to be known as 'Erix1 Mode'. Its first short demo version was released in October 2001. The game was gamma-released on 6th March 2003, with four bug-fixed revisions (called Rev B, C, D and E) released within the next few weeks.
A menu screen implemented by the BASIC loader allows the player to choose one of the three modes: Easy, Normal or Hard. According to the message which shows in the opening room, you need to collect 120 items to complete the game if you choose the Easy mode, 240 items if you choose the Normal mode and 246 items if you choose the Hard mode.
Daniel Gromann raised the question of the game question of the game’s completability on the Manic Miner Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group in June 2007, when he pointed out that Maria did not disappear after he had collected 251 items in the Hard mode.
In March 2012, Vidar Eriksen promised to look into the problem and check whether some ‘end-game corrections’ he had done in Rev D were not left out in Rev E. He mentioned that a Rev F might be necessary, but it did not materialise in the following years.
Ian Rushforth investigated the item-collecting code in Maria vs. Some Bastards and discovered the cause of the bug which made the game non-completable. He announced his findings on Manic Miner Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group in February 2019, offered a bug-fix for the problem and also showed the way to collect one of the items Daniel had not been able to reach.
After some further discussions, the Jet Set Willy Manic Miner Community Team produced a 2019 Bug-Fixed Edition of the game, with the following changes in relation to Rev E:
- Ian’s solution to the bug in the item-collecting code was applied.
- A way was provided to collect the rightmost item in the room "Stinking sewer" (27), which seems impossible to collect in Rev E.
- Three items located in the very same (non-)rooms which are used by the Softricks game engine (on which Erix1 Mode is based) to store the item table - which are thus invisible and unreachable in Rev E - were moved to other locations so that they became present in the game and collectable.
- As the total number of items possible to collect has now reached 256, the number required to complete the Hard mode was set to 256, with the corresponding changes in the BASIC loader and the message in “Master Bedroom”, where the game starts.
- An item placed in the same location as another item (as happens in “The Beach” in the original JSW) in the room “Afterliving” (46) was moved within the same room to make its collection more demanding and make the player use a route they might not use otherwise.
- A minor change to the layout of “Alien inferno 2" (49) was applied to force the player to press the special button in that room if they want to complete it without losing a life.
- The middle item in the room “Bubbles and Bob” (41) was moved to make its collection more meaningful.
- The up exit from "That slimy room" (11) was changed to itself instead of "The dungeon" (00), in order to prevent the protagonist from potentially getting perpetually stuck at the bottom-right corner of the latter room.
- The spellings of the room names “Flooding sewer” (15), “Seagull corner” (36) and “Deadly descent” (54) were corrected.
- A typo in the scrolly for Manic Mining Robot's Day Out, the ‘secret bonus crap game' attached to Maria vs. Some Bastards was corrected.
- Information about this being the 2019 Bug-Fixed Edition was added on the loading screen and in the REM statements in the BASIC loader.
- The Readme was also updated with the info that this is the 2019 Bug-Fixed Edition.
All of the above changes were applied to the actual game file by Ian Rushforth, after some deliberations with Andy Ford and Daniel Gromann.
We hope you will enjoy this Bug-Fixed Edition and the ability to complete Maria vs Some Bastards at long last. Have a go at it - it’s worth it! 🙂