IRF

That comment has just inspired me to wonder - has there ever been a MM game with a Kong cavern where an item is embedded within the collapsing wall, and therefore only collectable after the first switch has been tripped? 🤔

Okay, I've just seen the caveat at the start of your video. (EDIT: This post crossed over with DD's latest reply.) On that basis, whilst it's a very interesting and quirky experiment, I don't think it should form the basis of an update to the ranking table?
As you suggest, it isn't something that can be achieved in the High Score Challenge, because it relies on the player having completed all 20 caverns several times through beforehand! Which isn't something you can do in the HSC; you just pick a cavern and play it (slowing your score for that cavern easily to be seen, since you start off with 000000)
Also, the high scores in the table at the start of this thread should serve as a target for the average (good) player to aspire to. I don't think activating this bug is within the bounds of normal/sane gameplay!
Plus the precise outworkings of the bug may be somewhat predictable. In one cavern during your experiment, an errant extra life auto-collected an item (presumably because the INK in the host character space was rendered in white). But in other circumstances, a non-white INK attribute might get printed over an item, making it uncollectable!?
Those are just my personal musings; ultimately it's Andy (Spider)'s call as to whether to update the high score table, since it's his project.

It seems that it's still collectable when another attribute is printed over an item - this happens in Abandoned Uranium Workings. It also seems that the bug is consistent in what it puts on-screen. My main concern is that it isn't possible the first eight (at minimum) times you complete the cavern, and these are clearly different caverns to those intended due to modified terrain.

Duck - that is very much in keeping with the level of obsession about all things JSW & MM
related on these forums, excellent work! You also have more free time than I do! But top effort!

I played through, albeit not in real-time (so savestates, rollback etc.) - I'm doing it for a max score run because I think it's interesting to watch the game disintegrate as you play.
It takes about two hours of perfect play to get to this point so I don't recommend it.

In short: earning enough extra lives corrupts the screen, which acts as floor tiles in most caverns and allow routes that aren't normally available.
The following five scores are shown in the video:
Abandoned Uranium Workings - 1856
Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast - 4142
Wacky Amoebatrons - 1377
Attack of the Mutant Telephones - 1750
Ore Refinery - 1884

If the above statement is correct (quoted from the first post of this thread), then I can't think how you managed to achieve a higher score in that (or any other) cavern of the BB* version than you can in the High Score Challenge version!?
(*The HSC is based on BB, so it is possible to achieve one extra point in the SP version's 'The Warehouse', because the different sprites there means that Willy can sneak past the last one, one time-frame sooner. But that doesn't apply to 'Abandoned Uranium Workings'.)

Intriguing... I would say that if it involved the use of some quirky feature of the existing game engine, then it should count. But if you used a POKE of some sort, then it shouldn't.

If the above statement is correct (quoted from the first post of this thread), then I can't think how you managed to achieve a higher score in that (or any other) cavern of the BB* version than you can in the High Score Challenge version!?
(*The HSC is based on BB, so it is possible to achieve one extra point in the SP version's 'The Warehouse', because the different sprites there means that Willy can sneak past the last one, one time-frame sooner. But that doesn't apply to 'Abandoned Uranium Workings'.)

It doesn't use any POKEs, it's possible in both the original Bug-Byte and Software Projects versions without any modifications.
However, it's not possible in the high score challenge version of the game.

Maybe he's a fisherman, and in the spirit of Matthew's double entendres, it's called 'Willy's Big Tackle'. 😜

But then if Willy's first adventure was set on a chain of islands, it wouldn't have been called 'Manic Miner'! It would have been 'Willy the Island Hopper' or something, and he would be wearing a sunhat or visor instead of a miner's helmet.

Maybe he's a fisherman, and in the spirit of Matthew's double entendres, it's called 'Willy's Big Tackle'. 😜

Maybe he's a fisherman, and in the spirit of Matthew's double entendres, it's called 'Willy's Big Tackle'. 😜

I'll check and if necessary update the rankings in the download over the weekend.
Thank you! 🙂

Dynamite Dan II
Dynamite Jet Set 😉 Ideally with an ending this time 😮

But then if Willy's first adventure was set on a chain of islands, it wouldn't have been called 'Manic Miner'! It would have been 'Willy the Island Hopper' or something, and he would be wearing a sunhat or visor instead of a miner's helmet.

Sounds like a great idea for another game...

Waiting around too long can have two potential consequences: you might get hit by a fireball flare-up, but even if you manage to avoid that, if you crumble away all the cyan platforms near the portal, you may end up stranded on the lower level, with the flashing portal beyond reach! In fact, I thought you had made that mistake in one of your recordings (but it turned out that there was one crumbly cell with a pixel-row or two remaining, just within reach of the portal, so you managed to sneak out of there!)
**
Another unexpected difficulty can arise from the 'shadow' of the Skylabs passing over a column shortly before the deadly fireball arrives in that column. It can provide a helpful warning to take swift evasive action, as it briefly turns Willy's sprite yellow in advance of the deadly yellow pixels bursting out. But it can also make items temporarily uncollectable, if you try to jump up to collect them just at the moment that the yellow shadow passes through them and Willy! (Willy needs to have white INK in order to collect items.) It happened to me once, so I had to go back and try again for the item in question. Deliciously frustrating!

I should just add that, notwithstanding the name 'Eugene Lair', this cavern is more like a hybrid, conceptually speaking, of two original Manic Miner caverns:
- 'The Final Barrier' (aesthetically speaking, with the action all taking place in the bottom half of the playing area - although a strategically-placed pair of dancing pixels give the appearance of moving eyeballs to the [otherwise static] giant 'Eugene' printed at the top of the screen); and
- 'Skylab Landing Bay' - the fireballs are a very inventive and fiendishly tricky variation on Matthew's original Skylabs (they appear to be ascending rather than descending, and for most of their traverse they are INKless).
The version of the cavern which ended up in the official release of 'Ultimate Manic Miner' (with the 'Skylab' fireballs staying in their columns and not getting horizontally displaced, due to a flaw in the JSW64 game engine) really didn't do Igor Makovsky's original design justice.  Hence I was so determined to fix it!
For all of the above reasons, I really recommend people try out 'Eugene Lair as Manufacturer Intended' (via the above method, taking one of Danny's recordings as a starting point and 'seizing control' of the gameplay), even if they don't fancy traversing through the rest of 'Ultimate Manic Miner' to reach it.

Well done, Danny! I agree, the sense of panic is only increased if you don't have Rollback to rely on!  I think I did manage to do it once though (eventually!)
Because these are RZX recordings, I would suggest anyone who wants to have a go at this fiendish cavern 'as author intended', all they need to do is:
- load up one of the recordings in SPIN;
- once the gameplay starts, select 'Stop Playback' from the 'Recording' drop-down menu at the top of the emulator window;
- walk Willy leftwards into the portal of the start-up room (if that hasn't already happened by the time you stop the playback) ;
- emerge from the portal into 'Eugene Lair', and BEWARE THE FIREBALLS!!! 😜

Wow! That's quite a lengthy discussion I initiated! Or perhaps - in the spirit of the double entendre inherent in the Willy game - a 'mass debate'! 😜
Another example is 'Head Over Heels', which starts off linear but then once you reach the Moon base, you can decide which of four worlds to teleport down to and complete first. Then once you've finished all four planets, the ending reverts back to linear. I could talk all day about 'Head Over Heels', it's fantastic! But I would probably veer off-topic.
One thing I'm fairly certain of is that the term 'cavern' doesn't really apply to an outdoor setting, like Deserted Isle!

I wonder if all the other 'tributees' are aware of their 8-bit representation in the Manic Miner Pub in UMM?

This is the definition I was thinking of - although levels needn't specifically be completed in a linear order (for example, most Mario games have a fairly open structure where you choose a level, and completing that level grants access to additional levels) they are self-contained challenges which have a clear definition of "completion".
In the case of Manic Miner, completing a cavern gives you a score bonus based on how quickly you completed the room and then loads the next cavern, refreshing your air and providing a new checkpoint to return to when you die. So each cavern definitely counts as a level.
This is an interesting one. I'd definitely say 10 levels and 20 rooms, but I'm not sure if I'd count it as 20, 10, or even 0 caverns (the last being the same way I wouldn't consider the whole of Jet Set Willy as one cavern).
The C16 version of Jet Set Willy II is split into four parts this way as well - although you can load each part at any time and there's no requirement to complete them (in fact I'm not even sure it's possible to complete most of them). Personally I'd refer to these as levels as well, as they're effectively just larger versions of the Double Miner case, but it would be interesting to know how this was referred to in the manual.
The SAM Coupe version of Manic Miner has three sets of caverns, and the title screen asks you to select a "game"...
I'm thinking Deserted Isle is a cavern after all.

I thought about "Manic Mixup" as well as an example of levels of difficulty. I would definitely agree here.
However, I also relate to the word "level" being used for any kind of game where passing on to the next screen/game map/part of game map, etc. depends on solving the previous level (which may be a screen/game map/part of game map, etc.) successfully.
"MM" is a perfect example of a game having levels in this sense. One screen (room, cavern) is equivalent to one level.
Interestingly, in "Double Miner" I would say that there are 10 levels, but 20 rooms/screens/caverns, because the player needs to solve two rooms/screens/caverns before moving on to the next level.
"Double Miner" is also an interesting test for Ian's definition of a cavern, because each pair of rooms consists of a "non-portal room" and a "portal room". You can move between them freely, but you can only progress to the next level of the game (the word 'level' comes in so handy here!) after collecting all of the items in both rooms, which activates the portal. So are both of these rooms caverns or not? I would only say that individually they are not levels; together each pair of rooms creates a level.
Another consideration: speaking about 'levels' defined as I described at the start of this post, I believe the level of difficulty is irrelevant, or at least does not have to be relevant. The game can have a number of levels (in terms of this definition) that will have either the same level of difficulty, or a random level of difficulty (some levels are more difficult than others but not in any particular order - I would say MM is actually like this), or a rising level of difficulty, or, theoretically, even a falling level of difficulty, or some other pattern (like for example: a game where you progress through a zoo. First come screens featuring fish: easy level - moderate level - hard level; then come screens featuring birds: easy level - moderate level - hard level; then come screens features animals: easy level - moderate level - hard level, and so on).
Admittedly, it is probably more common to find games where the difficulty level increases as the player progresses through the levels ("Jumping Jack" is a great Spectrum example that comes to mind, one of my non-JSW favourites) than where it goes down. But again, it happens in many games, but it doesn't have to happen to define what a level is.
I would also agree that if someone talks about levels in JSW games, I would probably think about first of all about 'geographical' levels as per the game's map. However, this doesn't have to be the case either. Some games have so many "illogical" room exits (you leave room A and enter room B, but when you go back, instead of re-rentering room A you enter room C, etc.) that it may be very difficult to make a 'geographical' map of them. Or, even if the exits *are* logical, the game map can have such a shape that it would be difficult to talk about levels - which I think we subconsciously identify with the storeys of Willy's original mansion. But not every game map has such a mansion...
Finally, one could also design JSW games that would have 'levels' as defined at the start of this post. A prime example of this would be "Party Willy (JSW128 version)" - you have to collect all of the items in the rooms that are equivalent to the 48K "Party Willy" Part 1 and do the mid-game toilet run to be able to start playing the rooms that are equivalent to the 48K "Party Willy" Part 2. In this sense, the game has two levels (although I wouldn't normally think of them as 'levels', but 'parts', because of the game's name).
My general feeling is that in "Party Willy" you cannot really talk about an increase in difficulty level between the two parts (they are both very difficult). So it's an example of a JSW game that has 'levels', but they're not defined by increased difficulty.
"Jet Set 40-40" is another example of a JSW game that has levels in the sense of having to complete one part of the game to be able to progress to the next part. In this case, the levels are also marked by an increased level of difficulty (the player has to collect four complete sets of items; once the last item of one set has been collected, the items of the next set will appear. The difficulty of the game will increase with each consecutive set of items, as more and more guardians threaten Willy's progress through his mansion and its surroundings).