For fans of Ultimate Manic Miner...

[IRF]

Another consequence of the bug in 'Ultimate Manic Miner'...

There is another room in the game (other than 'Eugene Lair') which contains Skylabs, namely 'Reservoir Pumping Station'.

However, the game is quite linear in its layout, and following the usual route through the game, the player would encounter 'Reservoir Pumping Station' before any of the rooms which contain Droplets (namely, as far as I am aware, 'The Menagerie', 'The Stonehenge Mine Subway', and 'The Bank').  Therefore the corruption of the Skylab code will not have taken place by the time you reach 'Reservoir Pumping Station' after you first load up the game file.

However, if you were to play the game up until one of the rooms containing Droplets, but then lose all your lives and start another game, then when you reach 'Reservoir Pumping Station' the second time around, the gameplay will be different than it was the first time through!  (Because the Skylabs in that room will have morphed into Droplets i.e. always dropping down at the same x-coordinate, with no variation to their horizontal 'dropzone' as is the case for classic Skylabs.)

This is reminiscent of the bug in certain Manic Miner mods where Willy jumps off the top of the screen, causing overwriting/corruption of some of the data for other caverns.

Edited February 8, 2024 by IRF

[jetsetdanny]

On 2/4/2017 at 6:50 PM, IRF said:

Anyway, if you load up the game with Willy placed directly into Eugene Lair, then you will bypass the corruption caused by the Droplets in the earlier room, and so you'll be able to play 'Eugene Lair' with the Skylabs (which look like explosions of lava) in full effect.  It's an awesome challenge - nowhere is safe!!  😮 :excl:  😉

Ian has provided a fixed version of "Ultimate Manic Miner", where both the Eugene Lair and some other issues are fixed. Attached are three playthroughs of the fixed "Eugene Lair" done using the modified file. I recorded them using the Rollback feature.

To be honest, when one plays using Rollback, I would say it's not a particularly difficult challenge - when you die, you roll back and try doing things differently, either by improving your movements (e.g. when you see you just need to move a little bit more quickly to get things right) or by choosing a different way ('let's go right instead of left at this time') or timing ('let's not go for those items now, but wait until the horizontal guardian has passed'). Of course the Rollback makes all the difference - playing this room without its assistance would certainly be a nightmare.

UMM fixed Eugene Lair 3.rzx UMM fixed Eugene Lair 2.rzx UMM fixed Eugene Lair 1.rzx

[IRF]

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!!! 😜

Edited February 19, 2024 by IRF

[IRF]

On 2/18/2024 at 5:44 PM, jetsetdanny said:

'let's not go for those items now, but wait until the horizontal guardian has passed'

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!

Edited February 20, 2024 by IRF

[IRF]

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.

[jetsetdanny]

On 2/19/2024 at 12:15 PM, IRF said:

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. 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!

Yes, I've experienced it too. It is an additional difficulty, and it is frustrating 😵.

[igormakovsky]

Hi guys, hi dear Sendy!

Missed you so much.

Ultimate Manic Miner is the hardcore jsw gaming with a low respect to the newcomers. The target audience would probably be crazy jsw players like Andrew Broad. Better play it on youtube.

Over hype? Probably. The effect of the youth maximalism.

I'm fine and this is my first actual day on the forum. So much has been going on here. Forward to stay in touch more and, might be, return to jsw scene if I find the way to launch jswed on my mac.

[jetsetdanny]

4 hours ago, igormakovsky said:

I'm fine and this is my first actual day on the forum. So much has been going on here. Forward to stay in touch more and, might be, return to jsw scene if I find the way to launch jswed on my mac.

Welcome to the forum, Igor! I hope you have come here to stay 🙂.

[igormakovsky]

On 3/26/2023 at 2:03 AM, jetsetdanny said:

"Ultimate Manic Miner" was the last major JSW project ever released by Igor Makovsky. Afterwards, Igor released two more JSW64 games, but they were smaller projects, one having 21 edited rooms, the other 6, incidentally, both inspired by his girlfriends (different ones in each case, AFAICT 😉) at the time. I have always thought that the lack of uniformly positive reception of "UMM" must have been a disappointment for Igor and must have affected his enthusiasm for the creation of new JSW games. That's just my personal theory. I hope he will make a comeback someday, though, like other authors have done...

Daniel, thanks for such outstanding archive of UMM mentiones. Haven't been tracking reactions, honestly.

A few thoughts:

1. I haven't been disappointed, I was quite sure, that "ultimate" word in the title means I haven't lied to the audience: it was ultimate difficult, ultimately different and it was jsw engine at its ultimate limits.
2. It was experimental and experiments could be faced like that. Important that it hasn't been unnoticed, which is worse of all for me.
3. Besides that, it was my final year at the art university and I started working, no time left.
4. I got GF (one, then another, many of them), so had to spend less times on gaming. UMM took lots of my time! Spoiler: jsw games were super successful original presents. A bit geeky, but works for the right type of women.
5. Almost lost interest in retro gaming, was quite interested in playing Boulder Dash Gdash clone by Artsoft for the past year. Can recommend!
6. Small JSW games are not that bad, by the way. They are fun and not so ultimate to finish, can be played even without a rollback hell. Even Zx Heroes wasn't too long and it was appreciated. I think if I'll return to jsw making, I'd stick to this genre.
7. I'm fine, live in Moscow, married, have kids, run a business (place branding, developing tourism, design, wayfinding, maps).

[jetsetdanny]

5 hours ago, igormakovsky said:

It was experimental and experiments could be faced like that. Important that it hasn't been unnoticed, which is worse of all for me.

Oh, yes, UMM definitely drew a lot of attention and much discussion! And quite deservedly so 🙂 .

  

5 hours ago, igormakovsky said:

Spoiler: jsw games were super successful original presents. A bit geeky, but works for the right type of women.

Wow! If you would like to elaborate on it (e.g. what the "right type" means), it would be a great subject for the Chat section 😉 .

  

5 hours ago, igormakovsky said:

Zx Heroes wasn't too long and it was appreciated

Oh yes, it was greatly appreciated even by people who are not normally JSW fans. It's a great game! And not so small, well, it's certainly not a minigame.

  

5 hours ago, igormakovsky said:

I think if I'll return to jsw making

I definitely hope you will! 🙂