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 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 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 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 😵.