[File] Manic Miner: A ten-cavern challenge

[Spider]

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Manic Miner: A ten-cavern challenge

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The initial idea of this game was to take a different twist on the release of the "Manic Miner - Hi-Score Challenge" game, which, although was reasonably successful in itself, did have some quite limiting factors, namely being forced to either POKE or reload to change the cavern, which meant multiple cavern completion times were not possible.

 

With this in mind, Andy decided to make a cut-down version of “Manic Miner”, featuring a mere ten caverns. For the sake of traditionalism the first and last caverns, (those obviously being “Central Cavern” and “The Final Barrier”) were kept.

It was decided to simply create two other, new versions of it based on what we had, so we would have a total of three games. The new ones being an ”easy” version and a ”hard” version. The thoughts here were to make the ”easy” version a little bit more player- friendly than the original and the hard version slightly more trouble for the player.

More details of the changes and details between each version amongst other things are in the readme file.

The download .zip contains a standard .tap file of the game as well as a more detailed readme.txt file

We hope you enjoy this game as much as we did putting it together and look forward to seeing your high-scores, reading any comments and/or feedback on it. We feel it is an interesting slight twist to the original in offering the choice of skill levels to play at.

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• Submitter
  Spider
• Submitted
  04/20/2019
• Category
  JSWMM Releases

 

[Spider]

The W.O.S. discussion topic can be found here
EDIT... The readme.txt within the .zip was slightly updated to correct some minor grammatical issues (thanks Danny) :)

[Spider]

Mentioned on IDPixel:

https://idpixel.ru/games/manicmineratencavernchallenge/ :)

[jetsetdanny]

I have recorded RZX walkthroughs of all three variants of the game and submitted them to RZX Archive. They can be downloaded from here (alongside the other MM variants I have submitted) or directly from here:

 

mmtencavernchallenge.zip

 

I did not capture the loading screen, but I did let the music play the whole title-screen tune in each recording before starting the actual gameplay :).

 

My scores, achieved without any loss of life, at the re-entrance to the first cavern, are:

Easy variant - 27518

Fair variant - 19061

Hard variant - 18705

This actually means that while there is a significant difference in the scores the player can achieve between the Easy variant and the other two variants, the difference between the Fair variant and the Hard variant - when playing using Rollback - is minimal. So the Hard version is probably not that hard after all...  :unsure: 

Edited July 7, 2019 by jetsetdanny

[Spider]

Well done! :)  I have updated the table to reflect this, although you were already at 1st position for that cavern with a previous score of 1701 :thumbsup:

 

The easy variant does allow a shorter route in some caverns, in particular in Kong you can safely fall the distance from the middle/left platform to the floor and in Eugene you can fall off the end of the conveyor, neither is possible in Fair/Hard modes or the regular game. The extra fall height (it is not fall 'any' height, just allows a little bit more) in theory could shave a second or three off the cavern completion time. Combined with the small air-grace period too, a higher score than normally would be possible should be achievable.

 

Hard mode, I do agree its not that much more difficult than Fair mode, aside from some slightly changed guardian speeds and a few more hazards scattered around.