Manic Jet Set Willy.

[Norman Sword]

How deadly is the solar beam?

The play through enters the solar power room with a score of 46,456,230 and after completing the room has a score of 40,256,330. This means the solar beam zapped £6.2 million (approx) monies from Willy. Game wise the player would have had a higher score, if theyhad sacrificed all of their lives in the previous room. Or even completed the last kong room and  obtained the kong bonus for each of their lives.

Of course those higher score's do not complete the game.

So avoiding contact with the solar beam, is a room playing need for completion  if a higer score with all lives intact is wanted.

 

 

 

 

Edited December 29, 2021 by Norman Sword
Clarification.

[jetsetdanny]

I have completed the game, twice: playing at the fastest speed, and also playing at a fast speed ("S") but with the in-game music on.

I have made RZX recordings of both of these walkthroughs. However, I have to re-record their portions, because I did not wait in the second Kong cavern for the Kong to reach the floor level, with which I lost a couple of million pounds! 😮

Hopefully, I will be able to upload these corrected recordings tomorrow (or rather, later today).

Thanks for v. 1.05a, Norman Sword, and for completing this project! Congratulations on squeezing so many things in! 👍

[Spider]

On 12/28/2021 at 9:25 PM, Norman Sword said:

So avoiding contact with the solar beam, is a room playing need for completion  if a higer score with all lives intact is wanted.

🙂 Yes true. Have to bear in mind (for me at least) on a standard game Solar Power Generator is very time/air tight, whereas your version was very easy, albeit at a huge score cost. A better player could avoid the beam a lot more I think.

 

14 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

I have completed the game, twice: playing at the fastest speed, and also playing at a fast speed ("S") but with the in-game music on.

I have made RZX recordings of both of these walkthroughs. However, I have to re-record their portions, because I did not wait in the second Kong cavern for the Kong to reach the floor level, with which I lost a couple of million pounds! 😮

Hopefully, I will be able to upload these corrected recordings tomorrow (or rather, later today).

Yes, my second .rzx did this, just enough slowdown to have the tune play sensibly, about when the first "S" is fully shown.

Must admit I did not wait for Kong on one attempt, so yes there's something to be gained by waiting.

Looking forward to watching a highly skilled player 😉

 

EDIT... Merged my posts together, for some reason it decided it wanted to create two separate posts

[jetsetdanny]

All right, I have recorded the game twice, creating recordings which are up to my standard, thanks to using Rollback, of course 😁.

I have completed the game playing at the fastest speed possible (with no music) at 8:40 am in-game time, with £ 45,808,330 to my name. 

I have also completed the game playing at what seemed to be a reasonable compromise between a fast speed and the in-game music playing nicely at 8:39 am in-game time, with £ 45,819,730 to my name. 

I wish I had this kind of money in real life! I would retire from any professional activities and spend a significant portion of my entirely leisure time on MM and JSW 🙂 . 

A couple of comments:

The Solar Beam is indeed very deadly, and it makes the player complete the game with less money than they have when they enter the penultimate cavern.

The losses can be reduced by avoiding the beam as much as possible. I strove to do just that and in each of my walkthroughs I lost exactly £ 1,187,200, which wasn't as bad as losing £6.2 million, but still made me feel less-millionaire...

The fact that the in-game clock continues to function in the MM caverns allows for an interesting comparison between the completion time of MM and JSW. I completed JSW at 8:00 am in-game time when playing at a lower-than-highest speed, and at 8:01 am when playing at the highest speed possible. Both of these results are below my standard completion time of the original JSW (without any unnecessary loss of life), which is 7:58 am. This is logical, because with the game running significantly faster than the original, it is more difficult to make pixel-perfect movements in all places here it makes a time difference whether you achieve this kind of perfection or not.

I completed the MM caverns in 39 in-game minutes. So while in JSW you go through pretty much three times as many rooms as in MM (59/20), the time needed to complete JSW is only about 50% longer than the time needed to complete MM (in in-game minutes, say 60/39).

My further plans:

I will create an individual page for "Manic Jet Set Willy" on JSW Central in the near future, in the "Other game engines" section. I will then host the RZX walkthroughs attached below over there, with a complete screenshot gallery, game completion info, etc.

The completion of "Manic Jet Set Willy" will probably also be one of the next videos I will make for the JSW Central YouTube Channel.

Once again, Norman Sword, thank you for this game and congratulations on achieving your objective of including both classics in one 48K file, with some additional elements! 👍

I am looking forward to your future projects, which I hope will still be MM/JSW related 🙂 .

My walkthroughs are attached below.

Happy New Year, Everyone! 🙂

 

Manic Jet Set Willy v. 1.05a - Daniel's RZX walkthrough (fastest speed, no music).rzx Manic Jet Set Willy v. 1.05a - Daniel's RZX walkthrough (fast speed with music).rzx

[JianYang]

That's quite impressive.

I wonder if by casually mentioning @RuffledBricks I can summon him and maybe get him to make a speedrun through this version.

 

[Spider]

Thanks for your walkthrough .rzx's Danny, I'll watch them later 🙂

@JianYang, now that is an excellent idea. 🙂 I'm hoping he will be interested in doing it.

[Spider]

@jetsetdannyI'm curious, did you have any issues with Cuckoo's Nest collecting the object while avoiding the rolling boulder guardian ?

I am about 95% convinced its me, but I'd like your thought on it too.

The game plays fine on this location compared to the original, I even had that open at the same time to watch the movement.

Just can't explain why I struggled with that screen so much 😄 even on slow speed, as per my .rzx I slowed it down for that one and a couple of others.

@Norman Sword Although I did not check myself I'm sure that you kept the 'top exit' from Watch Tower and Esmerlda as per the original. Interestingly the BBC version of JSW has these (as far as I can tell, last time I looked a few years back) hardcoded in, so they remain faithful to the original.

 

[Norman Sword]

Re  "the layout of the JSW caverns".

A quick response.

In one of the earlier posts I mentioned that I encountered the Attic Bug, the missing items and some other interesting features from the original game. I was using the original game data and that unfortunately for me, gave me the original bugs. (which when I encountered them, needed me to remove those bugs.) Apart from glaringingly obvious things that needed changing. I left as much code and data intact, as was possible. The code I focused on was the parts that just waste space through their design. e.g. the imposible triangle, attribute data, room layout data, sprite data, key data, rope data. Then when I needed to add extra routines onto JSW to allow the extra events in Manic MIner. (kong/eugene/skylab/collapsing floor) The code written tended to be much smaller than the originals.  

I left room layouts and even the interconnections between the rooms as laid out in the original data. Although I did change how the data was stored and used.

Whilst I could change the room layouts, It was not what I was trying to do. I changed the layout data for the room that forced a death jump collecting the item. That change was trivial and would have been done by Matthew if it had been pointed out to him (before release of the game). I also changed the room layout for the banyan tree and also displayed or moved a few of the room collected items.

Changing the basic game was not the plan. Easy to do, but it does start a path that can be travelled on for a very long time.

Changing the room layout for:-

Watchtower.  --- Jump off the top

 Esmeralda  --- jump off the top

The elephant problem? --- jump off the top

The restricted height climb ropes --- jump off the top

Those kind of things were not the focus of my attention. Just squashing both games into 48k was all I wanted to do.

 

Addendum:
The rooms for JSW, now have the addition of collapsing floors, 2nd Nasty plus a switch. Plenty of extra tile graphics to redesign the top of the Elephant with a special case added into the code to handle the redesign. 

But where do changes stop? 

 

 

 

Edited January 4, 2022 by Norman Sword
SpeLKing and GromMer. Order sentence arrange I did.

[jetsetdanny]

Once again, congratulations on squashing both games into 48k, Norman Sword! 👍 And thank you for sharing your excellent work with us, of course 🙂 .

Andy, when I played "Manic Jet Set Willy" at maximum speed, I did struggle with "Cuckoo's Nest" a little bit. It did not seem as hard when I played with the speed reduced. I think that it may be that this particular spot is quite challenging in the original "JSW", so much so that any increase in the the speed increases the headache exponentially, and even if the speed is lower, it's still tricky. 

[jetsetdanny]

I have recorded "Manic Jet Set Willy" played at the slowest speed possible, for the sake of completeness (kind of; a complete set of recordings would be one illustrating every possible speed, but creating such a set would be extremely time-consuming and would have little value added IMO).

My RZX recording is attached below.

I can confirm, based on my subjective feeling, that "Cuckoo's Nest" is exactly as it should be. At this speed I got it right the first time, it wasn't difficult.

I noticed an interesting quirk in the Manic Miner part. In this effort, while playing at the slowest speed possible, I  completed the game with a better in-game completion time (8:38 am, finishing the JSW part at 7:59 am) than when playing at a very high speed (8:39; 8:00) and at the fastest speed (8:40 am, 8:01 am). That's logical, the lower speed allowed me to be marginally more efficient. However, I concluded this effort with less money (£ 45,782,330) than when I played at a very high speed (£ 45,819,730) and at the fastest speed (£ 45,808,330).

The reason for this is a stray solar ray which I couldn't avoid. As far as I can tell, it appears when you play at the slowest speed, but not when you play at the two fast speeds I had played at before.

Please have a look at the two videos attached below. The one called "Slowest speed.mp4" shows an excerpt from the game in "Solar Power Generator". The one called "Fast speed.mp4" shows the same moment in the game.

At this point I had £ 46,838,230 when playing at the slowest speed, and £ 46,835,630 when playing at a fast speed. As could be expected, my performance at the slowest speed so far had been superior to my performance at a fast speed, as reflected in the "financial result".

However, please watch the moment when I drop down to the floor below the yellow vertical guardian, jump to the left, turn around and then jump rightwards onto the conveyor. In both cases, I make the jump onto the conveyor after the solar ray had flashed above me momentarily (with the jump executed a little earlier, I would have hit the solar ray from below and lost money). 

When playing at a fast speed, I land on the conveyor after this jump and traverse it safely to get onto the next platform.

When playing at the slowest speed, after landing on the conveyor I get hit by the solar ray momentarily. Lethal as it is, it saps enough money from my account to affect the final game result.

This ray only strikes/appears when playing at the slowest speed. It does not appear when playing at the fastest speed or the fast speed I chose for my other previous recording.

[Delaying the jump in order to avoid this ray causes a delay later on, which makes the player miss the best moment to cross the solar ray to collect the item at the upper right, resulting in an even greater financial loss, so it's not a good solution; you *have to* lose this additional little bit of money when playing at the slowest speed AFAICT.]

Please note that I think this is actually a very cool feature, with some serious real-world parallels. Choosing the slowest speed possible does not always pay! Low speed on a motorway is not necessarily the safest one. Being too cautious (an attitude similar to driving very slowly) does not always let you carry out your plans and fulfil your dreams - sometimes you need to move faster /  more decisively / take a little risk in order to succeed. Great parallels, and a very fitting real-world lesson from "Manic Jet Set Willy" 👍 🙂 .

Finally, I should note (I meant to mention it before, but perhaps forgot) that Norman Sword's extra code which makes the solar ray turn red, with a corresponding sound effect, when it's touching Willy (first introduced in "Manic Miner: creme de la creme" IIRC) is a great feature, extremely useful to let the player know if they're doing the right thing in this room or not. It would be good if it was used in all games and rooms where the solar ray challenge is present (that's for the future games, I guess; we won't change the past ones).

A video of my walkthroughs of "Manic Jet Set Willy" will be coming to the JSW Central YouTube channel later this month, in a few days, if all goes well 🙂 .

Manic Jet Set Willy v. 1.05a - Daniel's RZX walkthrough (slowest speed, music).rzx