Re: Brilliant new Spectrum game released - Ultimate Manic Miner

Andrew Broad wrote:

The general consensus in the MM/JSW community is that Igor Makovsky's
Ultimate Manic Miner is indeed brilliant.

I'd draw the line there. "Brilliant" is reserved for people like Einstein,
games like Choas. This game is "different", definitely not "Brilliant".

Admittedly I myself have
only had a quick, casual go so far, but it was enough to see that the
game deserves full marks for novelty, amazing graphics, and a unique
atmosphere.

It amazes me that you can say that. The graphics are bloody awful - There's
far too much that the artist wanted to put into each screen that he
completely forgot that the best way to achieve real class in a JSW/MM game
is to be minimalistic. The more empty space there is, the less clash. You
don't *need* stairs with bannisters (that ruin the main sprite's fluidity of
movement). You certainly don't need white sprites on a yellow background.
Nor do you need white blocks of paper appearing when the main sprite walks
down the moonlit stairs.

It seems to be an excellent showcase of what can be achieved with John
Elliott's enhanced JSW64 game-engine, with the extra cell-classes,
cell-types, and guardian-types.

And room types? The main starting sequence - just rooms, for no particular
purpose other than to display text? And ones that you can't skip either. I
believe I've already ranted about the block types that don't give any
indication as to their purpose.

One downside of UMM is the uncertainty. Because there are so many
cell-classes, it's hard to know what to expect in terms of
cell-behaviour, whether something is a guardian or not, whether it is
stand-onable or not.

And of course, if you can stand on it, you're usually standing on thin air -
the skipping rope, anyone? Poor design. Try jumping under the first "lift"
sign.

The other downside of UMM is the lack of items, most of which seem to
be hidden inside portals,

Yes. Whenever a condition needs to be met, which results in a change of the
map, we get the "zoom" of the portal and an obvious teleport to the same
room with slightly different layout - witness the change from day (ugh) to
night, and many more.

But UMM is certainly something special in the development of the
MM/JSW field, and in graphical terms it will be a very hard act to
follow. Anyone who has written a MM/JSW game will appreciate the
amazing achievement of Igor Makovsky.

Graphically, it's been superceded by many other games in your own archive. I
can appreciate that you're a fan of MM/JSW (as am I - there's been some
fantastic work done with the engine), but you can take fanboy-ism too far.
Not every new release is "fantastic". This is just abysmal. The guy has
really tried to break through the barriers thrown up by the engine and just
not succeeded at all in anything other than an insult to the original games.

If can code, he'd have been better put writing his own engine, and getting
someone else to design the rooms and draw the graphics.

D.




.

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