MANIC MINER: THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA (C) BROADSOFT 1998 =================================== [Special Edition 2003] For the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Written by Andrew Broad http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/ The Game -------- Manic Miner: The Buddha Of Suburbia is a redefinition of the screens in Matthew Smith's classic Manic Miner, which I acknowledge as being the copyright of Bug-Byte (1983) - owned by Jester Interactive since 2001. It also uses a few bits and pieces from Jet Set Willy (Copyright Software Projects 1984) and Jet Set Willy II (Copyright Software Projects 1985) as detailed in the notes below. Aficionados of the ongoing Manic Miner series should note that this is *not* Manic Miner 5 - *that* was written by Ignacio Pérez Gil, and was released on the Internet just before MM:TBOS, prompting MM:TBOS to receive the unofficial title Manic Miner 6! :-) As the title suggests, the concept for the game is based on David Bowie's soundtrack-album for the BBC2 adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's novel. However, only the back ten rooms are based on The Buddha Of Suburbia (a room for each track on the album), the first ten being a motley crew of early Manic Miner experiments, which turned out to be good enough to keep. This game was originally written in 1994, with no plans to release it on the Internet (which I had not heard of at the time), but in 1998 I hacked it slightly to bring it up to my current standards, and here it is! :-) The Buddha Of Suburbia is a pretty impressive Manic Miner game, because it was written (on a real Spectrum +2) using my own Manic Miner Screen Editor, which is now released on the Internet. While MMSE did not quite have all the functionality then as it does now (notably the capability to edit vertical guardians), I was still able to create rooms which are radically different from the original caverns, unlike some MM rewrites I could mention! ;-) While most of the rooms are not as difficult as those in Manic Miner 4, they still provide the experienced Manic Miner player with an adequate challenge, especially due to the severe time-limits in the second half! :-> I have thoroughly play-tested the final version, and I certify that it /is/ possible to complete. You can consider yourself to have passed Manic Miner: The Buddha Of Suburbia if you finish the game using infinite lives (POKE 35136,0) on a real Spectrum, or saving and loading snapshots on an emulator. If you cheat by using any other POKEs, or by using 6031769, you should consider yourself disqualified. ;-) Members of the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manicminerandjetsetwilly/] can view exclusive screenshots in the Photos section. Acknowledgements ---------------- * Matthew Smith, for writing the original Manic Miner, and in particular for deciding on an unencrypted, perspicuous room-format! ;-) * Many thanks to Richard Hallas for rescuing this game off audio cassette for me! * The music that plays after the game has loaded is a rather crappy BEEP-rendition of the brilliant title-track, "Buddha Of Suburbia", from David Bowie's album The Buddha Of Suburbia. * The in-game tune also derives from the David Bowie song "Buddha Of Suburbia". I can't tell you how difficult it was to select a part of the song that would work satisfactorily as a MM tune. ;-) * Richard Hallas's document "A Miner Triad" was an invaluable aid to redefining the in-game tune. * The Special Edition was developed using Ramsoft's RealSpectrum emulator, following the death of my real Spectrum on 13th April 2003. * John Elliott, for his disassembly of MM (no longer online), from which I worked out how to edit the end-of-game colour-attributes (see Appendix E of my Manic Miner Room Format). Loading Instructions -------------------- To play Manic Miner: The Buddha Of Suburbia, you need a Spectrum emulator that is capable of loading TAP files (I hope I'm right in thinking that the emulators you all use are capable of loading TAP files, as I don't want to complicate matters by also releasing snapshot files). To find an emulator for your particular computer, see the Emulators section of the comp.sys.sinclair FAQ [http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~pak21/cssfaq/emulator.html]. A TAP file is an encoding of the files on a Spectrum tape (as opposed to a snapshot file, which is an encoding of the complete state of a Spectrum at the moment it was created). To load from a TAP file, you have to issue a load-command to the emulated Spectrum (i.e. select Tape Loader or type LOAD "" (in 48K mode, press J for LOAD and SYMBOL-SHIFT+P for ")). You also have to open the TAP file in the emulator (either before or after issuing the loading instruction). The Caverns ----------- ROOM 0: "The Terminator". Based on this awesome movie I once saw in which a robot which looked just like a man on the outside was sent back in time from 2029 to 1984 to destroy the leader of the resistance by killing his mother before he was born, this was (as far as I can remember) the first Manic Miner room I ever wrote, which was back in 1992 using an early prototype of my Manic Miner Screen Editor. In it, you have to get past the terminator (which has been stripped down to its metal endoskeleton after being blown up in a truck) to collect the dynamite stick from the high ledge. Watch out for the rapid falling- away floor! (This effect was unintentional, due to a bug in the graphic, but I liked it so I left it in :-) ). ROOM 1: "Terminator 2 : Judgement Day". A follow-up to the previous cavern, based on the film's sequel, which I renamed slightly to get rid of that awful Americanised spelling of 'judgement'! ;-) You have to dodge the morphing T1000 terminators (notice the clever way that the one on the left walks through a solid wall when it comes on - this was achieved by defining the wall graphic to be blank) and collect the two chips so that they can be destroyed. The cyan static nasties are arms ripped off from T800s like on the previous screen. ROOM 2: "Andrew's Hall". A grand chamber in honour of myself ( ;-) ), in which you have to avoid the giant spirit-level effort and collect the hanging droplets. I've given you a couple of tricky jumps over static nasties at the top, combined with a conveyor. No doubt this room would have been a compression of "Terminator 3 : Rise of the Machines" into 32 characters, had this game been written in 2003 rather than 1994! ;-) ROOM 3: "The Off Licence". A room in Jet Set Willy II, converted to the Manic Miner room-format! Unfortunately, I could only have five flashing cola-bottles, due to Manic Miner's limit on the number of items per room, and vertical guardians are not possible in Room 3. ROOM 4: "Zane Zane Zane - Ouvre le Chien!" A surreal, narrow cavern, named for the refrain that features on two David Bowie songs: "All The Madmen" and "Buddha Of Suburbia", featuring the robots from "Central Cavern" and a badly-drawn pterodactyl that behaves like Eugene Jarvis in the original Manic Miner. Don't be fooled by the floor that is animated and the conveyors that aren't! ROOM 5: "Screen for Monica Seles". A tribute to the greatest tennis-player of all time. I figured that if David Bowie could write a song called "Song for Bob Dylan", then I could do likewise for my heroine! This room was written in 1994, after the Stabbing (30th April 1993) and before the Comeback (29th July 1995). The screen, with its knives, rackets, nets and balls, symbolises my obsessive hope that she would return, at a time when it seemed increasingly likely that she would not. The portal represents the ladies's Wimbledon trophy - it has always been my biggest dream for Monica to one day hold it aloft! ROOM 6: "Dalek Invasion". A tribute to the wonderful creatures from Dr Who, encapsulated in giant pepperpots - I used to be one when I was a little boy! ;-) I saw the graphics on Teletext in low resolution, liked them, and decided to use them in a Manic Miner room. Cleverly designed so that you have to go along that tricky conveyor twice (or three times, depending on the route you take through the screen) to collect all the items and exit via the Tardis (my spellchecker didn't know the word "Tardis" - it suggested "turds" as a replacement! ;-) ). ROOM 7: "[". A tribute to Room 47 in Jet Set Willy, using the ill-defined block- graphics from there to make a real room. The graphics for the saw and the bog are also ripped from Jet Set Willy. Also based on "Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast" - this time, flicking the left switch will /block/ your way! ROOM 8: "The Girl From Tomorrow". A tribute to a TV series that was shown in the late spring of 1993, about a girl called Alana from the year 3000 who gets hauled back to the 1990s. The items are transducers - amazing devices from the future, controlled by psychokinetic energy that allow she who wears it on the head to move objects around, heal wounds, zap people, &c. I've also added Maria's feet from Jet Set Willy to increase the sex-appeal. ;-> The portal- graphic is my logo from my Dalek days: the death-star from Star Wars! ROOM 9: "Tomorrow's End". A tribute to the follow-up series, in which Alana and her friends from 1990, Jenny and Petey, spent most of their time traipsing around in the year 2500 (a time when the world is devastated by greed, lack of natural resources, war and fear) in a failed attempt to prevent the northern hemisphere being wiped out :-( (although they /did/ save the southern hemisphere - it's an Australian series). Featuring Jet Set Willies, fast-crumbling floors and more transducers. ROOM 10: "The BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA : suburbs". This room marks the start of ten rooms corresponding to the ten tracks on David Bowie's album, The Buddha Of Suburbia. The first track is called "Buddha Of Suburbia", hence the capitalised part of the title. The subtitle "suburbs" is due to the fact that Hanif Kureishi's novel The Buddha Of Suburbia is in two parts, the first of which is called "In the Suburbs". You have to collect the strange symbols from around Eva Kay's house, while avoiding the barrels (blagged from Jet Set Willy) and the kneeling Buddhists (I know they're crap graphics, but they were difficult to draw, and if you think those are bad, you should have seen them in the original 1994 version! ;-) ). ROOM 11: "Sex And The Church". The song, and hence this room, symbolises the union of the flesh and the spirit. Collect the flashing (in more ways than one ;-> ) statuettes, flick the left switch to unblock your way, and the right switch to down Maria (from Jet Set Willy). The horizontal guardian is a harmless shadow. There's an awkward jump at the top which requires you to walk the wrong way along the conveyor, and then suddenly stop dead and jump straight up! ROOM 12: "South Horizon". A fairly indescribable room which requires good timing and to see which blocks are which (e.g. there are floor blocks hidden in the wall). The weird bone efforts are again pinched from Jet Set Willy. ROOM 13: "The Mysteries". An easy room based on "Skylab Landing Bay", because I couldn't figure out how to make a difficult room out of it (but check out Room 13 of The Hobbit! :-> ). The only thing that makes it difficult at all is the tiny air-supply. The guardians are the boot graphic from Manic Miner, which explode into that weird platform at the end of that game (in The Buddha Of Suburbia, the Game Over sequence features the player being decapitated by a guillotine). The items are supposed to be palm-trees, inspired by a David Bowie quote between songs on the Santa Monica '72 live album that sounds like: "Plainty on the courtesy of a piece of palm-tree that I asked a lobster tail, and they sent me a palm-tree, piece of palm-tree..." ROOM 14: "Bleed Like A Craze, Dad". A pretty tough room, requiring good timing and accurate jumping under pressure, with the vertical guardians being solid 16x16-pixel blocks. It's almost as tough as trying to work out the lyrics to this bizarre rap song: "Easy come, come, coming back on the barley where the dead man walks on his right from the jice"? ROOM 15: "Strangers When We Meet". A surreal interpretation of the song which went on to be a hit single in 1995 (but in my opinion, the version on The Buddha Of Suburbia is far superior to the one on Outside, even though Outside is my favourite Bowie album). Featuring the flying pigs from Jet Set Willy, one of them swimming through a vat of blank floor. Can you spot the item? ROOM 16: "Dead Against It". Looking for all the world like a hunting-gallery with its moose-heads and the general atmosphere, this is the hardest room in the game, requiring pixel-perfect jumping, frame-perfect timing and nerves of steel (or judicious use of the pause-button) to collect the two items at the top-left of the screen, guarded by a fearsome horizontal guardian! ROOM 17: "Untitled No. 1". Ladders, levels and lollipops - yes, David really did write an untitled song (and peculiar, impressive-sounding lyrics it has too!). The items are placed over crumbling floor, to stop you from jumping up for them from the platform below, a failing of the original 1994 version! ROOM 18: "Ian Fish, U.K. Heir". Time is of the essence here, as I've combined a low air-supply with an air-sapping beam of light. At least I've had the decency to keep it still, by not having any horizontal guardians walking through it, but it'll still take most players several lives to clear this room! ;-) ROOM 19: "The BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA : city". On the album, this was simply a repeat of the title-track, featuring Lenny Kravitz on guitar but sounding almost identical nevertheless. This room is very different from Room 10 though, apart from reusing the Buddhist graphics; it features skyscrapers and another strange symbol (I can't remember what it's supposed to be! ;-) ). It's a really easy room, with the only real danger of death coming when you have to jump the red Buddhist at the bottom of the screen. Like the final room of Manic Miner 4, I've given you an infinite air-supply, causing the Spectrum to lock up when you complete the game. The subtitle "city" is due to the fact that Hanif Kureishi's novel The Buddha Of Suburbia is in two parts, the second of which is called "In the City". The top half of the screen, which also appears on the title-screen, is supposed to vaguely resemble the background on the album-cover. Internet -------- I currently have a website at http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/. Some relevant pages within this website are: * http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/ Top-level index of my Spectrum pages. * http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/ My Manic Miner/Jet Set Willy pages, including a list of Spectrum MM/JSW games (which I try to maintain as complete and up-to-date as possible - please inform me of any I have missed), various other MM/JSW documents, and links to other MM/JSW websites. * http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/download/ My download page. Currently contains my other games, my Manic Miner Screen Editor, my Jet Set Willy Construction Kit, and my Java toolkit SPECSAISIE. Also has previews of forthcoming software (mostly MM/JSW games). * http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/music/bowie/ My David Bowie pages. I founded a Yahoo! Group for Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. Its URL is:- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manicminerandjetsetwilly/ It includes a message-board for discussing MM/JSW, picture galleries which members can upload to, a bookmarks page and a calendar. Anyone can visit the Group and look around its public areas, but for full privileges you have to join the Group as a member. This prerequires signing up for a Yahoo! account, which you can do, free of charge, over the Web. I encourage all members of the MM/JSW community to join the Group. I recommend the comp.sys.sinclair USENET newsgroup as a place for discussing MM/JSW and other Spectrum-related topics. It's worth at least browsing through the headers each day (says he who has long since lost touch with USENET :-o ). The newsgroup is archived at http://groups.google.com/ for those who don't have access to a news-server - in fact, it's worth surfing there even if you do, as not all news-servers receive all newsgroup postings! http://www.mailandnews.com/ (a free Web-based email-service) also provides access to newsgroups over the Web. Copyright Notice ---------------- Manic Miner: The Buddha Of Suburbia is, of course, my copyright, but I don't mind you putting it on your own website or redistributing it otherwise, provided that no money is charged, and that you acknowledge that it is the copyright of Broadsoft (1998). This document must be included with all copies of the game. Modifications are discouraged but not forbidden, and you should state specifically what you have modified. I don't mind you reusing some of the rooms, graphics, &c. in your own games, or converting the game to another computer (e.g. for JSW-PC). However, the accompanying documentation must state that the reused material is the copyright of Broadsoft - failure to do so may be construed as plagiarism. I would like the documentation to be quite specific about this, e.g. "Graphic X in Room Y was taken from Manic Miner: The Buddha Of Suburbia", or whatever. Please let me know if you do rerelease Manic Miner: The Buddha Of Suburbia or reuse bits of it - it's not that I'd be likely to object, I'd just be very interested to know what follows from my releasing it! Version History --------------- 23rd April 1998: Initial release of Manic Miner: The Buddha Of Suburbia on the Internet. Though I'd never heard of her at the time, this was Daniela Hantuchová's 15th birthday! :-) 30th November 2002: Manic Miner: The Buddha Of Suburbia reissued with PC-sympathetic newlines, updated Internet section and copyright notice, and various other changes to the documentation. The TAP file is completely unchanged. 2nd August 2003 (Karina Habsudová's 30th birthday, ironically the day after Terminator 3 started showing in cinemas): Special Edition uploaded at my new website: title-screen graphics, playing-area colour-attributes, end-game colour- attributes, scrolly, in-game tune and Miner Willy graphics have been edited. This new character is supposed to be Karim Amir - son of Haroon Amir, the Buddha of Suburbia. The room-data (45056-65535) are identical to the original release.