JSW64 MANIC MINER: JAMES BOND (C) BROADSOFT 2007 ============================= [v1.0] For the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128K Written by Andrew Broad http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/ -------- The Game -------- The name's Bond. JSW64 Manic Miner: James Bond. It's a Manic-Miner-style game based on John Elliott's Jet Set Willy 64 game-engine (Variant Z, Hacklevel 12), which combines all the features of Matthew Smith's classic Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy (except the ability to combine cell-types by giving them the same colour-attribute, JSW's invalid ramps, and MM's vertical guardians that kill you if they collide with an item). In particular, this game is based on John Elliott's conversion of Manic Miner to JSW64. The game is based on the James Bond character created by Ian Fleming, and has 21 rooms, each corresponding to one of the official James Bond 007 films produced by EON Productions. James Bond is a fictional MI6 agent, whose assignments are to foil supervillains' plots for world-domination, whilst fighting off some very cool henchmen (and women). By all reasonable odds, he should have been killed hundreds of times by now, but he is a clever and resourceful man (two qualities which this game requires in abundance), whose enemies never decide to kill him immediately when they have the chance - or if they do, someone else intervenes in the nick of time. And so he keeps reappearing "with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season" [Hugo Drax, Moonraker]. He goes into each assignment armed with exactly the gadgets he will need and no others. He is always charming and witty, even when facing the darkest and most hopeless-looking situations ("Choose your next witticism carefully, Mr. Bond - it may be your last" - Goldfinger). He is also a cold-blooded murderer, a promiscuous fornicator, a dangerous driver, a smoker and an alcohol-drinker - but he is none of those things in this game (I did consider implementing a 'licence to kill' whereby guardians would be deleted instead of killing you on collision, but it kind of ruins the point of designing intricate, challenging MM/JSW rooms - even if this mode were only activated once all the items in a room were taken). I strongly considered ordering the rooms by the publication-dates of Ian Fleming's original novels: Casino Royale (1953) Live and Let Die (1954) Moonraker (1955) Diamonds Are Forever (1956) From Russia with Love (1957) Dr. No (1958) Goldfinger (1959) For Your Eyes Only (short stories) (1960) Thunderball (1961) The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) You Only Live Twice (1964) {Ian Fleming died} The Man with the Golden Gun (1965) Octopussy and The Living Daylights (short stories) (1966) However, I decided to go with the order of the EON films. With all due respect to Ian Fleming, I have always preferred the films to the novels, which in some cases have radical plot-differences. And this order is natural for adding the later films which do not use Fleming's book-titles. Thus the rooms in v1.0 are as follows: [0] Dr. No (1962) [1] From Russia with Love (1963) [2] Goldfinger (1964) [3] Thunderball (1965) [4] You Only Live Twice (1967) [5] On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) [6] Diamonds Are Forever (1971) [7] Live and Let Die (1973) [8] The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) [9] The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) [10] Moonraker (1979) [11] For Your Eyes Only (1981) [12] Octopussy (1983) [13] A View to a Kill (1985) [14] The Living Daylights (1987) [15] Licence to Kill (1989) [16] GoldenEye (1995) [17] Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) [18] The World Is Not Enough (1999) [19] Die Another Day (2002) [20] Casino Royale (2006) I plan to extend my game as future Bond-films are released. At the time of writing, Bond 22 is due in cinemas on 7th November 2008, so that will be added in v1.1. I also intend to add a detailed discussion of each room, edit the tunes (title-screen and in-game), and produce an easy variant of the game. I don't feel so inclined to write rooms for the non-EON films - Casino Royale (a spoof from 1967) and Never Say Never Again (the 1983 remake of Thunderball) - which the James Bond community does not consider to be canon. I was planning to release a James Bond game in 2007 since 2004, although my enthusiasm for the project was so low that I was even willing to turn it over to somebody else (Steve Worek volunteered on 2nd November 2005, but confirmed on 7th April 2006 that he had abandoned the idea). But midway through 2007, I reflected that it was now or never for James Bond, and I decided to go for it! I actually started writing the game in September, determined to finish it in time for a gamma-release on 31st December 2007, or abandon it altogether if it should fail ("This organisation does not tolerate failure," as Ernst Stavro Blofeld would say). I have not had time to watch through the Bond-films for research-purposes. It had been two decades since I'd watched some of them, and I had no clear memory (that said, I have gained a deeper appreciation of, and greater passion for, James Bond through writing this game, and in October 2007, I started watching through a subset of the Bond-films as televised on ITV1 - having already written the corresponding rooms). So I researched each film on the Internet - looking at plot-synopses and images - before I wrote the corresponding room. I picked out the key elements of each film: locations, characters, objects, and in some cases specific stunts that would map well to JSW64. I tried to design each room as a picture first, and think about the gameplay as I drew the picture. JSW64 is well suited to drawing pictures, as you can have up to 16 different cell-classes in a room, and Variant Z allows each cell to be an arbitrary colour-attribute (which behaves as Water if no cell-class in the room has that colour-attribute). Variant Z does have the limitation that the assignment of cell-types (behaviours) to cell-classes is global, but I have found that having two or three Air cell-classes in a room greatly enhances the atmosphere of two or three locations from a Bond-film, compared to what could have been achieved using the original MM game-engine. I have also used most of the advanced features of JSW64, including new guardian-types: fast horizontal guardians, diagonal guardians, colour-cycling guardians, triggers (which alter the next guardian when all items in the room are collected, or a switch is flicked), stoppers, opening walls, and the ability to enable superjump on a room-by-room basis (used in "Moonraker" [10]). Trap-cells may be unfamiliar to many players, but you will encounter them right from the first room of James Bond: if you set foot on a Trap-cell, regardless of what you're standing on with the other foot, you fall! Technically, a Trap-cell is a Fire-cell that has had its 'licence to kill' revoked. Variant Z only allows 64 rooms, but that should be more than enough for the number of Bond-films I expect to be released before I die! I have implemented several patches of my own in this game, as detailed in TECHNICA.TXT: * The game uses Broadsoft Lifts v0.2: my patch to make horizontal, vertical and even diagonal guardians stand-onable if Bit 4 of Guardian-Byte 1 is set. The game follows the convention that lifts use the lift-sprites and/or have white ink. As the patch itself is only beta-released at the time of writing, it can be downloaded from the Files section of the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manicminerandjetsetwilly/]. Even if I improve Broadsoft Lifts in the future, I don't plan to upgrade them in this game, which has come to rely on the quirky features of v0.2! * I have disabled the left/right/up/down room-exits, so that the game wraps around just like Manic Miner when you walk left or right off the screen (the room-designs do not allow you to go up or down off the screen, as I didn't want to risk corrupting memory like the MM game-engine does). The only way to leave each room is via the portal, which opens after you have collected all the items in the room without losing a life. * The game uses my patch to reset the cells' FLASH-bits. This means that nothing FLASHing can ever appear in the playing-area, but has the important advantage that two cell-classes may have the same colour-attribute: one FLASHing, one not. In JSW64, I'm often wanting to have '\' and '/' Ramp-cells with the same colour-attribute (since I almost always like my Ramp-cells white). * Since the portal cannot visibly FLASH, it turns from white to red when all items in a room are collected, in tribute to the gunbarrel-sequence at the start of every Bond-film. JSW64 Manic Miner: James Bond is written for advanced MM/JSW players, and the rooms are intended to be outstandingly difficult, as a challenge to the experts. It presupposes that you can play MM/JSW - the controls are exactly the same, but the gameplay is much tougher, requiring both manual dexterity (a need for pixel-perfect and time-frame-perfect accuracy of movement) and lateral thinking. JSW64 Manic Miner: James Bond liberally exploits all the quirky features in the game-engine - you need to know all the tricks if you want to get at all far! Each room is an intricate network of constraints, forcing you to face every single one of my intended challenges, though you do sometimes have to make difficult choices about the order in which you do things. My use of Crumbly cells, the relationships between guardians, and their relationships with conveyors, all mean that the consequences of your mistakes may return to haunt you several minutes later! I have playtested each and every room to completion after the last time I edited that room, so I'm 99% sure that the game is completable. I can't be 100% sure until I have playtested the whole game from beginning to end, but since I am determined to get 2007 as the year of first gamma-release, it has not been possible for me to do this. You can consider yourself to have passed JSW64 Manic Miner: James Bond if you finish the game using infinite lives (POKE 35899,0) on a real Spectrum, or saving and loading snapshots on an emulator. If you cheat by using any other POKEs, or by using WRITETYPER, you should consider yourself disqualified. ;-) Finally, you may notice that the number of lives I've given you is not very generous. You only live twice, Mr. Bond! -------------------- Loading-Instructions -------------------- "Correct again, Mr. Bond! All signals are on a coded tape! The trick is to have the code." [Blofeld, _Diamonds Are Forever_] To play JSW64 Manic Miner: James Bond, 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.shadowmagic.org.uk/cssfaq/emulators/emulators.htm]. 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 ""). You also have to open the TAP-file in the emulator (either before or after issuing the load-command). ---------------- Acknowledgements ---------------- * Matthew Smith, for writing the original Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, and in particular for deciding on unencrypted, perspicuous room-formats! ;-) The eye in "A View to a Kill" [13] is from Manic Miner, as are the wheels on the handcar in that room. * John Elliott, for the JSW64 family of game-engines (this game uses Variant Z, Hacklevel 12), and the conversion of Manic Miner to JSW64 upon which this game is based. * This game was written using John Elliott's JSWED (v2.3.1 for Rooms 0 to 17, v2.3.2 for Room 18 onwards), and playtested using Ramsoft's RealSpectrum v0.97.23. * Ian Fleming, for inventing James Bond and writing the original novels. * EON Productions, and everyone involved in the official James Bond film-series. * I used the following websites for research-purposes before writing each room: http://www.tcmdb.com/index.jsp http://www.bondmovies.com/movies.shtml http://www.wikipedia.org/ http://www.mi6.co.uk/sections/movies/ http://www.imdb.com/ http://screenmusings.org/screencaps-AtoZ.htm * Geoff Eddy, for the patch-vector to flip the player's horizontal position - first seen in "Willy's Drinking Licence" in _Willy Takes a Trip_ - which I have reused in "The Man with the Golden Gun" [8]. * I have reused some sprites from my own back-catalogue: the Dr. No sprite is based on Dr. Yes from Goodnite Luddite; the forcefield in "Dr. No" [0] is taken directly from Goodnite Luddite, the shark in "Live and Let Die" [7] from We Pretty; the freedom-fighters in "The Living Daylights" [14] are based on the Black Riders from _Jet Set Willy: The Lord of the Rings_; the many Bond-girl sprites are variations on Kari Krišníková from We Pretty, and the tennis-racquet wielded by Vijay Amritraj in "Octopussy" [12] is from Goodnite Luddite. * My fellow MM/JSW authors, for general inspiration, and some specific tricks (sometimes unintended on their part, but deliberately exploited by me! ;-) ). * Leszek Daniel Chmielewski for BMP2SCR EXP [http://members.inode.at/chmielewski.leszek/bmp2scr.htm], which I used to generate the title-screen picture. * The title-screen picture is from the gunbarrel-sequence at the start of every Bond-film. It was captured from Goldfinger, and the actor is Sean Connery's stunt-double: Bob Simmons . * I have not had time to edit the music before the release of v1.0, therefore the title-screen tune is still "The Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss II, and the in-game tune is still "In The Hall Of The Mountain-King" by Edvard Grieg - both being the 128K versions from John Elliott's JSW64:MM. In v1.1, I intend to use the James Bond theme as the title-screen tune, and the creepy music from the pretitle sequence of _The Man with the Golden Gun_ as the in-game tune. -------- Internet -------- I currently have a website at http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/. Some relevant pages within this website are: * http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/ Top-level index of my Spectrum pages. * http://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://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). 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 (with options for receiving and sending messages by email), Files and Photos (i.e. screenshots) sections which members can upload to, Links and 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 this 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 week. 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! The World Of Spectrum fora [http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/] are worth browsing through on a regular basis, particularly the Games forum (this is something I do on a weekly basis). ---------------- Copyright Notice ---------------- Their Copyright --------------- Manic Miner is copyright of Matthew Smith and Bug-Byte (1983). Jet Set Willy is copyright of Software Projects (1984) - it too was written by Matthew Smith, though I believe the copyright now rests with Tommy Barton. JSW64 is copyright of John Elliott (2005-2006). The James Bond novels are copyright of Ian Fleming (Glidrose) Publications Limited. The James Bond 007 films (including the gunbarrel-sequence from which this game's title-screen picture derives) are copyright of Danjaq LLC and the United Artists Corporation, and are licensed by EON Productions Limited. Please don't sue me; I'm making no money out of this whatsoever, so just think of it as free advertising that might just attract a few more people to the James Bond franchise. My Copyright ------------ JSW64 Manic Miner: James Bond 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 (2007). 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 JSW64 Manic Miner: James Bond", or whatever. Please let me know if you do rerelease JSW64 Manic Miner: James Bond 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! ---------------- Revision-History ---------------- v1.0 (31st December 2007): Initial gamma-release of JSW64 Manic Miner: James Bond.