The Rooms in Manic Miner: The Hobbit
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Each Manic Miner room corresponds to a chapter in The Hobbit, plus there is a bonus room at the end. This section contains a detailed description of each room in MM:Hobbit. The description is based on the /hard/ version (HOBBIT.TAP), not the easy version (HOB-LITE.TAP, which has been made considerably easier and has had the quirky features taken out).

CHAPTER 1: "An Unexpected Party". You begin in Bilbo Baggins's hobbit hole, on the night when the dwarves descend on him (thirteen of them in the book, but Manic Miner only allows four). You have to jump over the dwarves, collect their hoods and then go through the round green door to proceed on the adventure.

CHAPTER 2: "Roast Mutton". Bilbo and the dwarves are waylaid by three trolls; this room is set in their clearing, with their fire burning and smoke wafting upwards. You need to get the key to open the trolls' cave. First jump up the fire on the left side, onto a platform in the trees. This is quite tricky as the fire is actually implemented as right-to-left conveyor blocks. Then jump over the red troll and off the left of the screen. You can then jump up and get the key, but don't jump too high or you won't be able to get back down! Getting down is best accomplished by walking off the right edge of the screen, dropping down onto the platform where the red troll is, and jumping so that you land on the fire but miss the killer star. But, as they say in the Perl community, There's More Than One Way To Do It! :-)

CHAPTER 3: "A Short Rest". Visit the Last Homely House in the valley of Rivendell and collect the runes. Not a difficult screen, but emphasis on "Short" as I've only given you a small air supply! You may be surprised at how rapidly the crumbling floor vanishes! (technically, it's because I left the graphic blank, and a blank row of pixels at the bottom of the graphic is Manic Miner's criterion for judging whether such floor has crumbled completely).
	I added Elrond to this room (hard version only) in October 1999.

CHAPTER 4: "Over Hill and Under Hill". You have now arrived at the Misty Mountains. You shelter from a thunderstorm in a small cave, but are waylaid by goblins. You must jump over them and try to escape through a lower passage, which is quite tough because ordinary floor, crumbling floor, wall and conveyors all look the same, and there are several wrong turns you could take! Again, the air supply is short and the crumbling floor crumbles rapidly, forcing you to rush!
	Tip: If you keep moving to the right when the floor falls away, you'll find ridges to wait in before you drop down onto the goblins' swords!

CHAPTER 5: "Riddles in the Dark". The lower passage leads to a lake where a creature called Gollum lives - that's him sailing up and down the middle of the screen in his boat. In the book, Bilbo had to answer Gollum's riddles to avoid being eaten before he could get out. Here, the riddle is how you solve this very puzzling screen. Basically, you must grab the ring, whereupon Gollum will start flashing and come down to block your path if you don't get out of the way in time, so you'd better time it so that you take the ring just as Gollum is at the top of the screen (note that this screen lives up to its name by being very dark, so you can't see what you're doing properly!). Then you have to jump over Gollum left-to-right from far enough back to avoid cracking your head on a snag in the ceiling, and escape through the lower gate, which is guarded by goblins.
	Of all the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy screens I have ever played (prior to my next MM game, Ma jolie), this is the one that requires the most intelligence to solve, in addition to great manual dexterity. You will need to put your thinking cap on and approach this one with a cool, calculating mind if you're ever going to get past it! You will need to think laterally, as the solution requires a non-obvious early step to remove a problem you will encounter later on. You will probably have to experiment several times before you hit on the idea for the solution - I certainly had to, and I wrote the damn thing! ;-)

CHAPTER 6: "Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire". You have escaped through the lower gate to the other side of the Misty Mountains, but only to be attacked by a pack of wargs! You must collect the cones from the firtrees, avoiding the wargs and the fire on the ground (this requires some intelligent jumping) and then jump on the eagle to the right, which will carry you (literally, because it's implemented as left-to-right conveyor blocks - take care not to fall off!) to the safety of its eyrie. The jump onto the eagle is tricky because it has to be right off the edge of the middle firtree, under the pressure of crumbling floor. Quite a difficult screen, but it's beyond none of you really, especially if you have had the perseverance to crack "Riddles in the Dark"! ;-)

CHAPTER 7: "Queer Lodgings". An easier screen after the trials and tribulations of the two before, you now find yourself in Beorn's house. Collect the food from the table and jump up the ledges, avoiding the bears (excuse the terrible graphics with their wiggling bottoms). You can get out through the hole in the roof.

CHAPTER 8: "Flies and Spiders". You have entered the forest of Mirkwood, which is infested by giant spiders. The dwarves have been captured, tied in knots and left hanging in bundles (the tiny shining objects at the top of the screen). Rescue them, and then leave Mirkwood through the Elvenking's gate. To complete this room also requires flicking the white switches at the top of the screen - I won't tell you which one does which or in what order you have to flick them, but if you've played "Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast" in Manic Miner, you should be able to work it out by case-based reasoning! :-)

CHAPTER 9: "Barrels Out of Bond". In the book, Bilbo has to rescue the dwarves from the Elvenking's dungeons, which he does by sending them down a stream packed in barrels. This is a difficult concept to interpret for a Manic Miner screen, so the plot in this one is just to steal the chief guard's keys, avoiding the merrymaking elves, then go through the trapdoor and escape down the stream on foot, avoiding the barrel and exiting via the water-gate.

CHAPTER 10: "A Warm Welcome". A really rather pointless chapter in which the dwarves and Bilbo arrive in Lake Town. So I've used my imagination to create a room in which you have to emerge from a lake and then leave for the Mountain through the clouds, avoiding lots of static obstacles along the way.

CHAPTER 11: "On the Doorstep". In which Bilbo and the dwarves arrive at the Mountain where Smaug resides, and have to solve a puzzle to get in (finding the door). In this room, you have to solve a puzzle of a Manic Miner kind, which involves jumping through innocent-looking wall blocks. The vertical guardians are supposed to be smoke-rings.

CHAPTER 12: "Inside Information". In the book, Bilbo enters the dragon's lair (lit red with the glow of Smaug), where all the treasure is piled up, and manages to pinch a two-handled cup. Watch out, I've implemented the treasure pile as sticky conveyor blocks (I believe this was the first MM/JSW room ever written that incorporates sticky conveyors!), and you'll have to flick the left switch to open a crack in the middle and the right switch to send Smaug flying out in a rage so you can escape!

CHAPTER 13: "Not at Home". Now that the dragon has flown, Bilbo and the dwarves are free to raid the dragon's treasure hoard and take all they can carry! This time, the treasure pile is made up of 'off' conveyor blocks. Note that the dwarves can collect items as well as you, because they are implemented as white horizontal guardians! The 'A' on the items is for Arkenstone, a precious gem that Bilbo stole in this chapter. It's very dark in here without the dragon's glow, so I've made the platforms invisible (how extremely naughty of me! :-> ). The luminous eyes are my own idea. I'm particularly pleased with the red bat graphic - it was difficult to draw, but it turned out much better than I expected! :-)

CHAPTER 14: "Fire and Water". This is the chapter where the dragon gets slain (rather prematurely in my opinion, coming as it does only three-quarters of the way through, but that's Tolkien for you! ;-) ). In this room, Smaug comes down on Lake Town like a ton of bricks - I used even more guardians than "Skylab Landing Bay" in the original Manic Miner, and have them moving faster than the vertical guardians in any Manic Miner room previously written! You have to collect all the arrows (I blagged the graphic from Jet Set Willy II), and then fly up through the clouds and into the sun to escape! A dramatic, fast and furious room, the way to play it is with heavy use of the pause button, and you can plan your moves like a chess player once you've figured out the pattern of movement. It is possible to complete this room, with only a little air left!

CHAPTER 15: "The Gathering of the Clouds". A fairly anticlimactic chapter, and hence a rather uninspired screen, in which Bilbo and the dwarves learn of the death of Smaug from a bird, but find themselves besieged on the Mountain when Bard, who slew the dragon in the previous chapter, stakes a claim on the treasure! In this room, you just have to collect some of the gold around Ravenhill to progress to the next stage. Featuring ultra-fast vertical guardians!

CHAPTER 16: "A Thief in the Night". A straightforward room in which you as Bilbo have to take the Arkenstone stealthily to Bard to betray Thorin. Fast-crumbling floors, sticky conveyors and Elvish arrows spice up the room, and you may think it's impossible to get down to the bottom level until you realise there's an 'innocent-looking block' which you can jump through! (a bug in the game engine that I exploit in several rooms).

CHAPTER 17: "The Clouds Burst". The Battle of Five Armies - goblins, wargs, elves, men and dwarves - who, having heard of Smaug's death, are fighting over the treasure. Since Manic Miner does not allow five different guardian graphics in the same room, I just have goblins as the horizontal guardians (who patrol the bottom platform like in Jet Set Willy's "The Forgotten Abbey", made even harder by static nasties embedded in the floor) and super-fast thunderclouds as the vertical guardians - watch out on entering the room! It's the most spectacular, stunningly difficult room in this - and arguably any - Manic Miner game; it's cunningly designed so that you have to go round twice, making sure you leave enough crumbling floor (of which the eagles are made) on the first pass to make your exit on the second.
	Jumping onto the top-right eagle is probably the toughest manoeuvre you'll ever have to make: your movement must be pixel-perfect and your timing has to be spot on - you'll need to do many experiments using the pause button to work out how to get it just right, and you'll need nerves of steel to be able to pull it off at the end of a long, difficult screen! :->

CHAPTER 18: "The Return Journey". The book dismisses this as a quick, easy trip home for Bilbo after his heroic exploits (and yours too if you have managed to get this far! ;-) ) up to this point, but this room is anything but! Obviously the whole journey is too much to get across in a single screen, so I decided to concentrate on Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains to create a breathtaking Tolkienesque landscape, featuring a return of the giant spiders (which are tough to jump over on account of the low 'ceiling') and vertical goblins (unfortunately I couldn't have them as fast as I would have liked due to shortage of vertical space!). It's just possible to collect the gold coins and complete the screen with a tiny bit of air left!

CHAPTER 19: "The Last Stage". This chapter documents Bilbo's return to Bag End following a little holiday at Rivendell, but since the bonus room features Bag End, I did my own unorthodox interpretation of the road back home: a surreal screen of weird monsters (which also appear in We Pretty but originated here) and strange images, in which you have to collect the treasure chests and then exit via the Hobbiton mill - don't loiter or you'll run out of air! As in "On the Doorstep" and "A Thief in the Night", there's an 'innocent-looking block'.

BONUS ROOM: "There and Back Again". To bring the game up to 20 rooms, I've added this extra room which represents Gandalf visiting Bilbo at Bag End at the very start of the book - make sure to jump at the very start of the screen or you'll crash headlong into Gandalf! There and Back Again is the subtitle of The Hobbit, and also the title of Bilbo's memoirs (referred to in the final chapter). This room was originally called "The Hobbit" and was going to be the first room rather than the last, but the rooms with hard-wired special effects (such as the Eugene, the Kong Beasts, switches and Skylabs) map better onto chapters of The Hobbit the way I /have/ done it, and if you complete this room you'll go back to the beginning! :-)
	I added the smoke-rings in November 1999 (which I could only do after editing the title-screen/Room 19 picture, otherwise these guardians crash into the pixels of the original picture). It goes against my anti-smoking principles, but it does enhance the Tolkienesque atmosphere!