Jet Set Willy: Won!

If I've learned anything about house hunting, it's that you should always, always pay for a good inspection. Even in a seller's market, do not waive an inspection contingency. Walk away if they try to pressure you into it. Last summer, "D" and I thought we found our dream house, a six-bedroom country estate complete with a beautiful backyard garden and detached guest house. Inspection showed it to be a deathtrap of code violations, malfunctioning equipment, rotting walls, pests, gas leaks, and tip-prone appliances. Sort of like Willy's mansion.

I resumed play from where I had left off before, a saved game in an easy room directly above the gates of hell (see inspection report pg. 20, Foundation/Basement Issues). This time I knew not to drop in and continued eastward to the burrow under Willy's driveway, and found getting out to be much easier once I realized that a conveyor belt which seemed to be moving right was in fact moving to the left, toward the way out.

Emerging up onto the surface of Willy's driveway, I went back to the left, where my path converged back into "The Security Guard," only now on an upper level. I do like it when these semi-linear worlds interconnect like that.

Passing over the sentries is somewhat harder than passing below them was.

The next few rooms were surprisingly doable compared to the multiple nightmarish rooms I slogged through in my first run. The stairs led up to Willy's front door, from which I entered a hall with some spike traps to jump over while avoiding a single overhead duck, leading into a ballroom with some slow-moving and easily dodged spiders. A ladder here went up to a trickier room titled "East Wall Base" where a faster moving spider and a deadly-for-some-reason scroll vertically patrolled a series of narrow ledges, and after successfully navigating those, a nasty room awaited above.

What makes this room so nasty isn't so much the difficulty, nor the demonic imagery (just what do the priests do here anyway?), but the fact that if you fall even once from a slightly misjudged jump - quite possible given the pressure of having to stay a step ahead of the demon skull - you'll probably fall to your death on the room below, which means another endless respawn-and-die loop.

But I did, after a few save-state reloads here, get the bible at the top and continue westward, where after passing through a trivial generator room, a less trivial room with a big snake-shaped corridor, and then the infamous attic, I arrived in the rooftop area above the banyan tree, coming in from the other direction.

I see a potential Google Doodle here.

Heading further up, the next few rooms above the roof were pretty tricky, but nothing unmanageable with a save state every room or two. One room named "Nomen Luni" had a bird, an alien, a robot, and a moon moving around in simple patterns, more or less spaced out so that only one would be a problem at a time. The next had a swinging rope over a conveyor belt where a single dancing rabbit guarded a collectable sword embedded in the wall, and here I figured out the rope controls; move in the direction of the rope's velocity (not its orientation) to climb down, and against it to climb up. Afterward, a room "Up on the Battlements" had me dodge stray arrows while jumping across sentried parapets, one such jump made aggravatingly difficult by a conveyor belt on the preceding parapet, making it trial and error to figure out the exact timing needed to jump onto it and then be able to hop over the next crenelation without touching the sentry.

Not shown - at least a dozen failures

Another room eclectically named "We must perform a Quirkafleeg" was otherwise uninteresting, having nothing but a rope swinging over a spiked portcullis, and a stray arrow that kills you almost immediately if you don't enter the room jumping for it. I had actually gotten to this room before by accident, by clipping through the ceiling in the room below it, which of course killed immediately me as I was now touching the portcullis and had put the game into one of its infinite death loops. The rope, however, could be climbed to the top and into a secret watch tower.

This room may look simple, but cramped space combined with your inflexible jump trajectory makes it one of the hardest I've seen since the last session. You have to jump to grab the apples without touching the vines they sit on, and the enemies make things even worse for you. Falling from the tower is, of course, a death loop condition.

The rest of the rooftop rooms are comparatively trivial. There's another battlement room named "I'm sure I've seen this before," made much easier than the first one thanks to the removal of the conveyor belt. There's a "Rescue Esmeralda" room that riffs on Ocean Software's Hunchback but merely features two spear-wielding guards moving up and down some crenelations and a slow-moving duck flying overhead that you just need to be patient enough to not jump into. The final room has a flagpole with a collectable tip that you can just run up and take - touching the flag itself is deadly, and falling here is a death loop, but once you know that, you couldn't die here unless it was on purpose.

"Rescue Esmeralda" exits downwards to the generator room, from where I traveled back to the rooftop, and then westward to more unexplored rooms. A "Conservatory Roof" tantalized with multiple seemingly inaccessible objects, and a staircase down led to an orange grove, where two oranges could be taken, but a third one was out of reach.

Falling here = death loop

Further west, the roof above the west wing held some more objects. Heading down the stairs and out the back door, I landed on a beach.

Deceptively hard. The crabs (are those crabs?) are much wider than they look, and your hurtbox width changes with your walk animation cycle.

Willy's yacht was moored here; a two-room navigation puzzle of middling difficulty. It doesn't lead anywhere, but contains a few more items to collect, so I returned home, picking up a spare hammer in the toolshed by the back door, which would have been trivial to collect if it weren't for limited lives.

Fall down and die to grab it and respawn. Or take the hard route down, climb back up, and face a nearly impossible platform jump on the return route thanks to that hanging nail.

The cold storage room that I stumbled into during my first session was just off the back staircase, and its ice crystals seem impossible to collect without dying or using several save states.

Further to the right were the kitchen rooms, where I easily ascended a series of platforms patrolled by angry cooks and emerged in a previously inaccessible grotto under the Banyan Tree containing an item. I re-ascended the tree to a vantage point from which I could access the previously inaccessible items in the orangery and conservatory roof.

One of which seems to be impossible to get without dying.

The west end of the mansion seemed pretty thoroughly cleaned, so I headed to the east side of it, picking up a few objects of low to middling difficulty in some rooms near the middle on the ground floor. Heading out the door and past the driveway, I found myself beneath a "MegaTree."

As usual, completing any of these rooms in your first few tries is damned near impossible, and getting enough practice to do it consistently seems just as unlikely.

Touching the vines here kills you.

Touching the leaves will kill you.

Seriously, how?

Ok, this one's kind of chill.

That one was kind of unfair. Also, falling here is a death loop.

After clearing this miserable area, an effort that took me five save states to pull off, I continued past the tree to the right, jumped over a bridge, and entered the eastmost room of the game, featuring a plethora of objects and no clear way to get them all without dying.

This close to the end it didn't really matter. Only one room remained to be explored, and it was pretty close to the start. The mansion's chapel awaited off the first floor landing, which I backtracked to - a nontrivial task even with it being familiar grounds, and without having to worry about collecting items on the way! This room, featuring more occult imagery, was basically a timing puzzle, as the stairs force you to walk to the top and possibly into the demon skull at the top if timed poorly.

Finally, with 83 items collected, Maria allowed me into the master bedroom, triggering Jet Set Willy's shocking twist ending.

GAB rating: Bad. If Manic Miner was a chore to play, Jet Set Willy was torturous. I like a challenge, but I didn't have a moment of fun slogging through these punishing rooms over and over again, and that was with a lax policy on save states, of which I needed exactly 42 to make it through JSW's 60 rooms. Surprisingly, the toughest rooms of all were encountered early on - I'd say that The Nightmare Room and The Forgotten Abbey were the hardest.

It's a pity too, because Jet Set Willy has something going for it. The non-linear mansion design is inspired. Its interconnected map layout anticipates one the defining properties of Metroid-style games to come, coming together in a more complete and sophisticated way than Pitfall II did the same year, and authorial design shows throughout, even if Smith's authorial design only amounts to silly non-sequitur sight gags. Willy's Mansion is just as much of a fully realized game world, if not as logically consistent, as Dracula's castle in Symphony of the Night. But Smith's player-hostile design, with unending and impossibly narrow gauntlets of enemies and obstacles, its devil-may-care attitude toward its own bugs (never mind the literal game-breaking bugs that they had to fix via magazine cheat codes, its cheap random-feeling deaths from stray arrows and invisible hazards, and its patently inadequate spare lives and its infinite death loops that will drain them all in one bad fall all but ensures that nobody will see very much of it without some hardcore cheating.

Jet Set Willy reminds me a lot of I Wanna Be the Guy, a notorious platform hell that I've alluded to before with Jumpman. JSW resembles it even more strongly, and its DNA almost certainly propagated to that game, as it directly references Monty on the Run, a similarly structured platform adventure which was also originally designed for the ZX Spectrum. I Wanna Be the Guy entertains where JSW only aggravates, for a number of reasons, as does Jumpman.

First, the sheer variety of ways both games can surprise and screw you over far outnumber Willys', and that combined with a better sense of comedic timing makes it amusing to lose. Jet Set Willy only irritates and bores with its repetitiveness.

Second, once you have these tricks more or less memorized, IWBTG and Jumpman emphasize dexterity over pixel-and-frame-precise jumping. This is both more entertaining and more empowering, as you feel more in control, and therefore more at fault when things don't work out.

Third and most importantly, these games don't expect you do do everything in one sitting, unless you play IWBGT in its impossible mode (or Jumpan in Grand Tour mode). Death doesn't make you repeat the entire game - IWBGT has checkpoints, while Jumpman lets you start on the intermediate and expert floors without having to re-beat everything before them. JSW does whenever you run out of lives, which can happen for no shortage of reasons, whether fair or unfair.

To that end, I think Jet Set Willy would have been salvaged if it had built-in checkpoints that replenished your stock of spare lives and restored you when you ran out. The infinite death loops would have to go as well - perhaps best done by respawning Willy not always in the room where he died, but at the start of the last one where his feet touched solid ground for more than a few frame cycles.

Jet Set Willy is among the most famous and popular British 8-bit games. Its direct influence is seen not just in the aforementioned Monty, but also in the long-running Dizzy series which went in more of an inventory puzzle direction. Hacked copies with custom maps are just as popular on the ZX Spectrum as custom level sets for Boulder Dash are on the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64. I like to think that this massive mansion, most of which you'd never come within spitting distance of thanks to its insurmountable and unforgiving difficulty, led some mystique to British gamers in the day. Or maybe they just cheated even more than I did? I don't know, but I'm done with this series. Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier builds on the original mansion design making it even bigger, but was done without Matthew Smith's involvement and doesn't make whale status.

Game 299: Jet Set Willy

Waking up hung over in his bathtub, Willy's day is only going to get worse.

 

I knew long before playing that I wouldn't be capable of finishing Jet Set Willy fairly. Not only because of an infamous bug which makes the game unwinnable out of the box, in which an arrow flies off-screen, out of VRAM bounds, and into system memory where it corrupts other rooms' data, but also because its predecessor Manic Miner was already next to impossible. Jet Set Willy isn't known for being any easier, but it is known for being about three times larger, no longer a linear series of single-screen levels to clear in sequence but a sprawling mansion to explore in a non-linear fashion. Designer Matthew Smith reportedly didn't bother playtesting beyond simply beating each room individually to ensure each one was technically possible, and this lack of integration testing both explains the uncaught bug as well as these games' reputation for completely unreasonable difficulty.

Jet Set Willy does give you a starting supply of eight lives, but they run out fast. There were more rooms that killed me in excess of eight times before I finished them than there were rooms that didn't. Falling too far can kill you now, and the fatal drop distance isn't very far at all. In rooms below others, it's possible to fall to your death, only to respawn at the top of the screen and fall to your death again and again in a loop that does not end until your lives are exhausted.

Imagine a boot stamping, etc.

As the cassette inlay explains (and the cover art tastelessly depicts), Miner Willy, rich from his adventures, bought a big tall house in the middle of town and all night long he'd biddy biddy bum with his newfound friends. Waking up in the bathroom the morning after one soirée too many, the house is trashed, the Aston-Martin is gone, and the housekeeper Maria won't let him go to bed until he's cleaned up each of its dozens of rooms.

I have to digress, is this insubordinate domestic trope an English in-joke? Jeeves would have fixed up the place by 7 o'clock and still had time to prepare some hair of the dog, and maybe bear the slightest hint of eyebrow raise. Even the gaslighting queen of passive aggressiveness Mrs. Danvers wouldn't dare to tell her employer to clean the house himself.

In case you're wondering, if you touch her you die.

Because of the aforementioned arrow bug and a few others that make certain rooms impossible, which Software Projects unconvincingly tried to claim were intentional difficulty-enhancing features before publishing POKE command fixes in UK computing magazines, I'm breaking my usual convention of playing original versions and using the "PCG fix" copy which I presume contains these fixes.

It didn't take me three minutes to reach a game-ending room. Leaving the bathroom was simple enough. The top landing, from which you may exit left to the master bedroom or go downstairs to the first floor, was only marginally more difficult to clear, patrolled by a deadly whisky keg, Swiss army knife, and razor blade. But the only place to go on the first floor was an appropriately named "Nightmare Room," where Willy turns into a winged pig and has to navigate a series of impossibly tiny platforms while dodging technicolor servants and a tired running gag. As in Manic Miner, you can't control your jumps, and you move so slow, so frame-perfect timing and pixel-precise positioning is the only way to survive here. Merely trying to get to the platform just to the right of the foot seemed borderline impossible - you can't fly, and as a pig you're just fat enough that there's no way to safely position yourself on any of the platforms between the purple servant and the foot and be safe from both of them.

Unlike Manic Miner, you don't have to collect all objects just to leave the room, so you could just ignore the mug, exit to the left with comparative ease, and keep exploring the mansion.

This room "stumped" me.

The Banyan Tree is the very next room, and I couldn't even get through it in all of my allotted tries with numerous repeat attempts. Incidentally, this is one of the rooms that Software Projects had to fix with POKEs, as in its original rendition, a solid platform overhead prevents leaping over the spinning microchip.

I soon discovered, quite by accident, that on the first floor landing, you can pass through the staircase by jumping onto it at just the right angle. This allows access to several more rooms of the mansion, but all paths eventually led somewhere I couldn't make it through, and exploring was simply delaying the inevitable. I'd have to properly complete The Nightmare Room, The Banyan Tree, and the rooms beyond at some point.

After getting yet another Game Over in a cold locker found at the end of a series of kitchens and sculleries, where I failed to come to grips with controls involving a swinging rope, I decided I'd start savescumming and relax my rules, allowing myself a save every ten minutes as I ultimately did with Manic Miner. If Smith couldn't beat it fairly, I'm not going to pretend I have a chance.

It took me three saves to grab the mug in The Nightmare Room and leave. Three. For one room. One save at the start, one save after making it under the gauntlet of servants and feet and jumping up three platforms to one between a cyan and purple servant, and one save after making two jumps past the purple servant and the foot onto a safe platform right in the middle. And each save other than the last represents ten minutes of trying and failing to clear the room from that position, over and over again. And this is just the fifth room of the game! One thing that simplifies jumping from these narrow platforms is that with the arrow keys you can now make a forward hop from a standing position, but even with this concession, this room alone was harder than anything in Manic Miner.

At least the Banyan Tree gave me less trouble. Not that I didn't have to save at the start of it too - I still got nailed on the second jump's landing by the demon repeatedly, and this is in part because your sprite's width varies with your walk cycle frame, which you don't have a great deal of control over. But when you do land it safely, you can climb up the tree to a rooftop area, or squeeze through the hole on the left and continue past a swimming pool and onward to the mansion's west wing.

Down the stairs and into the wine cellar, pinpoint precision is needed once again to descend each level, avoiding the patrolling robots who are all just tall enough that you can barely leap over, grabbing the bottles in each alcove. Once at the bottom, a secret passage to the right can be entered by jumping over the stairs at just the right distance and height to clear them without ascending a pixel too high and hitting the platform above it instead. Otherwise, the only way out of the wine cellar is to sacrifice a life and respawn at the top.

But if you weren't using save states, you might wish you did sacrifice a life to respawn at the top of the wine cellar, as the next room has even more patrolling robots, and the only way through is tedious and costly trial and error, figuring out the exact timing needed to jump over one robot without bumping into the next, or hitting your head on a robot or obstacle on a higher level. A collectable golden cross demands jumping onto a conveyor belt at the precise time so that you can leap over two robots in a row but also pass underneath a ceiling light in the split-second between, and in order to exit right you have to jump over four robots patrolling back and forth. This room probably took me more attempts than any before it, and involved another three save states.

The next room, called "The Security Guard," is mercifully simple, with nothing but a few sentries moving up and down in simple patterns. I easily walked underneath them all, leading to the right and downward to a secret passage underneath Willy's driveway in which I lost all of my lives to a red rabbit dancing on a conveyor belt. Reloading and making my way back to The Security Guard, I went downward instead, which dropped me into an infinite death loop, one clearly put there on purpose.

Let's go, Seth.

I'm not ready to give up on Jet Set Willy, but nothing about the experience has been fun yet. The labyrinthine mansion, ripe for exploration, is a wasted opportunity when every direction I go soon leads to a brick wall that I bash my head on until it eventually yields, more often than not just leading to another brick wall. As of now I've seen 22 rooms and used 12 save states, and I'm certain that without them I'd have given up having seen less than half that much.

Games 231-232: Styx & Manic Miner

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Our next whale is a mining-themed platformer by a programmer who previously sold ripoffs of classic arcade games for the TRS-80.

This time, though, the story is happening on the other side of the pond, where Londoner Matthew Smith's weapon of choice would be the iconically British ZX Spectrum rather than the all-American Atari. But his earliest game credit was, like Bill Hogue's, a TRS-80 arcade-style game.

 

Delta Tau One

 

 

It's just Galaxian. To be fair, it's a competent enough port. The system's limitations certainly show, but not nearly as much as you might think. The sound effects are even halfway decent considering the TRS-80 wasn't meant to have any sound at all. It plays much faster than the real thing, and hitting targets isn't nearly as difficult, but avoiding hits is much more so, especially from the kamikaze attacks once the fleet size drops to three or fewer.

The most radical thing here is hyperwarp option that jumps you ahead a number of levels. You have finite warps, but each can take you anywhere from 1-10 levels ahead - you just hit the corresponding digit key.

Overall it just isn't interesting enough to bother giving a number or GAB rating, so I didn't.

 

Delta Tau One sold a whole 15 copies through the Molimerx catalog, but got the attention of Liverpool software publisher Bug-Byte, who offered Smith a contract and a ZX Spectrum loaner.

Game 231: Styx

 

Smith's first game with Bug-Byte is an arcade-style game very obviously inspired by Wizard of Wor, but it isn't quite a knock-off.

The action of Styx occurs over three phases, each taking up one third of the screen's height.

First, there's a maze of spiders, and here the game most resembles Wor, and is also the most interesting. The design doesn't work terribly well, though. There are three maze sections, and the spider mother in the upper-right corner of the last section is the source of all spiders, so it doesn't matter very much how you go through the maze's first two sections; just do them quickly enough and you wouldn't need to worry about spiders until you reach the third. And when you do, because your laser gun can only fire horizontally, there's only one sensible path through the third section; going directly into the top row where you can fire a shot at the spider mother. Getting in without touching the spiders is a question of luck and timing.

There's one interesting detail - your lasergun has a limited power supply, but this isn't evident at first. Fire it too often, though, and you'll notice that its effective range gets shorter and shorter until it's completely useless. This certainly caught me off-guard until I realized what was going on.

Next there's a river infested with piranha. They never stop spawning, and dead ones respawn right where you need to be, so it may actually be wiser not to kill more than you need in order to slip through the school.

The final part is pretty trivial; a mass of spiders wriggle around in a space between you and the boatman Charon, but you can just snipe them from the safety of the brick antechamber to the arena. Then once their ranks are thin enough, you can just slip through them and shoot Charon in the face with a laser. Then the game repeats on a harder setting.

GAB rating: Below Average. Styx is mechanically fine, with responsive controls (even if the QAOP layout common to the Spectrum is a bit weird), fair hit detection, and avoids the attribute clash so common on the system. But it's a bit trivial and not very well designed.

Game 232: Manic Miner

 

The title screen treats you to an off-key Strauss performance.

Manic Miner was Smith's second game for Bug-Byte, made in eight weeks and released the same year as Styx, and is the first of his two whales.

Fifteen minutes of playing was all it took for me to realize my standard saving rules weren't going to get me through this with my sanity intact.

Controls are dead simple - you move left or right, and when you jump you have no control until you land. It's like Donkey Kong or Miner 2049er but without any ladders.

As early as the first level, the path through to collect all of the keys and unlock the exit is very narrow and unforgiving. The timing window for getting through any obstacle is harsh, and I got killed so many times by brushing up against something lethal. Getting through is all about memorization and perfect execution. And you've only got so many lives - maybe six if you're good about scoring points for bonus lives - to beat all 20 levels. I allowed myself a save every 10 minutes, knowing I'd probably need one on almost every level, as the loss of a life would be unacceptable unless very close to the end.

One cute detail - although the ingame music (a rarity on the system!) is pretty bad and I shut it off almost immediately, the icons representing your spare lives do this cute little dance when it's on, and stops when you turn it off.

After the first level, the next few ones were comparatively easy.

Another level "Eugene's Lair" challenges you to leap over walking toilets and time your movements to avoid a levitating humanoid egg.

Collect the last object and Eugene will start glowing, move toward the exit, and stay there. So save the closest one for last.

Levels get progressively harder. Some reference certain popular video games.

And movies.

 

And current events.

 

That one's pretty unfair with stuff crashing down without warning faster than you can react, sometimes even mid-jump. There's a few breather levels after, but then it gets even more ridiculous.

The Warehouse's disintegrating platforms mean you can't stand still, but the bear traps and other hazards mean you need to time your movements perfectly, which is no small task when you can't stand around and wait. It's quite easy to accidentally have Willy jump vertically instead of horizontally - it's not enough to press a direction, but you have to hold it just long enough for him to move at least a pixel before you press a jump key - and the number of times I screwed things up because of this alone is crazy.

The amoebatrons in Amoebatrons' Revenge aren't so bad. The bad part is jumping over the minecarts without bumping into one above, especially the green one above the fast purple one. I had a bad time here until I realized it's possible to stand just to the right of the purple one's range and wait for an opening, and even then, reaching that part was pretty difficult.

 

The Solar Power Generator is a special kind of hell. Right off the bat these colors give me a headache, and thanks to my colorblindness I can barely see the gold (are they gold?) objects moving over the green background. So many jumps here require absolutely pixel-perfect timing - I'm talking with your heels barely touching the edge of the platform before you jump off it it - and on top of that, touching the reflecting light beam drains your air supply fast.

The hardest part here is getting back up from the ground after getting the lower key, but if you go for the bottom key first, then you'll waste time you don't have, as getting the key on the upper-left section will force you down to the bottom floor anyway, forcing you to make the tricky set of jumps back up to the platforms once again.

 

The last level isn't too bad - it's tricky, but not even close to the extreme difficulty we've seen before. First, avoid the hopper without hitting the spiders by jumping vertically as it passes under you, grabbing the keys above. The timing is strict but it's doable. Then hop on the conveyor belt at the right time so that by the time you reach the end of it you can jump over the floating eyeball - this may require some trial and error, but the timing window is generous. Then get the key, loop back, and exit, to find out that the password is.. fish sword?

After that, you're back on the first level. I don't know if the difficulty increases, but I don't really care.

GAB rating: Below Average. I did not enjoy Manic Miner. It invites comparison to Miner 2049er, a game that I found enjoyable but was hurt by excessively unforgiving difficulty. Manic Miner plays more slowly, controls more stiffly, looks uglier (and sounds ghastly), has less interesting levels, and is so much more unforgiving that it became a chore to play even with my lax rules on save states. I can't imagine trying to beat it honestly, where running out of lives means restarting from the first level.

Miner Willy will return for the 1984 phase of Data Driven Gamer, but my next game's going to go back a little further in time, as there's a particularly crucial genre-defining predecessor that I previously skipped.