MA JOLIE (C) BROADSOFT 2003
========

For the Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Written by Andrew Broad
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/


Willy waits for just another day
Drags his bones down Surbiton way
Owns white togs and flickers grey
Oh, he jumps away

Once a time he nearly might have been
Miner Willy on a silver screen
No one knew what he could do
Except for me and you
He jumps away
He jumps away

Don't forget to wear your hard hat
Twinkle twinkle Miner Willy
Watching all the mining robots
How I wonder where you are
Oh-hoh

Sailing to Deserted Island
Twinkle twinkle Jet Set Willy
You were drunk but we had fun, boy
How I wonder where you are
Oh-hoh

Willy knew there's never ever time
Some of us will always stay behind
Down the mine it's always 1983
Jump through the ILB
Oh-oh
What's the matter with Willy?
C'mon, let's go
Jump away
Oo-oo

Don't forget to wear your hard hat
Twinkle twinkle Miner Willy
Watching all the mining robots
How I wonder where you are
Oh-hoh

Sailing to Deserted Island
Twinkle twinkle Jet Set Willy
You were drunk but we had fun, boy
How I wonder where you are
Oh-hoh

[parody of David Bowie, "Slip Away" from Heathen]


Background Information
----------------------

On the morning of 17th February 1999, I had a vivid dream about a new Manic
Miner game. I was in a dark cavern, standing on a laminated platform of
crumbling floor and static nasties in the right half and vertical centre of the
screen. I was aware of the cyan presence of Kari Krisnkov (she of We Pretty
and Goodnite Luddite fame). The dream was so vivid that I was able to recreate
the room I'd seen, and of course, I had to create a new Manic Miner game to put
it in!

I `selesened' the game Ma jolie. The game is similar in spirit to the Miner
Willy games, but I want to being a certain We Pretty atmosphere to it as well -
a sort of `Willy meets Kari' game in a sense. It is not, however, part of the
Kari Krisnkov series per se - all of those will be Jet Set Willy games.

So, I worked on Ma jolie on and off for four years, between working on my PhD
and on Goodnite Luddite! I wrote Rooms 0-2 and 4-5 in 1999, Rooms 3, 6-7, 10,
15 and 17 in 2000, Room 8 in early 2001, and Rooms 9, 11-14, 16 and 18-19 in
the summer and autumn of 2002.

When I'm working on original MM/JSW projects as opposed to book-adaptations,
&c., most of my room-ideas go into JSW games, leaving the ones that entail
crumbling-floor &c. to go in a MM game such as Ma jolie. However, I never lost
my natural ability for writing extremely tough MM rooms, and this game contains
the most fiendishly difficult ever! :->

There's now an easier version called Ma jolite, which is less mentally
distressing to play and has a different tune! ;-)


The Game
--------

Ma jolie is a redefinition of the rooms in Matthew Smith's classic Manic Miner,
which I acknowledge as being the copyright of Bug-Byte (1983) - owned by Jester
Interactive since 2001.

I developed the game on a Spectrum +2, using my own Manic Miner Screen Editor
(also released on the Internet).

Ma jolie is written for advanced MM players, and the rooms are intended to be
outstandingly difficult, as a challenge to the experts. It presupposes that you
can play Manic Miner - 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. Ma jolie
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!

Ma jolie is the hardest MM/JSW game ever written, and the hardest that I ever
intend to write! ;-) I just want to show, once and for all, how hard Manic
Miner can get! You should not attempt to complete the game in one sitting if
you value your sanity, and children should not participate in the playing of
this game with laces in their shoes. Just remember that Manic Miner is
deterministic, and that the pause-key is as much a control of this game as
left, right and jump! ;-)

You can consider yourself to have passed Ma jolie 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. ;-)

I have thoroughly play-tested the final version, and I certify that it /is/
theoretically possible to complete. Unfortunately, there is an insidious bug in
the MM game-engine where erroneous blocks sometimes appear at (0,1), (0,5) and
(3,24) for the rest of the game (they only go away if you restart the game). I
don't know what causes the Three-Blocks Bug, but I have yet to complete the
game on my real Spectrum without falling foul of this bug, which makes Rooms 16
and 18 in particular impossible to complete. Therefore, as a special
concession, players on a real Spectrum may claim "room-completion" if they
restart the game and teleport to the room they're up to. But you won't see the
proper ending upon completing Room 19 if you do it this way, and thus cannot
claim "game-completion".

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.

This game contains sexual images which some may find offensive. These may be
airbrushed out at the option of the user.


Acknowledgements
----------------

* Matthew Smith, for writing the original Manic Miner, and in particular for
deciding on an unencrypted, perspicuous room-format! ;-)

* My fellow MM/JSW authors, for general inspiration, and some specific tricks
(sometimes unintended on their part, but deliberately exploited by me! ;-) ).

* Richard Hallas for transferring Rooms 0, 1, 2 and 5 from audio-cassette to
emulator-format in December 1999.

* Richard Hallas's document "A Miner Triad" was an invaluable aid to redefining
the music.

* The in-game tune of Ma jolie is the verse of "Slip Away" from David Bowie's
2002 album Heathen.

* The in-game tune of Ma jolite is the chorus of "Dreaming Of You" by The
Coral.

* The font on the title-screen/Room 19 picture is from Part 1 of the Spectrum
game Journey's End (Mastertronic, 1985). The words are from the title-track of
Heathen.

* 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 Ma jolie, 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).

MA_JOLIE.TAP is the standard hard version of Ma jolie.
MA_JOLITE.TAP is the watered-down version, Ma jolite.


The Rooms
---------

I decided to release Ma jolie in twenty weekly instalments, each containing one
room more than the previous, eventually starting on 1st January 2003 and
finishing on 14th May 2003 to celebrate Manic Miner's china anniversary! :-) (I
don't know the exact release-date in 1983).

ROOM 0: "Kari Weeds Off The Stragglers" (1st January 2003). This is the room
that I wrote on 17th February 1999, after the dream I told you about. I wish I
could have made it less vivid(!), but instead I tried to find the happy medium
between capturing the dream faithfully and getting in a lot of quirky features:
the way you have to step back at the start to jump over the poisonous pansies
(the 8x8 graphics in this room come from the original Manic Miner), the way you
can stand `on' the blocks in Row 0, jumping over a static nasty and landing
inside a platform, jumping from four horizontal pixels under a static nasty,
the old invisible-platforms trick, embedding static nasties in a conveyor-
animation, and all the things Kari deserves for being such a good girl, honey
[Shakira, "Underneath Your Clothes"].

ROOM 1: "The Hot Room" (8th January 2003 - David Bowie's 56th birthday). A
lateral inversion of "The Cold Room" from the original Manic Miner, with
appropriate recolouring, and the pretty penguins from Jet Set Willy instead of
the miserable-looking penguins from "The Cold Room". Oh, and there's a sneaky
trick to make you have to go all the way round again after collecting the
`last' item.

ROOM 2: "Majolica" (15th January 2003). Another tribute to Iva Majoli, this is
a very tricky puzzle-room that will also require precise use of the pause-key.
You have to get rid of the crumbling-floor in order to collect the earthenware
items without falling to your death. You can stand on each crumbling-floor
block seven times, or jump onto it eight times (when it's down to two pixel-
rows, you can stand on it once but jump onto it twice). You need to make a
plan, and keep a careful count for each crumbling-floor block.

ROOM 3: "One Day, in Teletubbyland, ..." (22nd January 2003). Teletubbies is a
nursery-school programme, which has also attracted a cult-following among
adults with its surreal world of bright colours, English country-gardens and
strange devices. Seeing how the four main characters (from left to right:
Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, La-La and Po) all look the same but have differently-
coloured fur, I just had to write a MM room! ;-) I wrote this room on 1st
January 2000.
    Another puzzle-room, involving the character-row-shift when you jump off
the sides of the screen, and crumbling-floors which you can only touch once
(because their bottom two pixel-rows are blank), and which leave a yellow
`ghost' (the background colour-attribute), and a sticky conveyor. The challenge
is to work out from which angle to approach each item, order your moves so as
not to get rid of any crumbling floor you'll need to land on later, and to time
it so the Teletubbies don't collide with you. Mind you don't get trapped in the
portal before you've collected all five items - the trick is to collect both
items above the portal in one jump.

ROOM 4: "The Hive of No Desire" (29th January 2003). The title comes from a
fake track-listing for David Bowie's sadly abandoned album 2.CONTAMINATION (the
planned sequel to his 1995 album 1.OUTSIDE), as did "EBOLA JAZZ" in Goodnite
Luddite. See http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/music/bowie/contamination/
for more information. You won't believe the amount of nastiness that can be
packed into such a small playing-area! :-> This calls for pixel-perfect
movement, which is the only reason I didn't replace Willy with Kari for this
game! ;-) Tip: emerge from the leftmost `wall' of the hive at the fourth
opportunity. The bee behaves like Eugene in the original Manic Miner, so you'd
better get the bottom honey-comb last! The portal-graphic is the hive in a
microcosm. I wrote this room on 31st December 1999.

ROOM 5: "The Mad Ramblings of Longbeard" (5th February 2003). Another title
from the fake Contamination track-listing inspired this atmospheric room. The
pirate-sprite was actually my first attempt at drawing the head of Tom Bombadil
for Jet Set Willy: The Lord Of The Rings. The head was too long for Tom's body,
but it's a great sprite in its own right so I transferred it to Ma jolie.
    It's up to you whether you want to `walk the plank' before or after you
jump across the crumbling clouds, but beware: you'll fall to your death if you
stand still on the clouds for even one time-frame, and it's incredibly
difficult to walk right and then jump straight up, even with the pause-key.
Also, there's a hidden platform in the portal, so if you don't get the jump
exactly right you'll be forced to commit suicide.

ROOM 6: "The Vatican" (12th February 2003). A play on words of "The Vat" from
the original Manic Miner, this room is notable for its innovative use of
horizontal guardians (HGs) to create forcefields that you have to walk through,
as in other games such as Starquake. Unfortunately sendy's where's woody, which
was released /after/ this room was written, robs it of MM/JSW novelty (we came
up with the idea independently of each other), as does my own Goodnite Luddite!
;-) Collecting the items is a puzzle, with some of them superimposed on
crumbling floor. I like the way you get to jump over a static nasty and through
a platform, and superb manual dexterity is required to collect the top-right
item! The static nasties are cyan inverted crosses, and the portal-graphic was
inspired by the large doors in the film The Devils.

ROOM 7: "Ape-Men with Metal Parts" (19th February 2003). A reference to the
lyrics of David Bowie's "segue - Ramona A. Stone" from 1.OUTSIDE, this room is
both fun and frustrating! Packed with quirky features and fast-crumbling
floors, it again makes innovative use of HGs to create a new type of puzzle.
It's a confusing room, in particular that it's often difficult to tell whether
a block is background, crumbling floor or static nasty!
    The left half of the screen is the more dangerous, as you have to jump
through an Innocent-Looking Block (ILB) on the run. It also features the
delightful move of stopping on a conveyor and jumping straight up to flick the
switch that opens the way to the right half.
    The right half of the screen features an optional quest to flick the right
switch and see a graphic depiction of the marital act! ;-> A clever jump from
the conveyor is needed to access the bottom-right, and the items aren't as
straightforward to collect as they look! ;-)

ROOM 8: "The Dawn of Bacon-Sharing" (26th February 2003). The title is a
mondegreen of the line "That only they can share in" from David Bowie's "Soul
Love" (from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars). The
mondegreen comes from p.11 of the July 2000 issue of Q magazine. The guardians
are Kari Krisnkov from We Pretty. The items are rashers of bacon!
    This is the toughest room of the game so far, requiring absolutely frame-
perfect timing and pixel-perfect moving from the very start. Unlike in Jet Set
Willy, the vertical guardians (VGs) kill you if they collide with an item (in
demo-mode, this throws the music out of phase!).
    First you must get under the upper white VG without losing a time-frame,
and stand still on the conveyor until she is three pixels above you with her
legs apart. Jump just before you reach the ladder to avoid the invisible static
nasties on the other side of the screen.
    Then you must go and stand on the embedded item to get rid of the crumbling
floor so that you can go back round (jump through the ILB), jump up and collect
it.
    Finally, to get to the portal entails a quirky jump to land in the middle
of the bottom-right ladder, followed by a precise jump under the lower white VG
- you need to jump from the edge of the ladder when she is at the bottom of her
path with one leg showing.

ROOM 9: "GimmeGimmeGimmeAManAfterMidnight" (5th March 2003). This is a tribute
to the Abba song "Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)". When I heard that
song, it immediately reminded me of the sound Willy makes when he jumps against
a wall-block two characters above his head! ;-) Thus I set out to make a room
which Willy's crossing would resemble the riff as closely as possible. This is
a very musical room also in that the walls and items are notes, and the portal
a treble clef!
    This room is tricky in that I have created hybrid crumbling-wall-blocks (by
giving wall the same colour-attribute as crumbling floor). Before you jump
through the ILB, you must clear the crumbling wall you jump from, otherwise you
won't be able to jump over the first pool.
    The HGs take their sprites from sendy's JSW128 game where's woody. They
take their paths from "The Forgotten Abbey" in Jet Set Willy (shifted three
characters to the left). They're tougher to pass, though, as you have to jump
the deadly pools, the overhead wall-blocks can spoil your jumps over the
guardians, and the platform above "erMidn" is actually a left conveyor! The key
is learning how to move with the guardians, like a tennis-player whose opponent
is spreading her! "Ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight? I always
ask that of all my prey" [Prince, "Batdance"].
    The top third of the room entails good turning and jumping under pressure,
in order to collect the items without hitting the bloody thorn. And don't be
caught out by the crumbling-wall-blocks behind the portal!
    I enjoy playing this room - it's like a nice game of chess! Ironically, I'm
not fond of chess itself. ;-)

ROOM 10: "Recurring Nightmare" (12th March 2003). This is a remix of "P  L A IS
    TO  W   G  R   OV E" from We Pretty, laterally inverted and with a darker
colour-scheme. Since this is a Manic Miner room, you don't get to reregister
your position after crossing the bottom half - this contributes to making it
the hardest room in the game so far! :->
    Tips:
* When jumping right over the shark, watch the cyan VG, not the shark.
* Jump under the magenta VG at the third opportunity, so that you will also be
  able to jump under the black-on-cyan VG.
* Don't forget to take the items in column 31!
* To jump right over the cyan VG, stand on the middle of the cloud with your
  legs apart, and jump when the VG is two characters higher than you on its way
  down.

ROOM 11: "Der Richter und sein Henker" (19th March 2003). This is a tribute to
Friedrich Drrenmatt's novel Der Richter und sein Henker (The Judge and his
Hangman), which I read for `A' Level German. Two policemen are trying to solve
a murder-mystery, but the older, Brlach, is actually trying to get revenge on
an old enemy, and is using his own unorthodox and extremely effective methods
to achieve his ends.
    This is actually an easier room than I intended it to be - only Manic Miner
4 difficulty, and a stroll in the park after "Recurring Nightmare"! ;-) The
hardest bit is getting the item and the left switch above the green hangman -
it's just a matter of good timing, though. Getting the crumbling-floor item
under the blue hangman was meant to be much tougher, but I couldn't get the
constraints on that part of the screen to `add up' the way I wanted them to.
    The floors are stone steps, the conveyor is a river, the static nasties are
swords and guns, the items are bullets (taken out of victims) in plastic bags,
and the portal is the gallows-curtain. Though I admit my inspiration was
sagging when it came to drawing the hangman sprites, I am particularly proud of
the judge sprite, which I think has a Richard Hallas quality about it (cf. the
wigs and TV-presenter in Join The Jet-Set!). Expect to see more of the judge in
future games.

ROOM 12: "Autostereographic Alien Invasion" (26th March 2003). Autostereograms
- those patterns of seemingly random dots in which you can see a hidden 3D
image if you look /through/ them instead of looking /at/ them - were all the
rage in 1994. I purchased several books of them, and indeed these inspired two
Jet Set Willy rooms: "IF W IS HE S WE RE F IS HE S" in We Pretty, and "EATING &
BEING EATEN" in Goodnite Luddite.
    I aspired to write a Manic Miner room which would be an autostereogram, and
this was the best I managed to come up with. Although there is no hidden
picture, if you look at two horizontally adjacent blocks, and then look
/through/ the screen so that they come together, the various rows of blocks
will appear to come out of the screen towards you, and the rows where the
blocks are further apart will look nearer! :-)
    Anyway, I'm particularly pleased with the graphics in this room: each
block-type is an alien, and I managed to use all eight colours. :-) The red
static nasties take their graphic from "To the Kitchens    Main Stairway" from
Jet Set Willy, and the VG-sprites come from Goodnite Luddite. The HG-sprites
are original, but I think they have a Matthew Smith quality about them. The
animated green conveyor-blocks make innovative use of the conveyor-animation: I
believe this is the first time that it's not the top and third pixel-rows which
are animated - the vertical position of the conveyor-animation can be defined
in pixels, not just characters.
    This is one of the tougher rooms, requiring accurate movement and timing.
Tips:
* You need to delay your jump over the red HG, to avoid crashing into the white
  VG. Use wisely the extra crumbling-floor blocks in the passing-places.
* The white VG has two alternating phases of animation. One will kill you no
  matter how tightly you try to jump over it, the other will not.

ROOM 13: "Verona No More" (2nd April 2003). Another title from the fake
Contamination track-listing (cf. Rooms 4 and 5). I didn't get round to
researching Verona as thoroughly as I would have liked (but cf. the We Pretty
diary), so I based it on Venice instead, which fits in with the "No More" bit I
guess! ;-) I'm not sure if it's a bird's-eye view or a worm's-eye view, but the
VGs are boats and the portal is the Bridge of Sighs.
    It's a challenging room to complete, but not too distressing IMO because
you just have to crack one bit and then perfect the next. You don't really have
to think on your feet to solve this room; it's not the nastiest `Skylab' room
I've ever written. There are invisible crumbling floors to get along the top.

ROOM 14: "Wiredlife" (9th April 2003). Yet another title from the fake
Contamination track-listing. My interpretation of the title was inspired by
"Zipzone" in the brilliant Amstrad CPC platform-game Radzone (Mastertronic,
1986 - I might well do a JSW-adaptation one day!).
    This is one of the toughest rooms in the game, not least because of the
white-paper background! The first time that you crack it, you won't want to
play it again any time soon! :->
    First, you have to make your way along the bottom from left to right. This
is most easily achieved with two precisely-controlled jumps followed by three
`free-wheeling' jumps. Then you have to jump up to the first storey, avoiding
the nasties!
    The middle level is the most failsafe, because you know where the blue
sticky conveyors are going to leave you. To get past the HGs, jump straight up
when you see a tiny `+' sign. Then you have to climb up to the top, sneaking
past the red VG.
    The top level is best tackled without the pause-key, using your natural
sense of timing to jump the HGs, and jumping to see where you are without
hitting the static nasties! The biggest danger is falling to your death at the
end, and watch out for the fast-crumbling yellow floor!

ROOM 15: "Speed 4" (16th April 2003). Speed is a very exciting movie in which
a terrorist attaches to a bus a bomb that is activated when the speed exceeds
50 mph, and will be detonated when the speed goes back under 50 mph! The sequel
movie Speed 2 is a geriatric poseidon adventure. "Speed 3" is a Father Ted
episode where Dougal gets stuck on a milk-float that will blow up if the speed
goes back under 4 mph. One scene in "Speed 3" entailed Ted having to move a
stack of cardboard boxes out of the road.
    And so Broadsoft presents "Speed 4", set in a car-factory. You must remove
the eight crumbling-floor blocks from the bottom-right of the screen before the
car crashes into them and kills you!
    Once you have done so, the rest of the room is relatively easy, as long as
you don't get fooled by the confusing layout of the boxes - some of which are
crumbling floors, and others conveyors. The green plant at the top-left is not
what it looks like - otherwise the room would be impossible to complete! ;-)

ROOM 16: "slime surfers & jissom monkeys" (23rd April 2003 - Daniela
Hantuchov's 20th birthday). Named for an episode of the TV comedy Game On,
this room was inspired by a quote from the agoraphobic Matthew Malone, when his
psychologist Jason asked him to imagine the worst that could happen if he went
outside at night:
    "I'm walking along this pavement, and it's all slimy, and I can't keep my
balance because the skunk pussies are biting at my toes. And the jissom monkeys
and the slime surfers are dropping down their glittering ropes of mucus all
over my face and hair. And I'm all sticky, and I'm all slimed up to the
eyeballs, man! And there's all this black stuff oozing up between the cracks in
the pavement, and I realise my feet are sinking in! And the whole pavement is
just black slime, just a great pus-filled swamp, sucking me down... I can't
breathe now! My mouth and nose are all choked up with this green stuff! And
then I realise what all the slime is! It's made up of rotting bodies! And even
though they're rotting, some of them are still alive! And this one reaches out
its stinking, rotting talons, and plunges them into my eyeballs! AND I'M BLIND,
MAN!! I'M BLIND AND DROWNING IN FILTHY BLACK PUS!!"
    The sprites for both the HGs and the VGs were `discovered' in sendy's
where's woody: see "ROOMS.JS2", Sprite-Page 164. The portal is Matthew Malone's
front door, the walls are drainpipes, and the floors are pavement.
    I wrote the room with a yellow-paper background, with the intention of
changing it to white after my initial play-test. But the room is rock-hard
anyway, and will probably take the best of us a good forty minutes to crack!
So I left the background yellow, and left the other sprites with white paper to
fit in with the `dirty' nature of this room! ;->
    Although this is the second-toughest room in the game to complete, it
should not be too distressing if you keep track of what works and what doesn't
work, so that you can get a little further each time (notwithstanding the lives
you lose due to careless mistakes). I have made the following notes primarily
to help myself - they are not precise, and subsequent points will not apply if
you get the timing wrong. If you prefer to work it out for yourself you might
want to disregard them, but it does help to make notes as you go along when
tackling such a complicated room as this.
* At the start: step onto the conveyor at the top-right when the monkeys are
  leaning slightly to the right.
* To cross the middle platform from left to right (first pass): step onto the
  conveyor at the middle-left when the magenta HG is moving right and two
  characters from its right-boundary, at the first opportunity.
* At the middle-right, you have to jump through the ILB once to clear the
  crumbling floor, then cross the middle platform back left and back right
  again so that you can jump through the ILB properly.
* To cross the middle platform from right to left: jump the red HG as it
  approaches the ILB, at the second opportunity.
* To cross the middle platform from left to right (second pass): jump the
  magenta HG as it approaches the ILB, at the second opportunity.
* To cross the bottom platform: jump the black HG as it approaches the right
  end, at the first opportunity.
* To cross the middle platform from left to right (third pass): jump the
  magenta HG as it approaches the ILB, at the first opportunity.
    This is a classic room in terms of timing when to wait and when to go. So
many MM/JSW rooms these days consist of a series of isolated challenges, but
this one really revives the ancient art of *timing* from the original Manic
Miner, and takes it to a new level.

ROOM 17: "Eternal Flame (Conveyor Avatar)" (30th April 2003 - tenth anniversary
of the stabbing of Monica Seles). This is an MM-conversion of a room by Iain
Eddy from J4, used with permission from Geoff Eddy. The room is a tribute to
The Bangles' "Eternal Flame", so my cover-version of the room can be thought of
as a tribute to Atomic Kitten's cover-version of the song! ;-)
    According to the J4 documentation, "Eternal Flame" was "in its original
incarnation almost impossible. It's now a bit easier, now that the ""water"" or
""liquid"" blocks aren't also conveyors". So I decided to make them conveyors!
(only one is animated, because if I stretched the conveyor-animation over all
of the conveyor-blocks, the VGs would collide with it).
    However, even this proved to be too easy by Ma jolie standards (especially
as Manic Miner doesn't have arrows yet), so I added invisible fast-crumbling-
floor blocks, which you need to make use of to collect all of the arrows in the
top-right, top-left and (hint) bottom-left of the room.
    Once you've figured out how to use the crumbling-floor blocks, though, this
room is a breather after the previous room and before the next! :->

ROOM 18: "Semi-Perilous Light" (7th May 2003). I thought of calling this room
"The Luminious Beam" (Bjrk, "All Neon Like" from Homogenic), or even "Heathen
(The Rays)" [Room 19], but finally settled on a mondegreen of "semi-perilous
lives" from Morrissey's "Maladjusted". Not that you'll even notice the air-
sapping beam, so distracted will you be by the room's other challenges,
although it might just prove to be your Achilles heel at the end!
    The VG-sprites are supposed to be models of atomic structures, and were
inspired by my distant memory of Wizball. The HGs were drawn in a stream of
consciousness - I think they look like foeti (fetuses). The items are prisms
(they let the light through when green, and reflect it by ninety degrees when
magenta, cyan or yellow). The portal is a three-storey house. I leave both
types of static nasties to personal interpretation. :-)
    This has to be the most mind-bogglingly difficult, traumatic MM/JSW room
ever devised, and if you complete it under an hour and fifty minutes (I play-
tested it starting at about 22:30 on 31st December 2002, and finished at 00:22
on 1st January 2003), then either you're a better player than I am, or you've
had a lot of help from my tips here!
* Stand on one leg to jump the yellow and magenta HGs on the first pass.
* Walk under the blue VG when its middle balls are slightly out - at the second
  opportunity (if you are in position as early as possible). Stand with your
  legs apart to jump the yellow and magenta HGs on the second pass.
* To cross the conveyor from left to right, jump into the wall. Set off when
  the tip of the magenta HG is aligned with the right edge of the middle
  overhead platform, and jump the HGs separately.
* Jump off the conveyor from two steps away from the edge, so as to catch the
  underside of the wall but miss the red VG (I love this manoeuvre).
* Jump over the yellow static nasty, which takes you slap through the conveyor!
  (the earliest you can do this is when you can see the toe of the yellow HG
  above the rightmost conveyor-block).
* The item to the left of the black static nasty is superimposed with a
  conveyor-block. You cannot jump across for the item to the left (even though
  you /could/ if this were Jet Set Willy) - it is accessible via an invisible
  ladder.
* To cross the bottom, wait two steps away from the third-leftmost yellow
  static nasty, and jump straight up over the red HG when it is exactly between
  the third and fourth static nasties. Then wait two time-frames to jump right
  over the black HG without clipping the cyan VG.
* Once you've collected all the items, you'll need to jump onto the conveyor
  from under the red VG, which is surely the most difficult move in MM/JSW
  history! You have to walk along the top row of crumbling floor (the further
  to the right you start, the more margin for error you have) so that the red
  VG will be a character below the wall with its middle balls slightly out when
  you jump, whilst also timing it correctly with respect to the guardians in
  that top-left section. Jump when you are standing in one character-space, so
  as to land one step into the conveyor. If you do this at the first
  opportunity, you should clear the yellow HG by the skin of your teeth.
* Finally, no matter how short on air you are, do not try to jump under the
  white VG immediately after jumping the magenta HG (which goes left up to the
  wall, in case you haven't been keeping track).

ROOM 19: "Heathen (The Rays)" (14th May 2003 - fifth anniversary of the death
of Karolj Seles). This is a tribute to the title-track of David Bowie's 2002
album Heathen, which has to be the ultimate song to close an album with! The
words in the top half of the screen are the first four lines of the lyrics, and
the font is from Journey's End (Mastertronic, 1985), as used in Goodnite
Luddite. The portal is the cover-picture of the album, and the items are bare
CDs. Red is the colour that our sun will turn at the (scientific) end of the
world.
    And when the sun is low,
    And the rays high,
    I can see it now,
    I can feel it die.
I don't want to give too much away about this room, with it being the last in
the game, and compared with "Semi-Perilous Light" it's a stroll in the park
anyway! ;-) The only quirky feature you might not have seen before is the
crumbling-floor block above the swastika. This is a direct steal from the
final room of Ignacio Prez Gil's Manic Miner 5: Los Peligros del LSD. I
thought that room was impossible to complete until I realised the special trick
needed to leave enough for a second landing! :-)


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, 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, picture galleries which
members can upload to, a links 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
----------------

Ma jolie 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 (2003). 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 MM-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 Ma jolie", or whatever.

Please let me know if you do rerelease Ma jolie 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
---------------

1st January - 14th May 2003: Initial release of Ma jolie on the Internet, in
twenty weekly instalments as detailed above.

12th August 2003 (Iva Majoli's 26th birthday): Ma jolie uploaded to my new
website and Ma jolite released. This README.TXT has been updated accordingly;
MA_JOLIE.TAP is completely unchanged.
