Broadsoft

(C) 1998 BROADSOFT
As the title suggests, the concept for the game is based on David Bowie's soundtrack album for the BBC2 adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's novel. However, only the back ten rooms are based on The Buddha Of Suburbia (a room for each track on the album), the first ten being a motley crue of early Manic Miner experiments, which turned out to be good enough to keep. This game was originally written in 1994, with no plans to release it on the Internet (which I had not heard of at the time), but in 1998 I hacked it slightly to bring it up to my current standards, and here it is!

The Buddha Of Suburbia is a pretty impressive Manic Miner game, because it was written using my own Manic Miner Screen Editor, which was recently released on the Internet for the first time. While MMSE did not quite have all the functionality then as it does now (notably the capability to edit vertical guardians), I was still able to create rooms which are indistinguishable from the original caverns, unlike some MM rewrites I could mention! ;-) While most of the rooms are not as difficult as those in Manic Miner 4, they still provide the experienced Manic Miner player with an adequate challenge, especially due to the severe time limits in the second half! :->

The music that plays after the game has loaded is a rather crappy rendition of the brilliant title track from David's album - "Buddha Of Suburbia".

WE PRETTY (C) 1999 BROADSOFT
The Plot (in a nutshell) - You have been sucked through a black hole in the 21st century, which has taken you back to the 17th century. As a result of your going back in time, the timeline has bifurcated, leaving you trapped in a parallel universe.

If that wasn't bad enough, you have a doppelganger in this strange new world, the art-murderess Kari Krisnikova! Not only is she at large, but you are the spitting image of her (except that you are white and she is cyan), so everyone is going to have it in for you!

You must explore the surreal world in which you find yourself, and collect all the flashing objects in order to turn the forces struggling for dominance entirely in your favour and defeat your evil alter-ego. You can then attempt to return back through the black hole to the 21st century, at the risk of being crushed to a point!

My inspiration for We Pretty comes from many diverse sources, ranging from personal experiences, dreams, television, computers, tennis, and music - particularly the works of David Bowie. It was his album 1.OUTSIDE that gave me the idea of writing it as a concept game, based on an underlying plot (documented in a diary) and characters, as well as influencing the theme (namely, the ideas of art as murder and utter destruction as beauty). I have taken my life's experiences and refracted them into surreality. I have let my imagination run wild - We Pretty is deliberately as surreal and esoteric as I can make it!

We Pretty is written for advanced JSW players, and the rooms are intended to be outstandingly difficult, as a challenge to the experts. It presupposes that you can play Jet Set Willy - 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 (We Pretty 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!). I have tried to be fair, though, by keeping multiple-death scenarios to a minimum. You shouldn't encounter infinite death unless you do something really stupid (such as jumping into an unfamiliar room when you should be walking into it).

I have thoroughly play-tested the final version, and it /is/ possible to complete - in principle, you don't even have to sacrifice a life to collect all the items! A blow-by-blow description of each room is not included here - some of the meanings can be inferred from the diary, the rest of it is open to personal interpretation!

Read We Pretty - The Kari Krisnikova Diaries

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away ere break of day,
To find our long-forgotten gold.

To celebrate the first year of the third millennium (or the last year of the second millennium, for those who prefer to count from one rather than zero), I release my long-awaited games Manic Miner: The Hobbit and Jet Set Willy: Lord of the Rings!

Manic Miner: The Hobbit is a redefinition of the screens in Matthew Smith's classic Manic Miner, which I acknowledge as being the copyright of Bug-Byte (1983).
It is based on J.R.R. Tolkien's equally classic novel The Hobbit; I acknowledge the plot as being the copyright of George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd, 1951, 1975, 1979 and 1981.

My idea was that The Hobbit would map quite nicely to Manic Miner as the former has 19 chapters and the latter has 20 rooms, so there is a room for each chapter in the book (in the same order), plus a bonus room to bring it up to 20.
In MM:Hobbit, Miner Willy plays Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit who is persuaded by Gandalf the wizard to go on an adventure with a group of dwarves to win back the treasure stolen from them by Smaug the dragon.

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

The Lord of the Rings is divided into three parts: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. Each part is further subdivided into two books.