Jet Set Willy

Copyright : Software Projects | Reviewed by : Ritchardo

Miner Willy returns in the massive sequel to the 8-bit classic Manic Miner.

Willy has been able to retire on the fortunes that he amassed on his last adventure and has built himself a huge mansion. After another huge party, Willy wakes up in the bathroom and heads for bed... No such luck! Before Willy can get his head down for a snooze, he?s going to have to tidy the house because Maria, his maid, has had enough and is standing guard on the entrance to his bed, refusing to let him in!

Your mission in this classic platformer is to collect all the objects in Willy?s extravagant mansion and head back to the bedroom for your well deserved rest!

Graphics

Using the same engine as Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy is, like it?s predecessor very well animated and the graphics are all clearly defined making collision detection spot on.

Once again the game is a Spectrum port and as such the colour scheme can be a little erratic at times!

The freedom of being able to move between different rooms in this game without having to collect all the objects first gives the game a more exploratory feel than the original and each room has been well designed in terms of sprites and layout.

Sound

Once again, sound is dominated by two fairly well rendered numbers, and again, frustratingly, the best one is to be found on the title screen. Sound effects are made for each collision and when jumps are made, objects collected etc. One more, these sounds (identical to the ones found in Manic Miner) are very effective.

Gameplay

Jet Set Willy is widely regarded as one of the greatest games ever made and while time may not have been kind to the colour scheme, the gameplay is still second to none.

Wildly addictive it takes the gameplay of the first title and includes the freedom of exploration making the game absolutely fantastic fun to play and it will be dozens of turns before you even contemplate starting to try and complete the game outright! Once you do start playing the game in earnest, you?ll notice a well pitched difficulty level making some rooms trickier to complete than others (The well named ?Nightmare Room? stands as a testament to that!)

Once again, this review will be preaching to the converted as 99.9% of you will have played Jet Set Willy to death but it still has to be said - if you haven?t downloaded this game do it now - and see for yourself what all the fuss is about!

n.b. A follow up to this game was released as Jet Set Willy 2 but was in fact the same game with a few extra rooms tacked on. Stick to the original!