Game:

Jet Set Willy (1984)

Duration: 18:25

1,650 views

19

Just to note, this video is primarily just filler content before I get back to my usual playthrough series. I suggest you all brace yourselves however, because here comes a whole bunch of nonsense (and a partial explanation for it)...

In case you're unfamiliar with the game in question of today's filler content, Jet Set Willy was originally a game for the ZX Spectrum. The game was extremely popular in the UK, which in turn spawned a sequel and several ports of the original onto other systems (including but not limited to: Commodore 64, Dragon 32, MSX, Atari 8-bit Family, and the Amstrad CPC). At some point later in 2007, an 'Online' recreation of the game was made by a small team of fans.

This Online version is very faithful to the mechanics of the original game (for better or for worse). The premise pretty much remains the same as well: You're tasked to collect every piece of treasure in your newly purchased estate before Maria (the house-maid) will let you go to bed. It's actually very similar to Monty on the Run - although that game in particular was released one year later after Jet Set Willy.

Development for this game stopped quite some time ago, which is a bit of a shame. From what I understand, there were several planned features for this, including a map editor. The whole game itself has faded into obscurity, and there's likely not many people that can really claim to have had much success with the 'online' aspect.....and even more-so, you'll also probably be very hard-pressed to find anyone who can claim that they've actually beaten this game as well.

Make no mistake: Despite having unlimited continues, this game is hard - damned hard. Instead of being a simple recreation of the original Jet Set Willy game, this one adds so many extra rooms to overall game map that it could make your head spin. As a rough estimate - this game has over 150 rooms, and (most likely) over 500 pieces of treasure to collect. As you can probably tell, attempting to beat this thing is an extremely tall task, especially considering it's very easy to die in this game (mostly due to the mechanics involved with it).

The mechanics for this game are relatively simple. You start off with 10 lives, and essentially unlimited continues (losing all your lives simply brings you back to the bathroom, the first screen of the game). Jumping can be a bit...difficult to get used to, especially if you didn't grow up with this game. You have a set distance each time you jump, and you can't change directions in mid-air. You fall straight down if you happen to reach the limit for your jumping distance as well. All of this is also paired in with one of the biggest hazards of the game: falling damage. If you fall too far, as indicated by the noise made when doing so, you'll lose a life. This is where the game can get downright sadistic, especially through the usage of combining these hazardous aspects with the way you transition to other screens.

Think of it this way: Essentially, if you jump into another screen as part of a transition, and then die somewhere on that screen, you'll start off back at the beginning of the screen in terms of how you entered it...by jumping. This can be a problem, especially if you fall into a new screen. Whenever you get hit by something, you respawn with a small amount of invincibility time (as indicated by the player's name blinking). However, this invincibility time can't save you from fall damage. Given this, there are sections of the game where you can literally get caught in an endless loop of dying by falling from too high of a height during a screen transition. Hell, the game itself even throws in trap-rooms (usually in the form of pits) that cause such death-loops until you run out of lives.

Obviously, this game doesn't mess around. Considering it would probably take way too long to complete this (even if it were somehow possible without falling asleep), I've opted to do a simple survival run of sorts. I essentially wanted to see how deep I could delve into this game's maddeningly large map, while sometimes picking up treasure if it's not too far out of the way.

Also, for those of you who are going to ask about this: All the music used in this video was composed by EliteFerrex of the Newgrounds Audio Portal (with the exception of the last track. That one is actually the 'Monty on the Run' theme composed by Ron Hubbard).

You can find all of EliteFerrex's music here:
http://eliteferrex.newgrounds.com/audio/

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