Game:

Manic Miner (1983)

Duration: 6:58

337 views

7

I was interested to finally see this conversion escape out into the wild after years of delay as to me this is my equivalent to "Super Mario Bros 3" is to people a decade younger than me outside the EU who had an NES. Manic Miner is a sublime platformer due to excellent controls and level design.

The Atari 800 or XL/XE machines were 1 of only 2 machines not to get it (many other games from £2 to £10 did get an XL/XE conversion in the UK and even the Tatung Einstein and Oric-1 got an official release). The TI99 is the only other machine to get left out (the TI never really made it past the early 80s in the UK).

It's a nice version of the game, the graphics are different but then the XL doesn't have a character based colour mode like that used on the C64 and Spectrum originals.

My thoughts? It's not bad at all but there does seem to be a slight difference in doing quick swaps from jumping left to right, or vice versa, immediately which makes it difficult to do some of the very later screens compared to the best versions released by Software Projects.

Shame it took so long but it is here now and if you can run it on a real machine so you can use a real decent joystick like a Zipstick then I can thoroughly recommend it.

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