Jet Set Willy : The Nightmare Edition - Timeless classic enhanced for the ZX Spectrum

Now here's a game I think most of our readers would have played or heard of throughout the years, is Jet Set Willy. A platform game originally written by Matthew Smith and published by Software Projects for many home computers such as the ZX Spectrum in 1984. It star'd none other than Miner Willy who is tasked by the housekeeper Maria with the cleaning up of items left around the house after a big party. But it was only just last year that jswmm released the bug fixed edition but now Jet Set Willy is back with a refreshing wave of new challenges and surprises in the latest ' Jet Set Willy : The Nightmare Edition ' for the ZX Spectrum!

According to jswmm and the Manic Miner Community, this project was originally launched in the Contributor Lounge of jswmm.co.uk on 26th October 2015. The founding idea was to have a new JSW build, using the existing 48K engine, with a few minor tweaks and also to have 256 items to collect and to locate them in interesting places where Willy might not otherwise venture. However it went far beyond just a few tweaked ideas, and thus within a short period of time several Contributors joined in and launched an avalanche of suggestions for the new build.

But how did the name of ' The Nightmare Edition ' come to be? Well this isn't some Halloween release with ghouls and ghosts, but it's mainly to do with the increased difficulty and harder puzzles to make the player suffer. Furthermore apart from a huge list of changes such as different tunes in various areas and a nightmarish font style, the team has also added extra screens and all unused graphics that were buried in the original JSW game engine since 1984 have been recycled and placed throughout the layout.

The original was a fantastic game, with many rooms to explore such as the Banyan Tree, to the First Landing, and each one containing baddies galore with items placed around the map for Willy to collect, left over from the night before. But It's hard to say why people keep coming back to the game, maybe because it has such an incredible 8-bit charm with simplistic side on detail and challenging well timed jumping gameplay. But now with this nightmarish release, Jet Set Willy has just got much much harder, while staying true to its awesome retro roots!

Links :
1) Further Details & Discussion
2) Download ( Standard .tap file, suitable for general use and transfer to other formats such as +3 disk or Sinclair Vega. )
3) Download ( High speed .tzx file, suitable for transfer to use on a real machine. This tzx version must be loaded in 48K mode only. )