Manga Puzzle 1.1

Shiuming Lai tries another variation of the sliding puzzle game theme

Universal Sliding Puzzle Simulator is probably more like it. This incarnation of the old children's favourite is a conversion of an STE game, wrapped in a GEM interface to broaden its appeal. It also comes from the Lotsa Individual Files school of game data storage in that the sounds and each level's pictures are all easily replaced with other ones, indeed it includes a picture format convertor for this very purpose, so it needn't be a Manga puzzle at all. Make your own sliding puzzle!

However, the author has decided to include pictures of a Manga theme, 35 in total in the images directory, so that should be plentiful playing time for puzzle fans everywhere, straight out of the box.

Where this electronic version beats the real one hands-down is in the flexibility of settings (yes, game settings on a sliding puzzle). For varying difficulty level, the picture can be split into 4 x 4, 5 x 5 or 6 x 6 tiles. Once the picture is complete, the "missing" tile is filled in so you get a truly completed picture, try that on the real thing! A soundtrack is available, too, in the form of chip music (five tunes are supplied, in SND format, chosen at random). Unfortunately this doesn't work properly for me and I don't see any good reason for it from a technical point of view

The help documentation states in the known bug list, "SNDH makes nasty crashes under multitasking environment" but it crashes on my CT2 Falcon even in TOS mode. Under TOS 7.04, enabling the music option immediately crashes, while in 16 MHz, TOS 4.04 mode with absolutely nothing but HD Driver loaded, it starts the chip music and bombs out to the desktop, still allowing the game to be started once more. Even on my stock Mega STE 4 I get this problem and I'm not about to mess around trying to find out why.

Due to the inherently simple nature of sliding puzzle games it's incredibly easy to pick up. Clicking the left mouse button while pointing at any tile immediately adjacent to the "missing" tile simply moves that tile into the space. Clicking anywhere else tells the computer you've finished (or think you've finished), at which point the puzzle is checked and you get a success or failure sound and the game either progresses to the next level or you continue respectively.

One control aspect I like very much, which isn't immediately obvious but marks the game out to me, is that you don't have to release the mouse button and click it again to move the next tile. In terms of game design that's equivalent to forcing a player in a scrolling shoot-'em-up to stand still while firing, simply annoying and so easily avoided. What it means for this game is you can hold the mouse button down and drag it along a series of tiles (either a straight line in a column or row, or even in snake fashion if you're quick) and shuffle them along in one swift move, like spreading a pack of cards on a table. Very slick.

The tile scrolling option is a neat touch, it literally scrolls the tiles smoothly, like you would see on the real thing, instead of just flipping them to their new positions. It's directly tied to CPU clock speed though and this has funny side effects. In 16-colour mode on a normal Falcon it's perfect. In the same mode on an accelerated machine like a CT2, they scroll so fast they look like they're being flipped. In any case, if you increase the colour mode, the scrolling leaves "snail trails" which look like motion blur!

I was last good at sliding puzzles when I was seven or eight years old, so haven't yet got past the first picture (Ahem...) but it appears the supplied pictures are in 16 colours, as the first one looks just fine in 16-colour mode. It would have been easy to lazily throw together a super-compatible GEM game with pictures in 16-bit or even 24-bit colour which are then reduced on-the-fly with ugly GEM dither patterns to work on lower specification machines, but the supplied artwork has been carefully prepared to avoid that from the looks of it. In this version, 1.1, a random tile shuffle mode has also been added, and a high score table which shows best time (but not number of tile moves, that would be too annoying!).

Update! I'm playing the game as I write this, and after completing the top half of a 4 x 4 and shuffling the bottom remaining seven tiles like mad, I completed the first level. It gives the option to save the level position for next time you play, nice!

Overall, Manga Puzzle is nothing outstanding and neither is it poor if you like to play this type of game. There are nice touches but still some glaring bugs with them that need to be ironed out. Three stars, as it doesn't cost anything.

shiuming@myatari.net

MyAtari magazine - Review #2, July 2003