Only a very few hazards
in Manic Miner are specifically named, which is why it's
always struck me as strange that the portentously-dubbed Kong Beast
simply sits at the top of the screen doing his weird little space
invader dance on both of the levels in which he appears. He
doesn't present much of a hazard, and interacting with him in any way
is purely optional. He personifies the classic trade-off between
bonus points awarded for a greater quantity of remaining air upon
reaching the exit, versus bonus points awarded for spending enough
time in either of his caverns to topple him from his perch.
In the Spectrum
version, the appearance of the Alien Kong Beast (to give him his full
and proper moniker) doesn't really align with any of the usual
connotations of 'Kong'... He's no bigger than any of the other
sprites, he
barely looks like a primate of any kind, and he only
looks 'alien' because he's coloured green by default. It's also
impossible to determine from the monochromatic sprite whether the
oval at the base of the head is a nose, a mouth, or a cyclopean eye,
while the two dots of black above them
could be beady little eyes or simply
shadow from his waggling ears/horns. He could just as easily be one
of the critters from the movie
Gremlins.
The original SAM sprite
appears to aim for something in the region of a primate, but it could
just as easily be Justin Hawkins from
The Darkness rocking a
red, open-fronted catsuit and bare feet. Whatever it is, it looks
weedy and nondescript, with minimal animation. It's obviously just
another 16 x 16 pixel sprites, so it's not huge, nor does it appear
potentially threatening (like
King Kong), but it's also
neither a cute, cartoonish primate (like
Donkey Kong) nor
discernibly alien-looking.
For the updated SAM
version, I felt it was important to make him
distinctive,
first and foremost, and then see what could be done from there. My
first instinct was to take a run at adapting the original Spectrum
sprite with reference to the GameBoy Advance version, but there
really aren't enough shades of green to make that a viable
proposition. The GBA sprites are all effectively 16 shades of a
single colour, determined in-software, and I had – at most – just
5 functionally adjacent shades. Given the variety of scenery required
for both of the Kong caverns, repurposing other palette slots to
increase the number of colours available for Kong himself could have
had a detrimental effect on the cavern as a whole.
The end result looks
alien, sure... but the yellow highlights on his chest just didn't
work. Perhaps I should have used yellow as the base colour, and
shaded with green... or, on a larger sprite, I might have been able
to fix it with some stippling. The blue 'snout' isn't particularly
discernible and adds little to his overall appearance. Also, while
the waggling ears looked reasonable, the rest of his animation was
basic and ugly.
Alongside this, I also
worked on more of a cartoonish primate, which was slightly easier to
achieve with the given palette, but still didn't quite hit the mark.
I kept the weird 'leg stretch' animation for the bottom half, but
tried to make him beat his chest and alter his expression. With only
two frames to work with, I'd have to say the first draft was a bit
rubbish...
When I eventually
redrew the Kong sprite a
third time, I was far happier with the
result. I made him one pixel wider and had him stamping back and
forth between two, shorter legs, enhancing the impression of movement
on an otherwise static sprite. Additionally, he's pounding his chest
with slightly enlarged fists, to make them more of a focal point. The
new version tends far more towards 'Kong' than 'Alien', with the one
concession to that being his yellow eyes... which, sadly, aren't even
that visible.
Version three lasted
the longest through development, but even that ended up looking
'wrong' to me, due to that very lack of any 'alien' characteristics.
I tried making him green again, but even with this new sprite, the
results weren't good. All I ended up doing was tweaking the shading
slightly, then making his ears waggle, more like the original
Spectrum version, and removing the slight shuffle to his steps.
The late change to the
two shades of green also,
finally, opened the possibility of a
reasonably good-looking alternate version of the sprite, though this
ended up only used in one specific cavern, to replace a unique sprite
that seemed likely to prove too contentious.
The Kong sprite also
highlighted another key difference between the Spectrum and SAM
versions of Manic Miner. While the original game featured the
rudimentary 2-frame animation for Kong both when 'standing' and
'falling', the SAM version was coded with only a single frame for
Kong once he's dropped from his perch. Given how quickly he falls,
it's an obvious sacrifice to make to conserve a few bytes of memory,
but it was nevertheless disappointing to learn of another shortcoming in the SAM conversion that couldn't easily be fixed.
I think it could
probably benefit by a couple more frames of animation but the game
has a hard limit of just three frames in total, including the
'falling' frame, for this specific type of sprite. That being the case, this is probably the best it's
going to get for The Lower Caverns. I may not be completely
satisfied, even now, but I think he looks pretty cute in situ...
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