The Most Fabulous Digiworld Review In The World = reproduced with with kind thanks to Jonathan Nash

"CSS MANIC MINER (SPECCY MOD)

SCENE: Space. Enter Mainwaring & Wilson

MAINWARING: Now, Wilson, this just won't do. The men are - Glk! Glghh! (HE DIES.)

WILSON: Captain Mainwaring? Oh dear, this is - aaarghh! Chhkkhh! (HE DIES.) (Enter Corporal Jones & Private Fraser)

JONES: Don't panic! Don't - hrrrghhh! (DIES.)

FRASER: We're doo - urghk! (DIES.)

VOICEOVER (AS BODIES FLOAT AROUND): Dad's Army in Space Without Helmets, tonight at 8pm on BBC1.

But anyway.

There's no ageism at Digiworld. A splendid game is a splendid game, whether a million years old (like Pac-Man, playable of course in MAME) or bang up-to-date (like X-Box MAME). Nor do we discriminate on the grounds of fanboy freeness. Why, only yesterday Mr Popular recommended a Thief mod. Accordingly, for my inaugural Digi review, I'd like to tell you about CSS Manic Miner. (Because Midtown Madness 3 hasn't turned up again - Ed.) Shut UP.

You all know Manic Miner, obviously. Single-handedly invented the platform game as we know it, with only the slight, trifling assistance of pinching 17 ideas from Miner 2049er.

You may not know that there's (still) a reasonably thriving mod community, with dedicated hard-working fans redesigning the game into a series of ever more ambitious "experiences" packed with features ingenious enough to make original author M Smith fall off his ottoman. And they're all rubbish.

These well-meaning mods are rubbish because they've lost track, completely lost track, of what Manic Miner is about: the fun.

Forgetting the excitement of fairness, they've substituted clever, enjoyable levels with extremely clever, horrid clumping lumps of haw-haw smugness so empty of fun that they may as well have the levels play themselves for all the entertaining, attainable skill that's involved. These mods aren't to play, they're to be shown off.

And then there's CSS Manic Miner.

It doesn't exploit bugs in the game to add special features. It doesn't lavishly redraw all the pics so you don't know what anything does. It's based (for flip's sake) on a bunch of in-jokes about a bunch of people on a Speccy newsgroup. Yet with its accomplished understanding of what made MM fun, it is ace. Hurrah!CSS Manic Miner returns that all-important confidence to the game. You know that if you mess this bit up, you can likely recover. There are the traditional pixel-perfect jumps, but the author lets you breathe in between. You're not forced around the screen along the one true route, any tiniest deviation from which spells disaster. In short, you have the confidence to play it for fun. Isn't that super?

I think that's super.

(PARENTHESIS. There are a bunch of games nowadays where you're encouraged to stamp your idiot personality on the thing by stringing together penny- farthing-riding combos or something. MM demonstrates acely that this has always been with us. Do you take a level bit by bit, anxiously pausing at the platform's edge, nudging Miner Willy's foot to the farthest point; or run like a loony start to end and take off in mid-stride, mixing exhilaration and panic? Express! END PARENTHESIS.)

The loving design, combined with a fine sense of visual clarity in the new pics make CSSMM a big old bag of lovely. Diabolical traps and neuron-defying feats of timing abound, but because it's all fair and fun, you don't feel cheated when you perish. (In fact, you end up applauding one of the traps, which puts an odd spike in the middle of nowhere solely to catch panickers who can't stop after a series of tricky jumps. I laughed for 7.2s.)

I can't think of a single bad level in CSSMM (except in the sense of staring at the Clubhouse one for about a week before understanding it. Cough). Every element in the Manic Miner sly-o-vocabulary is bunged in, by an adept bunger who understands you don't admire games you can't play. It's smashing, it retains the spirit of the original in exactly the way (say) Jet Set Willy II didn't, it's free and you're downloading it now. Hurrah!

CSS MANIC MINER (SPECCY) / N FISHWICK

MINER Accomplished and fun. Free of gimmicks, free of enragements, free.

WILLY Embarrassingly little. Needs emu? Er.

DIGIWORLD'S VERDICT Tremendous mod for a timeless game which masterfully grasps the original's stringently fair craftiness.

90%

THAT SCORE IN FULL

+10% Deedle-eedle um-dum.
+10% Relies only on the rules.
+10% "A-ha!"
+10% "Groan."
+10% "Yikes!"
+10% "Blimey."
+10% "I - I - corwumph!"
+10% Solar power-free zone.
-10% "That was never my fault!"
+30% "Actually it was, entirely."
-10% I've counted this up wrongly.
=90%

Review-me-done by J NASH.