THE SPECTRUM GAMES DATABASE MRS MOPP PUBLISHER Unknown AUTHOR Unknown YEAR 1983 DESCRIPTION A very basic arcade type game of picking up objects, using them to perform certain tasks, and doing it all very quickly! CONTROLS A - Up Z - Down N - Left M -Right S - Magic Spell Kempston Joystick INSTRUCTIONS The game is based around a single screen and several storage utensils! You control Mrs Mopp in her kitchen. As soon as the game starts, rubbish, dirty glasses and laundry start appearing all around you. You have to run and grab the utensil which is the same colour as the rubbish in order to clean it up. These utensils can be put down at any time and exchanged for anotherone, but only one may be carried at a time and you must replace the utensil where you found it. When carrying the wrong utensil, you may not walk over the rubbish, so as the screen gets fuller it becomes more difficult to move. You must therefore change utensils regularly in order to prevent the screen from becoming too cluttered (and to stop you getting trapped!). After so many pieces of rubbish have been picked up in a utensil, it (and Mrs Mopp) will begin to flash, indicating that it is full. When this happens you can no longer pick anything up until you have emptied the utensil into the relevant cleaning machine (sink, washing machine, bin, etc.). Doing well results in level advancement, where you get a wider variety of rubbish to pick up (including some fantastic Y-Fronts) and things appear much more quickly. Mrs Mopp has to be kept happy in order to work well, and to aid in this task she is provided with a bottle of wine (!) which you can make her drink at any time when she is feeling less than 'Happy'. Be careful though, drink too much and she'll get drunk - and a lot more difficult to control! Release from impossible situations is provided in the form of magic spells, which are earned when you work well and can be used to destroy any rubbish in your immediate area. CHEATS SEQUELS/PREQUELS None. INLAY CARD TEXT I don't actually have the inlay for this, although this little rhyme appears on the title screen (you'll have to excuse the lack of pictures...!) Mrs Mopp works hard to keep her house neat. She just glides around, 'Cos she ain't got no feet These are her tools, But these items, when tidied Must then be processed. Through utensils provided Spectrum games of this era often contained such marvellous prose! SCORES RECEIVED As far as I can tell, Mrs Mopp was released before any of the major Sinclair mags were around (apart from maybe Sinclair User, but I don't recall that far back!). It was never re-released, so only the oldest of Speccy users will remember it (sob, that's me, I'm getting on....) URL This snapshot is NOT widely available. I got my copy by requesting it from ca4aba@osiris.sund.ac.uk. However, to fix this I have uploaded the snap to ftp.nvg.unit.no. It is now available in the pub/sinclair/snaps/games/arcade directory as mrsmopp.zip, thanks to Arnt's very speedy service! Many thanks to him. GENERAL FACT Not much is known (if you know more, please update this document!), but here is what little I have worked out : Mrs Mopp can play up depending on the model of your Spectrum. The keyboard control causes major problems in Issue 3 Speccies - i.e. it just doesn't work! This can be shown using Gerton Lunter's Z80 emulator by selecting Issue 2 emulation OFF...try and move her now! This is one of only two games I know of which fails on an issue 3 Spectrum (the other being Rasputin, in which the music sticks on one note if you don't have an issue 2). This may have something to do with the fact below : Mrs Mopp is written in Spectrum BASIC and compiled into machine code using a BASIC compiler, which identifies itself in the snapshot as ZX COMPILER V2.0 1983 THRELFALL and HODGSON Compiled OK It plays pretty fast, but you can see how it could have originally be a BASIC game! It would probably fit into 16k, but starts too late in memory and is therefore 48k only. NOTES I love this little game - it takes me right back! I'd recommend it to anyone who got their Speccy way back when they weren't trendy (i.e. any time before Christmas '83!).