No, in fact all of the walkthroughs have been recorded by a pretty ordinary human being... yours truly 🙂 . The secret is a feature called 'Rollback', which allows the player - when playing and recording a ZX Spectrum game on an emulator - to insert cue points and - if the player makes a mistake or wants to improve their performance in some way - to roll the recording back to the last cue point and start again from there. In this way, you get an infinite amount of tries and can bring your performance as near perfection as you wish. Precise jumps and efficient movements are just one aspect of producing a nice walkthrough, though. In most JSW games it is also necessary to establish the most efficient route, both around the whole game and within the rooms. In case of many games, especially bigger ones, with over 100 or 200 rooms, it is a dauntingly difficult task (it would be even for an algorithm). There are also various other, minor strategies that can be applied to make the solution to the game more efficient (like e.g. leaving and re-entering the room in order to have a more convenient configuration of guardians’ movements). All in all, with Rollback, it’s perfectly possible for a human being to record a near-perfect walkthrough of a MM or JSW game, but - especially in case of more difficult games - it’s a very labour-intensive and time-consuming task. Some manoeuvres have to be repeated many times, even dozens of times to get them just right. It took me a few weeks to record some of the most difficult/largest games. However, the result is what you see in these videos. And though some people criticise it as cheating - and, to be honest, they are right, using Rollback certainly is cheating if you look at it from a purist’s point of view - the results are worth the effort, at least for me 🙂 .
