Easy Street has towers with themes taken from the first four worlds, and the second world, Candy Lane, is no exception. This is that one you saw where the towers look like they’re made of candy canes and lollipops, the background has frosted cake with “jimmy” type sprinkles, mountains are chocolate with icing and cherries on top, and the sky has cotton candy (AKA candy floss) clouds. Here, the towers get a little taller, a little trickier, and a little gimmickier, with this world introducing the bubble blowers. More on that when we get to them.
I chose Snow-EEE here, a snowman head, because, you know, icing. His voice clips seem to have been inspired specifically by Richard Roundtree, best known as Shaft. His grappling hook is a snowball at the end of a long cylinder of snow.
The name of this world, Candy Lane, may be a portmanteau of “Candyland,” the board game, and “candy cane.” The flag waving at the start of each race has what is either a small space or no space at all though, so it may be “Candylane.”
00:27 - Tower 1 - Critical Juncture
I don’t know what’s so critical about this tower, nor why it’s a juncture. Of course, you have to clear this tower to keep going through this world, but that’s the same for any other tower in this game for their worlds. However, this one has very little armored ground, I guess to showcase how Candy Lane is supposed to look.
02:50 - Tower 2 - Lebanese
Not really sure why, but this game has a lot of random names. This one…is unusually difficult for a tower at its point in the game, because right after the first “wall” of platforms, there is a point where you can just BARELY grapple high enough to reach it, with a single frame of timing where it’s possible. I decided it wasn’t worth trying to do that over and over when I can just use the more advanced technique of the drop-swing jump plus a grapple. Easier said than done, but the computer players get tripped real bad at this section too. Sometimes.
06:03 - Tower 3 - Roll ‘em Baby
This tower introduces the bubble blower, a little fixture on the floor that dispenses bubbles. By standing on top of it, your character will become encased in a bubble with a metallic sheen and float a small distance into the air. Hold down the jump button to rise higher, and you’ll keep going until you reach a certain height depending on how steady you are. You can pass through armored platforms in this way too. Bubble blowers will turn up as an infrequent but recurring feature from this point on.
08:32 - Tower 4 - Steady Eddie (Armored)
Here’s the armored tower of this world-every standard world has one, including Easy Street. I think this is the first one in the game to be 3 laps in length. Though armored towers tend to take longer due to having to run longer distances between layers, Steady Eddie is a pretty short tower.
10:53 - Tower 5 - The Nest
There are at least two shortcuts I take here, one more obvious than the other, and I take both of them all three laps, though the second one may arguably be the standard route, with going the other direction being a longcut. I would like to showcase the non-shortcut paths too, both here and elsewhere, but the computer players engage in aggressive rubber banding, which was typical of racing games of its era.
13:17 - Tower 6 - Curly Twirly
Here’s another bubble blower on this tower, and this one shows how you can pass through multiple platforms on your ascent. This is the difference between the bubble blower and the fan, for the record: while both control the same, the fan always ends at the first platform you reach. I’m still not sure about the difference between springs and teleporters though.
15:59 - Tower 7 - Tricky Climbing Wall
Should something really be referred as “tricky” when it’s still the second world out of nine? I’m guessing it refers to the large group of short platforms arranged in a flat plane near the top of this tower (which computer players are WAY better at navigating than I am), but there are trickier ones later on, with the next one of these in World 4, and that one has more armored platforms.
18:21 - Tower 8 - High Roller
I neglected to use the bubble blower on the first lap, and I paid for that by losing two positions. Luckily for me, I was able to regain lost ground because those computer players sometimes get lost and stumble about aimlessly. (A high roller is a person who gambles with a large amount of money.)
21:46 - Tower 9 - Doughnut Shortcut
I don’t know if I actually found that “doughnut shortcut” or not, but I had a remarkably hard time with this tower because the computer players definitely use it! You can see it on the placement chart on the left when they suddenly move upwards quickly.
24:08 - Final - Spiral Insana
And finally, we cap it off with a 1-lap race through the ruins. I had a fight with Sonny over the entrance to the auto-rolling section, though it seems he wound up losing out.
26 июн 2024
