It’s all brand new material from here on out, as far as visual themes and backdrops go, because we’re now done with the Easy Street and Easy difficulty stuff! World 5, Funkville, is the first would you can only unlock on Normal or Hard, and you do so by getting a gold trophy in each world from Easy Stret to Soft Sun Bay. One of the signs of this being a more advanced set is that the pennant flag displaying the world number and name is now gold with purple, instead of the green with blue of Worlds 1 through 4. In addition, there's a star behind the number.
This one is a monochrome world set in a colossal castle, and the whole place has a pencil drawing look to it. Fitting, as Funkville is specifically based on the art pieces “House of Stairs,” “Relativity,” and “Convex and Concave,” with the lowermost areas based on “Belvedere,” by M.C. Escher. (They were originally lithographs, but they have a pencil look to them.) Optical illusions were very popular in the 1980s and 1990s, and with it, Escher’s works themselves. In 1998, most people playing this game would immediately recognize the references, or at least the artist who inspired this world. Hopefully, the same applies in 2024. And if you didn’t, that’s what reading this paragraph is for!
Due to the art theme, I figured I-Ball is a fitting choice, because optical illusions are tricks for your eyes. He may be an unsettling character, with his grappling hook appearing to be a miniature space shuttle at the end of an optic nerve, but he seems to prefer making puns around seeing.
00:21 - Tower 1 - The Climbing Wall
Isn’t that what all of these towers are? I know the name of this tower specifically refers to rock-climbing features found in gymnasiums though. I also forgot that the Invincible item (a star, naturally) lets you grapple through armored platforms, so I missed out on an improvised shortcut.
05:52 - Tower 2 - The Skyscraper
Personally, I feel like this tower draws from its visual inspirations the most out of any tower in this game. The middle portion is full of random-looking, scattered, tiny platforms with a chaotic look. No illusions on the tower itself, but it is very hard to figure out what your path is through that mess! There are some shortcuts there, some intentional and some not, but I forgot what the were.
09:34 - Tower 3 - Spy D. Crinkle
This took me a WHILE to get right. It’s another one of those “swarm of tiny platforms to go up” towers, except this time, you start out furthest on the right where the only viable path is to the upper left, so you have the longest distance to cover. The platforms are also further apart than any previous instances. Combine that with the pointless aggression the AI has, and it was an hour of agony for me. (I don’t know who Spy D. Crinkle is.)
13:15 - Tower 4 - Bey Brooth
There was one point with the yellow spikes where you can drop down for a shortcut, but I can’t judge distance well enough in this game to do it reliably. This tower’s name is a pun on Bey Bickerton, one of the tower designers for this game, and baseball player Babe Ruth.
16:20 - Tower 5 - Snake’s Meow (Armored)
Due to the timing of the moving platforms near the beginning, good use of Turbos allows me to get ahead and stay ahead. This tower’s name comes from the idion “the cat’s meow,” to refer to the best of something.
21:14 - Tower 6 - The Inner Sanctum
This was another frustrating tower due to how much more easily the AI could climb the diagonal short platforms than I could. That, and starting next to Chatter meant I needed to get away from him, or he’ll attack me and allow Cecil and T’basco to get ahead.
24:52 - Tower 7 - Over Lefted
This tower features horizontal sections that test how well you can jump across platforms moreso than grappling. There will be more complex ones later. This tower’s name is a pun on “overwritten” and how you’re traveling leftward for much of it.
28:31 - Tower 8 - The Wiggle Wall
I don’t know if this tower’s name is meant to be a followup to “The Climbing Wall,” but it has little in common, design-wise.
31:10 - Tower 9 - Popburst
It’s fine to be reckless with Turbos here, because there are a lot of auto-roll sections. This one is tricky, though, because so much of the tower is automated, so you don't have much time to pull ahead, or catch up if you're falling behind. By the time you’re actually racing, you’re near the end! This tower’s name is an alternate name for the Unicode symbol ҉.
34:32 - Final - Bug Trousers
I don’t know what bug trousers are, but I always like some external loop-de-loops! Not knowing where to go allowed T’basco to catch up, and later, Chatter too.
Up next is World 6, Tektricity. This one is set inside of a giant computer.
1 июл 2024
