And now, The Post of 100 Mountains!
No just kidding Joogle update.
Here were are in INHERTZ FACTORY also known as LAB No. X. I guess they switched to Roman numerals for some reason. I don't even know why that's there because this area is completely separate from and unrelated to the other labs.
Below us is a "Flagon", a Blagon which is immune to shots from the Fire Key which we don't even have yet, and they're really easy to dodge anyways so who cares.
In the corner we see some red things with sunglasses? I never actually knew what these were called so I asked vgperson and she told me they were "Living Suns". What.
Anyways they're sort of annoying to screenshot because if you get anywhere near them they explode into 8 bullets. These bullets do as much damage as Gunner bullets so they're basically worthless. Joogle enemies tend to either be really annoying or have no reason to exist.
There's a Gunner hidden behind this coin. That's nice. Up ahead some guy says that Belvice knows the Earth Key is underground:
That's not a typo, it's an old MSN injoke. But of course nobody who played this would know that and they would think it's a typo. Anyways the moral of this story is that Joogle's writing is pretty bad most of the time.
This guy also tells us the door has a skull shaped keyhole (but he couldn't fit his head in there). I guess we need to find a key... a Skull Key? We'll come back here much later.
So here we get the Air Key back. In keeping with the Joogle theme of not making any sense, Belvice stole the key but instead of keeping it with him he left it on a random pedestal in a factory somewhere. Okay.
So we backtrack to here. I'd screenshot more of this but there's really not much that's interesting, at all. If you're wondering what's to the left of the Air Key area, it's an entirely pointless shaft with some Living Suns, coins, and lava at the bottom. I think it was going to be an entrance to another area at some point but I guess not.
Here's something that's fun to do. If you get a health upgrade and land in spikes, you will be repeatedly damaged by them even while the text box is up.
The end of the level is right beyond these machines. Here's what happens when you jump in lava:
You fall off the screen and then get the normal death screen, which I don't think I've shown before but it's a black screen with a "Do you want to try again?" textbox at the bottom. I think this is the only thing in the game that gives you a death animation of any sort when you die; running out of health otherwise just takes you straight to that screen. Pilid's death sprite is purple for some reason.
The switch machines, like so many other things in this game, are pretty much pointless because the exit is directly to the right, taking us to the official start of CHAPTER 2:
Sonic Advance 2 - Hot Crater Zone Act 1
Although it really starts when you go to Inhertz Factory but you don't get a cool intro picture thing until now.
KING SURN is waiting for us once again to outline what we have to do in this chapter:
: If he gets it, the volcano beneath the village will erupt! Probably.
: You must find the Fire Key before Belvice does. It should be in the Fire Chambers below this area.
: But how could you get there?... There's all this lava in the way. You might want to find a way to drain it.
: I do believe I heard something about a special switch in this village that could do that... well, I'm sure you two can do it.
This is probably the most boring chapter in the game. Fortunately it's also really short.
This is the entrance to the Fire Chambers which are apparently completely filled with lava. To get past this sophisticated security system you have to solve a stupid crate puzzle in some random place. That's for next update though (coming sometime in 2008).
We switch to Pilid and start going up these platforms. By the way this area is called "Inhertz Village".
At this point Mitch gave up on having the platforms be held up by columns and decided to have random floating staircases, much to my disappointment. It's hard to suspend your disbelief and become immersed in the world of The Joogle Bros. with glaring inconsistencies like this.[?]vg's Historical Notes: During an attempt at making a new version of Joogle from scratch, Mitch got really serious about keeping things "realistic" to "Earth physics," particularly regarding the use of floating platforms. We thought this was hilarious.
At the top of the staircases we can go left or right. To the right we find this giant pile of rocks and a green Joogle playing with his Pilid action figure and Pilid's Action House Playset™ (batteries not included).
Those crazy kids.
So we head back over to the left because we need to find a way to destroy this rock pile.
The Joogle Bros. is brought to you in part by Monkey Cheese of Doom. *waves spork*
Here we have the shop, one of two vaguely house-like structures in this village.
Now I may have previously stated that all the items in this game are useless, but I'm not giving them enough credit. The Speed Shoes are very useful because they make you run faster, which is always a good thing in games like Joogle (boring games). And the Super Wings let you skip large portions of some levels. Everything else sucks though.
The weird gray things are scenery objects being drawn over the shop text!
We get past a bunch of spikes and then we fall down here, to the other vaguely house-like structure which has some weird cannons on it, each of which looks like 4 cannons welded together (for four times the power). And apparently Joogle and Pilid are travelling together at all times, but can only switch at switching machines??? Anyways this guy wants 100 coins to destroy the giant rock pile with his cannons. So we pay him.
And then he disappears. I'm going to assume it's because we didn't want to write dialogue for him to say after you've fired the cannons because pretty much everything in Joogle that seems arbitrary like this was motivated by laziness.
This switch is stupid. It makes some walls disappear somewhere that let you get a gold coin. Who cares? Coins are stupid.
So the rocks are destroyed and we can move on to the next area. By the way, if you use Super Wings and Speed Shoes, you can follow the cannon shots across the map and discover that not only is the rock pile destroyed as soon as you pay the money, but the shots would miss anyways because the cannons are placed too low. Joogle Quality.
See you next update!
vgperson:
Actually, making that guy disappear but still having that last text box was really annoying and I think there's functions specifically for when this guy disappears (even though he could have just been made invisible??).
So I have no idea why we did it. Probably to avoid explaining what the frick is up with that guy.