This level is interesting in that the goal is to NOT kill things (for the most part). In most parts of the level, if you shoot at the monsters, you'll get locked out of the Beanstalk loading area. But how???

It's really pretty simple. There are a couple different areas on the map that look like this. The blue arrows are two different kinds of VacBob -- the one in poly 1016 (we'll call him Mean Bob) likes to shoot at the one on poly 1017 (Wuss Bob), while Wuss Bob doesn't do anything but stand there. Further, Mean Bob shoots shotgun blasts with a pretty wild error instead of the usual fusion shot. The three walls adjoining poly 1017 are all tag switches that close the door in question.

So, when you start shooting, you wake up all monsters in earshot. They'll run around a bit and wake up other monsters. The end result is that, almost immediately, Mean Bob starts shooting at Wuss Bob and closes the door by accidentally hitting the switches behind Wuss Bob. The Bob twins can hear because I left open passages leading to them, but can't be reached because the passages aren't big enough, so the player can't ever see behind the scenes.

To finish the effect, polys 1016 and 1017 are platforms that mush whatever's standing on them, and they're also activated by the switches. After all, it would kind of ruin the effect if you could hear a Bob off somewhere shooting non-stop and yelling "Okay, let's rip it up!" every now and then. :-)

Note that when you "lose" on this level, another door opens. If you go in and read the term, you'll eventually be immersed in lava. How does this work, since the level uses water elsewhere? It uses multiple media, which is tricky to do. Full instructions can be found in the notes for level 4 (CPS Central), which also uses two different media.

This page copyright 1995-2004 by Thomas Reed.