Game:

Armadillo (1991)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 26:34

6,140 views

38

[All Stages and No UFO Shortcuts]

The final world, and holy crap is it HARD. The main gimmick in ALL the stages is to have AS MANY damn holes and pits for Billy the Shell to fall in; I'm serious, there are more holes here than a football field length long slice of swiss cheese or bathroom sponge. Don't let the earlier colourful stages fool you, this place can be really dangerous. Most enemies are now the enemies that can inflict instant deaths (and later on, projectile enemies) such as the Spinning Clown and the WIDE Mouth... Pink Thing (could be a man-eater plant because it looks like it has white petals). The Spinning Clown despite his appearance, has a pointy bottom that is literally a sharp blade.

I hated this world so much, I did several re-records just to lower the overall video length, the VERY last stage right before the Final Boss confrontation is the longest and most annoying; in an earlier recording, I died about 20 times. Stage 4, the first subway stage is also pretty bad too, in earlier attempts I died around 12 times. It also doesn't help that all these subway stages mark the return of the annoying oriental background music from World 6, the Amazon. The subway environments look as if they took a complete nose dive in dullness compared to the carnival stages. Oh yes, there are (besides holes) also plenty of ice blocks, isolated single blocks, enemies on THOSE blocks, and lots of spikes.

The damn bunny at 13:22, there was NO WAY I could've rolled up in time, because after enlarging Billy through the funnel gate, your controls are locked for a brief moment. You have to KNOW to roll up before you exit the gate. Lousy cheap death, as if this world is unfamiliar with that term. One particular cheap death I'll take note of, which didn't happen during this attempt, but more than 10 times in my earlier one; the round bumper at 17:31 is near impossible to properly coordinate well enough to avoid either ricocheting to those spikes (instant death), ricocheting too far backwards (run-into-skunk death), or ricochet and fall into the pit, either one... CHEAP as hell. It is literally dumb luck to get across that obstacle. One solution that I can't really measure nor figure out how I did it exactly, TWICE no less, is to slowly bounce on top of the bumper and slowly drop to the other ledge.

Don't expect to find a UFO anymore at this point, because otherwise it would've made it soooooooooooo.... much easier to get straight to the final boss as it gives you the ability to skip past any number of stages and check blocks and then land on any check block. Interesting to note that the GOAL wording at the end of stages are more intricately designed than as just simple text font.

The final boss is actually a breath of fresh air, his stages combined are a billion times more difficult than he was. The only thing to remember is that he can hit you even while rolled up, something the goat bartender mentioned very early. He only has one time where he can be damaged (when he is wedged over a hole); after being damaged, he spins around for some reason, I think this is only a defensive manuever. Sorry about having to quickly skip through the final boss' intro dialogue, the translator actually wrote down a warning about a potential game freeze at this point, and a solution was to skip through the text and not allow it to finish on its' own. Interesting to note that the final boss explained exactly why he kidnapped Billy's girlfriend, and I can't help but speculate if this was Bowser's reasons or intentions in some of his Peach capturing schemes.

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