Game:

Captain Dynamo (1992)

Duration: 11:09

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3

"The diamonds are HERE!"

Cavern 4 is interesting in that sometimes certain enemies fail to appear, in particular a couple of turtles that run across magnetic floors at the beginning and the end. It might have something to do with some object limit, like with the jumping Kirbies, but if you can get it happen however, then lucky you, you can skip a jumping puzzle!

I think the most problematic part of that level was where there are two turtles on consecutive floors, and you have to spring up to the higher floor without hitting the fan or the turtle, and then be ready to jump that turtle over magnetic floor and run to safety. It's a lot to keep track of and figure out how to time.

I should note, those yellow plungers are deadly even when fully retracted, so be careful not to bump them at all.

If you've played this game, you might have noticed that hanging from the pickaxes makes you invincible to some things such as electricity and the evil Kirbies, but it doesn't protect you from the nails and fire... water... in Cavern 5. When you ride up that narrow shaft, don't jump right away, because you can end up grabbing onto the axe again and dunked into the firewater... lava. Also the firewaterlava contains an enemy whose only purpose is to surprise you by popping out onto a spot where you thought you were safe to stand indefinitely.

I ended up demonstrating what can happen if you don't time your jumps up the disappearing platforms just right. Not only can you bump your head and fall lower, but you can get your feet embedded in a platform, which prevents you from jumping again, so you can only walk back and forth a little until it disappears and you fall through. Don't let that happen at the beginning of Cavern 1! Also I had to mess around a bit at the top of the long disappearing platforms section because I wanted to be sure to see if the electric arc below with on.

Cavern 6 contains an electric arc that sometimes fails to activate, which happened during this run--it's right on top of another one which is on. So be ready to watch them for a long time to see if you need to wait for two. There's also a couple of electric nodes that I've never seen activate at all; I guess they're just decoration to freak you out and waste your time.

Oh, but just before that was another rather unfair part, the 5 vertical crushers in a row. While those crushers have minimum wait times before they can crush again, how long they wait after that is random. So although you know a crusher that has just gone is safe for a few moments, you could be in trouble if they're not cooperating once you get halfway across. Most of the other traps in this level are easier than they look, though. But that part where you have to jump from the very edge of one disappearing platform to reach the very edge of the next one wasn't annoying at all, no sirIAN GRAY

There was another 10 diamonds I missed, because again, I tried that part over and over with savestates, but Dynamo would never slip between the spikes safely. I guess those can be the diamonds that spilled out the hole in Dynamo's bag in the title art. (If there's some trick to this, please let me know!) Below that is the final evil Kirby, whose position conveniently resets back to the left once you've climbed over. You need to be careful when passing under him, though, as I discovered that Kirby has no wall detection; he'll just pass on through and float over the spring if he follows you that far.

And... that's it. It appears there's no ending cinematic or message or anything. We just get to see a cool total of 451 diamonds for all my trouble. Well, I imagine it would have been 465 diamonds with the ones I missed. Or 485 diamonds if you added the ones from the title screen, which is Cavern 7 now I guess.

So, that may not have really been worth it, but after playing this version, you might just look back at the other versions and think "Whoa, those traps were totally under-utilized!" Except, the bumpers may have been used a little more deviously for jumping puzzles in the Sinclair/Amstrad versions, whereas after the first bumper maze the Commodore 64 version started using them as simple "can't stand here" tiles, like a lesser spike. I guess the C64 bumpers weren't implemented well enough to make another decent bumper maze.

Now, what was the deal with reusing this music in BigNose Freaks Out?

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