Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
"Hey! You got your Lethal Lava Land in my Slippy Slidey Ice World!" "Hey! You got your Slippy Slidey Ice World in my Lethal Lava Land!"...
A not-quite-original way of saving time or storage space, bringing some originality into the standard Videogame Settings: Take two stock settings and combine them into one. Bonus points if the two are diametric opposites. Triple word score if the two are Lethal Lava Land and Slippy Slidey Ice World.
The simplest way is to divide the area in half. Half of it is one stage, the other is the second kind. This can also be done chronologically, where the stage is the first way in the first half of the game, but gets changed in the second. A really clever designer will combine them into a coherent whole (even if that doesn't make sense).
In some cases, a game's entire setting may be focused on one trope, which may combine with the others by necessity.
Examples:
- Named for the stage of the same name in Banjo-Tooie, which was one half Lethal Lava Land, the other half Slippy Slidey Ice World. It's pretty reasonable given that fire (volcanoes) and ice (snow cover) are both associated with mountain terrain.
- By necessity, the Slippy Slidey Ice World, Prehistoria and Eternal Engine stages, among others, of the Ecco The Dolphin series are all Under The Sea.
- The Marble Zone of Sonic The Hedgehog is a Temple Of Doom combined with Lethal Lava Land elements.
- Mid-way through Lava Reef Zone of Sonic & Knuckles, the lava cools and the stage becomes much more crystalline. If you're playing as Sonic, a small cutscene causes the volcano to start again.
- Sonic Chaos had the Mecha Green Hill Zone, simultaneously subverting both of the Sonic series's most distinctive settings by combining them.
- Hydrocity from Sonic 3 is a Down The Drain with the more relaxed, jazzy music of s like Star Light or Casino Night. Given it's a Down The Drain level, and act 2 starts with a nasty sequence where you're pursued by an Advancing Wall Of Doom, this makes it an interesting example of a platform game Bait The Dog.
- Ice Mountain from Sonic Advance combines Slippy Slidey Ice World with Under The Sea (glacial lake. Whatever)
- Half the time in Hill Top Zone from Sonic 2 is spent in breezy outdoors up in the hills, half the time you're running away from earthquakes and lava underground, inside the hills.
- Sandopolis Zone from Sonic and Knuckles provides a three-for of Shifting Sand Land, Temple Of Doom and Big Boos Haunt.
- A desert level called Dust Hill Zone was dropped from Sonic 2 early in the development cycles. Its art was meant to be reusable for a separate winter level. Some fan mods restore this level and implement the art reuse as a mid-level transition from desert into snow.
- Coral Cave in Sonic Rush Adventure mixes Under The Sea with Underground Level. It's a pretty-looking place too.
- Eggmanland from Sonic Unleashed combines the standard Eternal Engine level akin to the ones from other Sonic games with certain Amusement Park features. Rather impressive, actually.
- The ill-fated Sonic X-Treme was going to feature an area known as Red Sands.
- Rayman 2 featured The Tomb of the Ancients, which was a Temple of Doom that doubled as a Big Boos Haunt. There was also The Land of the Livid Dead from Rayman 3 which was also a Big Boos Haunt (although not in a way you'd expect) but had a few Down the Drain sections. And one of the later levels was a Death Mountain, Slippy Slidey Ice World, Eternal Engine, Lethal Lava Land, Temple Of Doom all in one.
- Mega Man X features three levels that, when beaten, alter the layout of other levels. Clearing Chill Penguin's stage freezes over Flame Mammoth's stage, defeating Launch Octopus floods Sting Chameleon's jungle, and grounding Storm Eagle's airship wrecks Spark Mandrill's power plant.
- Snowhead Temple from The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask would be a fire-themed dungeon in the traditional Zelda vein, if not for the fact that half of it is frozen over.
- Oracle of Seasons contributed the Sword & Shield Dungeon to this trope. It consists of two floors, one full of lava (shaped like a sword), the other full of ice (shaped like a shield). To progress at some point, you have to drop magical ice cubes into the lava to cool it down.
- Prey largely takes place in a biomechanical spaceship that combines aspects of an Eternal Engine and a Womb Level.
- Wario Land 4 featured a level which was a lava world until you hit the end-of-level switch (which acts as a Load Bearing Boss), at which point it freezes over. We're just as confused as you are.
- The Darkice Mines in Star Fox Adventures.
- Donkey Kong 64 featured a level called "Crystal Caves": an Underground Level with some Slippy Slidey Ice World elements (Namely frozen log cabins and igloos).
- Donkey Kong Country 2 featured a level that was a Lethal Lava Land merged with Down the Drain. This was due to the fact that the level featured a Animal Buddy who could turn the lava into swimmable water. Even more directly, the Game Boy port Donkey Kong Land 2 merged the 2nd (a lava world) and 3rd (a swamp themed world) into one.
- And with all the wildly different biomes on the island, Krem Island deserves some kind of medal.
- Icefire Mountain from Wizards & Warriors II.
- The Freezeflame Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy.
- Though because each level is broken up into "missions", it was actually quite rare to encounter both the fiery and icy parts of the stage at one time.
- Super Mario Galaxy seems fond of this, such as Buoy Base Galaxy having features of Eternal Engine and Under The Sea, and Deep Dark Galaxy being a Gangplank Galleon overlapping with elements of Big Boos Haunt
- And then comes the part where you have to create ice platforms that float on top of Lava so you can slide on top of them. Ice Mario is too cool to care about Convection Schmonvection.
- Actually that is theoretically safe as the ice would asorb the heat in order to melt, although the ice you'd need in order to actually walk on it before it melts would probably have to be the size of Greenland.
- And then there's using Ice Mario to walljump up parallel waterfalls in a tropical paradise galaxy. Which is populated with penguins.
- Dry Dry Desert from the first Paper Mario is a Shifting Sand Land with its own Temple of Doom.
- La Mulana is another example of the "whole game" variety, its Temple Of Doom containg a Lethal Lava Land, a Slippy Slidey Ice World, and, of course, A Bonus Level Of Hell, among many others.
- In Metroid Prime 3, there's the Planet Bryyo, which mostly consists of deserty plains and temples overflowing with exploding lava. Then there's a teleport that takes you to a frozen cavern on the other side of the planet. It is justified in that the desert side is apparently always facing its sun.
- In Serious Sam The Second Encounter the next-to-final level starts in a snowy Santa's Village, continues with a sojourn in the hellish bowels of a fiery cave network and returns to an iced-up area for the final part.
- The final dungeon of Golden Sun 2: The Lost Age, Mars Lighthouse, is yet another fire-themed dungeon that has been frozen over. It sports both fire-breathing statues and slippery ice floors...in the same rooms.
- Many of the levels in Team Fortress 2 feature a somewhat stark contrast between traditional Red construction and the industrial Blu buildings.
- Sparkster: Rocket Knight Adventures 2 seamlessly combines Shifting Sand Land, Lethal Lava Land, Temple Of Doom, and Eternal Engine in one level. Also, in the series in general a lot of different level types have elements of Eternal Engine.
- Lost Planet: Extreme Condition has this as the basic premise of the entire game; the first half of it mostly takes place on the Slippy Slidey Ice World surface of E.D.N. III, while the secondhalf takes place in searingly-hot volcanic regions.
- In Rocket: Robot On Wheels, the level "Pyramid Scheme" is a jungle level with a pyramid, a river, and isn't that hazardous... until you step on a special Sun/Moon pad, which switches the level to and from Lethal Lava Land mode.
- As lampshaded by Lisa in The Simpsons Game: "How can a cold place be so close to a hot one?"
- The penultimate stage in Little Fighter 2 is an ice-covered landscape with raging volcanoes in the background. Appropriately, the Mini Boss of the stage is Firzen, who uses fire and ice attacks.
- Frostfire, Warm Up Boss (no pun intended) of City Of Heroes is this trope personified, using fire and ice Elemental Powers. His unique map is an office that's been alternately frozen and set on fire, and famously features an ice half-pipe.
- In Jackie Chan's NES and PC-Engine game, the second level's first part is Lethal Lava Land and the second part is icy world.
- Okami features a haunted shipwreck, thus combining Gangplank Galleon with Big Boos Haunt.
- One of the worlds in Milky Way Wishes in Kirby Superstar has four different levels connected by doors (winter, summer, fall, and spring).
- Guild Wars has two. Shing Jea Island is an Eastern-looking Green Hill Zone / Slippy Slidey Ice World, and the Maguuma Jungle is a wasteland filled with red rocks, Jungle Japes, and Krem Quay.
- Happens in the Shoot Em Up Tyrian. In Episode 4, you are required to go into a planet's core to stop the bad guys from turning it into a sun. Once you do so, the planet's core starts cooling down rapidly, and you have to get out of there via an ice passage or freeze to death.
- The Neverwinter Nights expansion Hordes of The Underdark has Cania, the eight plane of hell, which is a frozen wasteland with rivers of lava. The characters even point out the physical impossibility of this, and that it must be supernatural.
- In the Worldof Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, we have the otherwise chilly and cold continent of Northrend's tropical forest of Sholazar Basin, although its largely self-contained so its a light example (Since there are other parts of the continent snow-free, but it stands out). A more straightforward example is the world PVP area of Wintergrasp, which features a lava-filled area at the edge of the map, smack in the middle of an otherwise ice-water and snow region. You could argue the same for the Un'goro crater in southern Kalimdor, which is also tropical region (Complete with Volcano) between two deserts (Tanaris and Sithilus). but its actually justified in that the Titans deliberately made the crator into a sub-tropical region complete with Dinosaurs.... Why? That remains to be fully explained.
Literature
- The high score is currently held by the Keep of the Four Worlds in Roger Zelazny's Amber series: Lava, an ocean, mountains, and a dusty plain with never-ending tornadoes, with the castle at the place where all four intersect.
Webcomics
Real Life
- Mount Erebus
 in Antarctica is a lava lake surrounded by snow and ice.
- Iceland.
- Yellowstone, particularly in the winter.
- In winter, most active volcanoes whose crater is above the snowline are like this.
- Hawaii's Big Island is home to just about every clime in the book. From a desert made of miles and miles of black rock, to a rainforest (where Kona Coffee's coffee plantation is found), to more temperate zones, and of course everything is situated around an extinct volcano. The Big Island has been described as having every climate in the book, except for arctic tundra.
|
|
