Unenjoyable Frustrating Obstruction
Sort of a short installment today, folks. There wasn't much to do in-game before I hit another stopping point, see. While I theoretically could've moved on, it would've made a hugely bloated installment, and no one wants to endure that.
Well, I say "short," but that's only for you guys because you get all the filler cut out. This recording session... well, you'll see in a moment.
We have bombs now, and can now break down bricks! There are a lot of those in the world (boy howdy), but let's start with the ones we saw on the way in.
Right here.
Boom shakalaka!
Thus, we make a completely dry hole to walk through. I'm reminded of the star-filled, cube-shaped floating water from the Kirby universe.
Hey, look! We're back out here! Now we've got ourselves a shortcut. Not that there's any reason to go back there anymore. All that's there is empty treasure chests and spear guys.
Now that we have all the exploring gear, though, we can go pretty much anywhere we like. But where would we like to go? Ah, that is the question!
Luckily, it just so happens we have a handy-dandy map!
If there's a place you gotta go, I'm the one you need to know; I'm the map! And one of the first things I notice is a blue "KEY HERE" mark next to a pink "YO TREASURE" mark! That looks like a good place to investigate.
That, however, means travel. Quite a bit of it, in fact, as we have to go all the way back to the river area. The place we need to get to is above us, and it's still quite a climb.
I'm sure some of you remember the breakable bricks behind this waterfall here. Don't worry; we'll get to those. I want to do this first for a number of reasons, though. The primary reason being we could've done part of this the instant we got the suction cups, but I wanted to put it off for another number of reasons.
Look, if you stop asking questions, I can stop being vague and you can actually see what I'm mysteriously alluding to. So shut up. Even though I'm talking to myself, and the only one asking anything is—Shut UP, me!
OK, I'm done now.
It's the river we dammed with the giant cheese ball! But while you remember this part, did you ever think to ask what lay behind the cheese ball? Ah-ha!
There's a precipice back here, as it turns out. A decently steep one, even. It's been a while since we had a good ol' fashioned Long Fall. So shall we?
Wheeeee!
Make sure to hug the wall here, though, or else you'll just plummet back towards the starting area. Stay close, though, and you'll hit this little ledge.
Wall fall down; go boom.
Here's kind of a jerkish thing about these destructable walls: They respawn if you switch away from Gil. I have no idea what happens if you're standing on top of one when they respawn, as I've been too chicken to try. Maybe I'll do that for bonus material, along with that one Good Bad Bug I found.
After paying that lip some service, let's see what's in here...
Gee, who woulda thunk it? Certainly not me! It's not like I looked at the map or anything!
A lessthanthree! Just what I always wanted!
Now our health has yet another additional bar to it! Beefy.
Getting down from here is a simple matter of letting yourself fall again. It's possible to land on another small outcropping, but it's not necessary since this particular Long Fall just drops you back in the entrance to this area anyway.
You kids sit tight while I go fill up this pupper. (Fun fact/exploit: When you load from a password, all of your health containers that are currently filled will stay so, with your highest-level "filled" one at 10 life. But the medicines respawn, so you can, in theory, fill yourself up, then save and reset to stock up on even more medicine or go get the easy ones.)
Some time later...
We return to the top of the cliffside. There's more than health in that big pit.
Make sure you've got Shades out, and jump for your life!
Oh-ho-ho? What have we here? The other characters will just plummet past this unusual construction without being able to reach it, but Shades' lazy drift makes it quite easy to touch down on this tiny, floating spit of land.
In Cool Gate fashion, the place the doorway takes us to looks absolutely nothing like the area we just came from. Ah well.
...This is bad.
This is very, very bad.
Meet the game's fifth boss. You may notice something a bit different about this one. Mainly: He isn't glaring at us! Thus, it feels a bit inappropriate to stick to the "-[vowel]rry" theme for his name. Hmmm... Since you're an alien, how about we call you... K'ti P'ree? Yeah. I like the sound of that. K'ti it is.
I hate, hate, hate this boss. He bobs up and down the room in a fashion far too fast to be jumped on, even by the mighty Shades. Instead, he air-lifts his Teletubby army in to harass you, and for you to harrass for ammo. Mutual harassment!
They respawn quickly, too—the second one dies, he summons another one.
As you might've guessed, you want to throw balls at him to damage him. A few problems with this, however:
- He bobs and weaves, moreso than Sky-High Harry's second form, even. And he's fast.
- That UFO of his is completely invincible. You have to hit the soft fleshy bits operating it to do any damage.
- The only time you can actually jump high enough to throw the ball and have a chance of hitting him is when he's at the very bottom of one of his swoops.
- The window of oppertunity you have for doing this lasts about half a second.
Shades is pretty much the best option here. One strategy you can use is to play jalai-alai and bounce the balls off the wall, which gives them just a smidgen of extra height with which to potentially hit him. Then duck and avoid him when he flies down while you wait to pounce on one of his midgee clones.
The other, ballsier strategy (well, technically they're all ballsy) is to get up in his grill when he starts diving, timing you jump such that you go up while he's going down. You have to be a bit more precise, but if you can get the timing down, it does work.
Kinda dangerous, though. Not helping is the fact that the collision detection is kind of finicky, so often the balls will bounce off even though you could've sworn you hit him.
But all things must come to an end, and this, too, shall pass. ...Right?
WRONG. Despite the fact that K'ti's UFO just shrugs off the balls during the flight itself, the "final" blow just causes his flying saucer to self-destruct. Then the man comes after you himself, with a ray gun.
You would think that his absence from this screenshots is due to sprite flicker, right? After all, there's obviously some bad flicker going on in the other screenshots. Except again, you'd be wrong. He turns invisible. He turns invisible as he paces around the room and fires lasers at you and while you can't hit him while he's invisible, he can hit you. You've basically got to stay airborn at all times to avoid getting hit.
The lone solace here is that you don't have to screw around with balls any more. You can just pop him upside the head. Downside: He still takes about seven more hits in this form.
FINALLY. The video component of this installment was about 20 minutes long, and 13 of those minutes was just me fighting him. And that was one run, too. I'm honestly surprised I did it without dying—I died to the underwater boss once, actually, offscreen—and this guy's harder. Yet, somehow, I made it.
Let's go claim our reward, Shades. We've earned it.
If that UFO were still around, I would be taking this key and rubbing it all over that thing's shiny new paint job.
With our key ring slowly expanding, this seems like a good place to stop. See you guys.
Next time, on Let's Play Ufouria: We finally investigate the waterfall and grope around in the dark for another key! See you then!
- Enemies updated!
- Bosses updated!
