A Marvelous Alternative to E3: Part Two

Part 02: Getting Clues, Wetting Shoes and Betting Blues

We now have full rein of the camp, though it's a small segment of the overall map. The camp administrators wisely put up obstacles to block kids from wandering into the deadlier parts of the island. Still have to wonder if this is a good idea for a school trip. It's like Hogwarts, where they *say* it's for kids but there's a cerberus in the attic and a ten foot troll in the basement. You'll notice we found two collectibles right out of the gate: the first is the firewood we're tasked with collecting. There's six pieces, and they get a little harder than "put directly in your critical path". The other are luck stones, which I'm set on collecting even if their true purpose is currently unknown.A tragedy in four parts.The investigation button works outside of that specialized window too, allowing you to pick out points of interest on the map. Invariably, however, you need to get up close for a proper look (or to pick anything up). You sometimes get clues though, and the little spotlight here will turn question mark shaped if anything's worth looking at.Tent #3 is the girl's tent, and I guess they're stuck with cooking anything that the all-boy fishing team catch, along with this gigantic pile of tomatoes. What is this, Gender Role Reinforcement Camp?Tent #4 is the nerd tent. There are tutorials here, and also this unfortunately-named magic box they invented. Put an object in, and something might happen. We tried it with the luck stone we found, and got five back! (That only works once, unfortunately. No wishing for more wishes here.) I'll have to remember this box: I suspect it might the work the same way as the fairy fountains in A Link to the Past.The blackboard in here has a few control tips. Just hitting the A button apropos of nothing doesn't give you one of those "here's what you should be doing" hints, it just lets you explore the space with the spotlight cursor you saw before.There was some firewood near the lake, but we can also take a dip to investigate this submerged pair of shoes and the fish swimming around. Unfortunately, without any diving goggles, we can't see any items when underwater.Investigating any of the fish zooms in on these piscine punks. Damn, is that one pissed off guppy.Oddly enough, the fish will talk to you (there's a "TL" before it speaks, suggesting that the game's helpfully translating it to the player, if not necessarily to the heroes. The monkeys had one too.) He'll even give you fishing advice: reel in with the D-pad, but don't push too much or the line will snap. I suppose this means there's a fishing mini-game, huh.The Fishing Team ran into a snag when the bullies took their fishing hook. To be fair, it sounds like these guys tossed what are actually the soccer-playing hoodlum's cleats into the lake. We're already resorting to The Lord of the Flies tribal antagonism? We've been here for almost a day.Pot Team had the smart idea to let cave water drip into the cooking pot (ew? But I guess it's getting boiled so hopefully that gets rid of all the cave microbes...) but overdid it and now it's too heavy for them to move. This is the first use for our "teamwork" mechanic.By using the independent movement of each character, we can pick a spot around the cauldron and lift it, sloshing some of the water out in the process. It's now light enough for the puny Pot Team to take out of here, once they're done giggling and eating Lion Bars.This suspicious boulder meanwhile, which has a straight up skull on it by the way because that's fun for children, could also be picked up by the team if there was a way to get around it. All three lifting from one side won't cut it: at some point, one of my trio will need to work their way around to the opposite side before we can lift it and open up the shortcut. Here's fun: a luck stone behind a wall, and I have no idea how to get it. Well, currently. Kind of weird to write that after taking all the other screenshots this episode, including the one where I figure out how to get it. I think I just broke LP kayfabe.Like The Lost Vikings, each member of your trio has their own "thing". With Max, the big guy, he's bulkier than the other two and can perform feats of strength. In this case, we help a completely different fishing team near the ocean snag those missing goggles. We don't hand them back to the morose kid who lost them. This is an adventure game, dangit.Important to note that *Max* got the goggles. Items are non-transferable in this game, far as I can tell, so any character that finds an item that unlocks a new ability - say, seeing underwater - will be the only one who can use that ability. More The Lost Vikings style delegation work.I suppose I should be slightly suspicious about that monkey. I won't be making any progress here for a while, but I assume we'll be meeting Winky and that bird at some point.Ditto with this "no entry" sign that leads to a pitfall. It actually took a while to find the path around the left side of the lake, which leads up here and to the fifth piece of firewood. The sixth? Well, you can see it in the above screenshot with the fishing team. I'll need to fix their problem, get them to move, and then move the boulder before I can reach it. That means......I'll need to get the hook back from the soccer hooligans before I can complete the fishing team's task for them. The hooligans immediately start throwing shade once we arrive: we can get the hook back if we win a penalty shoot-out game, but we can't do that without cleats.Are you dissing my Panama, chump? To be fair, it doesn't do Max any favors. Feels like he's about to start talking about red pills and "the females" any second.Now we have the goggles, it's no big deal to collect the cleats from the lake. There was a sunken luck stone around here too. Unfortunately, grabbing any passing fish seems unlikely.The penalty shoot-out works like this: I have to get the ball behind the blond kid at the top and into the tent. Because I can only move so far in one direction before he snaps back to the middle, it's impossible to outmaneuver him with Max alone. What you can do is send the other two kids to the far ends of where the kid's limits are, use them to distract the kid (he'll follow whoever is active) and then immediately switch back to Max and take the shot. I've no doubt we'll see more timing puzzles like this in the areas to come.So I already talked about how specific members of the trio get to use specific items. Sometimes that's a natural thing, like how Max was the only one who could've helped hook up the goggles, but sometimes it's a little arbitrary, like the bully only giving the fishing hook to Jack.After this. the bullies set up a gambling type mini-game where you give them a luck stone and then open one of three boxes. One box has nothing, which means you lose your bet. The second has the one luck stone, which means you even out. The third has anywhere between two and five stones, giving you a big payout. The law of averages states that, as long as I don't lose all my current luck stones with a streak of bad luck, I'll eventually take all 20 luck stones that the bullies have found and put up for this contest.Of course, I could just save-scum it and save myself a lot of trouble. That isn't even something I need an emulator to do: the game has a handy "save anywhere" feature. So long, Team Suckers.Getting the hook back to the fishing team forces them to reconcile the fact that, even when they had the hook they still sucked at fishing up anything. Thus, Jack gets to be custodian of the complete fishing rod, and now we must fish up the camp's dinner ourselves. Saw that coming.The inventory screen. Here we can see how many luck stones we've found, and equip items if we have multiple to choose from. When in the investigation menu (with the options down the side), you can use "item" and select between anything you're carrying. While on the field, though, you simply hit the B button to use the item you have equipped. It is, not unlike everything else in this game, very much like how items work in Zelda.Using the fishing tips we learned from the fish themselves, this mini-game is fairly simple: you hold right on the D-pad to reel a fish in, but you also have to remember to release occasionally to let the line go slack before it snaps. There's no gauges or anything, so you play it all by ear. I don't imagine I'll be using this rod to fish actual fish too often.I'll point out here that every time you catch a fish, one of the fishing team rushes in to carry it back to camp and presumably take credit. That's fine, we just need them to get away from that boulder so we can shift it.Talking of non-fish items to use the rod on, we can finally grab that isolated luck stone we passed earlier. Something around the nice roundness of the number 30 suggests we've found all the ones we can reach right now.The fishing team have run off with our catches, so now we can start on this boulder. It's another one with a skull on it. Is there a psychopath out here carving these things?A lot of mashing for these teamwork mini-games. But what button to mash, though?Wha- these damn kill steals! She showed up out of nowhere too. Since we're collecting the firewood for the girl's tent anyway, we hand the rest off and make our way back to camp. Except I guess removing that boulder loosened something underground. Oh great, is this going to be our first boss? None of us have even found a sword yet!No, it's just the Monkey Shrek fan club. That's a relief. I thought it was all ogre for us.Winky's being pursued by... some really small pirates. Are we supposed to be scared by this bunch? A group of two-foot tall buccaneers with no depth perception? At any rate, the monkey wisely leaves some footprints going north and then hides with us in the trees to the south. I suspect the monkeys might be smarter than the humans. If these tiny corsairs are even human.

With that exciting development, the game begins for real and we start exploring the island outside of the safe confines of the camp. We'll leave all that for Part 3 and beyond, however, since I think I'm running into the upper limit of GB's blogging client's screenshot allowance. Next time: We hunt for treasure, elude pint-sized pirates and resist making any "spanking our Winky" jokes.

Part One	Part Two	Part Three
Part Four	Part Five	Part Six