Round 5: Mam Desert. Looks pretty lush, for a desert.
I score 8G from a tree and an arrow up the bum from a GOBLET. I need a drink!
Oh, I guess I’m not in the desert yet. That makes sense. Anyway, my nerves fortified, it’s time for revenge:
Bite it, you scum.
It’s a bit hard to make out in the shots, but I killed this second GOBLET for 10G, then jumped (at the third tree after the bar) to get that hidden bag of cash.
I missed the shot of it, but this GOBLET dropped a gauntlet rather than money.
I kill the SNAKES and move on. There’s some hidden cash just past this structure.
3G! Yeah! But alas, a dead end! Hold on, though. What did the bartender tell me?
“The old well over there is the entrance to the Mam Desert.” Thanks, bartender.
These are VAMPIRE BATS. Colour aside, they’re no different from the FANG BATS earlier in the game. Probably if you didn’t upgrade your sword they’d take more hits to kill. I get two life hearts from them.
Man, a MADMAN (Maybe they were supposed to be mudmen?). Screw these guys. Doesn’t look so bad in that shot, but the problem is they usually look more like this:
You can’t hit them when they’re down low like that. They go back and forward, then pop up and fire their projectile at you. That’s your chance to hit them:
Ha ha! Sneaky devil.
One more hit and his money is mine. I kind of wish MADMEN didn’t drop cash, so I could just ignore them.
There’s a few of them around. Once you get past one, he’ll respawn while you fight the next and then start shooting at you from behind. Jerks. This is a really great place to have magic, because then you can hit them while they’re low down. Sadly, I wasted my magic on the KURACKEN. Anyway, there’s another mysterious door here. Let’s see what it contains!
A GIANT KHONG!
He throws rocks and jumps around. The rocks break up into smaller rocks, which I dodge poorly.
The trick is to get him backed up to the edge of the screen. Each time you hit him he’s knocked backwards. If you get him up against the edge, he can’t move back out of range, but he’s still stunned for a second and you can get some hits in. Unfortunately he’s just out of range in the last shot above, so I missed and he jumps away:
He actually takes a lot of hits to kill, though I miss a lot, too. Like a lot of enemies in this game, he gets pretty upset when you beat him.
The great thing about bats is that even though I suck at fighting them and get hit a lot, they drop health so you tend to come out ahead. What’s through that door?
An armour shop! I can’t quite afford hard armor, and even if I could I wouldn’t get it when the armor of legend is sitting right there waiting for my monies. For the moment the heavy armor is protecting me pretty well, anyway.
As always, there’s some cash upstairs.
If you stand on the top step then this bat will swoop into the ground in front of you. When you kill it there the heart it drops will be trapped. I tried to avoid this by jumping, and I took a hit for my troubles.
Oh hey, I’ve heard of this place. Let’s see what’s happening at the bar.
This is Jack, the guy the bartender in Round 4 mentioned. How do I know? He sells the premium ale. 28G! I’d better stick to mead, which nets me some advice on how to kill the final boss. But if I were to buy a few rounds of the good stuff, here’s what I’d get:
Jack and Betty are perhaps the most developed characters in WBiML. They’re in a relationship. She lives in a bar. Buying ale twice nets you a Letter to Betty. If I’m ever in the Pyramid’s bar, I’ll pass it along. Or I will in the bar run, anyway. I don’t think this sidequest is worth the money, so I’m not going for it in the main run.
Now this is a desert! I’m getting sick of GOBLETS dropping GAUNTLETS instead of cash.
I jump around a bit, but I don’t find any hidden cash. Instead:
I fall through the floor and nearly get hit by a bat. I don’t know what kind of bats these are, by the way. There’s only two types listed in the manual, and this is the third I’ve encountered. Anyway, whatever these bats are called, they’re the boss of Round 5.
Each time you kill one, a platform appears.
You also get a platform for collecting the stage key.
The bats themselves are pretty easy. They might’ve taken two hits each if I hadn’t picked up that gauntlet, but I did, so we can’t be certain. After killing the bats comes the secret actual boss of the stage:
Climbing out of the hole. It’s kind of hard to depict in screenshots, so take a look at the .gif at the end of the update. Basically the platforms move erratically (or maybe I just suck), and I tend to miss them on the way up and fall back down again.
I kill some more GOBLETS. Note that I’m getting shot at from both sides in the second shot. As I move to the right, the pyramid comes in to view. But even more amazing, we’re about to solve the riddle of why these dudes are called GOBLETS:
They’re weaker versions of this guy, the GOBLIN.
Run away! Hey, someone’s shooting at me!
Oh, I forgot about this guy. It seems that when you climb out of the hole you’re in a different part of the desert. Kind of like replaying the boss in Round 4. There’s an extra GOBLET off to the left of where you come back out.
I take two teaspoons of concrete and go face the GOBLIN.
Actually he’s not so tough.
So here’s where I stand after Round 5. Not too bad, really. I got a GREAT SWORD from the KHONG, I didn’t lose too much health, and I’ve got a fair bit of money. Speaking of KHONG:
And I think I promised some inept climbing:
I also took a shot at the KHONG in a separate run where I still had the gradius instead of the broad sword:
He took forever to kill. I wanted to figure out whether he always drops the great sword, or if he just drops the next sword up from what you have. Looks like it's the latter.
Here's the map:
I've been having some trouble with my computer, so the scanner's out of action. That's partly why I didn't manage to keep my cracking pace with this update, by the way. For a while there I thought I might have this LP knocked on the head by the end of the month, but that looks pretty unlikely now. Sorry, gang. Anyway, I had to resort to freehand computer drawing. The yellow circles are hidden cash, and the letters represent enemies. The Gs are GOBLETs and the GOBLIN, the Ss are SNAKES, the Bs are BATS, and the ms are MADMEN. Just so you know, this is probably the least accurate map yet.
Edit 28/8/11: So I had a quick run through the game this morning just for fun, and managed to jump over the hole in the desert where the bats are, allowing me to kill a few extra GOBLETs before falling down and get some extra money. Also there's a hidden coin at the cactus just past the hole, and you can get it both before and after falling down (that is, you can get it twice).
TL,DR:
Next: Round 6
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