Volume 1, Number 4 April 23, 2003
 
Pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Imagine my happiness when I finally found my way through the maze! But my joy was short lived, for the end stage challenge on this level was freaking hard! Se Ri now finds herself in the bottom of a deep well; all sorts of ledges above her. She must jump up the ledges to climb out of the well. Easy? Not quite, because while you are doing this, the water level is rapidly rising. If you are not on the ball you will drown. And some of the jumps are really hard, the kind I would normally take a second or two to prepare for. You have no such luxury on this stage!! Then, just to make it really annoying (the hallmark of a good game, after all), some of the ledges are fake! You think you are jumping to a real ledge, only to fall through into the soup. Nothing is more annoying than when you have almost made it and that happens. Not even a missed tap in for par!

The rest of the game is a piece of cake compared to stage 3. Stage 4 finds Se Ri in a cool stone corridor, with a starry background. A groovy disco tune plays in the background. Frickin Chicken and Chester the rat are back, as are the blobs, and a new enemy, a surly Pig I just had to name Blodwin. Blodwin Pig's trick is to charge at you quickly, but like Chester he's a pantywaist. I did however catch a card and turn myself into Blodwin at one point, which was kinda cool.

As you work your way up the stage, it gets darn pretty, what with all the stars. But you also encounter the dancing sunglass wearing mushroom guys (somehow seems appropriate), also weaklings, and the flying whale, who is the single most annoying enemy in the game. He floats above where you can't easily get him, spitting tons of water at you. The only way to defeat him is to get behind him, jump and shoot while you are jumping. It takes three shots to nail him. Towards the end of the level the bombers and tanks reappear, and this time you don't have your cart, so it's quite a hairy situation!

Stage 4-2 is more of the same, but towards the end of the level the jumps from ledge to ledge are very tricky. If you miss, you go back down to an earlier part of the stage. Be aggressive and they are doable!

Now you've reached the next boss, a round living bomb named Tanma I believe. This time you have a top view of the action. Tanma wanders around and belches a bunch of bombs from his gut. You have to catch them and throw them in his path before they explode, while avoiding getting caught by the explosions yourself. Once you get the hang of this, it's pretty easy, as Tanma isn't too smart and tends to wander into the blasts (especially if you can pin him into the corner; he continues to try to escape, hitting the flaming remnants of the bomb over and over. Fun!).

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