Junimo Kart
| Junimo Kart | |
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| Type | Mechanic |
Junimo Kart is the second arcade cabinet in The Stardrop Saloon, and it stays dark until a farmer brings back the Skull Key from the bottom of The Mines. The game puts a Junimo in a minecart that rolls right on its own, and jumping is the only control there is, so everything comes down to reading a gap and holding the button for exactly the right length of time. Progress Mode runs six stages and sends a Junimo Kart Arcade System to the farm by post the day after they are cleared. Endless Mode gives a single life and a running score, and it is the mode Mr. Qi's special order asks for, with a pile of Qi Gems waiting for fifty thousand points inside a week. Routes branch and some stages only appear under certain conditions, so two runs rarely look the same.
Overview
The Skull Key does two jobs. It opens the door into Skull Cavern out in the Calico Desert, and it switches on this cabinet in the saloon. The key itself sits in the reward chest on the last floor of The Mines, which makes Junimo Kart a late reward for a long descent rather than something to play in the first Spring.
Control comes down to timing. A tap of the jump sends the cart a short way, and holding it down sends it further and higher, so learning how far a given hold carries the cart is the single most useful skill in the game. Missing a jump, or sailing into a gap, costs a life. Landing on top of an obstacle rather than running into it destroys the obstacle instead of the Junimo, and the same move works on the whale's bubbles, which bounce the cart high enough to reach rails that are otherwise out of reach. Running off the end of a rail is survivable for a short moment, since a late jump still registers, which saves runs that look lost.
Progress Mode is the forgiving half. It starts with three spare lives, and finishing a stage tops them back up to three, so a bad stage can be recovered from. A hundred coins buy another life, and each stage hides a cherry, an orange and a bunch of grapes, each worth ten coins, with a bonus life for finishing a stage holding all three. Six stages finished ends the game and earns the cabinet.
Endless Mode is the scoring half, with one life and no second chances. Distance pays steadily, every tile of track adding to the total, while coins and the three fruits pay far better and finishing a stage pays best of all, with the same amount again for carrying all three fruits through. Eight stages run in a fixed order, and clearing the last one loops back to the first. The practical approach for the fifty thousand points Mr. Qi wants is to collect every fruit on the early, easier stages, since the fruit on the whale stage is awkward enough to be worth leaving alone, and to treat coin collecting on a safe stage as timing practice.
The stages themselves branch. Crumble Cavern opens every run, with the occasional falling boulder and little else to worry about. Slippery Slopes follows, where downhill track speeds the cart up and lengthens every jump, which takes real getting used to; clearing it briskly skips two stages and jumps straight to Ghastly Galleon. Slomp's Stomp is the mirror image, with sticky uphill sections that slow the cart while a huge bouncing slime chases it from behind, and slowing down lets the slime catch up. The Gem Sea Giant is underwater, so the cart falls more slowly, and the whale on the right keeps spitting bubbles across the track. Ghastly Galleon speeds everything up, with wide gaps, narrow landings and ghosts circling on fixed paths that cannot be bounced off. Glowshroom Grotto pairs giant purple mushrooms that see-saw as the cart rides them, which has to be timed precisely, while smaller red ones fire spore clouds upward. Red Hot Rollercoaster piles diagonal ramps on top of each other and scatters short stretches of rail through empty space, so the jumping barely stops. Sunset Speedway closes with short rails at wildly different heights.
One stage is hidden. A screen marked only with question marks replaces the second stage for a farmer who clears Crumble Cavern without losing a life and takes every coin and every piece of fruit. It is a dark cave of stalagmites over water, with no hazards of its own and an enormous quantity of coins, which makes it the best place in the game to bank extra lives.
Notes
The title screen of Endless Mode carries a leaderboard filled with the valley's own residents, and Mayor Lewis sits at the top of it. A good enough run puts the farmer's own score on that board alongside them.
Leaving the cabinet alone for a while is worth doing once. The Junimo on the title screen gets bored and starts dancing.
The soundtrack is half borrowed and half written for the game. Several stages play the music from the mine floors, picked at random from the three tracks for that depth, while others have their own compositions, and two run on ambient sound alone.
All Mechanics
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
