Fantasio hasn't thought of everything, it turns out (to the shock of all), as the stupid looking flying machine plummets out of the sky thirty seconds after departure unless through some near miraculous means Spirou can procure a FUEL® brand fuel cannister in flight and make The Vessel absorb its fluid somehow. Despite the multiple scrolling background layers, the foreground objects which can (and will) break the ship are grouped with background objects that don't cause damage and are the same color. Either it is Cyanida who has thought of everything, or Infogrima has not thought of very much. Yes, so, if I ram into terrain like this on my own, the ship plummets beyond the screen's scope and presumably explodes. Spirou does it without my help and wins the level. Here, I have several questions, which will not be answered, but I shall ask anyway: What is "Palombie," how did Spirou get to any place with mountains from New York in just under two minutes, and how are you learning any of this by looking at those bottles? Hey, how do you figure our maroon-modeling milquetoast is lost when we never found out where he was going anyway? I once thought the name "Champignac" was a combination of "champagne" and "cognac" to suggest he's a raging drunkard, but it turns out to actually be derived from the French word "champignon," which means mushroom. So he's a dirty hippie, then. What he sees no one else can see, as indicated by the "he's tripped out of his mind and old. Whaddya gonna do?" pose of Fantasio here. Oh yes, snuffletrump! Sure, I have heard of it. That's the lamo Macintosh air hockey game my fourth grade class tried to convince me was the best video game ever made. They failed. Nice of them to put a fence around The Mountain, though. In this level, Spirou seems to have lost his gun. Just in time, too, because the foes in this level are extra annoying. This bird merely needs to make contact to injure Spirou, and only employs use of the hammer beak for the humiliation aspect. Also, it appears to just have one wing against this background because of the similar color and lack of detail. That's just audacity! More selfless devotion, this thing looks to quite near kill itself just to be a nuisance. I wonder who this hurts more. If our Fantasio-friending Frenchman survives enough of this level's guess jumps, in which there may or may not be a place to land on the other side, and a bird may or may not happen to be in the part of its predefined path that causes Spirou to ram into bird, lose all forward inertia and fall to his dewm, he will get to a point at which one of those awful Spencer Gifts squeeze toys appears. It excretes a tiny yellow umbrella and then promptly disappears again. I decided to provide this animation because I didn't realize how many frames it had. This is one of two times you ever see such a creature, and it is never mentioned or explained one time. I imagine its existence is justified and put to valid use in the comics, but then, I'm only imagining. Obviously, it's not as important as what the invisible shrink ray looks like.    The umbrella fortunately happens to possess the power to turn this big pile of rocks into a smaller cloud of smoke and no other power. However, at this time a new problem seems to have arisen: Spip has disco fever! Now that the birds and electric lizards are gone, Spirou thinks it's a good time to bring the gun out again. While not as unfair as the last few levels before it, by displaying this picture out of context I can make it look like it is. Ooch! This similarly causes no damage. Unlike fellow international sex symbol David Blaine, our scarlet-sporting submariner can only go for 20 seconds without breathing. And yes, Spip is still a scoundrel. Very much so. I decided, "alright, SPIP, if you're so in control of the situation, I'll just jump over this and leave you to fend for yourself..." GLITCH! Next is The Swamp, probably the nicest looking level, so let's not dwell on that. Saying a foul bog is a relatively pleasant sight is enough. Nevermind that past Spirou adventures not only took place in jungles, but that specific jungle, in which he became familiar enough with one of the foul beasts that it followed him around for 17 years eh? What? You actually never will mind that? So. If it's that easy to send stuff, why don't you send a tank? Oh, what's the use? I guess the thought here is that maybe if our brass button bedecked botanist feeds the plants they'll be nicer. It is the thought that counts. Just not for a whole lot on this occasion. Fantasio also is as useful as ever. These two make a great team. Ah yes, la jungle Palombienne, home of the fabled boxing glove plant. This is either an official "canonical" Spirou foe, or the result of a quick graphic hack after Infogrames found out that weren't allowed to use marsupilamis at all, (That being the leopard-skinned fiend making the shape of a boxing glove plant with its tail appendage) in even the vaguest, merely implied sense. See also: I suspect Champignac is as useful in a fight as he is in this video game. The reason Infogrames would not have been permitted to include such things is that in 19xx Franquin, who I mentioned earlier (don't look for it, just trust me that I did), stopped drawing the comics to let someone else try, but kept that one character for himself, eventually forming Marsu Productions to have exclusive, Paws Inc.-esque use of it. That's Marsu as in: Franquin will Marsu Infogrames if it tries to put those things in the Spirou game. Or at least he would if he had not been executed for murdering Orville Redenbacher in 1995. Now (or then, rather), in the very same year there was a video game with marsups in it, that which is the subject of the page I initially planned to have combined with this one, before I remembered how needlessly longwinded and procrastinatory I was and that it would be almost a year before I got around to finishing one half, let alone both, let aloner the first half occupying the space of two pages! So look for that later. You won't find it. I will show it to you when it's ready! It's ready! ANYway, as for the animals, other than Spip there are none to be found, and while I regard Spip as plenty strange and malicious, the word used was "unfamiliar," so I doubt this counts. Ehhh, so, despite being hopelessly lost in The Jungle, Spirou just happens to come across The Secret Base. See? Spip, ever the coward, points and points but refuses to enter The Secret Base, AKA Level-1 from The Legend of Zelda. If Spirou is struck down after a certain amount of time has elapsed, instead of the usual restart deal, we see this peculiar scene instead: I let it go before, but because of your attitude I'm going to tell you outright, it's shiver ME timbers, buddy. You embarrass everyone when you say it that way! Considering that there's only one pass"word" halfway through the game and I doubt these programmers were capable of making a timer that goes the other way whilst the game is paused (having a break), it's probably impossible to not see this message. That is; assuming its possible to play properly without giving up in frustration after six minutes. I wonder if Fantasio left or Count Champignac hallucinated he was a giant banana and ate him. Note also that the count appears to be hovering a few inches off the ground. There are a lot of doors in this level. I think that our Cyanida-stalking sausage must really hate them, because he always stomps while going through them. So much for looking for clues. Spirou walks directly past these two giant unguarded computer terminals. They aren't even in a secondary background layer. I guess he figured "for over an hour (my dear), I've gotten to exactly every place I've needed to be at, including The Secret Base, just by walking in this general direction. Why deviate now?" Or maybe our cyborg-seeking sexegenarian just shuns the computers because they aren't running Red Hat Linux. In yet another brilliant gameplay innovation, our robot-rueing ridic can look up and shoot up, but not at the same time. Spip remains dedicated to the cause. We are meant to think this is a vicinity self-destruct mechanism (whose idea was those things, anyway?), but the next level takes place in the same area, which means it was only a Spirou self destruct mechanism which was activated. That makes more sense. That still doesn't explain why escaping aborts it, however. Uh-oh, the ceiling have started to cave-in! Quick, dive under it, there's not much time! Bah. Uh oh, I saw this in a Bugs Bunny cartoon once. Lots of times, actually. Don't shoot, Spirou! Before we do this, just because I have it, a babelfish translation of a passage from a French website explaining the motives of this violent and unpleasant robot: Which will stop Cyanide? (not Fantasio, I'll wager) Robot with the image of Marilyn created by Overhead line. It is wretched and malicious. It will take the control of a factory of robots with Champignac in order to take the control of the village. It has the capacity to remotely control the electric objects. Obviously, it's not fair to poke fun at how weird that English is, because it was done by an electric object. Even during "the final fight," our red robed retard insists on putting his gun away before making any movements. He's about as nimble as Dragon Warrior. These robots are more effective falling, where they always land directly on Spirou, than after they've landed and actually activated their programmed functions. Whoever's throwing them will allow no more than two occupy the room at the same time, which makes me think they should have been constructed from much less durable materials so as to blow themselves up when hitting the ground. Oh dear. Now you've did it. Eventually realizing that Spirou firing his water pistol one time, putting it away, walking a bit, and getting hit on the head with a robot was not an effective offense, Count Champignac momentarily regained conciousness to send over, via express plothole-mail, some of his mushrooms to try and help Cyanida, in his words, "mellow out." It only worked too well. But what happens next? Will a more frightening "final form" emerge? Will CYANIDA explode? And what of the Secret Base? Surely the self-destruct mechanism will have been re-activated! How will our cranberry-cloaked cinnabon escape? And how will he survive, hopelessly lost in the jungle, long enough to be found or reach a place of civilisation from which to return to wherever he came from? Fantastioc! I wish every movie I watched ended like that. No explanation, no epilogue, no dialogue, no new movements by the actors, just an unseen voice saying "everything went well and that's the end. Hey, want to see some names scroll up the screen?" Any time the most unique and interesting thing someone is doing is sleeping is a good time. I'd also just like to take this opportunity to say that I am deathly afraid of Count Champignac. I think he should go back to work on his old inventions. Hey, ar, what adventure is Fantasio resting from? You know what, forget I asked. How about SPIP, though? Get to work, rodent! I saw you contribute nothing that whole time. Well I never...! Don't you have some bird feeders to pillage?