#72. Super Bonus World (Monday, December 31, 2001)

#72. Super Bonus World (Monday, December 31, 2001)

What was your best day…of almost giving up hope on something, but finding the answer right in the nick of time?

I thought I had hit a terminal point. I truly did. I woke up that New Year’s Eve morning with 149 dragon eggs and 14,995 gems in my Spyro: Year of the Dragon game1 – only 5 gems away from accessing the secret end portal. The game’s guidebook said that those 5 missing gems were in the dreaded “Fireworks Factory” level. But when I pressed L1-L2-R1-R2 all at once for my dragonfly to point to any uncollected gems in that level, I got nothing. Then I did the same thing for the two sub-levels. Same result. Had I just encountered a game-breaking bug?2

So I just wandered the Fireworks Factory aimlessly a bit more, planning to put the game down forever any minute now. Then, all of a sudden, I see it. A third sub-level, hidden away in the corner, that I had completely forgotten about since my first run-through of the level.3

So I get the gems there. And I get out of the Fireworks Factory and go to the secret end portal. It opens up. It’s the Super Bonus World: a whole new set of levels. This is unexpected and totally awesome. I end up spending almost the whole day on these levels, which are pretty easy – except for this one challenge where I have to beat this group of yetis in a snowboard race4.

The night goes on, it’s four hours before the new year, and I’m still stuck. But now, as promised, we were going to have a “Family Game Night™”, playing the Clue board game we had recently gotten. This was the third game with my parents and I: and this one…I guess I won, but the whole thing got messed up because my dad didn’t know that Colonel Mustard was the yellow piece when answering my mom’s suggestion5.

We were going to play another game…but then my brother6 starts feeling really sick. So my mom takes him to bed, and Clue is on indefinite hold.

In the meantime, I go back to Spyro. I beat the damned yetis. Then I get to the final, final challenge where I have to beat the Sorceress (the big boss, who we all thought was dead after beating her to end the main storyline, but surprise, surprise…she did not actually die) in a spaceship battle. I nail her ship down half an hour before midnight, I get the 150th egg, the credits roll again – and my 2001 Spyro journey is now complete.

  1. The greatest adventure game for the first PlayStation, bar none.
  2. I sure thought so. There was this one FAQ I found online that had this question about “gems on the roof of the Fireworks building” that couldn’t be accessed – so I actually thought that was it for me. (That FAQ turned out to be false.)
  3. Probably because Fireworks Factory was the only level in the game with three sub-levels. Also because the other two sub-levels contained probably the hardest and fourth hardest egg challenges in the game (#1: killing ninjas in this DOOM-style map with Agent 9, Spyro’s laser-shooting monkey friend; #4: killing these two dragons by shooting down their tails – which would constantly regenerate – piece by piece), while this one was literally walking through a tunnel to get an egg.
  4. You did tricks with your snowboard to get “turbo fuel”.
  5. The previous game last week I had also won, but only because I was standing in front of the door to the Conservatory, blocking my dad from going in to make his final accusation (yes, that is a rule, read it up).
  6. Wearing this ugly Chinese Christmas sweater with a horse and chariot on it (the ugliest I had ever seen), that I never saw before or since.