Part 24: Gizmos and Gadgets pt 4

These are my winning vehicles, exactly as ugly as I left them.



And this is the alternate energy building, where we come up with wacky ways to create cars that won't make Al Gore put on any more weight from the worry of the worlds hanging on his increasingly larger shoulders!



This building has different colors and that's just about the only difference.

Okay the only OTHER way this building is different is that the 'traps' (cushions, springboards, vents) are mixed in the same room. In other buildings, you only have 1 of each kind in every room. This is because alternative energy is a quack science!



This is the first of many lies told to us by the game. Paint has everything to do with speed.



15-speed gears and 24-inch rims for max top speed, egg-shaped body for minimum drag, ball bearing wheels for less friction, brakes, and flames for extra speed. Grey Goose is in da club gettin' loose!



If you doubted my abilities, get out of my thread right now.



And that's DOCTOR IcePotato to you, fag.



Sure, this is all well and fine now, but what happens when the sun burns out? We'll have to send a crack team of 8 young, hot, talented scientists on a almost-suicide mission into the sun to restart it, but it will inevitably be disrupted by a series of increasingly serious accidents ending with the deaths of all but 2 of the crew, and then they'll have to single-handedly save the mission through self-sacrifice while crying tears shaped like the American flag! (Or the mission will be attempted again 7 years later by another crew who will fall victim to nearly the same exact problems only to save the day at the last minute!)



This car blows. The best parts I could come up with were a 40-cell body, which is less than half of what the best body will have, which equals less power, a 60-kW motor and 70-kW battery (out of 80 kW), lubricated bushings (worse than ball bearings, better than metal bushings), 11-inch tires (instead of 12) and a differential with a 3:1 ratio (best is 2:1, which means every time it turns twice it turns the wheels once). I lost, and rebuilt it, but then my emulator crashed because of a gears puzzle so this is all you get. Not like you care.

I also painted it green and then won, because green always wins in the alternative energy department!



This is an awesome shot of me winning.



From here on out, cars don't really change much. This is the last non-traditional car we'll be building, and then the blueprints only have minimal changes between here and the automotive building. This is car is a downhill racer, so no engine: just wheels, tires, body, and brakes. And a few other things that matter so little I won't even include the blueprints (because I lost my screenshot of it, but also because it was unimportant!)

The Land Shark is impossibly dumb. Wooden body with a long slope is heavy, a fiberglass body is best. The wheels are metal with self-lubricated bushings, which is right in the middle of the road with regards to friction, etc. etc. etc. I rebuild it, and move on:



A battery-powered car. It's exactly like our solar-powered car, except it doesn't have solar power, only the battery. Assume I win (you assume correctly!) and we can move on to...



Another battery-powered car. With a windshield. Let's look at how some of the puzzles have evolved instead, because we already know how the car deal will turn out.



This game is still king. Now we have differently sloped ramps to deal with, as well as different balls (and... a boot!) and oil/sand to reduce/increase friction. And different levels of gravity! The objectives change a lot too; sometimes we have to shoot the boot into the 5th hole, sometimes we have to use a certain ramp, and sometimes we have to use oil/sand. Sometimes we have to do all 3!



This puzzle is what got me through high school physics.



To be honest, I normally solve these types of puzzles by disassembling everything and then just hooking them up in series.



god DAMN I hate magnet puzzles. Now we've got horseshoe magnets, and sometimes we are given an uneven amount of the two different orientations, so you need to arrange the magnets in a very specific way in order to be able to fit all of the magnets together. And if you screw up, you have to listen to the SCREE SCREE SCREE of magnets sliding in and out of place for 10 minutes. It's like caverunners for 8 year olds.



This puzzle crashes my emulator every time I pick up a gear. I can back out of it fine, fortunately - and the puzzles assigned are semi-random (The game picks a set of puzzles and you get a new set only when you've solved all but 1 or 2 of that set).



Tracks are way more bitchin' now, too! Don't get caught in the - CROSSFIRE! (Morty flies safely over us FYI)



The last vehicle was a hydrogen racer, FYI. It was exactly the same as every other thing except instead of a battery you had a "fuel cell" and H2 fuel pack with a kW rating.


In case you can't tell, this game is starting to drag a little bit. We'll blow through the rest next time, and then stop in to examine some past history real quick before jumping into AE.