A Grown-Ass Man Continues To Play: JumpStart 3rd Grade

Back to Mystery Mountain! Last time, we put up with Polly's bullshit long enough to find one of the clues needed to find out where she sent one of the robots. But you have to find like four of the damn things.

Per robot.

And there's like 25 robots.

Polly, you're a straight up bitch.

Ok, so now it's time to head up to the next floor of the lair. Up here the Professor keeps a few trivial inventions, such as the Biosphere and Shrinking Ray. Botley scans the room and says there's clues in both of them.

"There's also a Mission Clue.....up my ass.......No? Hahaha, doesn't hurt to try!"

I go to the Biosphere, because he said that first. The Biosphere is a dome comprised of all different kinds of biomes. You don't get to go into the Bioshpere directly, because the Professor doesn't want any outside contamination...

Specifically, these gentleman.

...but in your stead, you pilot a little robot drone thing and just watch it on a little monitor, which is lame because I wanted to walk around meeting lions and penguins and shit.

And the Professor couldn't make a bigger monitor? DUDE BUILT A TIME MACHINE.

Polly shows up on the monitor to say there's a clue in there, which we already know, and Botley whines about the Biosphere being soooooooo big and we'll never find it wahhhhhh.

Botley sucks.

So we launch a probe thing, and it turns out you have to navigate an underground maze before you fly up into the biosphere. The ship controls like ass, but the music underground is rockin'.

While driving around you'll find locked doors you need to fly your ship into. Once docked, you have to answer a trivia question from Polly before it will open. These are multiple choice and easy as hell. One of the questions was the following:

Which one of these is alive?

• An adobe hut
• A coral reef
• A seashell
  

I get that the idea that a coral reef is a colony of living things is not just something you pick up on the streets when you're eight, during stick ball games or squirt gun fights or whatever else it is they do. But goddamn if any kid answers adobe hut on that question get them away from the computer, because they are going to try to eat the mouse at some point.

And I have to stress this, all of the security in this volcano lair filled with doomsday machines is simple puzzles ANYONE can solve. In fact, the only ones who can't wouldn't know how to fuck up a shrink ray (or how to walk) anyway. So what is the goddamn point!?

"NO ONE must enter my Biosphere! And to make sure that doesn't happen.....Botley! Where is my copy of Interesting Trivia for Toddlers?"

After making your way through the maze and answering five questions, you enter the Bioshpere proper. Your five trivia answers all share a common theme, and mine are all ocean related, so I make my way all the way to the end of the Biosphere to get to the ocean.

There isn't one freakin' shark. Shittiest Biosphere ever.

We get our clue: A sundial.


Back to the main room, we make our way to the shrinking ray.

In here, there's a shelf full of random garbage, and Polly pops in to say she shrunk the clue and put it inside one of the specimens. So you have to figure out which one it is and go inside of it.

She gives us the clue "Seagulls hate these specimens, they're always dropping them on rocks." The Professor's specially designed nerd robot, Egbert, is there to tell us that Polly doesn't know shit. We're looking for something Seagulls love, and they drop them on rocks so they can chow down on them. He gives us an analyzer to scan the objects, and when you do he'll tell a little bit about them.

"I could just tell you which one it is, but I was programmed to be a dick."

Thanks to my mighty brain, I easily deduce the answer is the cunning mollusk. So we place it in front of the very menacing looking shrink ray.

Botley gets sucked up into the machine, and shot into the mollusk.

Inside the mollusk, Botley has to explod a bunch of molecules until he finds the one with the clue in it. This is achieved via a Breakout style minigame.

Botley does love being paddled.

This is one of those shittily designed Breakout games though, because after like ten minutes I had every molecule popped except the one in the middle, the one with the clue in it, and Botley bounced back and forth between the top two corners over and over and over again. No matter where, how, and when he hit the paddle, he just went to both corners.

Eventually, he stopped being a douchebag and got that last molecule. Inside is the clue: a dollar bill. Jinkies, this is getting exciting!

We're done with that floor. Next we take a tram to the top floor of the mountain. This is where the Professor keeps his time machine, telescope, and robot boot camp. The boot camp is where he tests his robots, and if they fail, fuckkin scrap'd.

Botley senses a clue.... in the observatory.

In here, Polly pops up like she always does and says that the clue isn't even in the fucking solar system. Botley whines like he always does about the universe being so big we'll never find it waaaaaahh. This time though, he has a point. Luckily, Polly is all too eager to tell us how to ruin her plans. She says she shot the clue toward a black hole the Professor just discovered. More luckily, the professor also recently just launched some probes out that way, so we can use those to get the clue.

We need to shoot some radio transmissions that are getting sucked into the black hole. Our little probe is sitting right in the damn thing, but Botley mentions that the Professor made it strong enough to avoid the black hole's gravitational pull (though anyone with a Kindergarten graduation certificate knows that's bullshit). Botley says I have to spin the probe around using the arrow keys and try to hit these transmissions with the space bar as they go around. Because I'm super kick ass at games, I realize I can just mash the space bar and rapid fire those bitches right out.

Now that I have all the transmission packets, I have to unscramble them. It's a simple matter of rearranging a few words until they make a sentence. All together they make this:

I made the days longer than the nights.
I made flowers grow tall and days grow warm.
How did I do all these things?
I brought spring to ancient people.

Which is, of course, nonsense.

Using that "hint", we have to find the constellation on the star chart that matches that description.

Ummmmmm....shit...the big dipper? No? The little dipper? No? I'm stumped.

You're supposed to click on every installation and here a little bit about it, but the voice over guy speaks in a slow booming Godlike voice, so I just click everywhere until I win.

Always a solid strategy.

Ok, we have all the mission clues. Time to reverse Polly's shenanigans. To the time machine!!

First we have to figure out where to go in the time machine, and of course we have to do that by way of some silly activity. This time it's a dumb game show, with us having to answer questions about all of the clues we found. This will give us the who, what, when and where.

 There's about four questions per clue. But the line of question always follows this formula:

Question 1: What color is red?

Question 2: Can I borrow a dollar?

Question 3: What time is it?

Question 4: Oh by the way, who did Copernicus' mother give birth to?

I'm a genius.

Obviously, we find out that we need to go to chat up Copernicus in 1531.

OK, finally, finally, it's time to use the time machine. Botley sets it all up. Presses a button....and....and..

What the hell? I'm...still in the present.


Yeah, we just get to watch the past on that big monitor. Fuck that.


Anyway, we get to the past and realize what the big problem was. Cosmobot......just look.

That's why everyone in 1996 knows that the Earth revolves around Polly. I just.....


HOW DOES THAT MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE!?

First of all, after Cosmobot drew Polly on the Sun and was like "Yeah, this is what's up", Copernicus would have just been like "What? Get the hell out of here! I've done experiments and shit. You have a marker."

Secondly, no one, in over 400 years, thought to maybe check that out? No? We'll just accept that the Sun is actually an 8 year old girl?

Thirdly, wouldn't it kind of be a big deal if, after hundreds of years, an exact physical representation of the center of the universe was born on Earth? Polly is God to these people.


It's just so goddamn stupid.

Anyway, all I have to do is hit a "Recall" button, and Cosmobot gets sucked back into modern day, and his drawing of Polly disappears.

Now all that's left is to return Cosmobot to the robot display case.

Holy shit......there's a lot more work to do.

Hahaha, just kidding. Did you see how many robots there are left?