I believe I owe all of you a post about the thing I enjoyed most in this update’s Super Adventure Box.
It’s this.
No lives consumed. No grinding a million baubles. No juggling with a dozen skills and items. No piss-poor annoying knockback. No grousing about how latency makes timed portions harder.
Just the cheerful unadulterated joy of figuring out how to get here and dance.
In case you were not aware, the lobby of the SAB is a lot bigger than it seems on first glance.
A little judicious exploration will reveal a subterranean space.
With an extremely odd feature.
A little logical extension brings you to where you’ll find a number of people like to perch.
And further extension from there brings you into the clouds. With cannons.
It’s funny, they run on the same principle as the flowers and lightning crystals that shoot you from place to place. That is to say, they’re twitchy, sensitive to latency and not altogether that accurate. Which makes reaching certain clouds with the checkpoint flags on them rather a pain.
But somehow, climbing into the barrel of a cannon and being shot into the air as a rolled up ball of heavy armor spiky doom is SO MUCH FUN.
Y’all owe it to yourselves to give it a try too, if you haven’t already.
It makes finding the genie in the game only a pale second coolest thing.
The Konami Code on the rock is an amusing easter egg.
It leads to an interesting mini-story that grounds the SAB back in the GW2 world. I liked finding the new lab open where none existed before.
It’s a tiny reminder that it’s actually possible to permanently change the GW2 landscape if so desired.
In the lab, you get to overhear little conversation snippets that suggest that Moto broke away from this krewe some time ago, before appearing once more with the fully functioning and sophisticated Super Adventure Box, which leaves you to wonder about what happened in the iterim. Did he get any help with this technology, fer instance?
You learn that there was another original Adventure Box, developed in the past, which was a lot less portable than the technology of today. This krewe borrows some of its schematics to use as a recording device for their Somno-Scholar, which is an attempt to induce learning while sleeping.
Again, there are some implications that are not outright said, but fun to speculate on. The technology this krewe is using is still fairly chunky in size, we might compare it to a PC in our world. Moto seems to be running around with the equivalent of a highly sophisticated smartphone, just one portal that leads into an 8-bit virtual reality creation?
Where, too, might the original Adventure Box be located if we extrapolate backwards and compare the size of a mainframe of old to a PC of today?
Well, there IS an abandoned Proxemics Lab that guilds have been running about in today. It’s ostensibly a place where someone was studying intelligence and learning capabilities of Skritt subjects by throwing them in a giant maze.
It’s a stretch and I personally doubt they’re related beyond being very big in size and not at all portable, but who knows.
Also, on following the instructions of the Genie in the Box and in the metagame quest for achievement get, you end up being the scoundrel who does something to their test of the Somno-Scholar device, which leads to a cutscene.
It ends up scrambling this guy’s brains a little, but again, there are some interesting implications to speculate on further.
Like, why would anyone go through the trouble of making this a cutscene unless there was an important story development in here somewhere?
There’s a faint hint of it being potentially possible to touch the Eternal Alchemy like Scarlet was supposed to have done in the short story posted on Anet’s website. Except he didn’t, thanks to your interference. On someone’s directions. Whoever that someone is. The guy is convinced it’s a prank by Moto, his old rival. Moto claims complete ignorance when you ask him.
And whether there are any lasting side effects or unforeseen neural re-programming from his experience is an open question.
Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Why I Game 