Any tips for avoiding stuff on Bump 'n Jump? I've never been able to get the bonus once. One car always seems to get destroyed in some way I had nothing to do with.
If a car dies that you actually had nothing to do with, it doesn't invalidate the 50K no-kill bonus. So for example, if a dump truck drops a rock that kills a car, that doesn't count against you as a kill. However if you run into a car and it causes a chain reaction that results in a car crashing, it does count against you. Note that It's easy to have this happen at the beginning of a stage or after a death where if you are at the bottom of the screen and a car hits you there can be a chain reaction behind that causes a car to crash even if you can't even really see it. So at the start of each life/level, make sure you quickly get some speed and get away from the very bottom to avoid triggering a chain reaction.
The best way to avoid hitting cars is don't drive too fast. Instead drive about the same speed as the other cars and only accelerate over 100mph when you need to jump. If you stay around the same speed of the other cars you can try and keep them all in front of you and don’t let them go off the top of the screen. If one goes off the top of the screen and reappears behind you, try and let it pass you without hitting it and let it rejoin the other cars in front of you. If there is a car that is moving really slowly, you may need to pass it.
In general by controlling speeds and not going too fast, it is fairly easy to avoid hitting the other cars. Once you get the hang of it, the only places where it can still be hard is: on the sections where you have to either take the narrow bridge on the far left or jump off islands, and the sections on some of the later levels where you have to jump off a small island between bridges at high speed.
Your goal on every stage should be the 50k bonus. If you get in a situation where you need to commit suicide rather than losing the bonus, you frequently will be better off committing suicide since you get extras every 30K until you roll the score at 1M. This is especially true if you are almost to the end of the level and still have the no-kill bonus for the level. Once you get the basic hang of the game and how to play for the no-kill bonus, and once you generally learn the layout of the levels, getting 1M+ isn’t very hard since you get a ton of extra lives if you are getting 50K bonuses pretty often. If I remember correctly, the layouts of the first 3 levels are unique, then after that you get a cycle of 5 different layouts that keep repeating. To get 1M+ you don’t need to memorize the full levels, but you will need to be familiar with them. In particular 3 of the 5 levels that repeat have a difficult section that requires you to jump off a small island and if you don’t go into it correctly, and jump in the correct space and at the correct speed, you will die on that section every single time (sometimes multiple times). So you really have to learn and remember exactly where that section occurs on those 3 levels. Of course it helps to learn other sections, but in general you can wing it on rest of the sections and still do ok. Once you can score over 1M and stop getting extra men, you’ll need to learn how to play cleaner and safer since you’ll need to average more points per life to score higher.
A couple of other tips:
- If you are going fast enough to jump, remember that you can immediately regain control of your car after a collision by jumping. This can also be useful if you land on a car. If you rejump immediately you can avoid moving to the left or right. This can be very important if you are landing on top of a car on a narrow bridge.
- If you’ve already lost the no-kill bonus and are approaching a jump, you can safely smash the cars that are stopped right at the edge of the jump if you time the jump so you jump just as you touch the cars. At first this seems risky, but it really isn’t once you learn the timing.
- Landing on islands is much harder than landing on the bridges. In general avoid trying to land on the islands unless you have a really good reason to or in one of the places where it is strictly required. You get a few bonus points (I think 1K) for landing on the islands, but it really isn’t worth the risk.
- One other fun trick that isn’t really very useful is that if you’re going fast, when you jump you can scroll off the screen on the left or right and you’ll wrap around to the other side and can land safely there. You can actually use this trick on the early wide parts of the first level to still go fast and avoid bumping into cars since as you go to one side they’ll move to that side and “chase†after you, and you can easily switch sides this way without them immediately starting to move back to the other side.
-George
