Wrecking Crew: If I had a hammer

Wrecking Crew has couple of secrets lurking in the depths of its NROM - what would a Mario game be without a few? I had some glimpses at them in past sessions though never quite cracked their inner workings. Until now.

Unfortunately, one secret isn't worth puzzling out, and another is so obscure that it feels like it wasn't meant to be found.

In past sessions, I had occasionally heard a cheerful tone after smashing a wall, leaving behind a letter 'M.' Sometimes I'd also find an 'A' in this manner. In at least one occasion, I even found an 'R', but never more than that.

Spelling "M-A-R-I-O" (or "L-U-I-G-I" if you're the second player) earns you an extra life, and the method is obscure but straightforward. Each level simply has five invisibly designated walls that you must destroy in sequence for the prize. All of the other walls are irrelevant and can be destroyed at any time. The catch is that if you destroy any of the prize walls out of sequence, you get no letter from it (or any subsequent walls), and no clue that you did anything wrong.

It seems that repeated trial and error on the same level is the only way to uncover the hidden sequence, which of course will cost you more lives than it gains you. I suppose you could learn and memorize all of the sequences ahead of time and then hit them all on a replay and earn tons of lives, but it hardly seems worth it.

The obscure one is so well known that "wrecking crew nes golden hammer" is one of Google's top autocomplete predictions, but the method to get it is crazy.

I had noticed on occasion that after setting off dynamite, it might spawn a valuable prize, like a pig, a cat, or a Santa Claus costume. But it wasn't often, and never a golden hammer.

As it turns out, some levels - not many - contain "prize bombs" which may yield a prize if you set it off under correct circumstances.

• There is at most one prize bomb in any given level, and there is no way direct to tell it from the others.
• To yield a prize, it must be the third bomb detonated. So you can't get this on levels with two or fewer bombs.
  
• The prize given is determined by this logic:
• Take the level number.
• Add the number of times you swung the hammer.
• Divide by 8 and keep the remainder.
• A remainder of '1' gets you the golden hammer. Any other remainder gets you a lesser prize.

 

The golden hammer is terrific - you move faster, you swing much faster, you demolish the heaviest walls with a single tap, and you can bonk Spike right on his stupid head with it. You can even bash and stun regular enemies, though the timing is very difficult and risky, and will cause some of them to speed up once they recover.

Getting it also changes the music - there's a whole other tune that only plays when you've got the golden hammer - and it lasts until you lose a life.

Despite the hammer's usefulness, I decided to ignore it and keep playing without trying to find them. The prospect of discovering one whether by accident or by figuring out the method fairly seems remote at best, and it wouldn't last long even if I did. And at least one of the levels would have been impossible to beat with it!

Level 46 - Picking right up where I left off last session, six enemies haphazardly walking around the stage and no opportunities to barrel-trap them! The eggplant men don't pursue you, but they move fast and their Amidar-like patterns aren't always easy to predict.

They can be trapped, though, but it takes some patience and perhaps some luck. When the coast is clear, wreck one of the upper ladders, climb down the ladder below it, move out of the way, and wait for an enemy or two to climb right back up the lower ladder into the negative space before you break the lower ladder beneath its feet, trapping it there.

It took me a good number of tries to pull it off perfectly three times, but I got all of the enemies out of my way in this manner eventually.

Level 49 - One jam-packed demolition site! Big ladders on either side give your enemies plenty of chances to surround you, and all those ladders in the middle give you plenty of chances to escape them (and of course the fireballs)... until you start smashing them.

I'm not really sure how I beat this one - my various attempts to be smart or clever just would inevitably just get me trapped and killed, often by a fireball coming in one direction and an enemy coming from the other. I did discover that enemies above you can be delayed a bit by smashing a ladder just as they start descending it, which helps but isn't a surefire victory strategy. Breaking either of the big ladders before you've cleared all of the upper floors will definitely screw you over in the end. But mainly I just ran around a lot, kept my distance from enemies when possible, and eventually had a run without any unlucky inescapable fireballs.

Level 54 - Six enemies and not a lot of escape venues despite the apparent complexity. Good news is that there are several opportunities to trap them. Bad news is there are even more opportunities to trap yourself in a softlock situation. But that makes this one of the more logic-driven stages in this session, which I consider a good thing.

Level 57 - Oh man, talk about a pain. Six eggplant men would be bad enough, but you have to deal with Spike too, and he loves to ruin your day by bashing out a ladder or support before you're done using it.

You want Spike out of the picture here. If your timing is really good (or you're just very lucky), you can get him to knock out a support and drop a barrel on his own head, but this takes frame-perfect and pixel-perfect maneuvering to pull off.

 

An easier method, one I discovered by accident, is just to drop one of the barrels and then lure him on top of it, getting him stuck there. The eggplants can be enstuckened in a similar way.

Level 60 - Another dense level, with ladders on both sides. Two barrel traps can eliminate up to two of your enemies, but Spike won't make it easy for you.

Getting him to drop a barrel on himself makes things less chaotic, but certainly not easy, and that leaves only one barrel to eliminate one more enemy with. Dealing with three enemies and fireballs as you run around the site breaking everything isn't any picnic, but it's better than your starting conditions.

Level 62 - Probably the hardest level of the session! It alone took me a good hour to solve, and the solution feels dirty. Incidentally, this one is impossible if you have the golden hammer.

The wrenches can be lured into the doors, and with the correct timing, trapped inside permanently.

The upper eggplant man will walk around in a loop for awhile until you smash the upper-left ladder, and then will eventually drop down into the central area with his twin, leaving you free to smash the gray blocks (don't use the dynamite or you might free the wrenches).

After that you have a problem. Both the leftmost and rightmost ladders need to be destroyed, but they can only be smashed at their bases - and breaking either one will trap you on that floor. Destroying the support below the left ladder is no good either; that will drop the lowermost rung out from the ladder, causing the rest of it to be suspended in air with no way of breaking it.

 

The solution - drop down into the central area, carefully, so that you don't get caught by the eggplants here.

Tap the thick wall once, cracking it but not destroying it (the golden hammer will destroy it, which you don't want yet). Break the isolated wall and ladder here.

Then you must tap the dynamite, but you have to be standing at a pixel-perfect position just a bit right off center. You want to be at the rightmost pixel of the explosion's radius. Too far right and you'll avoid the explosion and be trapped on the floor and probably get killed by an eggplant. Too close to center and you'll fall down and be trapped between two barrels on the bottom floor. But if you do it right, you'll set off a chain reaction that destroys the row of walls behind you and the leftmost ladder, and the explosion will knock you down to the bottom floor, where if you stood at the perfect position, you'll be able to walk right through the barrel that would otherwise be trapping you, and finish the level.

And the whole time, you can get blasted by fireballs. Sheesh - I know the fireballs come at periodic intervals, but I really wish Wrecking Crew gave you a fireball warning timer. Nothing's worse than a perfect execution ruined because a fireball comes at you and there's no way to dodge it.

 

Level 64 - This reminds me a bit of level 57 with its horizontal layout and minimalism. At least Spike isn't here.

You need to use the bottom floor to do most of your ladder traversal, but this is where the six eggplant men all tend to wind up, and they reverse direction when bumping into each other, making it a nightmare to try to slip into their ranks. Knowing that you can scroll the camera up and down when the game's paused can help you to decide whether to descend a ladder on one side of the platform you're on versus the other.

The most dangerous part is dropping down to clear out the bottom floor, teeming with eggplants, which is best done with the dynamite.

 

 

Level 70 - A complicated level, and what would a complicated level be without Spike thrown in to screw things up for you?

Ruin things for me he did indeed, and my efforts to trap him under a barrel failed repeatedly. Until I wound up accidentally trapping him and one of the wrenches above a barrel instead.

 

After that, trapping the other wrench and clearing the stage was a piece of cake.

 

This last session was about over three hours of gameplay, and my principal experience here was frustration. Which beats boredom or hopelessness, but the moments of joy from solving a good puzzle have been vastly outnumbered by the moments of relief from passing one that I failed a dozen times.