MEGA MARVIN LIFE FULL WALKTHROUGH
A guide by xxxSparrowAxexxx
COPYRIGHT 2003 DO NOT REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION!
****TABLE OF CONTENTS****
- Introduction
1.0 Hospital
2.0 Playground
3.0 Middle School
4.0 Retail
5.0 Night School
6.0 Mega Marvin
7.0 Management
8.0 The Snap
9.0 Drifting
10.0 Patience
11.0 Reckoning
- INTRODUCTION
Mega Marvin Life is my favourite game in the series and has been unfairly overlooked for years. In this guide I will show you how to beat it fairly and have a good time.
- HOSPITAL
After the introduction cutscene with God you have to escape the baby ward. Easy to do: this is just the game introducing you to keycards and locked doors. Take the janitor’s keycard and get through the halls to the elevator, bounce down the shaft, and find your way to the parking lot – just follow the signs. There’s a time limit until your parents’ car leaves but it’ll basically never matter unless you get way too into exploring the level, and there’s nothing much to see. The janitors are too slow to catch you and the nurses just ignore you. Hop into your parent’s car and the level’s over.
1.1 SECRETS: there’s only one secret in this level, and it’s only useful if you’re trying to speedrun the game: if you crawl into the crib with the golden spoon on it push the other baby out of it and wait five minutes Marvin becomes Wealthy Marvin and you go to the credits. Boring.
2.0 PLAYGROUND
This is the first proper level, and it’s a real open-ended sandbox. You have thirty minutes to do whatever you want, and it’s the tutorial to another big mechanic which is the Boredom meter. Do whatever you can to keep it up – throw pebbles at squirrels, build sand castles, bonk the other kids on the heads, whatever. Don’t overdo the last one though because every kid you take out makes the boss harder.
2.1 BOSS – AUNT MANDY: Aunt Mandy shows up at the end of the timer and again she’s basically a tutorial. Dodge the bottles she throws and use the Ignore function when she starts talking. If you’ve ko’d at least three other kids she gets REALLY hard and basically never shuts up so watch out! Kick the bottles back at her until she falls over and you win the level.
2.2 SECRETS: The bird in the skybox is an actual model, not just background art, and if you hit it with a pebble (I was aiming at a squirrel) it’ll poop on Marvin’s head and your controls are scrambled for the rest of the level because he won’t stop crying.
3.0 MIDDLE SCHOOL
This is the last ‘tutorial’ level of the game, and it’s where the gloves come off. You need to keep your Boredom low AND not get the teachers to notice what you’re up to, AND collect enough points. If the teachers spot you, expect a tough chase – and all the desks and other kids make getting away difficult, AND they’re one-hit ko’s.
3.1 BOSS: SCIENCE FAIR: Like the school itself this is a test of your multi-tasking. You need to keep the other kids from messing up your project AND show it off to the parents AND keep the judge distracted by messing up the other kid’s projects. All of these are easy – the other kids back off if you give ‘em one good thwack, the parents will nod and walk away if you pretty much do anything at all, and the other projects will fall apart if you give them one quick shove in the right place – but they’re all constantly right up in your face about it. You really can’t afford to sit still at all.
3.2 SECRETS: You can beat the boss super fast if you let your project get knocked over and then just hold down the Scream command. You don’t get as many points, but it’s faster – especially if you knock your project over yourself.
4.0 RETAIL
Probably the first really hard level. You can’t move at all, but the enemies just don’t stop coming at you. You need to perfectly avoid every single one of them, which is totally impossible but the good news is you don’t have to do it forever, just until your Bucks score gets high enough – it ticks up a little bit every minute. Once you screw up and too many customers hit you, the boss fight starts.
4.1 BOSS: BOSS: You want to finish this as quick as possible because every time he hits you you lose Bucks. If you grab his hair and yank it comes off and he can’t move for a minute, that helps a lot.
4.2 SECRETS: If you attack the first customer he has a credit card in his wallet that maxxes out your Bucks but the boss gets a duplicate in a security guard outfit so the fight’s real hard.
5.0 NIGHT SCHOOL
This is like Middle School on steroids – your Bucks score is back from Retail and if it hits 0 before you finish the level you lose and your save file gets deleted, which sucks.
5.1 BOSS: FRIDAY NIGHT: Dodge the cans, glasses, and bottles or lose your Bucks. REALLY avoid the whiskey, that’s a one-hit KO.
5.2 SECRETS: If you hit the bartender the level ends without you losing any Bucks, but you start the next level at half health.
6.0 MEGA MARVIN
Here is where the game lost 50% of its playerbase and I think it’s weird because having the chance to customize your character from scratch is cool, even if it’s a little weird that it happens halfway through the game. You can make Marvin look like anything so go as crazy as you want. Then you play through a sort of mashup highlight reel of levels from Mega Marvin, Mega Marvin 2: Marvin’s Domain, Mega Marvin Planet, and Mega Marvin Planet 2: Marvin’s Inferno. The trick is you have to play through them backwards and upside down and the music is replaced with screaming which I think a lot of people were unable to appreciate.
6.1 SECRETS: If you try to name Marvin anything that isn’t Marvin your save file deletes itself. I think a lot of people weren’t smart enough to know why that happened and really missed out on the rest of the game for no good reason.
7.0 MANAGEMENT
Just like Night School was Middle School but harder, this is the Science Fair but way way tougher. Now you need to guard your Marvin projects from other managers, beat up your employees whenever they try to work on it, suck up to the CEO whenever he’s near, AND on top of that your relatives keep phoning you and draining your Bucks. If you don’t answer the phone they show up in person and you have to dodge them while doing everything else, so unless you’re REALLY attached to your bucks don’t even bother.
7.1 BOSS: CFO: This one’s either really hard or really easy depending on how hard you think outside the boss. If you try and counter his arguments you WILL eventually lose, if you try and beat him up he gets infinite Security and you lose. But you can move around while you talk and if you look in the bottom drawer of your desk you will find a gun. If you fire it at the boss you lose, but if you hold it while you make your arguments you win no matter which ones you pick. I like to pick the ones about Estonia because they’re interesting but if you’re in a hurry you can just yell “my COCK” over and over and it ends the fight really quickly.
7.2 SECRETS: If you fire the gun at yourself instead the game goes to credits and tells you you won just like if you beat it normally.
8.0 THE SNAP
This is sort of a breather level? You don’t actually do anything – stuff happens around you. None of the noises people make are words, they just sound like them. You can try and move, but it doesn’t change anything. Sometimes Marvin walks around the screen and yells at you. It lasts anywhere between seven seconds and six hours; I checked like five times.
9.0 DRIFTING
This is a race: you have to make it to the far side of the bay with the money before the cops catch up to you. It’s really hard until you figure out you can switch cars partway through by pointing your gun at them and screaming.
9.1 BOSS: META-MARVIN: This fight is hard the first time because you don’t expect him to jump out of the briefcase after you shoot him the first time. The whole fight’s like that: you need to have quick reflexes because it’s totally random where he’ll jump out of next and he’s super fast. Under the car, out of the surf, up from behind a beached seal, beneath rocks, inside a discarded beer can, parachuting out of the sun…Marvin can be anywhere. If you run out of ammo you lose so you can’t just spray and pray either. Make every shot count.
9.2 SECRETS: If you make it to the checkpoint in the convertible you started in Meta-Marvin just spawns in the passenger’s seat every time and stares at you, covered in blood and holding a wedding ring up so you can see it.
10.0 PATIENCE
This is the last new mechanic in the game: your Sentence goes down a little bit every minute and goes back up if you hit any buttons. Just put the controller on the table and go to bed and you’re usually out of prison by the next morning.
10.1: BOSS: ??: Not sure if there is one, I never saw it just the clear screen.
11.0 RECKONING
So you have to get Marvin all the way from the top of the last will & testament to the bottom and it’s pretty hard if you try to take it one line at a time but pretty easy if you just blindly jump from paragraph to paragraph. You CAN jump on the ink smears, but the blood smears are INSTANT DEATH so don’t confuse them; some of the really dried rusty ones can be mistaken for each other.
11.1 BOSS: MEGA MARVIN LIFE: Jump over the logo when it appears at the end of the document and it’ll explode and then the credits start.
11.2 SECRETS: If you have more Bucks left at the end the last will & testament gets longer. If you finish the game with zero Bucks it just says ‘fuck you’ so if you want an easy level try and get rid of them in Management by letting your relatives phone you a lot or something.
Thank you for reading my guide I hope you enjoyed Mega Marvin Life as much as I do. It’s my favorite game and I hope I can make one as good as it someday.