This game has to be the easiest way to rack up a quick 3000 NP in all of Neopia. The game is not tough to begin with and actually gets easier the farther you go. The more monkeys on the vines, the more the game slows down.
The object is to keep the monkeys from stealing the bananas and coconuts you have stashed at the top of the vines. Cheeky monkeys! They have 4 vines to choose from, and your job is to knock them off before they get to your stash. In typical jungle fashion, snakes and monkeys also come down the vines from time to time trying to knock you off. In not-so-typical jungle fashion, letters and stars float up from the bottom of the screen from time to time.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that there is absolutely no point in scoring more than 667 points on this game. There is no high score table, and no matter how many points you score, the reward is capped at 1000 NP per game. With the 1.5x multiplier effect, this means your magic number is 667 points. Get to 667 and get out. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If, however, you disregard this advice, you can go on and see some amusing bugs in the game. The best one is that the game has a cap on how many monkeys can be on the screen at one time. Eventually, the game will throw so many monkeys at you that it will have to remove monkeys from the top of the vines to put them at the bottom of the vines. You will begin seeing large groups of monkeys simply disappear from the vines. Finally, the game is removing them so quickly that the monkeys cannot ever reach the top of the screen. Sit back, take a breather, and laugh at the silly monkeys. The down side is that not too long after this, your controls fail and you die fairly quickly. The up side is that you will have long passed the magic number of 667 points.
Keeping your goal of 667 points in mind, your goal is to knock stuff off vines until you reach the magic number and then to quickly lose the rest of your lives. You can knock stuff off in two ways. By holding the mouse button down, you slide down the vine surrounded by little lighting bolts (“electric Tarzan”). This is your primary weapon. If you jump and catch a star floating up the screen, you are surrounded by a green cloud (“stinky Tarzan”) and you knock off anything you come in contact with, sliding or not.
1) Don’t worry about letters. You don’t get any points for them. If you leave them alone they may turn into a star. Letters tend to change either near the bottom of the screen or near the top, but almost never in the middle.
2) Get every snake you can. At a whopping 50 points each, these go a long way toward your goal of 667 points.
3) Don’t try too hard for the monkeys going down. At 10 points, they are worth 5 regular monkeys, but in the later stages, the monkeys come thick and fast, so don’t risk losing a life to catch them.
4) Each vine has two sides. You can climb past a monkey on the other side of the vine, and switch once you get above it. Be careful, though, the snakes cover both sides of the vine.
5) If you time it correctly, you can jump, release the mouse button, and then click and hold while you are in the air. When you land on the vine, you will knock off anything you land on, instead of dying. This is actually easier the farther you get because everything is moving more slowly.
6) Try to stay away from the very top and bottom of the vine. At the top, monkeys coming down can hide in the leaves and kill you before you even see them. At the bottom, the monkeys can hide just off screen and kill you when you release the mouse button at the end of a slide.
7) Stinky Tarzan is your friend, but the effect wears off with no warning. Particularly at the beginning of the game, the effect does not last long. Near the end of the game, one stinky Tarzan can easily net 60 or 70 points because there are so many monkeys on the vines. It can also get you a lot of breathing space: by quickly jumping from vine to vine you can clear a lot of space.
8) Keep moving. Jump from vine to vine clearing off as much as you can. At the start, you should try to completely clear each vine. Near the end, you may not have enough time to completely clear any of the vines, so clear a short section of each vine and move back and forth to keep any of the monkeys from reaching the top. Try very hard to keep the middle two vines open, or you can get cut off from half the screen.
9) If a batch of monkeys are about to reach the top of the first vine, or it is very full, you can always lose a life. When you come back, you get a temporary stinky Tarzan effect, and jump across the first vine to the top of the second vine. You can use this to blast a blank space at the top of the first two vines that you can use to get onto a full vine to clear it off.
This morning, just for kicks, I took it even farther just to see what will happen, and found a couple of new things:
If you manage to get all the letters for “Tarzan & Jane”, every additional letter you collect earns you an extra life.
The problem with the controls does not always happen. If it doesn’t, you will eventually see the monkeys climbing and vanishing right near the bottom of the screen, well below the lowest leaf cluster. A Stinky Tarzan at this point racks up crazy points, because the monkeys are so tightly clustered and the game is moving so slowly that the Stinky Tarzan lasts a long time.
Eventually, the game will send the monkeys climbing down in such numbers that they will begin vanishing as well, leaving a zone in the middle of the screen that only the snakes can reach. It only takes 4 or 5 at a time to trigger this bug.
The game will also begin sending barrages of snakes as well, 3 or 4 at a time. I ended the game before seeing if they start to disappear as well. You can really rack up ridiculous points at this stage, although your Neopoint reward is still capped at 1000 NP.
With a small amount of practice, you can hit 667 points consistently and quickly, netting yourself a neat 3000 NP every day. Enjoy! – shogoyahagi