I was looking through the .LEV files in Notepad and saw that the blue boxes go by the name "BoxLife". I counted how many instances of the term appear in the files and I also played through the levels again to see how many I could find in-game. I came up with these results:

5-A - 2 lives total, 1 not found yet

5-C - 4 lives total, 2 not found yet

6-A - 8 lives total, 3 not found yet

6-C - 8 lives total, 4 not found yet

7-A - 3 lives total, 2 not found yet

7-C - 3 lives total, 1 not found yet

8-A - 18 lives total, 6 not found yet

8-C - 13 lives total, 2 not found yet

It's possible that some of the instances in the files are just leftover text, or maybe some of the boxes are out of bounds. It's also possible that you need to do something specific to make them appear, like with the 3 secret lives in 1-C.

If anyone finds anything let me know!

Most of these lives aren't actually real. These unfound entries appear to simply be the name for the actor that the level creator used in the level editor (some BoxLife elements are named BoxLife1, BoxLife#5, etc; the actor name comes 54 bytes before the actual actor object in the .LEV format). I guess whoever worked on the earlier levels was better at giving custom names to the actors and got lazy with the later ones.

8-A appears to be the exception, this level has names for all actors and DOES actually have 18 lives! I'm not sure where all of them could be since the coordinate system is a little strange, but by modifying their positions in the .lev file to the starting location I was able to get all of them to spawn without any tricks like 1-C. 8-C I'm less certain about, but those may be real as well since I'm not seeing the same duplicated "BoxLife" strings in the name field.

Very interesting! If I had to guess, I think they're all probably leftovers that were placed out of bounds. Or maybe it could be something similar to 2-C where if you jump in the middle of a certain doorway, you get some hidden minis for some reason.

By the way, I have noticed that certain parts of the game act differently on different computers. Specifically 5-A and 6-B. Sometimes the physics on 5-A feel different (I think it has to do with falling off platforms) and with 6-B, if you're standing in place, Yellow may or may not move by himself when the train turns a corner. Both of these issues may also be related to the game speed acting strange when the music/sound are turned completely off. Do you know what might be causing these inconsistencies?

If you're able to find any other neat stuff about lives/editor/etc. please let us know!

2-C's case is strange, since you seem to be hitting and breaking a door element itself - I assume the data for this door was flagged incorrectly somehow, since all the other doors seem to be fine.

5-A is especially weird since certain segments of it run at very high speed on my computer, much faster than normal, but not even the whole level - unfortunately I only have the one computer to test on so I can't do much testing in these matters.

But in much more exciting news, I managed to track down the missing lives in 8-A, and I think it warrants its own thread!