PixelLinkr #142: The Story Behind the Puzzle
Spoilers ahead: for the puzzle and the movies/games
This post assumes you've already solved the puzzle. It reveals all categories and their connections, and discusses plot details, endings, and spoilers for featured movies/games throughout.
Rampage gave arcade players a clear objective in 1986: become a giant monster and reduce city planning to loose bricks. The cabinet did not ask why. Good cabinet.
🟢 Easy: Build and defend a dungeon
Games: War for the Overworld · Dungeons 3 · KeeperRL · Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Manager
These games hand the dungeon to the villain's operations department. Rooms need placement, monsters need direction, and heroes keep arriving without appointments.
War for the Overworld openly carries the spirit of Dungeon Keeper. Dungeons 3 adds an overworld campaign. KeeperRL mixes management with roguelike systems, while Legend of Keepers focuses on arranging traps and employees. Evil has become middle management.
🟡 Medium: Dead players return as visible ghosts
Games: Spelunky 2 · Don't Starve Together · Ultimate Chicken Horse · TowerFall Ascension
In Spelunky 2, a dead co-op explorer can blow air as a ghost. Don't Starve Together lets ghosts haunt objects. Death is inconvenient, but it does not end the opportunity to annoy a friend.
Ultimate Chicken Horse keeps eliminated players visible between turns, while TowerFall Ascension supports ghost play through its variants. The link is role change: the body is gone, the player is still in the room.
🔵 Hard: Playable kaiju wreck cities
Games: Rampage · War of the Monsters · GigaBash · Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee
War of the Monsters and GigaBash turn buildings into arena furniture. Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee adds Toho's roster and the natural conclusion that every skyscraper was temporary.
Rampage is the older, simpler ancestor. George, Lizzie, and Ralph climb facades and punch the city apart. The shared pleasure is scale. Normal action games avoid property damage. These measure it.
🟣 Tricky: Play as a god shaping a world
Games: The Universim · WorldBox: God Simulator · Godus · Crest
WorldBox gives the player creation tools and disaster buttons in the same menu. Godus lets a deity sculpt land and guide worshippers. Peter Molyneux apparently looked at terrain and saw clay waiting for a cursor.
The Universim grows a civilization across eras. Crest is less obedient: followers interpret commandments rather than following them perfectly. The aha is authority. The player sits above the world, but control ranges from direct landscaping to divine office memo.
If the kaiju leave anything standing, today's CineLinkr puzzle has art thieves ready to remove the valuable parts.