PixelLinkr #206: 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.
Otocky turns firing in eight directions into a way of making melody. Shoot something, contribute a note. A missed shot can still be part of the arrangement, which is unusually generous of a videogame.
🟢 Easy: Crossover platform brawlers
Games: Fraymakers · PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale · Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 · Brawlout
Fraymakers invites characters from indie games into a customizable fighter. PlayStation All-Stars and Nickelodeon draw on larger libraries, but the appeal is similar: people who do not normally share a world suddenly have to share an arena.
Jumping, platforms, and aerial attacks organize the fights. Their scoring rules differ, particularly PlayStation All-Stars' emphasis on super attacks, so the connection does not require every game to use the same knockout system. It requires the crossover cast and that platform-fighting shape.
🟡 Medium: Player actions generate the music
Games: Everyday Shooter · Otocky · Electroplankton · Panoramical
Destroying targets in Everyday Shooter adds guitar notes to the backing track. Otocky links shots and directions to its melody. Neither asks you simply to press a button in time with a song already finished.
Electroplankton turns touch and other DS inputs into musical experiments. Panoramical lets you manipulate audiovisual dimensions and hear the soundscape change with them. Playing becomes a form of arrangement, whether or not you arrived intending to compose.
🔵 Hard: The protagonist begins imprisoned or captive
Games: Gothic · Enclave · The Elder Scrolls: Arena · Prisoner of War
Gothic throws its nameless hero into a magical penal colony. Arena starts its prospective adventurer in the Imperial Dungeons. Before a player can explore the world, the game has to establish how badly that world treats them.
Enclave's light campaign begins with a mission called Imprisoned. Prisoner of War makes capture the basis of its stealth adventure. The title makes one obvious; the opening scenes reveal the others.
The connection is deliberately narrow. These are not games in which someone happens to get captured halfway through. Confinement is the starting condition, and gaining freedom supplies the first purpose.
🟣 Tricky: Originally shipped on four CD-ROMs
Games: Koudelka · Panzer Dragoon Saga · Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix · Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
The boxes give this one away more readily than the plots. Koudelka and Fear Effect 2 use four PlayStation CDs; Panzer Dragoon Saga fills four Saturn discs. Wing Commander III's original computer release also arrived on four CDs.
They use that capacity for very different experiences, including role-playing horror and filmed space-opera scenes. Shared hardware, genre, or setting will not unite the whole row.
The click comes from remembering the physical release. Four discs meant the adventure extended beyond whatever was currently in the drive. Digital libraries have spared us the swapping, although they have made a game less likely to come with its own small stack.
The music row is my favorite excuse to stop optimizing and just make something sound pleasant. If you prefer a larger physical spectacle, today's CineLinkr puzzle finds room for the Roman Empire.