PixelLinkr #211: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Pool Paradise puts its pool tables in huts at a beach resort. You could look at the sea. You could enjoy the weather. Instead, you have travelled somewhere lovely to stare at the same difficult angle you could have missed at home.

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🟢 Easy: Cue sports on a pool table

Games: Cue Club · Pure Pool · Virtual Pool 3 · Pool Paradise

Virtual Pool 3 includes fifteen pool disciplines, plus snooker and carom billiards. That is an ambitious amount of instruction to put between a player and the simple wish to knock something into a hole. Cue Club also includes snooker alongside eight-ball and nine-ball; its original Windows release dates to 2000, the same year as Virtual Pool 3. These are two separate games, even if both could consume the evening you thought you had free.

Pure Pool adds an Accumulator mode to its cue sports. Pool Paradise gives its tournament ladder that holiday setting, which I find personally offensive: a resort should not know whether I am improving. The easy connection comes from the table and the cue. Three titles say Pool outright, and Cue Club supplies the equipment. You can recognise the sport without having played all four simulations or mastered any of those fifteen disciplines.

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🟡 Medium: Fight with a yo-yo

Games: StarTropics · The Goonies II · Yo! Noid · Kirby Super Star Ultra

Mike's weapon in the original NES StarTropics is a yo-yo. Later Virtual Console text calls it a star, so the name you remember can depend on the version you played. This board uses the 1990 original. The Goonies II gives Mikey a short-range yo-yo as his primary weapon too. I would be more worried about hitting myself than rescuing anybody, but these boys have evidently practised.

Yo! Noid makes the toy a weapon for its advertising mascot. The Japanese game it adapts, Hanamaru, uses a hawk instead. That is quite a localisation meeting: we have removed the bird and supplied string. The selected game is the North American NES Yo! Noid from 1990, where the yo-yo attack actually belongs.

Kirby Super Star Ultra brings back the Yo-Yo copy ability. Kirby acquires it from Gim or a Copy Essence; he does not begin every mode carrying one. That optional ability still lets him smack enemies with a red yo-yo, which is the shared action. The string is for attacking here, rather than hauling yourself onto a rooftop. Kirby has found a use for a children's toy that would get it confiscated at school.

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🔵 Hard: Command an army while piloting a combat vehicle

Games: Battlezone · Battlezone II: Combat Commander · Uprising: Join or Die · Executive Assault

The 1998 Battlezone lets you coordinate attacks with thirty units from inside your tank. I like the confidence of a command structure in which the person managing resources is also currently being shot at. This is the strategy-and-vehicle hybrid, rather than the 1980 arcade game that shares its name.

Battlezone II: Combat Commander continues that combination of piloting vehicles and building or managing units. Its 1999 year refers to the original North American release on December 30; Europe received it in 2000. IGDB's header says 2000, although its own description calls the game a 1999 release. Neither the board nor this connection refers to the 2018 remaster.

Uprising: Join or Die puts you in the Wraith assault vehicle and lets you call in a Citadel, build bases and direct allied forces. Executive Assault's official description explicitly lets you command armies and take control of tanks or aircraft. It also lets you enter your own buildings and fight inside them. I would prefer to inspect the building after everyone has stopped firing into it.

The satisfying part of this row is the double responsibility. You make decisions for an army while also fighting through direct vehicle control. Driving a racing car supplies only half of that connection, and commanding units from a distant viewpoint supplies the other half. Remembering both jobs is what earns the hard group. The two Battlezone entries give you a foothold; Uprising and Executive Assault ask you to recognise the same arrangement beyond that series.

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🟣 Tricky: Titles repeat a word consecutively

Games: Bang Bang Racing · Waku Waku 7 · Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic · Go! Go! Kokopolo: Harmonious Forest Revenge

Waku Waku 7 has seven playable characters. It is not the seventh installment. The number looks as though it ought to send you searching for six earlier games, but the answer in this row sits immediately before it: Waku Waku.

Bang Bang Racing gives you Bang twice. Its 2011 year denotes the original Android release, Bang Bang Racing THD; the Windows and console versions followed in 2012. Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic supplies the adjacent Doki words in its English title. That is the 1987 Japanese Famicom Disk System game, before its adaptation into the overseas Super Mario Bros. 2. Spellings such as Koujou and Doki-doki vary across sources without removing the repetition.

Go! Go! Kokopolo: Harmonious Forest Revenge has the most determined punctuation of the four. Two exclamation marks and a revenge subtitle are a lot of energy to bring to an item list. This is the original 2011 DSiWare game. Its repeated Go words count even with the punctuation between them.

The click comes when you read each title a second time and catch it doing the same thing. Bang Bang. Waku Waku. Doki Doki. Go! Go! Racing, fighting and platforming knowledge can keep you looking in the wrong place; the printed words already provide the match. Every title has repeated itself, and we have somehow made that our problem.

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I would take Pool Paradise's beach over a tank commander's workload. I reserve the right to abandon the tournament and look at the water.

If the pool table is where you want to stay, CineLinkr's September 21 puzzle has a row where competitive pool drives the story, including Poolhall Junkies and Turn the River.