PixelLinkr #216: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Vanquish lets Sam Gideon's suit slow his perception of time so he can evade attacks and line up shots. Its Augmented Reaction mode can also activate when he takes too much damage. The suit then needs to cool down if you overuse it. A very expensive piece of equipment that has also become his exhausted colleague.

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🟢 Easy: Boxing bouts in the ring

Games: Punch-Out!! · Super Punch-Out!! · Fight Night Round 3 · Victorious Boxers: Ippo's Road to Glory

The 2009 Punch-Out!! here is the Wii game, while Super Punch-Out!! is the 1994 SNES release. Both ask you to read an opponent and find your chance to strike. Their cartoon presentation is a lovely contrast with how precisely they can punish a poorly timed decision.

Fight Night Round 3 arrived in 2006. Victorious Boxers takes its boxing from Hajime no Ippo, with a Japanese PlayStation 2 release in 2000 and Western releases following in 2001. The ring and the bouts do the linking. One row can hold both Nintendo's exaggerated opponents and a manga-based boxing game without pretending they use the same presentation or control scheme.

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🟡 Medium: Slow motion helps you aim during gunfights

Games: Stranglehold · My Friend Pedro · Vanquish · Wet

Stranglehold calls its gunfight slowdown Tequila Time. My Friend Pedro lets you slow time while dividing your aim between targets and dodging bullets. Both turn the extra reaction time into an offensive tool, so the effect earns its place through what you can do with it.

Vanquish lets you manually enter AR mode while aiming through evasive movements. In Wet, acrobatics trigger slow motion and Rubi can automatically aim at a second enemy, helping you shoot two targets at once. The choreography is part of the mechanics. These are gunfights that seem to have hired a stunt team before anyone checked whether the room could survive the shoot.

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🔵 Hard: Developed by Sucker Punch Productions

Games: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus · Sly 2: Band of Thieves · Rocket: Robot on Wheels · Infamous: First Light

Rocket: Robot on Wheels was Sucker Punch's first released project, arriving on Nintendo 64 in 1999. That makes it the historical hinge in a group a lot of players will initially approach through Sly or Infamous. The studio existed before the PlayStation associations became the obvious shortcut.

Sly Cooper followed in 2002, with Sly 2 in 2004. Infamous: First Light is the 2014 standalone companion and prequel to Second Son. You get a studio connection that crosses different series and periods, instead of needing four entries from the same franchise.

The name is the nice decoy. Sucker Punch sounds perfectly at home next to the boxing row, but it is the developer's name here. Once Rocket joins the cast, the studio history gives you a firmer answer than trying to turn a raccoon thief into a professional boxer.

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🟣 Tricky: Titles name units of time

Games: Minute of Islands · Year Walk · Half-Minute Hero · Last Day of June

Minute, year, minute again, day. Read the unit words and the four titles fit together. Half-Minute keeps its hyphen, which doesn't prevent minute from being the time unit inside it.

Half-Minute Hero makes the title literal in many of its game sections, with a usual thirty-second limit. Year Walk began as a 2013 iOS adventure, followed by Windows and Mac ports in 2014 and Wii U in 2015. The words are enough to solve the connection even when the games themselves have very different relationships with a clock.

Minute of Islands is Studio Fizbin's 2021 puzzle-platform game. Last Day of June first reached Windows and PlayStation 4 in 2017, with Switch following in 2018. Release dates are an entertaining extra calendar, but the answer lives in the titles. You can put the publishing timeline away and just read the nouns.

I like Rocket's appearance most. It turns what could be a familiar PlayStation-studio row into a question about where that familiarity started.

For another spelling distinction, CineLinkr's November 2 puzzle separates ordinal title words from the One in One Fine Day, then takes its arguments to military court.