PixelLinkr #217: 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.
Red Faction lets you answer a closed door by blasting through the rock beside it. Geo-Mod turns a familiar shooter obstacle into a suggestion. Somewhere, a level designer has spent an afternoon placing that door, and you have decided to become a structural problem.
🟢 Easy: Golf is the main sport
Games: Mario Golf: Super Rush · Everybody's Golf · PGA Tour 2K23 · Walkabout Mini Golf
Mario Golf: Super Rush adds Speed Golf, where completing the course quickly matters alongside the shots themselves. Turning a sport associated with patient concentration into a race feels entirely reasonable once Mario gets involved.
The connection also includes miniature golf: Walkabout Mini Golf builds its virtual-reality play around 18-hole courses. Everybody's Golf and PGA Tour 2K23 supply the more conventional fairways. Different presentation, same central business of getting a ball into a hole.
🟡 Medium: Destroy terrain to change the battlefield
Games: Red Faction · Scorched Earth · Worms Reloaded · Pocket Tanks
Explosions change where you can go and what can hit you. Red Faction applies that idea to a first-person environment; the artillery games make the changing landscape part of the argument between opponents.
Worms Reloaded fights take place in destructible 2D environments. Pocket Tanks can leave players on pedestals or tucked into bunkers as the ground changes. The clever shot isn't always the one that deals the most damage immediately. Sometimes you improve your position by removing somebody else's position altogether.
🔵 Hard: Fire a gun in each hand
Games: Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne · Killing Floor 2 · Serious Sam: The Second Encounter · Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
Two firearms, one in each hand. This row asks about equipment you can use, not a requirement that every encounter be played that way.
In Killing Floor 2, you can find or buy a second 9mm pistol. The original pistol has no weight; the extra one does. Even this particular action-movie fantasy has a luggage allowance.
Max Payne 2 offers paired 9mm pistols, and The Second Encounter lets Sam use two Schofields. The Old Blood also supports dual-wielding firearms. Recognizing the pose connects games with rather different combat rhythms.
🟣 Tricky: Developed by Bungie
Games: Halo: Reach · Destiny · Halo 3: ODST · Myth: The Fallen Lords
The two Halo entries make Bungie a plausible answer. Destiny reinforces it. Then Myth asks whether you're identifying a studio or just recognizing a type of shooter.
Myth: The Fallen Lords arrived in 1997 as a real-time tactics game. Its battlefield-level decision-making makes it the useful outlier here: Bungie's credit connects the row even when the perspective and genre stop cooperating.
Publisher alone wouldn't do it. Destiny originally came from Activision, while the selected Halo releases came from Microsoft. The common credit is the developer, which survives those different release relationships.
The closed door in Red Faction still has my vote for the least secure object on the board. Today's CineLinkr offers a less explosive management problem: finding someone to take over as Santa.