Garden Gnome Carnage



"Daniel Remar: Don't ask why. Ask why not."

"Ludosity: It's pretty much impossible to describe this game. Here's a quote from one player:

M3nTo5: At first I was wtf. But then I was wtf."

An arcade game by Daniel Remar.

You're a garden gnome. You hate Christmas, and you hate christmas elves. You have a rope, wheels, and a remote. So what do you do?

You install the wheels below your house, modify the remote to control them, and tie yourself to the chimney with the rope. Then, you proceed to swing around to shake the elves off, supported by your trusty cat, a princess and lots of explosions.

The game's old download version and trailer can be found here. The Flash Updated Rerelease can be played here. An Xbox Live Arcade version is available here. A spin-off-game called Hyper Princess Pitch (heavily inspired by Operation Carnage in means of gameplay) has been released at the beginning of December 2011.

This game provides examples of the following tropes:
"Pitch: Please come to the window. I baked an airstrike for you. Pitch."
 * Airborne Mook: Sleighs.
 * An Asskicking Christmas
 * And Now for Something Completely Different: The minigame is even initiated by a voice saying this.
 * Badass Santa: According to Hyper Princess Pitch at least, he is also a mecha.
 * Building Swing: Sort of, without the detaching and reattaching part. You properly do this in the (unfinished) Spiritual Sequel Bear Miner, but with a chain-axe, and a bear instead of a house.
 * Button Mashing: You can shake elves off by rapidly pressing Left and Right. This was much easier in the Game Maker version, arguably even an easier way of dealing with them than hitting them with your gnome.
 * Christmas Elves: Your enemies.
 * Cool Shades: The gnome sports them.
 * Death From Above: Airstrikes.
 * Endless Game
 * Excuse Plot: Played for Laughs.
 * Everything's Better With Princesses: Princess Pitch bakes airstrikes for you and collects gold bricks in a minigame.
 * Grievous Harm With a Body: You can knock down sleighs with elves, or knock sleighs (which then explode) into hordes of elves. It's the main way to achieve hit combos, which in turn give you Whopees.
 * The Grinch: The Garden Gnome. Why he hates Christmas is unclear, but it's apparently a pretty harsh hatred.
 * Helpful Mook: Sparkling sleighs still act like other sleighs and try to land on your roof, but they also drop blue bricks on defeat, which cause a huge explosion and split into golden bricks.
 * I Can See My House From Here: Uttered by elves launched into the air.
 * Joined Your Party: "Rheinforsements have arrhived!"
 * Kindhearted Cat Lover: Most likely averted. The garden gnome and his cat seem to be long-time partners in battle, but the gnome, like Princess Pitch, is a Villain Protagonist of some sort.
 * Kung Fu-Proof Mook: The elves disguised as gifts cannot be defeated just by hitting them. They'll just keep getting up again until you knock them off the screen. You cannot shake them off either.
 * Made of Explodium: The bricks you can chuck at the elves. Golden bricks explode harder, blue (Sapphire?) bricks explode into more golden bricks, and you don't want to know what grey bricks do. Oh, did we mention that you can shake every single brick in the building at once if you feel desperate?
 * Medium Blending: Pixel art graphics... and unexplained Christmas hat-clad photographical heads.
 * Multi Mook Melee
 * One-Hit-Point Wonder:
 * When a single elf reaches the chimney, it's game over. No questions asked.
 * On the other hand, elves (except gift-clad ones, who have to be knocked offscreen to be defeated) by a single hit or explosion.
 * Pinball Scoring: About 200000 points are a pretty normal score. Not caused by added zeroes, though, but just a result of the massive amount of Mooks you defeat.
 * Saving Christmas: Inverted.
 * Shout Out:
 * The guy who pops out of the corner of the screen and yells "WHOOPEE!" whenever you get a big enough combo recalls Dan "Toasty" Forden.
 * When you are out of airstrikes and bounce the cat three times in the air, Princess Pitch appears at the window with an airstrike and says this:


 * Additionally, Pitch is quite clearly a parody of Princess Toadstool (AKA Peach) from the Super Mario games.
 * Smart Bomb: Airstrikes and the Brickopalypse serve this purpose, though they don't auto-hit enemies. The Whopee strike, however, does...
 * Stuff Blowing Up: Bricks. And sleighs. And parachute bricks. And chimneys. But mainly bricks.
 * Updated Rerelease: The game was initially made in Game Maker and released on Daniel Remar's website. It was later remade as a Flash version, with re-balanced gameplay (elves are easier to hit, but harder to shake off) and some new extras.
 * Variable Length Chain: The rope holding the garden gnome.
 * What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made On Drugs?
 * Weird Swedish Thing: The premise: You're a garden gnome tied to a building on wheels, and you're trying to hold off elves from dropping Christmas presents into the chimney (because gnomes hate holidays) by swinging into them and dropping bricks on them, in addition to the occasional air strike. And the bricks explode. Oh, and this game was made by Daniel Remar (of Iji and Hero Core fame).
 * Zerg Rush