Words fail to describe this game.
Don't ask why. Ask why not.
— Tagline
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 Re-release 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:
- Airborne Mook: Sleighs.
- An Ass-Kicking Christmas: You versus an army of Christmas elves, with enough explosions to make Michael Bay jawdrop.
- 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: The Christmas elven army is endless and relentless. No matter how well you do, your anti-elf crusade is doomed to always end in failure. Don't go down without a fight, though!
- Excuse Plot: Played for Laughs.
- 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!"
- Kind Hearted 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: The entire game consists of you fending off endless waves of Christmas elves and flying sleighs.
- 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 off screen 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 Bros. 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 Re-release: 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.
- Zerg Rush: The elves' only tactic is to swarm the building in increasing large numbers and sometimes from above.
