Monsters Menace America: Rampage

**Monsters Menace America: Rampage** is an unofficial video game adaptation of the board game *Monsters Menace America*. The board game is created by J.C. Connors and Ben Knight. *Monsters Menace America: Rampage*, or MMA:R, draws heavy inspiration from the aforementioned board game, the arcade game *Rampage*, and Tangent's earlier calculator game, *Robot Rampage*. MMA:R is a Vista era game.

This game is a prominent attempt where Tangent aims for making a longer game, as most previous games were intended to be arcade style games that last roughly 5 minutes. The entire game lasts roughly 45 minutes, and can be saved and loaded at certain points.

In MMA:R, the player plays Zorb, an eyeball monster, trying to stomp and level cities in the United States while fending off attacks by the military and other monsters to ultimately be the king of monsters. The player plays against 2 pseudo-opponents, which can be Konk (a giant gorilla), the Sludge Monster (inspired by the monster of the same name from Garfield and Friends, and Toxicor from the original board game), or an unnamed dragon monster (Tangent's original creation).

## Screens

### Map screen

The first screen the player will encounter after closing the instructions or gallery is the map screen. The map of the USA is divided into hexagons, each representing a city to be stomped and levelled by one of the monsters. The light green spaces represent a starting space/hex for one of the 3 monsters, and may not be attacked. Brown spaces are levelled cities, and may also not be attacked further. Pink spaces are attacked, but not levelled cities (i.e. an unsuccessful attack). Cities that were just visited by another monster and has had a colour change flash. Hollywood flashes if another monster was just sent there. The other monsters are invisible to the player on the map screen.

Additionally, the player's current stats are shown on the map screen, and is also given the chance to save/load a game. The player starts with 6 attack and 6 defense points, which reference dice rolls. This is a peculiar choice, as attack and defense stats in the original board game are fixed, though combat is influenced by dice rolls.

After the player clicks on any transparent or pink space, the player will be taken to the rampage screen.

The final showdown starts when all cities (not counting the monster starting spaces) have been successfully destroyed.

### Rampage screen

This is the main gameplay screen, which is where the arcade game Rampage is most referenced.

In the rampage screen, the player controls Zorb and shoots humans inside buildings. If all humans inside a building have been shot, the building collapses. If 4 or more buildings collapse, the attack on the city is counted as successful. More enemies are added as the player levels up, each behaving differently. The enemies are:

* **Building resident** (50 pts): Shoot all in a building to make the building collapse (100 pts).
* **Black car** (20 pts): Must be jumped on. Running over it hurts Zorb.
* **Red car** (10 pts): Inspired by the movie cliché of cars never working when trying to get away from dangers, the red car moves away from Zorb in general, but often stops momentarily from malfunctioning. It may not be jumped on, and must be shot. After that, it becomes an obstacle that Zorb needs to jump over.
* **Running man**: The helplessly running man from movie clichés. Jump on him to eat him and regain some health. Running over the man kills him without giving Zorb health.
* **Helicopter** (30 pts): Choppers take 2 laser shots to kill and try to shoot at and take a kamikaze dive at Zorb. The pilot knows the chopper is going to crash after being shot, and that he's going to die, so he might as well try to hurt the monster as much as possible in the process.
* **Tank** (30 pts): Protected by heavy armour, takes a lot of shots to destroy. Tanks always maintain a distance from you, and so they move forward as you do.
* **Rocket launcher** (250 pts): Sends laser-blocking rockets flying at Zorb, dealing the most damage to him if it hits. The rocket launcher enters the danger zone, moves backwards as you approach to take aim, then quickly retreats after launching its indestructible rocket on Zorb. It is really difficult to destroy them in the short space of time they're present on the screen, but there is only 1 of these per rampage screen.

By principle, the larger the object, the more damage it deals to Zorb, from bullets dealing next to no damage to rockets dealing the most damage. As the player progresses, it becomes impossible to dodge all objects, so the best strategy is to minimize the damage you take and regain health by jumping on running humans.

It was originally planned that the player could select which monster to play as, with Konk requiring the player to punch the buildings while Zorb would shoot at it. In the end, only Zorb was playable. There was also an afterthought of having jets in the rampage screen as they were present, Tangent having discovered so after most of the game was already made, in the original board game. However it seemed like an out of place add-on to the game and there were enough enemies as is, Tangent felt. Furthermore, the rocket launchers were already an afterthought to introduce another board game element into the video game. Thus the jets were not added. Jets would zoom horizontally across the screen from the right side at a height and basically only hurt Zorb if he jumped up.

The background uses parallax scrolling, and one of the clouds is blurred to give an impression of distance.

### Fight screen

The fight screen is triggered if either you and another monster were attacking the same city, or at the end of the game during the final showdown. If triggered before the final showdown, it is triggered after the player gets to attack the city in the rampage screen. Then a message is displayed asking if the player wants to fight the monster. In this case, the fight screen may be exited at any time, and lasts only for 3 turns.

The outcome of each round of combat is determined by luck, and uses *Robot Rampage* style combat. The player chooses an attack: Zorb's laser beam or his blood vessels (tentacles), and see if the attack was successful.

In the final showdown, combat continues until either monster is defeated, and may not be exited. Before facing the second monster, the Zorb regains some health after defeating the first monster. Zorb always needs to defeat 2 monsters, as other monsters regain some health at Hollywood, but if Zorb ends up in Hollywood, it's game over.

While battling Mecha-Monster, the fight always goes on until either Zorb or Mecha-Monster is defeated. Mecha-Monster may come back at a later level even if it is defeated. The higher the level, the more health Mecha-Monster has.

In the final showdown, the choice of Pokey Means Business (also translated "Porky Means Business") background music is from the suggestion of Tangent's friend Ellis.

### Upgrade screen

The upgrade screen is based on the Monster Mutation cards from the original board game.

The player may choose to upgrade their attack, defense, or health. If attack or defense is chosen, 6 will be added (as a reference to getting an extra die for the attack/defense). If health is chosen, the player receives [current level] number of dice rolls of health. I.e. if the player chooses to upgrade health in level 1, the highest amount of health they could receive is 6. Therefore it is recommended to upgrade health only at high levels. The maximum level is 10, and the player gets only 10 upgrades in the entire game.

While not explicitly shown in the game, Zorb gets new attachments and becomes bigger with each upgrade. In the ending, Zorb is seen with a pair of blood-vessel-wings and is considerably bigger than Mecha-Monster.

## Mecha-Monster

Mecha-Monster is a giant military unit built as a monster buster. It represents Mecha-Monster and Captain Colossal from the original board game, which enter into play through Military Research cards.

## Trivia

* Zorb's, Konk's (modified from a picture of Donkey Kong), and the dragon monster's pictures are from a time when Tangent decided to experiment with text-based drawings. As a result, the 3 monsters were drawn with letters and punctuation.
* While Zorb's laser is red and blue, Mecha-Monster's is light pink and fuchsia.
* The dragon monster was originally planned to be used in a Turmoil-styled game as the playable character, inspired somewhat by Trogdor from Homestar Runner. The game was ultimately unfinished and unreleased. The dragon was also featured in Tangent's animated comics as a monster that asks a riddle, burning its iterlocutor if they fail to answer it in time.
* The save and load icons are from Game Maker: Studio and were considered a step up from the Windows 2000 save and load icons previously used in Tangent's board game programs.
* The chopper sprites are the same as the ones from Tangent's *Wavy Navy* remake, *Wavy Battle*.
* Mecha-Monster attacks with its own laser fire and its metal fists, though the latter is never actually shown.
* Building residents hide away when the monster is too close. This, while making sense in reality, was done to prevent them from blocking Zorb's shots as soon as they're fired, so that better enemies such as the helicopter may be targetted.
* The idea that the bullets deal next to no damage (each) to Zorb comes from the monster movie trope of how the military is usually useless against giant monsters.
* The game has had a few updates after hearing from Ellis' feedback.