A Startup A Day

Not sure whose copyright wrath I’d rather avoid, ABC’s or NBC’s.  Anyway, today’s Xbox Live community game idea is pretty basic.  It’s a puzzle game based on the MacGyver concept of escaping a difficult situation using some basic everyday items, such as diffusing a bomb using only a pair of shoelaces, a ballpoint pen, and a piece of aluminum foil.

There are a couple of different ways you can approach this concept, but I’d probably take the SNL angle of doing a spoof of the original, and focusing on a series of quick mini-game style puzzles with completely unrealistic situations.  For example, the game may start with a Richard Dean Anderson-like character who is sitting in front of his TV playing the MacGruber game on his Xbox.  He clicks on an item on the screen and suddenly his TV is taken over by Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”.  Your task for puzzle #1 is to use the correct combination of items that MacGruber has around him to build a flamethrower to make his TV explode in order to stop the video from playing (in this case – a straw, the batteries from his Xbox controller, some steel wool, and a glass of Tennessee Whiskey).    You have a timer that is counting down on your screen, and if you don’t get the correct combination of items in time, your punishment is a mandatory 30-second rickroll that you must watch in order to move on to the next situation.