Short one today, might do a longer blog sometime later this week though. I am trying to get more than one done a week, but it's pretty difficult coming up with new stuff without retreading the same genres or simply modifying old ideas/games with new settings. Most of the famous designers just specialize in the one genre after all (usually FPS if we're talking about a famous games designer in the western world).
So anyway, I was considering the randomization thing again. Readers of the blog know I tend to go on a bit about the ol' random generators, talking in past blog entries about using barcodes, music CDs and the recent Spam Mail update. I figure there can be a relatively simple one for DS games too: A squiggle. The game can take co-ordinates from a squiggly line someone scribbled using random points along the line (different random points every time I mean, so no-one can figure out a system and cheat) to generate the necessary stats or what have you.
In fact, I just remembered it can do the same thing for recorded sound too. I'm sure those in the music industry and sound technicians specifically know how to generate all sorts of numerical values from a single noise which will go on to be used by the game in the same way as the above scribble method to create stats and things. It would be a pretty cool feature on something like Pokemon, where you would be given a starter Pokemon based on a noise the player records at the start of the game. You could do a bad impression of your favorite real-life animal and the game will probably give you its animal counterpart (so doing a cricket noise will get you Nincada, probably) by comparing the noise you made with all the various electronic growls the game has recorded on the Pokedex.
These sorts of random stat generation tools are sort of trivial for the average player, but it's a little more fun than simply clicking a button that says "randomize". At least this way there's the illusion that they're contributing directly to their characters' development.
