Something a little different this week. I will take a classic arcade staple (in this case, Qix) and discuss the core elements of its gameplay, and how those core elements can be transferred or integrated into other games and game genres. I am able to do this because the core gameplay of Qix is a free license, if not the name itself (which belongs to Taito), which is why there are so many Qix clones around that aren't called Qix.
First, the fundamentals of the Qix gameplay: The goal is to fill-in portions of the screen by piloting your ship from the safe-ish border to draw squares in the "danger zone" before the enemies in the unshaded area can attack you or your unfinished line. Successfully reaching the border again with your line will fill/shade-in the percentage of the screen you managed to box in. If your line gets hit midway, you lose a life. Filling 75% of the screen will complete the level, though sometimes this goal % can vary. The game's system demands a fair amount of caution, but also the occasional bold move to cover a large percentage in one go. There are also various techniques you can employ, such as making a bridge of safe small boxes from one side of the screen to the other in order to trap the wider area above/below this bridge.
Second, I'll discuss how this system can be translated or integrated into other games. The most basic way, obviously, is to transfer the entire thing as-is into the core game as an optional mini-game. In this case the victory conditions and the game itself are the same, it's just a game-within-a-game with little relevance to the actual game in which it appears. Compilations of Taito arcade games often feature Qix in its entirety. Sometimes there's an arbitrary beneficial effect for the main game in which Qix is a minigame, such as in Rockstar's Bully, where the Art class is a Qix-based minigame that grants you bonuses to your character's skills depending on your success. In this case simply achieving Qix's usual victory conditions is sufficient for the main game bonus, which is unrelated to the minigame.
However, the game can be integrated even further into the game's engine. For instance, say you were playing a futuristic hacker game and that the password to an important computer system was hidden inside a virtual portrait (which has a computer chip in it). You would have to "hack" the portrait in a Qix-style minigame while avoiding the anti-virus protection software, which would be represented by the usual Qix enemies of a large, central enemy and various smaller ones that crawl around the border. Successfully completing the Qix minigame means that you've hacked a sufficient amount of the virtual portrait's memory file to recover the required password.
But it doesn't have to stop there. Let's say the game you're playing is an RTS. You fire a bombardment missile to a specific square in the enemy's territory. The purpose of this missile is to bomb regions it will "paint" (a military term for targeting an area) from the sky, while the enemy tries to shoot it down before it can destroy anything major. As soon as the missile is fired to a map square of the controlling player's choosing, the player then controls the remote missile in a Qix-style minigame. For every enemy building it can box in, that building is destroyed. Similarly, it can box in stationary/moving enemy units to destroy them also. All territory that the missile has currently boxed in will be on fire (as it drops a sort of napalm) and impassable until the missile is either destroyed or fulfills a 75% quota of the chosen screen, in which case it returns to base to get refuelled. While this is going on, the enemy can either try to shoot down the missile by firing at it from outside of the chosen square (the enemy player won't actually know the specific boundaries of this square) or risk shooting it down from within the square that is being attacked. Alternatively, the enemy can attack the other player's base while he is distracted with the minigame, if he believes the buildings in the bombing areas are an acceptable sacrifice for a surprise attack. The player runs the risk of using this devastating weapon at the cost of being distracted while he's busy with the Qix minigame. He can abort the missile at any time if the enemy decides to take advantage and attack.
Here's another example using one of my own ideas; specifically, my Item Quest idea from a few weeks ago. I mentioned that one of the many items you can pick up are Portraits. Well, occasionally, you may find a "cursed portrait". These are portraits which used to be valuable but now have a hex on them, changing their original, beautiful image into something twisted and unpleasant. Subsequently, the value of the portrait has dropped considerably. If you wanted, you can pay for a sort of "uncursing exorcism" to change the portrait back to what it once was to hopefully increase its value substantially. This will be done, again, with a Qix-style minigame, where you have to draw in the "real" portrait by boxing in cursed areas and purifying them, all the while avoiding the evil spirits that have possessed the painting. As soon as a specific % of the painting has been recovered, the rest of the portrait is purified and you have a much more valuable portrait in your hands. If your little exorcism spirit dies, you have just wasted the money it costs to summon it. You may even lose the portrait itself, destroying it utterly. The risk of failing the minigame would need to be equal to the potential gain, though one could simply boost the difficulty of the minigame if the "real" portrait is much more valuable than usual. The Item Quest idea could benefit from all sorts of "uncurse the cursed item" minigames, which would take a lowly treasure you may find earlier on and turn it into something highly collectible that you can later brag about. Of course, if you're playing as an "evil" character, you might prefer the aesthetic of the cursed image.
Anyway, there's some ideas about how an old Arcade game that people are familiar with can be integrated into modern games in a much more immersive way than simply dropping the whole thing in there, untouched and unmodified. If there's a definite gain to be made in the core game from successfully completing a few levels of a Qix minigame (or Pacman, or Yar's Revenge, or Space Invaders..), then people might start getting addicted to these old games all over again.
