Sorry, sorry, too busy replaying Anachronox. Man does that game kick ass. These ideas kick less ass, but still kick some ass. Between moderate and reasonable on the kickass scale.
011. A Game With A Cat Protagonist That Isn't Garfield or some Furry Abomination
Those things are dexterous and can get everywhere, seemingly. It'd be cool to play to their acrobatic talents by having the main character be an actual cat with grace and poise that isn't fatter than a house or doesn't wear clothes or crack wise about things. Maybe the cat is a reincarnated human who died early and can remember its past life and now uses its stealthy and slinky new form to solve the mystery behind their death? Or it can do cat stuff like look for mice or shiny things. Or whatever it is they like to do when they aren't killing me with allergy-related maladies. Damn cats. Evil things.
012. Another Cool Way to Store Treasure In a Dungeon-Crawler Game
OK, so you have this Imp familiar right? "Familiar", as in wizard's pet. Since Imps come from a different dimension (usually that bad fire place, though not necessarily in this case) they can store things in an extra-dimensional pocket by eating them. You feed your Imp anything you come across and once the thing gets too fat to float around after you, that's the point where you go back to town and regurgitate your spoils for the no-doubt grateful merchant to deal with. The combination of a cute imp that gets progressively fatter plus all the vomiting is a surefire winner. You could have other familiars with similarly ignominious tasks, like a bat that checks out ceiling cavities for hidden switches or something.
013. FPS Nutshot System
In a lot of FPS games, the amount of damage you can do to an opponent can be increased by aiming at the dude's head. So why not his glorybox? Aim a decent shot at the happysack and you'll do lots of damage and get a cheap laugh to boot. Of course, if you're dealing with aliens they may have their breadbasket someplace else. Like that Ballchinian in Men in Black 2. Obviously there would need to be a downside to constantly hitting people in the pleasurepouch, because that isn't the sort of thing you want to advertise to small children (who will invariably find and play any game with this much violence somehow). Maybe you'll get some negative reputation, or dark force points if it's a Star Wars game. Nothing like hitting someone in the dark side of the pants to join the dark side of the force quicker.
014. Improved Interactive Cinematic/Cutscene Controls
By this I mean those "revolutionary" bits in video games where you're told to press a button or five in quick sequence while a cutscene is playing to make sure your hero doesn't die or whatever. You know, the "revolutionary" ones? I use "revolutionary" a lot, in quotes, because this system has, in fact, been around for donkey's years. Since Dragon Lair and earlier, in fact. Little has changed or improved with those bits since then. So instead, if you're going to have these stupid things, put them in every cutscene. If you have a quiet dialogue section to move the plot along a little, have a button indicator suddenly show up halfway through a lengthy exposition. If you fail it, a giant boulder inexplicably drops on the talker and you have to redo the scene. You could be sharing a little comedy section to build on character development between the main guy and gal - have an arrow come out of nowhere at random and kill the heroine if you press the wrong key. Would've livened up that stupid laughing scene in FFX a little. It would also stop people from thinking those interactive sequences are so neat after having to replay a dozen of these things because they were told they had to press a button completely unexpectedly.
015. Unethical Sports Coach
This could work for any sports management game, though I'm inclined to think Baseball or the Olympics would be the best areas to concentrate on. Instead of the clean-cut management sims that don't deal with the seedier side of competitive sports, you play a coach/manager that isn't afraid to pump your star athletes with any kind of concoction that may improve performance. You'll be mostly in charge of shipping in the narcotics from somewhere (black market, gangsters, mad scientists), supplying it to your athletes as a herbal performance enhancer and then trying to sneak them past compulsory drug testing for the megabux you receive when they win. Hilarity ensues when the dubious steroids causes your athlete to become violent, crazy, dead or some kind of tentacled flesh-devouring monstrosity that will need a proficient SWAT team to bring down before it can reach all the tasty spectators in the stands. Your successes need to outbalance your failures to keep your reputation in the clear (though an expensive lawyer will help), and more importantly your money inflow (cash prizes, sponsorships) needs to exceed the outflow (bribes to officials, expensive medicine, armed security teams, corsages to grieving widows). A sports sim game everyone can enjoy.
016. Lemmings Pinball
Good old Lemmings. Haven't heard from them for a while. There was some remake recently, but its been overshadowed by all these newcomers to the sphere of unfortunate-creature-management games. Such as those utterly cute/edible Pikmin. With Lemmings Pinball, your goal is still the same: Get all the Lemmings (or as many as you're able) past the traps and into the exit. Care must be made to transport the Lemmings through a danger-filled pinball table (there'll be several tables to choose from, possibly based on the 12 lemming tribes from Lemmings 2) using the paddles and a special Lemming pinball (these Lemmings will become the pinball itself to help out its friends). Knock it around the table a bit to score points and close off all the traps and barriers so they can march their little blue asses around the outside of the table (and often across it, so watch out for that) to safety. And then try and rescue the brave lemming that assumed the role of pinball to finish.
017. Confuse-A-Cat
Basically a game version of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMCRru6JEo8
There are cats that need confusing and only your carefully assembled team can do this - otherwise the cats are doomed to a life of soul-crushing ennui. Direct the scene in the manner of one of those movie director games and use the available elements, as well as special effects such as people randomly vanishing or shrinking or something, to utterly confuse the cat out of its deep funk. As you succeed in your tasks and earn cash from wealthy cat owners, you can expand your repertoire so you may one day confuse even the most inconfusable (real word) of felines. The game will decide how confusing your performance is by assigning each combination of actor/prop/special-effect/music accompaniment with a "confusion quotient" score. Often the most random configurations are the most confusing, though continually repeating the same configuration or element can breed too much familiarity - a cat confusement (real word again) killer. So keep it varied, keep it bizarre and confuse those cats!
018. UFO Game
Now I know there's been a few "destroy all humans" games (including the stunningly titled "Destroy All Humans" and others like "Alien Hominid") but this idea is based more on stealth rather than outright violence against mankind. You want to scope out humanity's chances through experimentation first, and that requires keeping under the radar. Steal cows and rednecks and make sure they get returned back to where they came from - not inside out (may take a few tries to manage this) and without any accompanying evidence of their trip to the stars to get probed a bit. You can start getting brave and move your operations up a notch, including theft of interesting landmarks (for analysis, of course.. and maybe space cash). Get spotted by the feds however, and you'll be dealing with black helicopters and dudes in observatories trying to find you, which means a lower profile for a while. I submitted something like this for the Invader Zim game idea a long while back, but it can be used for any kind of comedic invade-them-up game.
019. Random Power-Ups in Fighter Games
Most of these "serious" fighter games get too samey, as you rely on elaborate combination attacks or combo juggling or clever dodging ability. Any newcomer won't really get a look in until they've memorized half an encyclopedia's worth of fighting techniques. Sometimes they just want to beat the tar out of something, goshdarnit. Which is where Power-Up Mode comes in. A power-up can have any kind of random affect: sometimes good and sometimes bad. It's up to the players if they want to use one that's offered to them. These affects can range from being on fire (double damage to opponent but your health bar slowly sinks from the burning) to shrinking (absolutely no use to anyone) to getting boxing gloves (easier to hit and block with but does less damage) to some kind of gun (OK, this is plainly cheating now). It could switch the health bars or make them invisible, change to disco lighting, give both characters cowboy hats or eliminate the entire background, leaving both fighters in some kind of weird white zone. Like the serious racing car idea, players sometimes need this kind of randomness in their games to liven it up and chill out in the crazy zone for a while.
020. MP3 Champions
An idea that progresses on those of Vib Ribbon (generated gameplay content based on music) and things like Monster Rancher or Barcode Battler. Since consoles, specifically Xbox consoles, can have custom MP3 soundtracks, there needs to be more games that take advantage of those additional MP3s for more than just something better to listen to than the noisy nu-metal pap games usually come with these days. One idea was to have a champion (an RPG hero perhaps, or a custom-made fighter like the ones in Soul Calibur or WWE/WCW/nWo games) created by interpreting the MP3 by its coding to produce a generated character, and have a clip of the MP3 (preferably the bridge or chorus, though it might be hard for the engine to pinpoint) be his theme music whenever he shows up. If you have a group of these characters out fighting, or online, they can exude this theme music to warn people of their presence. Obviously there couldn't be everyone's theme music playing at once, so it would only start up if you've got your cursor currently on that character or its their turn to fight. It'd be cool if they could be personalized even further to match the MP3's genre/tune, though that would require some kind of extensive recognition software. Maybe it can be configured to identify certain characteristics from a genre of music (deep base and guitars or something for Heavy Metal, you can tell I'm no music expert) and develop the random character's style and appearance based around those fundamental aspects (in this case some kind of boss axe or viking helmet).
OK, I'll make sure to get the next 10 in on time. I could assure you that these delays are caused by spending too much time on quality control, but the evidence doesn't exactly support it.
