Halfway point, yay. Those of you who only wanted 50 new game features can stop after this one.
041. France France Revolution
A rhythm game based around the French Revolution. Execute your corrupt and arrogant aristocrats to catchy music numbers, following the beat by pressing arrows to get the guillotines all warmed up. Do a good enough job and you may even reach the meritorious rank of "U Executin' COOL!".
042. Kartamari Damacy
Adapting the roll-em-up chaos of the Katamari games with the fun, non-serious racing of something like Carmageddon or Mario Kart (hence the name), Kartamari allows the Prince to race against his cousins in various tracks based in different Katamari levels, including locales such as a busy living room, a pond, a village or even a continent. The main focus is to simply out-drive your opponent, collecting all the small items littered on the track for a small size boost that will allow you to muscle out opponents in your way. However, you are also able to go off-road and start collecting the larger objects that lie off the track. Doing this constantly will no doubt jeopardize a decent lap time but you'll become even larger and therefore more of a presence on the track. If you're able to grow large enough, all but sacrificing any hope of finishing the race normally, you can still "roll-up" the other players by being considerably larger than them. If a kartamari is rolled up by another one, it is effectively taken out of the race. If a big enough kartmari can roll-up all of its opponents, it will win by default, creating a very promising alternative to simply racing as hard as they can. Just to note, I'm aware that there is a driving level of sorts in the second Katamari game, but this idea kind of focuses on being allowed to race for real with multiple opponents as opposed to just being a neat stage gimmick that doesn't really affect the core gameplay.
043. The Sims Boosterpack #142: Killin' Time Wit' [sic] The Sims!
In this Sims add-on, you're granted numerous new ways of killing off your Sims somehow, including elaborate traps and weaponry they can use to off themselves or others. With exciting new careers like Serial Killer to follow, players are sure to do what they've been wanting to do with those soulless automatons since the very first game. Invite others to your booby-trapped home for violent fun or simply put your own Sim in jeopardy by turning their home into a labyrinthine deathtrap with bombs on the toilets while they're at work. Don't pretend like this isn't what Sims fans have been clamoring for for years.
044. Zelda: Water Temple Edition
All the Water Temples from throughout the Zelda series, packed together consecutively in this fun package. Who wouldn't want that? Added bonus: Link doesn't have the item that allows him to breathe underwater indefinitely. Plus his movement is reversed. And the screen is too dark to see anything. Oh, and you have that fairy who keeps telling you to listen. This should finally stop people from putting Zelda as the best series ever on a bajillion top 100 lists, though persuading Nintendo that this is a good idea for a Zelda game might take some doing.
045. Torch-Bearer
Torch-Bearers tend to be low level hirelings that adventurer parties hire to light the way forward who invariably walk into every trap and attract every monster out there in their thankless jobs. You play the part of one of these utterly vulnerable saps as he embarks on a dungeon-spelunking trip with a new party of indifferent adventurers. Your main task is to simply run around in a mad panic as deftly as possible, staying out of reach of fast-acting traps and faster-moving monsters. You can indirectly kill monsters by luring them into traps, which you eventually start to intuitively feel the presence of after years of experience of running straight into them - not so much from a skillful and knowledgeable assessment of danger that thief-like characters can one day attain but rather from a generally pessimistic and cynical outlook on life which all too often proves to be true. You must also ensure that the adventurers that have hired you stay alive, primarily because your paycheck depends on it but also for the limited protection against monsters they bring. Outwitting and outrunning monsters, setting off the deadly traps before the "important" characters stumble into them and guaranteeing the success of the party's mission are your responsibilities; though there's a strong chance that your employers remain blissfully ignorant of your heroic accomplishments, unfortunately for you. Eh, It's a living.
046. Magic Camera Thief
You see these games where you can take photos of stuff and take them with you inside the photos. They tend to be ghosts or other magical creatures that can somehow exist as pictures, possibly based on the old superstition that a piece of your soul is captured on film whenever someone takes your photo. In this game, you're able to physically take objects and place them in an alternate dimension of sorts if you take a picture of them in ideal conditions. Though you could, in theory, start taking pictures of everything and everyone, you're only really interested in anything unique or valuable. You must also ensure that no-one sees you "stealing" the objects from under their noses or the gig is up since they're more than likely to believe that you stole an item by taking a picture of it somehow. As an added incentive to get the best shot possible, the value of the stolen item is based on how well you frame it inside the picture: Taking a bad picture of something will decrease its value after removing it from the dimensional space it's stored in, as it'll come back as blurry and off-center as it was in the photo. Also, expect to find jokes about "capturing things on film". See? that's at least one. Pretty much the only joke one could feasibly make, in retrospect.
047. Pokemon Picross
Really simple idea this one. Since there are hundreds of these little buggers now, a Picross game where you create pictures of individual Pokemon (with all new art, so you don't recognise them from a specific pose of theirs partway through a puzzle) in a Picross grid wouldn't go awry. There'll also be a few differences to regular Picross: First, the pictures are presented in a random(ish) order instead of selecting them from a chart of incomplete pictures, so you never know what Pokemon is coming up next - just like the real game, sort of. Second, you need to "catch" (i.e. solve the Picross of) a Pokemon before its evolved form will start showing up randomly - considering the evolved forms tend to be much larger, and would therefore require bigger Picross grids, this makes for a fairly decent difficulty curve progression too. Third, the Picross pictures have time limits that need to be met to properly catch it, which vary based on the Pokemon's rarity: If you fail, you'll have to wait until that Pokemon comes up again to catch it (though the silhouette is added to your Pokedex as a simple "seen it" Pokemon). Finally, you'll be able to use tools to help you solve the puzzle faster: A pokeball could reveal a 3x3 square on the grid while another powerup could reveal all the tiles of a certain less-used color if it happens to be a multi-colored Picross. Considering the amount of Picross games churned out on the DS plus the Pokemon franchise's eagerness to explore genres other than the regular RPG system pretty much guarantees that this game will come out sooner or later, though probably not exactly as it's described here. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there already was one that wasn't released outside of Japan. Shows what I know.
048. Capcom Vs. Konami
OK, so Capcom do a lot of these grudge match link-ups with apparent "rival" companies like SNK (understandable, since both companies dominate the Arcade Fighter genre) and Marvel (which is somewhat less explicable) so why not with their real rivals: Konami? Both are zany Japanese companies that came to Western attention through the arcades and the 8-bit/16-bit console era; Both have a range of franchises and one-off hits to choose fighters from and both of them are probably united in their scorn for Square-Enix. Maybe. I see Square-Enix as the nerd that either of the two jocks will make a truce with temporarily so that he can successfully finagle the other one and get him all wet and/or blackmailed before the big dance, so that the first jock Japanese video game company can make a move on the highschool sweetheart, who I guess can be Sega for the purposes of this increasingly incoherent analogy. Anyway. Konami vs Capcom. Using some kind of genre/setting familiar to both parties as the battlefield. A creepy castle full of robot masters and cardboard boxes to hide in?
049. Spaceballs: The Game
LucasArts needs to stop making the same boring old Star Wars clones (see, the new ones are all set during the Clone Wars, so the joke is-ah gah blah blah blah) and move back to comedy. What better way, short of something more/actually (depending on how critical you are) humorous, than Mel Brooks' Spaceballs? Send up your own damn boring-ass space and Jedi games by pastiching aspects that constantly and invariably show up in each new Star Wars game. Force powers that vary on whether you've been good or bad? Install a new Santa system that replaces your Schwartz powers with coal if you're on the down-side of the Schwartz. A dumb Hoth-like level where you need to use the Speeder's finicky tow cable to bring down an AT-AT? Install a pair of pointy fingers on the front of the Speeders and zok the AT-ATs in the eyes Stooges-style to take them out. Jam Spaceball One's radars in five fruity flavors based on preference. Avoid Pizza The Hutt's Noidian battle cruisers. Cross the galaxy in a painstakingly-rendered 3D Winnebago, raking in the spacebux whenever possible. With all those promises of easy merchandising (I GET SATIRE) in the movie (or "moichandising", as Brooks would say), they'd be crazy to do this. Not to do this. That's.. that's probably what I meant to type.
050. Gremlins Redux
I'm well aware Gremlins had some fair-to-middling platformer affairs on the Commodore 64 or Spectrum ZX or SuperCaptain 32k or whatever barely functioning cassette-driven crap they had back then. Oh, don't give me that look, retro gaming fans. Stop. Seriously, stop, your long beards are freaking me out. The new Gremlins games should properly reflect the monster-plague "egad, they're everywhere and eating everything, save yourselves!" atmosphere from the movies. What better way, then, than something like Dead Rising and how it handles zombies? Scare off the Gremlins with any bright light-emitting items you can find, prohibit them from reaching any source of water and eliminate those slapstick-y troublemakers as best you can. Rescue as many folk as possible from numerous locations. If you can hold out until morning, you might be able to wipe them all out in one go. If you feel that it still needs a guy to interrupt you every five seconds to be as enthralling as Dead Rising, you can always have Gizmo fill that role. He might have Mogwai powers to know when someone in your sleepy town/NYC skyscraper is in trouble and needs rescuing from his reptilian brethren. The game becomes even neater once you start taking on all those unique Gremlins, like Stripe and Brain and the Bat-Gremlin and that wacky one that could travel through the electricity sockets.
