Part Seven and yes, I am still continuing with this. Against all reason. Against all hope. And his only enemy.. is himself. Rated R.
061. Panzer Dragoon Aorta
Frantic Dragon-riding Sh'mup meets the Fantastic Voyage (or Innerspace, if you happen to be my age). Shoot down all the viruses, pathogens and other foreign bodies in the busy bloodstream of a gigantic body and purge it of evil. With the trademark 360 degree panoramic vision of the Panzer Dragoon games, you'll always need to keep on eye on the branching capillaries and such. This actually sounds pretty neat to me now, and I was just going for the lousy pun.
062. Meta-Game Katamari
Last Katamari Damacy entry on this list, I promise. I just find it easy coming up with new ideas for the format. Inspiration begets inspiration, I suppose. This is just a Katamari level that is set inside a games console or what have you, and has other genres of game packed together and doing their own thing. Like you have a few Atari-esque spaceships milling around shooting invaders, or a scaled dungeon-crawler Gauntlet with no ceiling that you can roll over and collect all the little skeletons and treasure chests. It'd be a neat touch for a Katamari to overpower and roll over all these "lesser" games, though I'm starting to see why they have yet to do it. Hubris can be a terrible thing. Allegedly.
063. Ultimate Spaceship Grudge Match
Like Smash Bros, only in space with famous spaceships. Get the permission of the license-holders of both Star Trek and Star Wars, mix in a bunch of other ships, space stations and what have you from movies, TV shows and other video games and jumble them all together to see who is best. Obviously there would be an equivalent of weight classes: fighter divisions, starship divisions and battle-ready space-station divisions, possibly leading up to sentient planets and nigh-omniscient cosmic energy beings. This sort of thing is doable with the right 3D editing tool and something like Freespace, which allows you to insert your own models and mission scripts, but it would still be awesome (and more legal) to make a whole unique game of it and make it playable online for Trekkies and, um, Warsies to duke it out in their endless "my fandom is better than your fandom" debates.
064. Speed in Video Game Form
This is applicable to any racer or action game with driving in it, especially GTA, who often do movie spoofs in their games. I'd be surprised if they haven't done this one already, in fact. Premise is the same as the movie: Drive around town without dropping below 50mph until the bomb on the bus (though it doesn't necessarily have to be a bus) has been defused. It can work as a solo mission with an NPC defusing the bomb as you drive or as some kind of survival mode multiplayer thing: seeing which of the players driving around the city can last the longest without crashing or otherwise dropping their speed too far.
065. Escape From New York Game
Basically, I could really see this working if the dudes that made RE4 got behind it. It basically has the same plot even: Rescue the President's daughter (well, the President in the first movie, daughter in the second) from a bunch of hostiles in a dilapidated environment, within a time limit before something placed inside you kills you. Explore, hide and survive for as long as possible in the crumbling remains of NYC. It would have GTA-esque driving sections too most likely, and a far less linear progression than the "we've arbitrarily closed off 80% of the village for this chapter, so I guess you're going this way" system that RE4 either suffered or benefited from, depending on your view.
066. Puppets
Just a game, any game, that makes the artistic decision to have their character models resemble marionettes, such as the ones in Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlet (or Team America, if we're going with a modern example). You'll literally be controlling the strings. Well, not literally, but you know what I mean. It's a neat idea for pretty much any game genre to use, as long as you don't need them to be too dexterous or life-like. So, American Football?
067. Weapon-based Level-Up Mini-Games
Lots of hyphens means lots of innovation. Maybe. What that jargon refers to is a system of levelling up RPG characters in mini-games that are based on the weapon that the chosen character has specialized in. Not only do the mini-games feature the chosen weapon of the character levelling up, but the mini-game itself tests the player's ability in a skillset that would be relevant to wielding the weapon. For instance, let's say you have a character that uses a gun, his/her minigame would involve shooting targets. Shoot a lot of targets and you'll get more bonuses at level-up, more than you would if you had left the process up to chance. A character using a sword would have a "draw a line to chop the wood in half" kind of game, to demonstrate the character's increase in accuracy and power. It does seem sort of gimmicky, but this system would really let you feel like you've earned those arbitrary few extra points in weapon training. PCs are only as good as the player controlling them after all. In theory.
068. Color-coded Treasure
For RPGs again, this time for the more dungeon-delve-y ones that feature more than one character. Your characters can get knowledge/appraise skills based on specific types of items that you may come across, such as being able to identify a good quality gem or the fine craftmanship of shields. These appraise skills can be only be learned by one character, who in turn can only have a certain number of appraise skills each (so no loading all of them onto your chosen "merchant" character). These items, when found in the dungeons, give off a slight sheen in the color of the character that is an expert with them. If your main female character has a pink color-code, all the items she can identify (let's say gems) will have a slight pink sheen that you can set from the options menu to let you know that she's the go-to gal for those things. Treasure hauls become all that more personalized as you divvy up the goods between the characters who are able to sell them on for a higher price.
069. Pokebombermon
In this combo of Pokemon and Bomberman, you control the Bomberdude himself as he clears his lands of all these oddly-shaped interlopers. Because Pokemon "faint" whenever they receive too much damage, Bomber can safely extract fallen Pokemon without killing them (besides being inside massive explosions). However, they sort of like the strange grid world they have found themselves in and will fight back with real-time attacks based on their Pokemon abilities. Several of the more dangerous Pokemon will be bosses (like a giant Onix that chases you around a grid snake-like) and evolved forms of Pokemon will be unlockable under special conditions. Obviously, there won't be the full 400+ or so of the current Pokedex, but a considerable number should be manageable with the various worlds you can visit (like a volcano land and a forest land and so on and so forth).
070. Poker Hand
One more RPG feature for the road, a character-specific skill for a normal console RPGs to adopt. There's been a few gamblin' type PCs who believe a playing card is an adequately damaging weapon, notably Setzer from Final Fantasy 6. For a special move, why not have them draw five cards and hit the enemies with the equivalent power of that hand in Poker? A Full House could be a devastating attack that would also heal your allies. A three of a kind does more damage than a pair, though two pairs is almost as powerful. If the suits of the cards are based on elements too, you could end up with a nifty little system that will probably fail as often as it succeeds. But then that's the whole point of the "makin' out with Lady Luck" character profile, isn't it?
