Supertacularness: The Blog

If I Was In Charge: Persona 5

2010-12-05T12:26:00.000-08:00

Whoa, look who's come crawling back. To the blog world. Sphere, if you will. So I was thinking the other day about how I would change one of my favorite RPG series, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona (or Persona for short) to make it even more to my liking, to the possible detriment of many of its other fans. Because screw those guys. Here's what I came up with:

Now this blog article assumes you have some knowledge of this series, and of the last two entries in particular. Go look up some videos or reviews or Wikipedia info on it or, hell, just go play them. I'll wait.

So anyway, my biggest gripe about this game and the source of many hours of pointless and non-entertaining grinding is what a lot of MegaTen fans love the most: The Persona fusion system. Taking its cue from various Mons games, including its predecessors in the larger MegaTen franchise as a whole, the fusion system allows you to raise two monsters, merge them and create a new hybrid monster with the abilities of its parents, usually at the cost of the parents themselves. While you are left with a superior monster type, it is weakened by its current newborn state, and you're out of the two powerful monsters used to create it. This is where the grinding comes in. Especially if your real target is a monster that is several more generations down the line. Adding to your woes is the necessary "ability inheritance", where part of your perfect creation requires that certain abilities from the parents are passed down, which means constantly refreshing the creation process for the right assortment before finally committing to the fusion process. The whole shebang often takes up far more of your game time than playing the actual game itself.

I'd like to stick a disclaimer here: When coming up with a new system, you have to check it at every angle to make sure it works. While I am just one person, prone to blindspots, I'm fairly sure this is bombproof. Fairly sure.

My proposal is for a single, malleable Persona, one that befits the Fool Arcana's "wild card" status. The idea is you have the one Persona for the whole game but you're allowed to change its abilities, resistances and statistics to suit the circumstances on the fly in battle. For instance, instead of having one Physical-focused, one Ice-focused and one Buff-focused personae, you could have separate "builds" to switch between with the same Persona. You'd modify these builds before battles, either in the Velvet Room or at any point while exploring when not in direct combat, keeping in mind the properties of the bosses and typical enemies you're about to come up against. With this system, you'd have much greater freedom to create a Persona ideal to the situation you'll face. There will be limitations based on the dungeon you're on and the level you're at (e.g. no giving away Victory Cry on the first dungeon), but otherwise you'd have full mastery of the material available.

So where do the other Personae come in? The Compendium, Arcana and Social Links are such important aspects of the Persona game world that you couldn't really lose them. Well, you'd still obtain Persona in much the same way you did before: After random battles. Acquiring a new Persona for the Compendium grants any of the following bonuses to you and your static Persona:

1) A new ability. Abilities are meted out to you upon acquiring certain personae after battle. So a low-level ice-based persona like Apsaras might grant you the use of the entry-level Ice spell "Bufu". Abilities earned in this manner will need to be equipped to a build before you can use them. This way, the player doesn't receive the more high-level abilities until they have conquered the higher-level battles that grant them.
2) A stat boost. Your Persona gains a small amount of stats when leveling, much like they did in the previous games. However, to stay at a competitive level with the tougher enemies, they'll need larger boosts from time to time. These are also earned from certain personae found after battles. Stats like Speed, Luck and Endurance get individual increases, but Strength and Magic (the two stats that determine damage based on what attacks you use) get a shared pot which can be shifted from one pole to the other when editing the build - this is so a build that focuses on magic attacks can be given a stronger magic-attack stat, and vice versa for a physical-focused build.
3) Character bonuses. These go directly onto your character instead of the Persona, increasing health, mana and the three stats important for creating social links: Courage, Intellect and Charisma.
4) Cosmetic Items. In even rarer cases, you'll be given an item for display in the player character's room, such as a Jack Frost doll on a shelf somewhere. Though they'd have no practical applications, these items may well be sought after by completionists.
5) Money and XP bonuses. These are given for duplicate personae, if no new ones show up after a battle. As this may often be the case if you're on the latter floors of a dungeon or are specifically looking for a rarer persona, the frequent instances where no new Persona occur will at least have some small benefit.

Social Links, when increased, grant you various bonuses to how often Personae of that Arcana type appear. The highest type of that Arcana only appears if you've successfully completed that Social Link, much in the same way as it was in the past. If you have a certain predilection for physical attacks, say, it might convince you to follow the Emperor's Social Link for sooner access to its more physical-based Personae.

As well as changing your build's abilities and focus on physical or magical strength, you could also shift around its resistances. Occasionally, you'd be given a new resistance point from an acquired Persona but most of the time you'd have to shift around what you already had. This meant as well as increasing resistances to various elements, you could also drop your resistance to one element (becoming "Weak" to it) to buff up a more critical one.

Ultimately, you'd have the full customization options to create whatever builds you wished, including possible options to customize even the look of the Persona builds to help distinguish them. You'd have all the strategic variations for the difficult battles ahead with none of the endless fusion experiments and wasted cash and time. Plus, this system allows the developers to add a lot more Personae to read about in the Compendium, since they don't need to balance them and assign arbitrary stats for each - just a single bonus.

Difficulty Cont.

2010-07-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

Continuing the theme from last update, I'll be going over which genres should and should not employ some sort of difficulty system. In the case of the latter, I'll suggest what alternatives they could use (if most of them don't already).

SHOULD

1. FPS/TPS - Essentially for reasons the blog (and elsewhere) has gone over already: Tactics vary at higher difficulties. Whereas you can charge through most areas on Normal like an action hero, higher difficulties will require more cautiousness, a deep understanding of the level you're on (regarding where enemies and items appear, which is why a previous Normal playthrough is beneficial) and some degree of stealth. In certain types of shooter, ammo conservation is also important for the harder modes, since bosses often require an awful lot of it.

2. Survival Horror - Like mentioned last post, Survival Horror uses a difficulty system to basically save people from having their spooky experience too bogged down with fighting and bosses. Ideally, a low difficulty setting will make the same number of enemies show up but make them far less aggressive, heightening the creepy tension by all the weird monsters stalking around without forcing you to destroy them all to progress. Of course, a good deal of survival horror requires that you don't fight the enemies anyway - Siren and Clock Tower are examples of this sort. Perhaps in those cases, where you're not expected to fight, the difficulty could be raised for additional challenge in getting past them.

3. Stealth - Similar to the above, a modern stealth game usually offers players two ways to progress: to make as much noise as possible and defeat the enemies standing between you and your objective, or to sneak past without a whisper. Ideally, there would be a slider bar of difficulty, with "Stealth" on one end and "Action" on the other. A Stealth-oriented game would increase the enemy force's deadliness (perhaps one-hit kills under almost any circumstance) and drop their attentiveness, making stealth a viable option. Inversely, setting the bar far along the Action side could make stealth very difficult but enemies far more accommodating to dying from gunshot wounds to the face.

4. SRPGs - This only applies to the "chain of story battles" SRPG, like Fire Emblem or Vandal Hearts, instead of the more open and less specific battles of the Nippon Ichi SRPGs like Disgaea. The best way to incorporate a higher difficulty setting in these games isn't (only) artificially raising the stats of enemy combatants, but to insert additional battles throughout the story that are far more difficult than those found in the normal setting. This can be done either as a post-game set of "challenge maps", that might provide backstory or a previously non-player character's viewpoint to some scenes earlier in the plot, or it could be on a completely new playthrough with the extra battles inserted as and when they occur in the story.

SHOULD NOT

1. RPGs - The difficulty in these games are usually self-imposed: You could decide to fight the Ogre at a low level, or simply avoid him for now and come back later. This is a little more applicable in Western RPGs (which tend to be less linear) than JRPGs, though with the latter there is always the option for any player to attack the next boss along the story route as they are, or to spend a few minutes grinding in the current area. RPGs work because players go at their own pace, and fighting a boss under-leveled is much more rewarding for any expert player than to simply let the CPU boost the enemy's stats, as it is a self-imposed challenge. A decent alternate is the New Game+. In this instance, enemies are upgraded (or often not) and the player is allowed to keep some or all of their equipment, levels, cash or anything else they've earned on their first playthrough. This assists with achieving 100% on a game (especially one with branching paths that makes 100% impossible for a single playthrough) and the game can also unlock some difficult side-missions, dungeons and bosses for the second time through. Players are once again advised to go at their own pace.

2. Roguelikes - Roguelikes don't require a difficulty curve, because they're largely random. Of course, it wouldn't do to put the hardest monsters and best equipment on the early levels (unless there was a way of evading the first and enforcing a minimum level limit on the second) but in most situations, a Roguelike's difficulty is defined largely by luck.

3. RTS - This is a purely subjective standpoint (as opposed to the others, which are only mostly subjective) but I believe RTS games work best when they provide players with multiple factions to control. This is pretty much true of any modern RTS of course, but when relating these factions to the game's difficulty is where things might get mildly controversial. Ideally, each campaign has its own difficulty setting - this way, you have a difficulty curve to progress through and each faction's campaign is different enough to warrant a playthrough of each based on originality alone. There are a few problems with this: the "easy" campaign might move too slowly for experts (maybe shortening that campaign and making it more of a "tutorial" of sorts might fix that) or maybe that someone's personal favorite faction might also be the hardest, forcing them to learn the ropes with a group they didn't want to play as. Nonetheless, this is a good way of incorporating a difficulty mode of sorts without forcing the players to play through the same campaign multiple times with a slightly tougher opponent.

4. Platformers - Kind of obvious, this one. A platformer's difficulty is inherent in its level design - to increase the difficulty would be to rebuild the entire game world. The more shooter-based platformers (like Ratchet and Clank) are exceptions though, provided the difficulty is based on the shooting part.

5. Sandboxes - Really, this includes any large, non-linear game (most of which are now known as sandboxes). Generally, you have the story missions - which are of a casual difficulty - and as many harder, optional missions as you'd like to take on. Another reason why difficulty shouldn't apply to sandboxes are their size: After fully exploring some five square miles of real estate for hours of gameplay, why would you want to go through all of that again on a slightly harder setting? Better they follow inFamous' example and have the second playthrough be subtly different based on something like an opposing morality (though that game has a redundant difficulty setting too, if I recall).

6. Sim Games - I'm a proponent of variable difficulty for games like the Sims, or any game where you assume the role of some developer or creator. If you're doing well the game should create challenges for you, but if you're struggling they should hold off on dumping extra trouble on you and offer help instead. Any other type of simulation game (say, flying a plane) should only be as difficult as the real life activity you're simulating, since realism counts.

New Updates? Trying Not To Be Quitty McQuitterson For A While

2010-07-18T13:25:00.000-07:00

Back to making a concentrated effort on this Design blog, for no discernible reason. Good enough, right?

So today I'll talk about difficulty, since Yahtzee Croshaw brought it up on his Extra Punctuation blog thing - this won't be a recurring "rip-off that Yahtzee fellow" thing though, don't worry.

Difficulty is an odd thing for me when relating to games. As regular readers have probably figured out, I pretty much abhor anything that resembles work, including updating a blog more than once a year. So naturally, Easy would be the preferable setting. Yet a game without conflict has no purpose - with no challenge, there is no reason to keep playing. A narrative draws its power from conflict. At least, this is what I've been led to believe from any other media.

Because a video game derives its narrative conflict from the in-game story (i.e. a cutscene depicting a reversal of fortune or the irreversible death of a major character) rather than your own actions (i.e. dying for the twentieth time, because it will reset itself by returning to an earlier save anyway) the difficulty setting does not really provide that necessary narrative feature.

So what about fun? A game has to be somewhat challenging to maintain your interest - if you were to waltz through every stage without a scratch, the enjoyment would be minimal. Well, yes and no. In a lot of situations, that is indeed the case - an action game specifically needs to keep your interest by throwing catastrophe after catastrophe at you.

[ This is where we get the precarious balance of in-game and cutscene ("cinematic") set pieces, wherein a dangerous situation beyond simply "there are a dozen guys shooting at you" or "there is a boss" is presented to the player, and to resolve the situation requires a design choice: you can give the players the capacity to beat the situation with the usual controls (jump, shoot, what have you), go the half "cinematic" route with an annoying Simon Says Quick-Time-Event, or just go fully cinematic and solve it for them in a cutscene. Obviously, the first option would be preferable to the player, but it's difficult to pull off and still keep the whole experience tense and perilous. A good example would be the Uncharted games, where climbing a collapsing bridge or running from an explosion can be easily performed with the game's Tomb Raider-esque acrobatics. Talking of which, Tomb Raider Legend goes pretty much the QTE route, only the buttons you press correspond to in-game controls of Lara - e.g. if the scene requires you to shoot a rope support to lower a bridge you're rushing towards, the QTE will prompt you to press the button that normally corresponds to Lara's guns. So in a manner, the QTEs and in-game controls kind of merge to allow players to quickly react to these split-second decision dangerous scenarios. It's not perfect, of course, but I feel the reign of those annoying QTEs is coming to an end as games find ways of prompting a player's quick response without just flashing buttons at them. ]

It's not always true that a game needs to constantly challenge you to stay fun. A game like Animal Crossing thrives due to its complete lack of challenge. It also has no momentum, save the slow introduction of all the game features that are available. A player is free to create and meet their own targets, or to simply hang out in a danger-free environment. Games that focus on exploration and development, such as sandboxes and building sims, shouldn't require a difficulty curve. I dare say even some games like Oblivion or Fallout were more fun when enemies stayed a low level and just let you explore. It all depends on what elements of a game appeals to you the most.

Some games realize this, and provide difficulty options that reflect this insight. If a game is action-packed, there's no reason not to just stick with the usual "easy, medium, hard" options - once players are experienced enough, they can tackle the next category up. Other games enhance their longevity (something I talked about last time) by making the harder modes not only more challenging, but a substantially different experience. There's two ways in particular where this happens - A) What was a survivable melee is now an impossible-to-survive massacre, and thus requires a different approach (usually stealth, or simply aversion) and B) allowing the player to keep what he's earned in previous playthroughs, and provide even greater challenges to match this advantage (i.e. the "New Game+" trope).

But there are games that take this even further. Take, for instance, survival horror games. The main focus of these games are to frighten you, and thus are more dependent on telling a scary story (that you experience first-person) than the interactive elements that make them games instead of just movies. Subsequently, survival horrors can often focus on puzzles [puzzles are a great way to introduce story elements while giving the player something to do - e.g. figuring out the furniture in a dollhouse based on the haunted house you're in forces the player to learn more about the setting before they can solve the puzzle and continue] (like "The 7th Guest") or action (like "Resident Evil"). In most ("Silent Hill" being a good example), there's a smattering of both. Often, there are two difficulty scales - one for the action and one for the puzzles. A higher action difficulty makes the various monsters harder to kill and more dangerous to you, creating a more rewarding experience for those who want to fight the darkness, whereas a higher puzzle setting makes the puzzles more complex and harder to solve creating an overall more cerebral playthrough. Depending on what kind of game you'd prefer to play, you can choose to make one of those settings easy (pretty much removing that aspect of the game, almost) and the other difficult (to make that the focus). If you're indifferent to either mode, you can focus on one for one playthrough then switch focuses for the second creating two very different experiences. Or you can simply set both to highest and go full "hardcore".

So imagine if you could do that with, say, Sandbox games. A hypothetical GTA-esque Sandbox might have a mix of driving vehicles, shooting enemies and fighting enemies hand-to-hand - each category, though mostly using the same reaction-based gameplay, requires a different type of skill from the gamer. The game could feasibly just give you a relatively easy time with all three categories for the main story, with harder challenges for any of the three categories as optional asides (such as optional street races, gang takedowns or cage fighting tournaments respectively). Or the game could allow you to choose the difficulty of each categorically separately, once it has let you test-run all three modes. Not only will making one category "easy" make those segments of the game less difficult, but it will actually remove some of them and replace them with something else - perhaps a non-interactive cutscene, or a lengthier sequence involving either of the other two categories. If you decide you suck at fighting armed & unarmed both, you can just set the driving to "hard" and the others to "easy" and spend most of the game performing driving-based challenges.

In other examples of a dual-genre format, like the Metal Gear Solid series, you can decide if you hate stealth more than the usual action or vice versa and change the difficulty settings accordingly. Of course, in that sort of game either option would be equally viable, but occasionally one or the other is impossible to avoid. This was the case with the recent Alpha Protocol - forcing players into a combat with the game's final boss with little recourse from any non-combat approach that they had previously focused on.

Other examples, from one of my favorite genres:
RPGs
Battle Complexity/Difficulty - Not only making monsters stronger, but increasing the complexity behind the strategy required to defeat them - such as a stronger emphasis on elemental classes or weapon types. A "Difficult" setting will be equivalent to a standard MegaTen battle - victory is only assured by being properly prepared. An "Easy" setting, however, might simply auto-fight the battles for you and tell you how you fared, allowing you to focus on something else.
Dungeon Complexity/Difficulty - If you prefer the fighting to the exploring, setting this to "Easy" will simply line up a series of random battles before a boss battle with between-battle prizes that basically consist of "gold", "health potion" and "mana potion", instead of creating a dungeon to explore. A "Difficult" setting will give you various dungeon puzzles to solve (usually involving keys, switches or pushing blocks), maze-like corridors and a more varied treasure haul that might require inventory micromanagement.
Story Complexity/Difficulty - If you're the impatient type who skips cutscenes, setting this to "Easy" will simply weed out any unnecessary character-building cutscene and leave you with the bare essential exposition needed to tell you where to go next. Of course, setting it to "Difficult" will just unleash every minor piece of chitchat between the characters for you to enjoy. Actually, this is more of a gag suggestion.

As games continue to "casualize" and find audiences from absolutely any walk of life, it'll grow more important that video games can be both challenging to the twitch-reaction hardcore crowd as well as approachable to the casuals alike, without dumbing it down so much that it becomes "Baby's First Video Game". The basic "Easy, Medium, Hard" system won't suffice forever.

A New Update Draws Near

2010-03-28T13:11:00.000-07:00

So today, I'm going to discuss a game's Longevity.

Longevity is a tricky virtue to apply to video games. Obviously, to sell your game, you will need to advertise some sort of 'replayability' factor: No-one will shell out full price for a game that can be completed in a week and have no further surprises in store. Some, but not all, video game reviewers will feature a "Longevity" score alongside their usual "Gameplay" and "Graphics" to emphasize the importance of this feature.

But longevity has its dark side. Because of its aforementioned importance, the developers will need to implement some manner of expanding their game's total playtime so it can be advertised gleefully on the back cover's blurb about containing "X number of hours of gameplay". Briefly (lol), I'll go over just some of the methods this expansion can be achieved, and discuss the relative merits of each.

1) Unlockable Difficulty Modes

Simple enough: Allowing players to unlock a harder version of the game AFTER the fact is simply stating "we weren't sure you were ready for this mode, but after completing the game, we're now fairly sure you are. I mean, unless you're chicken..." Provided the harder mode has, in fact, something to offer the player besides a frustrating time, it can be both the easiest and most effective way to give players a reason to play the entire game over.

2) Collectibles

This feature can be hit-or-miss. If there's a point to the collectibles (they might unlock bonus features like concept art, or power up the player's character in some way) then they can be a worthwhile pursuit during a quiet moment of any RPG or Sandbox game (where this feature is most common). Generally speaking, though, most people will prefer to use a guide to find these little MacGuffins rather than waste hours searching every nook and cranny themselves - or simply abandon the search all together. In this situation, it becomes a case of artificial longevity, and is of no use to anyone. The best instances of this feature usually give the players some way of finding them beyond checking everywhere - usually an item acquired late in the game that points them out on the map.

3) The Almighty 100%

Somewhat nefariously for those obsessive completists, a game will include an overall progress score somewhere in the game's interface. While a nice gesture from the developers to tell the player how close they are to seeing everything in the game, it's not always crystal clear what constitutes the grand total. It can mean different things for different games: Map Completion (Castlevania), Bestiary Completion (many recent JRPGs), Item Completion (JRPGs again), and Achievement Completion (any recent PS3/360 game). Sometimes it means leveling up a character or skill to its maximum: often a truly immense amount of time. Worst of all, there may be a few percentiles that were missed and will require an additional playthrough to chase down. And really, the only people who will dedicate themselves to this percentage are the die-hard completists - a regular player will probably not bother (or at least be sated with a lower number).

4) Mirror Worlds!

Oh fuck off.

5) Branching Paths

RPGs and Bioware in particular love this one. The usual format is to have a "good" and "evil" path, and strongly telegraph any choices a player must make that could fall into either one. Handled appropriately, the major decisions between good and evil usually boil down to a simple moral dilemma - though often, it's hard to tell which was the "right" option. Handled inappropriately, your character will often have the choice to give away large quantities of his money to a random hapless NPC, or tear their arms off, with scant middle ground. Unless the main character is a noted schizophrenic, this rarely comes off looking anything like a normal decision-making process and is therefore painfully obviously linked to the branching paths feature.

Sometimes the branching paths will simply be due to a random choice the player makes without them knowing the consequences of their decision, or indeed the significance of the decision when they made it. Mass Effect deserves special mention for having decisions made in the one game only come to fruition in the sequel (and presumably in the second sequel as well): It may well lead to a player having to play through the first two games to unlock a special mission or plotline in the third.

** Bonus Longevity Feature - Achievements **

Some lip service must be paid to this recent phenomenon - perhaps possibly the best recent example of a game-extending feature. Achievements are earned through various tasks, programmed into the game to recognize a milestone and given to the player to do whatever it is they like to do with their achievements. Gaze at them longingly? I don't know.

Generally speaking, they fall into five categories:
Progression - Kind of missing the point, since that's ostensibly what the person who bought the game intended to do with it - play it through to its end (or before then if they get too bored with it). Generally speaking, anyone who cares about achievements is someone who intends to play a game through to its completion.
Discovery - These are achievements, given sometimes effortlessly, that prod the player into trying something new. It can range from a special new move the player learns during the course of the game to a different type of game mode to any number of side- and sub-quests. The goal is, as stated, to raise awareness of everything the game has to offer and is therefore one of the better uses of the achievements system. It's usually the most common after the Progression type.
Collectibles - See "Collectibles" above. Usually a pain and often dealt with quickly with the help of an online guide, though some people love the scavenger hunt aspect of it all.
Black Holes - The worst type of achievement, these are rewarded for completing some huge target number of singular tasks. Most infamous would be Gears of War's 10000 online kills. Many games will feature a "Do X Y number of times" for no other reason than to keep the player playing for the length of time it requires. The Black Hole of the title simply refers to where all your time goes while completing these cynical attempts to pad out a game's longevity.
Whimsical - In my opinion the best kind of achievement, these are awarded for bizarre (and sometimes quite tricky) tasks. A prime example is escorting the gnome in Half-Life 2 Episode 2 to the rocket towards the end, or Borderlands' The Lonely Island shout-out "You're On A Boat!". They're usually very rare in Achievement sets and are often enigmatically hinted to in their descriptions instead of plainly explained.

Indistinct from the above, and falling into any of the five categories, are the Online-Only achievements and Secret achievements, both generally hated by most. Not all players have access to online content (or simply don't enjoy the anonymous hostility of online gaming) and Secret achievements usually have no point to their secrecy (with the one exception being to hide spoilers).

I may well come back to this article and add any other design feature intended to increase a game's longevity if I find any more. So you may have to come back from time to time to get the full caboodle.

(Heh, see what I did there?)

WISE FWOM YORR GWAVE

2009-07-26T18:22:00.000-07:00

After I started using Twitter I remembered how much I enjoyed having opinions on the internet that no-one will read. However the 160 character limit (you only have 140 you say? Oh. Well, keep at it and they'll make you "Elite" too) isn't always sufficient for my verbose ranting. Any casual reader to this blog (I just made myself chortle) knows I use fifteen squillion words when one (or any real number) would suffice.

So instead of trying to come up with content every week like some moron with motivation and dedication, I'll just occasionally update with whatever pops into my head.

Just to verify, for those wanting the full Mento internet experience:
My Twitter ( http://twitter.com/KingMento ) will be used for updates on what I'm playing and my opinions thereof, therefrom and wherefore. In that order.
My Backlog ( http://www.backloggery.com/mento ) is what I own and will intend to play in the future (pretty unimportant, unless you want to read some random internet stranger's playlist and recommend something. Why would you do that? You're weird.)
(I Love) My Dead Gay Blog ( this one ) which I will be about anything else. Nagging mostly.

I will christen/baptise/"anoint with unguents to appease Baphomet" this resurrected blog with a Game Design Observation. What a thrill ride. This is. This blog. Read on already I'm dying up here.

~~ Game Design Observation of the Week ~~

I lately tried the freeware game The Untitled Story (try it here: http://www.gamemakergames.com/?a=view&id=6278 ) and, while a very decent effort from a single dude using Gamemaker software, there were a few design choices I took issue with. Please note that these design decisions aren't exclusive to this fine (and free!) game and that I'm not picking on it because I'm a resentful hack. *Cough*. These could all be tropes already, in fact, on that TV Tropes site that I waste too much of my time on (though I haven't spotted them as of yet) due to how common they are. What design choices am I talking about? And why do I dislike them? Let's make a list, those are always received well by internet article places:

This Week - Money Glitch or Money Farm Conundrum.

A common instance in any RPG as well as Action/Adventure variants like Zeldas and Metroidvanias (especially the latter genre, where money and numbers in general aren't as relevant) is the appearance of a store where several useful items often necessary to the adventure can be purchased. As the Designer, you have to anticipate that the player will want these items as soon as they're available.

Common convention dictates that you should simply provide your player with sufficient funds to purchase everything available. You could do this by making the usual drops (from enemies or barrels or wherever else you think video game NPCs are likely to hide money in, like toilets or loved ones) plentiful enough to easily buy everything, making the whole money/shop element largely redundant. Or you could simply make the game's currency finite and a secondary collection subquest (such as the Red Jewels in Illusion of Gaia). Finally you could just withhold items until later in the game when it's more likely the player can afford them and are less able to break the game with them. This requires additional scripting flags and some consideration towards balance, so that's extra work the designer isn't interested in. Which leads us, inexorably, to the case below.

Unconventional wisdom dictates that you should present all the game's inventory in one spot and then make some of the items ridiculously expensive in the hopes it chases the gamer away until later on in the game when they have the funds. It will not. Today's crowd are a very anti-authoritative bunch, and if you tell them they're not ready to buy this item they will defy you even if it irritates the heck out of them. But not as much as missing out on something in the present would irritate them. The path of lesser irritation, if you will. So we come to the Money Glitch vs Money Farm decision.

You have anticipated that your players won't take no for an answer, so you can present them two options: Go fish, or a subtle hidden option that allows them to "break" the game's bank with a glitch. The "Go Fish" option is a fine decision if incurring the resentment of everyone who plays the game is your objective, but on the strange off-chance that it isn't, let's consider the glitch option instead. The best place to hide a money glitch is in some kind of nearby gambling mini-game that can be exploited with a little forethought. Don't make it too easy - you want the players to earn this money one way or another, so why not present a challenge that will make them feel superior over the game - even though their "cheating" has only really saved them some farming time. My Case Study example (see above) chooses not to do this - it will provide a gambling mini-game but that game will automatically deduct funds and save the game before you can reload. Forcibly quitting the game to get around this unwanted save will cause the game to kick your PC's RAM in the balls and run off. It very much wants you to earn vast amounts of currency the hard way.

With the Glitch option, the resulting "player confidence boost" costs you nothing as the designer, but it heightens the enjoyment of the player considerably. And if you believe that giving the players that much power will disturb the almighty "balance", just sic something horrible on them as the next boss. This is a battle of the egos after all, my friend.

As an end note, TVTropes does have something about measures a game may take to prevent players from having to endlessly farm gold or items or what have you, charmingly called "Anti-Poop Socking". The idea being that a player will remain fixed to his (I would make this pronoun gender neutral but I honestly don't believe it applies in this case) screen as they farm for hours, necessitating the need to poop in one's own sock rather than take a bathroom break. Ah, to proudly bear the mantle of "Gamer".

An End To Supertacularness

2008-05-27T13:15:00.000-07:00

Oh right, this thing. Yeah, I sort of abandoned it a few months back. Well, I got nothing interesting to say these days. Sorry. I figure I got enough game ideas here to sink the Bismarck, which would be an apt analogy if game ideas were torpedoes, which they are not to the best of my recollection.

SO.

So I've decided to list them all here in handy link form with very brief descriptions which you, the internet user, may feel free to browse (but try not to carouse). Otherwise, the blog or whatever it is is now officially dead. I'll try a slightly more engaging system to present ideas next time around, with pictures I hope. Everyone likes pictures.

In no particular order, besides alphabetical, I present all my, uh, stuff that I wrote:

Abyss Divers - Space-Sim - Command a group of starfighters/temporal-mechanics in order to shut down tears in the space/time fabric to bizarre alternate dimensions. Like a fishbowl. Totally Not: X-Wing vs TIE Fighter. At all, really.

Alien Abduction - Sandbox - Beam up anything of value from some random backwater planet to expand the cultural and educational horizons of your species (as well as boosting your bank account). Totally Not: GTA meets Destroy All Humans.

Alien Life - Exploration/Strategy - Environmental-minded alien academia take on opportunistic alien loggers in this thinly-veiled moral allegory about conservation. Totally Not: Captain Planet.

BrainTrain - Railroad/Strategy - Build the universe's first interplanetary railroad system avoiding alien menaces along the way. Totally Not: Railroad Tycoon with a sci-fi element and a dumb name. Actually, that's pretty much exactly what it is.

Capsule World - RTS/God-Sim - A world built up from random gifts, creating unique results each time. Totally Not: Black & White.

Carnage in Candyland - Squad-based TPS - Take control of a somewhat darker reimagining of a cherished childhood wonderland. Totally Not: Call of Duty with candy.

Castlevania: Between a Belmont and a Hot Place - Platformer/Action - Just a concept for a 2D Castlevania that looks into what happens to the titular castle between vamp-cullings. Totally Not: Castlevania.

Choose Your Own Video Game - Multi-genre - Direct how you want your game to play out genre-wise. Sick of jumping puzzles? Get rid of them. Hordes of enemies to shoot down? You got it. Totally Not: Every game ever, combined.

Deep - RPG/Digger - Explore the mysterious past of your planet, shovel-first. An excavation full of excitement exclamations. So to speak. Totally Not: Mr Driller.

Dumbgeneers - Strategy/RPG/God-Sim - Omnipotentally protect a group of barely-functional dumbasses so they can get rich and powerful and spread the good word of you, the omnipresent director guy there. Totally Not: Worms, except they go underground this time instead of what they normally do.

Fire & Ice - RTS - Take control of elemental factions embroiled in a religious civil war. Fireballs versus blueballs. Because they're made of ice. That's what that means. Totally Not: War Wind, because only I remember that game.

Freakshow Simulator - World-Sim - Build your own freakshow by hiring freaks or making them. Then get rubes to pay to see 'em. Totally Not: Theme Park or the movie Freaked (aka Hideous Mutant Freakz).

Godhood - Action/Adventure - Smash cultists to smithereens to reclaim your divine heritage, one piece at a time. Totally Not: God of War.

Hammerspace - Action/Platformer - A lovesong to Looney Toons and cartoons in general. Refill the universal inventory of props that all cartoon characters depend on. Totally Not: Katamari Damacy.

Identikit Heroes - Team-based RPG - Create a bunch of heroes from bits and pieces and let them go to town. The parts decide their powers and abilities. Totally Not: LEGO Diablo. But wouldn't that game be awesome too?

Interdimensional Bandits - Stealth/Action/Strategy - Become leader of a gang of thieves and pillage all sorts of eras and dimensions for illicit booty. No, not that kind. Totally Not: Time Bandits, the movie. That had little people. This has regular-sized people. Mostly.

Item Quest - RPG/Strategy - The collectible subquest becomes the main quest in this colossal dungeon-delver/treasure-hoarder. A cure for kleptomania. Totally Not: Diablo, but with Scrooge McDuck's money bin to store stuff in.

Literamancy - RPG/Word Puzzle - Create three-letter spells to defend your kingdom or accidentally blow it up, depending on how easily amused you are. Totally Not: Boggle.

Luddite - Platformer/Stealth - Blowing up giant robotic aliens from the inside. Totally Not: Shadow of the Colossus.

Master of Magic In Space - World-Sim/Strategy - Take your magic mastery to the next level in this unnecessary sequel. Totally Not: Master of Magic in space, only it totally is.

Sacrifice - Squad FPS/TPS - Send troops to their probable deaths, rewind, repeat until you get it right. Or within an acceptable casualty limit. Totally Not: Lemmings.

Sky Citadel - RPG/Strategy - Conquer and control a mighty sky fortress in the time of sky pirates. Not that such a time existed, but still. You got a damn sky castle, who cares about factually-accurate historical details? Totally Not: Skies of Arcadia.

Spam Fight Simulator - RPG/Shooter/Beat-Em-Up - Take out that annoying spam in style. Shoot down wiener pill ads in phallic-shaped starfighters for extra irony fun. Totally Not: Gmail's spam filter. Because that shit don't work.

Super Mario RPG Suikoden - RPG/RTS - A merging of the Mario RPG series with Suikoden, taking the world from the former with the large cast and RTS battles of the latter. Totally Not: Super Mario RPG or Suikoden. But combined. You see?

Ultimate Showdown, The - Online FPS - A fanboyish internet song, made reality. Video game reality at least. You'll believe a Care Bear can take down Godzilla with the handy handicap system. Totally Not: An internet fad way past its prime.

Take a gander also at the Design series, including: Design Genres for ideas for all the different genres out there, the Design Licenses for ideas that require copyrighted material such as TV shows and Design Elements for ideas that focus on commonly-occuring video game elements.

Also of note is the 100 Game Ideas thing I pulled off after ten arduous weeks. They're mostly joke ideas, but there's some gems buried in there somewhere. Buried deep, deep down. Use a metal detector.

See you next time eating the pudding.

- AJI/Mento.

Contact: spento@gmail.com
or King Mento on XBL if you got dat XBox 360.

Design Element #5: NPCs

2008-02-01T10:03:00.001-08:00

NPCs. Non-Player Characters. Essentially, they are any character in a video game (or tabletop game) that isn't you. This includes your many antagonists, bystanders and non (directly) controllable followers, which are all controlled by the in-game AI. The term NPC does have a slightly more refined and condensed definition, specifically used in RPGs, which limits the term "NPC" to any important, developed character that isn't controlled by a human player. So a named innkeeper that has their own gruff personality might be an NPC while a mindless, nameless zombie opponent might not.

For the purposes of this Design Element article, I'll be discussing the use of NPCs in a hypothetical free-roaming RPG (similar to an MMO like World of Warcraft, or a single-player RPG like the Elder Scrolls series) which allows you to hire NPC assistants, all of which have parameters and statistics randomly generated from a complex algorithm. Such a game may already exist, but it's been my experience that any game that uses developed NPC hirelings (such as Neverwinter Nights) uses specially created characters that remain identical for each playthrough.

These generated NPCs will follow some basic rules. For instance, a character that generates a low strength roll will not be a fighter - the stats will be generated first and then the game will simply assign the class that best suits those stats. It will then follow by generating, in order, the character's history (based on the class and stats), personality (based on the history - a troubled history will no doubt create a troubled character) and quirks (which, of course, will come from the personality aspect). A character's quirks may end up creating complications, but may also create various boons to that character, such a strong aversion to one type of enemy. Since the quirks are the last thing to be generated, they are also the least predictable, since they depend on every previous generated factor turning out a certain way. Therefore, players should always be on the lookout for a character with a generous assignment of positive quirks as they will be the rarest and most valuable allies to have.

Additionally, because the generation process can end up creating a dud and an overpowered freak respectively, the game will make a note of how powerful your hireling is and attach an experience handicap. Like golf, this handicap will boost or penalize the character depending on how good he is. As such, a powerful character will go up levels far slower than a weak character, who in turn will become high level very quickly and less of a liability as time goes on. This system is a variation of 3rd Edition D&D's Challenge Rating-affected character raising system that denies players controlling a particularly powerful race (such as half-dragon) from levelling up at an equal rate to their peers, to reflect that character's enhanced starting parameters. For simplicity's sake and also so the system can be balanced easier by the designers, the highest handicap will be x0.5 and the lowest x2.0.

The following are a few NPC "tags" that will strongly effect the NPC's usefulness and growth. These tags are generated along with everything else about the character and can often be very rare occurances. Most tags will be displayed on that character's readout during the hiring process and may also be worth your consideration--along with class and stats--when deciding who to hire.

Destiny - The destiny tag reveals that the NPC has some important factor about themselves which will come to light at a certain point of your adventure (should you stumble across the thing that triggers it). If a character with the Destiny tag is invoked (created by the generation tool, in other words) and hired, the game will generate a "secret" backstory for that character based on a selection of various RPG standards (or clichés) for a mysterious character hook. These can include the following:

Prince/Princess of a lost or remote kingdom, hidden and raised in obscurity so that the enemies of that kingdom's royal family might never find them, allowing the royal line to continue. Obviously, to resolve the destiny of this NPC would require discovering this kingdom and their heritage. It may also include defeating the kingdom's current usurpers and recovering the throne. Fulfilling this destiny may grant all sorts of riches and bonuses to the NPC (and also therefore to the character who hired them and helped them reclaim their kingdom).
A cult's chosen one. This may go very, very well or very, very badly depending on the cult. The game will have various story-developed cults, both active and abandoned, with a different destiny for each cult's respective chosen one. You may assist the cult in enacting that destiny with your hireling, or try your hardest to stop them. Obviously a doomsday cult should not be allowed anywhere near their chosen one. Inversely, a cult looking for the avatar of their fallen deity might be a good idea to invest some time into.
The successor to another NPC's legacy. Various powerful non-hired NPCs populate the world and while the world's dungeons, hirelings and even topography may be randomly generated, these faction leaders stay the same. They're like the major characters in any kind of highly developed RPG world, like the Forgotten Realm's various famous personalities. A destiny-tagged hireling may have various aspects in common with any of these major NPCs and may decide to align themselves with them (or perhaps take over their legacy) instead of staying with you. As such, whenever the opportunity to enact this successor destiny presents itself, the NPC will do just that with or without your consent. Though this sort of Destiny will probably be irksome and entirely unexpected, there may be clues in the character's backstory and personality profiles which hint at an affinity to the chosen major NPC. Obviously a wizard with the Destiny tag and a personality that mentions "may be willing to do anything to increase their powers" will probably not result in anything good, especially with a famous power-mad lich character on the loose. The in-game hints will probably be a little less overt, however.

As you can see, the Destiny tag can end up being either a boon or a hindrance and will probably end up with you losing that NPC as they go off on their destined path without you. But it should be an interesting ride nonetheless and could grant you all sorts of advantages down the road. The friendship of a monarch or repowered deity would probably come in handy.

Epic - An Epic NPC hireling is one that will eventually be able to pass the regular level cap for NPC characters and become a truly powerful ally. Because not everyone in the world is capable of such a feat, the Epic tag is reasonably rare. Epic NPCs will also be able to unlock all sorts of powers and abilities they would not normally be able to, such as learning magic if they're a warrior class (provided they have a high intelligence stat) or being able to heal due to some divine sponsorship (when a God takes special interest in an amazing NPC). The downside, of course, is that the Epic tag traditionally only affects the over-powered characters that level as quickly as molasses in January. It can, however, and this is rarer still, affect those of a moderately powered character with halfway decent level progression. Such characters will be NPC gold if you can find them.

Cursed - Opposing the Epic tag is the Cursed tag, which works in a similar but usually far more negative way. Like Epic, it will unlock various randomized abilities at random levels. These abilities will almost always be bad. Like a strong allergy to water or lycanthropy; leading to a berserk, uncontrollable werewolf character during nights with a full moon. The plus side is that the game takes the Cursed tag as a major negative character aspect and will therefore increase the XP gain that character will receive in turn. This will mean a highly overpowered but Cursed character will go up levels quickly as if they were a weakling. Of course, this means you'll be stumped with all kinds of random fun maladies later on in that NPC's growth.

Betrayer - Unlike most of the other tags, the Betrayer tag is a secret one that the game will conceal from you. You won't receive any hints that this character will eventually betray you at your darkest hour, either because of some sociopathic disorder or simply because it would mean their fame and fortune. NPCs with the Betrayer tag exhibit no unusual behavior patterns or a change in their abilities and powers. The Betrayer tag is, fortunately, as rare as most of the tags and there's a chance they will simply abandon you after too long instead of stabbing you in the back at a crucial moment. Still, creating this sense of distrust among your hirelings should create some interesting drama and will stop you from being too dependant on the hired help.

I may cover more NPC aspects and tags in a future update, using the same hypothetical game template. Perhaps it will be tweaked for a sci-fi theme next time.

Top Games of 2007

2008-01-29T17:50:00.000-08:00

Just a round-up for anyone interested in what I was playing last year. Keep in mind I had basically no money in 2007, so this is by no means taken from the full list of quality titles that came out last year. Just the ones I cared enough to fork out for, or at least rent (or liberally borrow from the internet, but only in a few cases. Honest.) :

1. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)
- Sort of obvious, really. A pureblooded Mario platformer is on average as fun as supermodels in jello, and this one was the best one yet.

2. Mass Effect (XB360)
- My XB360 game of the year is Bioware's Mass Effect, a game I ended up renting three times overall. The combat never gets boring (despite having rather dumb enemies for an FPS) and the exploration elements were top-notch - I loved scanning the planets for valuables and reading their detailed histories (I know, nerdy). What this game really does for me, though, is create that optimistic Dark Chronicle feeling: that the first game was the flawed experiment of a new format which the inevitable sequel will nail perfectly.

3. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
- Technically a 2006 game, though Europe (and therefore I) didn't get to play it until February of last year. Fantastic game that distanced itself from the tired traditions of the series while retaining the Final Fantasy charm.

4. Bioshock (XB360)
- Bioshock already got reviewed once by me. It's somewhere on the blog, go look for it.

5. Rogue Galaxy (PS2)
- My inevitable Level-5 entry, Rogue Galaxy was a little more generic than Dark Chronicle but still maintained a high level of RPGing quality with much, much to do by way of sidequests and the like. The weapon system was similar but improved, the Hunter missions were fun and time-absorbing and the whole setting - an intergalactic pirate ship out to find the galaxy's greatest treasure one planet at a time - is perfect for an exploration-based RPG. Outshone by Mass Effect in terms of sheer spectacle and size, but a great little game nonetheless.

6. Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2 (DS)
Yep, compulsory elitist video game snob entry of a Japanese-only release with a unpronounceable name. Ouendan 2 is a sequel to the similarly-named hit DS rhythm game and continues its mission to bring cheer and bolster confidence to people on the edge of failing some monumental event of their lives. As well as the comedy aspect (largely intact despite the dialogue being entirely in Japanese), the game continues to be devilishly difficult and fun at the same time. The songs have improved and a few very convenient features have been added (some from the ill-received US version, Elite Beat Agents). It's a nigh-perfect DS game.

7. Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (DS)
- Widely reported to be the best DS game of 2007 and one I'd agree with if I hadn't wasted an exorbitant amount of time on Ouendan 2. A similar case to Mario Galaxy: the Zelda developers could've phoned it in - the name alone would've shifted a million copies without even trying - but went ahead and created a fantastic, innovative game anyway.

8. Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria (PS2)
- Valkyrie Profile 2 is the first chance, along with the PSP port of the original, for many European gamers to play this fantastic Norse God-based RPG series from Tri-Ace. You only have a small cast of "normal" human characters - the bulk of your adventuring group comes from Einherjar: the glorious dead that the Valkyries are charged with delivering to Asgard, the home of the Gods. This dynamic party of characters, coupled with unique 2D exploration and an almost-real-time strategic battle system brings together one of the finest RPGs I played last year.

9. Metroid Prime III (Wii)
- Included as part of the "most improved" category. The second game kind of dropped the ball, giving the game an interesting (if occasionally exasperating) gimmick but nothing else new. The third takes full advantage of the Wii, no mean feat for an already stable engine, as well as adding a whole bunch of cool new elements, such as remote controlling your ship to assist you in crucial missions.

10. Eledees (Wii)
- Guilty pleasure time. Eledees (Elebits in the US) is essentially hide-and-seek with a HL2-esque gravity gun, allowing you to throw the furniture around as you seek out tiny electric-based lifeforms and capture them. The more you capture, the more power the surrounding electronic objects gain and the resulting power boost increases the weight limit of the items you can toss around. It becomes addictive fun very quickly and perfect for those of us who have always wanted to trash a house with little effort.

Ten Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order):
Blue Dragon (XB360) (Cute RPG with lots to explore but essentially flawed)
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (DS) (Terrific 2D Castlevania, like most of them)
Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol (DS) (Brilliant sequel to the GC classic)
Drawn to Life (DS) (Innovative "draw the stuff you need" platformer)
Eternal Sonata (XB360) (Another cute RPG with repetition problems)
Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales (DS) (Minigames galore in this card-battling curio)
God of War II (PS2) (Hyper-violent, button-mashing myth-them-up)
Overlord (XB360) (Like Pikmin, only with way more carnage and farting)
Puzzle Quest (DS) (Bejeweled/Zoo Keeper with a great RPG built around it)
Super Paper Mario (Wii) (A decent, but not amazing, RPG/Platformer hybrid)

Games I didn't get to play but will acknowledge that they may have made the top ten list had I played them: COD4, Guitar Hero 2 (and 3, and Rock Band for that matter), Orange Box (including Portal, which sounds great), Crackdown and either of the new Pokemon

Games which were out in 2007 in Japan/US but aren't out until 2008 in Europe and may make next year's list: Beautiful Katamari, Persona 3, Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaro's Treasure.

And finally, fuck Halo 3.

Thank you and good night.

Game Idea: Luddite

2008-01-18T18:26:00.001-08:00

Yet another strategy game I'm afraid, though one that requires an equal mix of smarts and explosions. I know, those two things aren't usually the busomest of buddies, but I figure everyone likes explosions and the smarts are sort of unnecessary once you get into it.

You're a demolitions expert, one that is currently part of a guerrilla team of rebels fighting a conquering race of colossal mechanical creatures. In order to bring down these mechanical titans, you need to blow them up from inside their own power shielding, which renders them invulnerable from outside weaponry (which is how they took over your world so quickly). A second factor is their repair-bot technology which allows them to quickly replicate any damage by speedily reforging lost metal parts and repairing/welding holes and the like. As such, you need to move fast and create a network of explosives that will destroy the creatures utterly once set off, detonating every vital part before they have a chance to recover.

As such, you need to study the theoretical blueprints, reverse-engineered by fellow rebel scientists who have a vague understanding of how these synthetic aliens work, and plant all the necessary explosives before being discovered and then escaping the creature's proximity before the bombs go off. Sounds simple enough, right?

The gameplay is in the form of a stealthy platformer with multi-goal-based objectives (such as "go here and then here and then here" rather than a single course through the level) and a constantly moving and dynamic "stage", similar to the bosses in Shadow of the Colossus, though far larger and less personal. You have to evade not only the detection systems of the gigantic robot you're walking over and under (which tend to be in the form of smaller robotic parts shaped like alarms and cameras) but also the repair-bots themselves, who will identify you as a mechanical error and try to fix you. Just to clarify: you don't want to be fixed by those things. You have little in the way of weaponry, since most of your carrying capacity is taken up by the many explosives you need to plant, so discretion is the key. You can actually blow up the repair-bots without immediate detection if you're careful, since there's a delay between the destruction of a repair-bot and the time when the lost signal is acknowledged by the main lifeform, but this will mean speeding up your work since you now have a time-limit. Prolonged detection or the acknowledgement of a lost signal will mean highly corrosive gas will be vented throughout all areas of the lifeform, eliminating any organic life (such as yourself) that may have gotten in - You can, however, escape the gas by retreating temporarily and trying again later (hopefully with all the planted explosives still in place).

Your character is also equipped with a lightweight flying apparatus which can be unfurled and escaped on when necessary to escape the gigantic robot, either before it vents the gas or before the explosives go off. A partially destructive result (PDR) will not destroy the lifeform but its repairs could take a considerable amount of time to complete, based on how many explosives went off and how many repair-bots you put out of commission. A completely destructive result (CDR) will eliminate the creature entirely, allowing you to move onto the next one. Each being has its own personality and appearance, ranging from humanoid to animalistic to far more conventional "mechanical" shapes such as a giant sphere or a tank. It's up to the pre-mission theoretical blueprints and the various modifications to those plans while on the job to decide where best to plant the explosives. Sometimes, some reconnaissance is necessary for an informed decision of where best to strike - your colleagues can interpret what you're seeing from a video feed from your beneficial vantage point this close to the creatures and may often change their minds about the best spots to place an explosive.

Obviously, the danger level will be considerable, since you're carrying a lot of dangerous materials and have very little to defend yourself with. In most cases, you can simply dump the explosives and get the hell out if it's getting too risky. The explosives aren't easy to get ahold of, but they're far more replaceable than you are (which makes a welcome change). You can decide to leave the explosives (both planted and abandoned) where they are if you escaped without detection, or set them off to create a distraction to escape in as well as give you a head-start on the next attempt. The robot will recover the damage quickly if you failed to destroy it completely and be more alert for your next attempt, but may still be distracted with repairs when your next attempt is ready to go.

The tense, time-sensitive action, the deliberate decisions needed when calculating the optimum destruction as well as the non-obtrusive-but-still-sort-of-prevalent stealth elements should be a decent package. The massive majesty of your antagonists should cause some amount of awe and dread too.

Game Idea: Capsule World

2008-01-11T20:09:00.000-08:00

This game idea is partly (mostly) based on Kinder Surprise toys, which are awesome to the max. Or were. Back when I was a kid. In the late 80s. Which was also, coincidentally, the last era where it was socially acceptable to say "awesome to the max".

Capsule World is similar to a world-based God-Sim such as Civilization or Black & White. You have full control over the development of the little area of the world that your people reside in, and partial control over the rest of the currently barren planetoid. In order to populate your world with a plethora of interesting specimens and artifacts, and also increase the physical, cultural and educational boundaries of your existing followers, you need to resort to the "divine tumbler": Basically one of those giant egg machines you find in arcades and outside convenience stores where you crank the handle and a capsule comes out - only really, really big. The resulting capsule, in the context of the game, can contain almost absolutely anything. However, once hatched, the capsule's contents must be placed somewhere on the Capsule World - at which point it will blend in and become part of it.

These capsule contents can vary in their usefulness. Almost all have an inherent value and will, at the very least, make your world a little bit more interesting to live in. They can range from mundane tools, such as giant deposits of valuable minerals or metals as well as lush forests and seas, to the slightly inconvenient, such as dinosaurs or the undead. Once added to the world they become an indelible and inseparable element of it. Your denizens will react to their new gifts/neighbors as best as they are able, though the net gain might not always be as positive as one might hope.

Your main tasks are to concentrate on the safety and happiness of your people and integrate these new random elements as best you can. The game will pause the action going on planet-side every so often for a compulsory capsule addition, though you are able to add new elements at any time yourself. More capsules means more variation in your world which will ultimately net you a higher score as the world eventually develops into a somewhat strange but beautiful and (importantly) "complete" world. It's recommended you get a new capsule every time you've stabilized the effects of the previous capsule - this way you can maximize the benefits of the additions and their enhancement on the world without losing too much stability among your citizenry (along with not losing the citizenry itself).

While you can control the population as a whole, defining where their research and development should work towards (in proper Civilization fashion) as well as setting up defenses and such, the people tend to think and act for themselves. This includes curiosity, something inherently human and inescapable. Your people will attempt to explore and interact with any capsule additions as they appear as dictated by their natural curiosity. This may lead to many unfortunate incidents as they come to terms to what has just landed on their world and their changed reactions to the world and to you (since, as their god, they blame you for everything). It's up to you to manage those incidents amongst everything else. Your people aren't stupid though, so anything dangerous will be given a wide berth if too many lives are lost and anything beneficial will be mined and exploited as effectively as possible.

The people will also, charmingly, come up with their own ideas about what these new additions are and why they were placed here, based on the kind of history your world has had so far and their relationship to their maker. For instance, if most of the capsules have been bad news until now, your people will be generally pessimistic and may view the advent of a genuinely advantageous capsule as a trap, something new for the tyrant deity to break their wills with. Inversely, if it's been nothing but milk and honey for your people up to this point, something like the coming of gigantic deadly insects will be accepted gingerly by your people as some adorable buzzy friends to play with (until they start eating people, that is). These analyses from your people are generally based on their overall happiness score which will eventually even out to a moderate and informed level as they grow in intelligence and wisdom. A mixture of both good and bad additions is necessary for the people to retain a sense of cautiousness as well as happiness.

Important focuses when developing this game will be to include a highly playable and configurable god sim with a truly diverse cast of additional elements to establish on the world. Ideally, such a set-up will recreate a near endless amount of variations and, therefore, a considerable amount of replayability. A finished world, with all the strange elements integrated effortlessly and overlapping one another, along with an ongoing timeline of what joined the world and when, as well as a diverse population of people thriving due to (or in spite of) the additions should be a thing of wonder for the player to want to look back on, or perhaps share with others.

Game Idea: Sacrifice

2008-01-04T17:21:00.001-08:00

Okay, so, the exact mechanics of this idea is still a little nebulous for the time being, since I don't want to make another Lemmings thing so soon. So the actual game may end up being a lot different. Since this idea is sort of broad, I can later apply it to the genre of my choosing (currently, it's a third-person shooter thing, though could easily be something else). I also mess around with the concept of time manipulation again, which I still don't think we've seen the last of after the success of the Prince of Persia games (and Blinx to a lesser extent).

You control a squad (or a clan or a bunch of dudes) of some kind. You have a series of tasks to perform, but they are highly dangerous due to the enemy's resources vastly outnumbering your own. In fact, the only way to achieve these missions is through various life-threatening exercises, such as experimenting with the enemy's defences, using units as bait to draw out the worst elements and various other techniques that will no doubt end in you losing one (or many) of your units for the sake of the mission. Upon achieving the mission objective, though, you can reverse time and regain all your lost units, while still succeeding with the mission - the goal of which may vary to things like a top secret item you need to recover (which you take with you when you go back in time) or learning an important code or password (which you can memorize before returning).

In order to pull these missions off, you need to get your commander (the player character, in other words) into the enemy base without him dying. The rest of the units, however, are entirely expendable, since you'll be getting them back once time resets. Of course, they're not aware of this (and won't ever be as long as you keep resetting time) and so will need some coaxing to perform anything too dangerous. They aren't die-happy fanatics, nor are they stupid, so you'll have to be inventive if you're putting them in harm's way for the greater good. So no simply strapping explosives onto them and getting them to run at enemy enclosures. Losses are always to be expected though, via the enemy's superior weaponry or traps or any other kind of security measure so don't think your success is based on how many of your units survive. In fact, you may need to repeat the mission a few times (by going back in time before achieving the objective) to get a sense of where all the dangers are. Since your troops won't remember, you can get them to obliviously set off any booby trap or hidden ambush without risking yourself.

The appeal of this game will be twofold: First, and most obvious, is that sense of sadistic fun that's been a staple of these kinds of management games since they first began. The second is that it will allow some really inventive (and cruel) level design: The designers will want to constantly challenge the player with apparently impossible situations to get through, where the only way to win the mission is to lose almost everything else in the process. It should still be difficult to solve even after you get all your subordinates to trip every kind of nasty surprise out there. As long as you play by the golden rule of always keeping your main character safe and out of harm's way (he's a bit of a cad), you can experiment with various tactics as often as it takes before making a run for the goal yourself. Your hapless troops are just going to have to bite the bullet a few times first. In the unfortunately literal sense, in most cases.

Design Genres #17: FPS

2007-12-27T21:16:00.000-08:00

Seems odd that I've covered 16 of these Design Genres without covering the noble FPS, possibly the most popular (and most populous) of the genres aimed for the Western market. The appeal is immediately apparent: FPS puts you directly in control, point-of-view and everything, of the game's protagonist - giving you an unparalleled level of immersion. The commonly high amount of violent content also helps sales somewhat. Milestone games include Castle Wolfenstein 3D, the Doom series, the Half-Life series and server-inundated online FPSes such as Team Fortress and the incomparable Counter-Strike.

There's two reasons I've given this genre a wide berth in this blog until now. The first is that I don't much care for it on the whole. While the games mentioned above are classic staples of any gamer's library (god knows I've played and owned most of them) there are many, many examples of the genre out there, most of which are mindlessly derivative and not all that great, frankly. Which brings me onto the second reason: there's such a huge market of these things that innovation is hard to come by and, thus, harder still to come up with without some important technological breakthroughs (Half-Life 2 wouldn't have mattered so much without its iconic Gravity Gun, for instance).

Now, the difficult decision when coming up with an FPS game idea is whether to take the simple route or the complex route. A reason why the FPS genre is so strong is its relative simplicity: you simply point at a bad guy and press a button until he goes away. As such, it's almost a form of relaxation for some people: a way to blow off steam for a few minutes either against the combined forces of evil in one-player mode or a bunch of friends on multiplayer. So making it simple would appear to be the best course of action, perhaps even shortening the range of weapons and enemies you might meet to minimize confusion. Games like Halo pride themselves on their microscopic range and lack of innovation - choosing to focus instead on the bare essentials and multiplayer, thus becoming the beloved of all casual gamers the world over.

On the other end of the spectrum, players don't feel challenged unless there's a new gimmick or, perish the thought, some sort of thought process required. Games like Rainbow Six give you a somewhat realistic level of health (that is, one round in the chest or head and you're done for) and so some amount of strategy and forethought is needed in order to come out unscathed. Games like Gears of War will kill you quickly and mercilessly unless you regularly take advantage of cover. Mass Effect, a game I very much enjoyed recently, even bases an RPG system around the combat, allowing you greater control with your weapons upon levelling up and even providing psionic attacks (called Biotech in the game) and various clever less-hazardous methods to take out the enemy (like short-circuiting a robotic enemy). Bioshock, Deus Ex and the System Shock series are all examples of an "intelligent" FPS game.

I'll quickly outline two game ideas that respectively adhere to the philosophies above. In other words, an idea for a brainless slugfest and an idea for a complex shooter with more going on than meets the eye.

IDEA #1: Now, the main feature of a game idea like this is to simply make it fun and highly playable, something which is usually provided with sharp and accurate programming. On the design side of things, all a designer needs to do is make sure the levels aren't too complex, don't require a lot of backtracking for keys and the like while configuring the amount of content to keep it a minimalist paradise. At the same time, they need to direct most of the action, keeping the game constantly exciting with a series of action set pieces and a plot that never waivers too much or gets too complex at any given point.

What this pre-idea prattle all means is that it is hard to simply come up with an idea for a game such as this without writing the entire game's story and claiming that as the game idea. In this blog I always tend to concentrate on elements I would feature or a trend or gimmick I would employ, rather than create an entire game world and story from scratch. So for Idea #1 for this genre I'll outline some kickass scenarios an FPS game could follow:

A) You're a space marine who.. wait
B) You're a regular marine who has to fight off an alien incursi.. wait
C) You're a regular marine who doesn't fight aliens at all, but instead has to fight the undea.. wait
D) You're a regular marine who doesn't fight any kind of fictional fantasy creature, but instead must take on Nazis in Normand.. wait
E) Vietcong? ..No?
E) No aliens, undead, Nazis, the VC, ninjas, conspirators against the presidency, pirates, scientists, mercenaries or evil penguins. Instead, you're in this underwater city that.. oh damn it all, I give up.

IDEA #2: Here we are, gimmick county USA. Right at home. For this idea we'll imagine that there's some novel scenario that we're following. The gimmick is that one of your weapons can disintegrate tiny objects if you shoot them with it. While mostly useless in busy firefights, where firepower and running around like a crazyman until everything else is dead is the objective to success, it becomes useful at certain points in long-drawn out battles or pre-battle sneakery. For instance, a giant robot would have several smaller parts that it requires for movement and blasting at you. A tiny cog in the right section gets disintegrated and ol' Devastator is in a heap of trouble. Likewise, dissolving the correct piece of minor machinery in an automatic lock would allow you to get past. It works on organic creatures too. Can't get past the body armor? Disintegrate one of the dude's eyes. That should keep him distracted for a few moments.

This weapon, though powerful at the right moment, would require such precision timing and aiming to be effectively useless in most situations. But the situations where it can be used.. oh me, oh my.

Another gimmick, preferably in a game where you can slowly regenerate, is realistic body part damage. If you manage to fuck up your foot in a mine trap, your speed is lowered. Bust your arm and your aim goes down. Bust up one hand bad enough and you may need to switch weapons, also lowering aim (if you don't happen to be ambidextrous). I have a feeling there are games that have done this in the past and were a complete pain, especially if you had to limp slowly to the nearest health pack. Hence the insistence of a regeneration feature.

A third and final gimmick is one where the gravity suddenly cuts out (so presumably this is in space, then) and you're suddenly drifting. Shooting anything, if sleeping through Physics has taught me anything, would propel one backwards from the force, since the recoil would be sufficient enough force to move a large mass (such as an armored trooper) in zero-G. Your first priority in that situation would be to either turn the gravity back on or find some way to stop floating around like a loon. Again, something like this has probably already been done, though I don't know if that game turned it into such a fun little "how the hell do I stop floating around?" puzzle to figure out first.

Game Idea: Carnage in Candyland

2007-12-21T17:26:00.000-08:00

Kind of a low-brow game idea this one, but it's for the kids and kind of suits the festive season anyway. At least it does if you eat as much sugary stuff as I do over Christmas.

The game is set in one of these worlds that is brought into existence from the shared imaginative power of kids the world over, sort of like Santa's workshop. However, it has long been out of the hands of its childlike progenitors, either because the kids have forgotten it or have grown up to become moody adults with issues and the like. As a result, the Candyworld has become sort of a dark and violent place, but still with all the coma-inducing sweetness in every corner of the land and its inhabitants. Currently, the various tribes of the world (which are typified by the type of candy those tribes are comprised of) are in the midst of a bloody and endless war for supremacy.

You are a member of a new tribe that has shown up because of a candy-based innovation in the real world. As such, you not only have to survive with the limited support of your fledling tribe, but also grow powerful enough to take over the other tribes too. Fortunately, as the newest and therefore most technologically advanced form of candy matter, you have an advantage over most of the other tribes, which feature--but aren't limited to--beings made out of marshmallows, chocolates, lollipops, boiled/hard sweets and the always terrifying fudge tribe. The player's tribe I haven't decided on yet, but I'm thinking it'll be some kind of space-age candy that is able to take on the attributes of any other candy, to create some sort of power-acquisition-based progression in the game (taking over one tribe's territory allows you to use their strengths, for instance).

The game itself is a third-person squad-based shooter, though I've yet to decide on an "over-the-shoulder" view system of many recent squad-based games, or the slightly more convenient bird's eye view. The world itself will be a little like Crackdown or GTA, in that the politics of the world is dynamic with the NPC tribes scoring various victories and losses against each other in real-time - these battles, if you're not actually in the vicinity of them, will be calculated using randomized figures for casualties and who ends up getting more territory out of it. If you are close by, the battle will be going on all around you and you can use the warring (and therefore distracted) tribespeoples to your advantage. These tribal wars are mostly random, but constant, so you should find yourself entering several by accident. Of course, you'll also want to make an effort to join them as soon as one occurs if you want to take down the enemy's numbers quicker. There'll also be various attacks on your home base which you may want to be present for (though your tribe should be able to handle most minor skirmishes). You'll be given the choice of systematically destroying one tribe at a time, or using your intel to take down large numbers of opponents at the most opportune moments (the aforementioned tribe wars).

Ideally, you should want to find a way to acquire the abilities of one tribe and use them on another tribe that may be weak against them. Sort of like the Mega Man bosses. If you take out the Warheads (extremely hot-flavored candies) you can use their firebreath to melt the marshmallows and chocolate factions, who are considerably strong against other forms of damage. Because there's no blood (but lots of jelly filling), the game can be as gleefully violent as it wants. The cutscenes can be gritty as all hell (especially if they involve cotton candy) and the various deaths of the candy tribes can be pretty explicit, since it's just candy and all.

I will admit to two things while coming up with this idea. The first is that the general premise (violence in candyland) came about from this Perry Bible Fellowship comic (great comic series by the way, if you didn't already know). The second is that this is sort of an example of how to get incredibly violent games into the hands of youngsters without too much controversy. See, it'll be violent and bloody (well, jelly-y) but there won't be any swears or bad polygon boobs to make it unholy filth. Perfect.

Game Idea: Dumbgeneers

2007-12-14T18:09:00.000-08:00

This idea kind of builds on various elements of other ideas I've had, which is shorthand for "after ripping off so many other game designs for ideas, I'm now resorting to ripping off myself for ideas". Only pretend I didn't say that. I'm innovating. That's what's going on here and that's all that's going on here.

We zoom out so our token party of adventurers are shrunk down and we (the player) are able to see a large cut-section of the dungeon the adventurers are about to explore. Now, the gameplay's focus (and much of the humor) comes from the fact that these entirely computer-controlled adventurers are dumb. They will wander into pretty much any impossible situation without a thought and quickly perish. They do have some amount of combat ability and magic between them, but their ability to apply it effectively is limited. So, as is usual in these scenarios, it's up to you to try and keep them out of trouble, while still procuring for them enough treasure to make the entire ordeal worth it.

The adventurers will level and haul treasure around like they do in any other hack and slash, but generally their role is minimal. You, the player, control a guardian deity of sorts that is using its diminishing divine powers to keep the small gaggle of true believers alive long enough for them to start influencing others and restoring your strength. The fact that these morons are the only worshippers you have, who in actuality only wrote your name as their patron deity on their Adventurer License application forms to avoid requiring a referral from any of the established churches of the land, is causing you some grief. You have some limited amount of godly powers in this role and can directly influence parts of the dungeons for the benefit and safety of the goonish heralds you're stuck with. These powers include forcing stone passages to open/close, increasing the water levels, flooding chambers with poisonous gas and other powers based on any given dungeon's natural attributes. A volcano dungeon (I always use a volcano as an example for some reason, strange huh?) might allow you to raise/lower the level of deadly lava, but only while you and the adventurers are in that dungeon. An ice dungeon wouldn't have lava, so you can't use the same power there. That's just an example, the point being is that every new dungeon will have its own tricks and related powers, and it'll be up to you to explore and experiment with what you can do before the adventurers tumble along into whatever trap is set along their path.

Which brings us to the core gameplay. You have to ensure that the adventurers get into as few traps and fights as possible (they can survive some, granted that the traps aren't too deadly and the monsters are well in their league) while acquiring as much treasure as possible (it'll be important for influencing others to join your religion, boosting your power reserves with their prayers). The best way to do this would be to keep the adventurers out of trouble while eliminating the monsters in the dungeon with your powers. If possible, think of ways to eliminate the monsters guarding some treasure without also destroying or blocking off said treasure, then allowing the adventurers to come across the now unguarded booty. Keep in mind that the adventurers have no idea that you're actually real (why would they? They used your name as a convenience) and that if a dungeon appears to be blocked off to them (when really it's just you temporarily blocking the passage to protect them), they'll leave. Similarly, they'll panic if you see your powers in action or somehow find themselves trapped (which might be something else you'd consider doing if you didn't want them wandering off). This panicking could cause them to run around aimlessly and be even dumber than usual for a while. While every attempt will be made to keep your adventurers lovably stupid, there will be some situations where they might just end up annoying you slightly by doing something unbelievably idiotic that they end up destroying both themselves and your progress in acquiring a clergy. Hopefully this kind of thing can be kept to a minimum.

Like my previous Lemmings-ish Hack-N-Slash game, what I'm really interested in messing around with is scale. So giant monsters will end up really big, appropriate to the scale between them and the heroes. No simply using human-sized enemies to keep to conform to a specific sprite size, no sir. Monster AI, too, is something that needs a strong focus. The game needs to repeatedly demonstrate that most of the monsters are actually far superior in mental agility than the dumb treasure-hungry humanoids invading their homes, which is why your input is so necessary to keep them alive. You have no qualms about destroying any kind of lesser life, as a god and as the player, so feel free to wipe out whole civilisations of sentient, peaceful but potentially-dangerous-if-riled monsters to keep your followers alive long enough to demonstrate that having you as a patron god might not be such a bad thing. In fact, if other, slightly more competent adventurers start taking you on as their patron god, you can go help them and simply abandon your current bunch of dumb assholes to the inevitable grisly fate that they've dodged for so long. I guess I should note that the deity you're controlling is not necessarily the benevolent type.

Design Licenses #8: Heroes

2007-12-07T15:49:00.001-08:00

For the one or two of you that don't know what this show is, it's basically X-Men plus a bunch of other superhero comics set in a "real world" universe and how the super-powered characters deal with their powers and each other. As someone who follows most of the references (read: theived material) and is addicted to the show regardless, I generally make it a point to make fun of the show and its various flaws. Because I'm going to be watching it next week anyway. Sort of a love/hate thing.

Anyway, there are already many games being made for Heroes and they'll probably all be cash-in license games with little originality or charm. They'll also follow the show closely without revealing anything new. Which is fine enough, I suppose, since not all the fans of the show will be willing to play these games for some vital answers to any of the concurrent plotlines going on in the main show.

So with my idea I'll take it in a different direction. Instead of controlling one or more of the protagonists of the show, the game will instead follow a couple of "morally grey" agents in the shadowy anonymous company that is dealing with all these super-powered anomalies. To make sure not a whole lot is given away, the game will follow a newly recruited rookie with a similarly fresh super-powered partner (as is policy). Both of these characters will be new to the universe and you'll control both in turn, depending on the situation. You'll go about business subduing super-powered humans as they're identified by the company's research department (whomever they might be) and follow orders like you're supposed to. Of course, eventually you'll start to ask questions and get involved with the internal politics of the company and the game will start to focus on that after a while - though, again, without giving away too many secrets that will be revealed eventually in the show but also making sure the game gives you some closure on its own story at least. Maybe a non-canon section leader of the company that's gone corrupt will be the game's main antagonist.

The gameplay will be pretty standard, at least in coming to terms with the controls and such. It'll be either a 1st or 3rd person shooter that is set up as a series of missions with targets to be captured in a (preferably) stealthy manner, sort of like a non-lethal Hitman. Of course, most of the targets will either be dangerous (either to you or, indeed, to themselves and bystanders) or are particularly evasive and you won't get the benefit of the deus ex machina that is the Haitian (memory wipe and power nullification? that's a little bit too good, really) to stop them. Your partner's powers will help though (I have yet to decide what these will be, or those of the non-TV show super-people you'll be tracking down). The game will build a database as heroes are brought in, and there'll probably be various hidden collectibles (like XIII's dossier files) that reveal what the company knows about other, more famous characters.

Obviously, you'll be seeing a lot of the show's main characters, either trying to bring them in for testing/tagging/whatever it is the company does or just as cameos in the background or something. Maybe you'll get roundly defeated by one or more of them in fights you're not able to win, because everyone loves those in their video games. Or maybe they'll be tough optional battles in some kind of "non-canon" mode where you can imprison or kill all the show's main characters, continuity be damned (let Hiro go back in time and sort it out afterwards).

So that's just my interpretation of a Heroes video game. Something a little more interesting than simply reliving events of the show with various cast members. My other choice would be a Fighter game, since the powers format and large cast is perfect for one, but that would be a little obvious I think.

Game Idea: Identikit Heroes

2007-11-30T10:10:00.000-08:00

In a lot of RPGs, you have the ability to select your character's model and appearance. Generally, this doesn't affect the character's abilities or stats in any way, but does give you the chance to personalize the character and let him stand out in multiplayer. In this game, you have a whole team of such characters that are created by combining body parts. These parts all have inherent stats and characteristics, with the resulting complete hero being literally a sum of its parts.

The head is the most important element. It contains that character's knowledge and personality, so is the default "core" for any new identikit hero. If the head's a wise-cracking joker, so will the resulting hero. The head also contains all the abilities a character knows, but these abilities can only be earned by using the right combination of other body parts. So you can't learn any sword-fighting abilities until you have an arm holding a sword - but once you have learned that ability it'll stay with the head from then on. So you can actually switch a head's body after it learns a lot of fighter skills, for example, to allow it to start learning magic skills instead. Of course, some abilities can't be used without the right body part equipped (you need a sword to use some sword-fighting moves), but most abilities will be available even after changing the body part that you learned the ability from.

The torso is another vital component and comes right after the body's head in the hero creation process. The body defines a large part of that hero's eventual hit point and armor scores. It also provides the lion's share of the character's stats. The arms define the character's profession, since some arms are holding weapons (equipping those allow you to use that weapon and learn abilities associated to them) and others are able to conjure magic using hand gestures. The legs contribute a large part to the character's overall speed and agility. Finally, you also have a "bonus" body part, which can be various additional body parts such as horns or wings or a tail: These are optional (you can make a hero without one) and the character can only equip one at a time. The arms, legs and bonus body parts also contribute to a character's HP and armor, but to a lesser extent than the torso. There's also a weight factor too, where heavy body parts (those that are better armored) will slow down the resulting character's speed. All body parts (besides the head) can have abilities attached to them that you can learn: the arms tend to have most of the martial ones, but the legs can have dodging skills and the bonus parts can have special abilities included as well. You get a bonus for forming a "pure" hero (one where all the body parts match) but these heroes tend to be limiting in the long run: you'll earn more abilities and powers by mix-matching. Don't be afraid to break up your pure fighter if a stronger body part with a useful ability comes along.

The game itself uses these combined heroes as a group to pillage and loot the various locales of the game, in part to discover new body parts which you can use to construct even more powerful units. Gameplay-wise, it'll play like a large-team RPG strategy game, either real-time or turn-based: despite my usual preference of the latter, I think the former might actually work better for this idea. Some body parts are rarer than others and therefore tend to be more powerful. As well as body parts of corresponding RPG classes (armored knights, robe-wearing magicians, forest-gear wearing rangers and so on), you can also find body parts of humanoid monsters which often provide higher stats in some areas. A cat-like humanoid race's legs might be considerably faster than a regular human's, for instance. These humanoid abilities might also have unique abilities of their own (a troll body part might be able to provide the Regeneration ability) for you to learn. Eventually, you'll discover many rare body parts that don't correspond to the vaguely-medieval setting of the game, with anachronistic body templates such as cowboys, ninjas or robots. All of these body parts can be found in either treasure chests or taken from the bodies of your defeated enemies.

Eventually, you'll have a huge number of body parts with which to create a very eclectic-looking bunch of heroes. Experimentation will be the key to find the ideal combination of body parts for any one character and because the heads' personalities are all different, you may find some body parts work better for one head than it does another.

Game Idea: Fire & Ice

2007-11-23T20:54:00.000-08:00

Okay, so you have this other world that's overly big on prophecies and religion and whatnot. The most prevalent of these prophecies is that the Gods will return to the planet once it shines brighter than the stars themselves, as that will be the signal that the denizens of that world are finally ready to receive them. What follows, as is common with these sorts of religious fanatics, is that the world basically splits into two opposing factions that disagree on how the prophecy is supposed to be interpreted.

On the one hand you have the Infernites, who believe the prophecy can only come true when the world is burning brighter than the nearby sun which--as the people of this world all know--is itself a giant burning ball of flame. Their holy mission to is render the world aflame so that it can be seen as clearly as the stars, fulfilling the prophecy. They theorize that because such a conflagration would likely be the end of all life on the planet, they are demonstrating to the powers that be that they are not afraid to destroy everything and anything dear to them to appease said powers. Such an act of sacrifice is what the Gods demand. And, of course, the mercy of the Gods will grant them a new planet to live on afterwards. They hope.

The Auroralites, however, believe that the resolution of the prophecy requires the exact opposite: that the world needs to reflect the light of the sun to become the beacon needed to call the Gods home. In order to do this, they need to transform the entire planet to ice to achieve the maximum amount of reflective properties. By turning the world to unmoving ice, they bring about an era of peaceful silence and beautiful shimmering lights, both of which will prove to the Gods that the people have abandoned the loud aggressive ways that caused the Gods to leave in the first place.

Their ongoing struggle has been in stalemate for years, since both factions are about equal in power and number. Which is where you come in. You lead one side in this fantasy-based RTS and reclaim the world from the other cult. Both sides have an arsenal of specific weapons: The Infernites depend on machinery and explosives, devastating the continents with their flame-based weapons of science. The Auroralites depend on water and magic, specifically Ice-based, and produce and maintain the world's many seas, rivers and lakes to use against the Infernites and their structures. The Infernites also base most of their structures and units around metal, which can be endlessly melted and reformed, while the Auroralites mostly use wooden structures which can be quickly and easily grown and regrown with nature magics.

A typical Infernite mission would be to destroy all the resources of the nearby Auroralites, including the various sources of their magic (as well as pumping stations and dams) before they can retaliate. Scorching the various forests to cinders will eliminate any chance of them growing new trees in their place. Their missions therefore can be to either destroy the Auroralites operating in the area or simply turn enough of the map into unusable ash.

A typical Auroralite mission would be to eliminate an Infernite stronghold either by opening a river so it will flood a region or to simply freeze and destroy the Infernites and their structures themselves with their powerful magic. The Infernites depend on metal, which is far harder to procure for them than wood is for the Auroralites, so managing to freeze over an ore mine will cripple the Infernites operating in the area.

Both factions can also win by the brightness/reflective index, which measures how much open fire/ice is on the map at any given time (based on a % of the map covered) and awards victory to whichever side qualifies first. They will need to keep that percentage for a few minutes before a victory will be declared though. Depending on the map and various other factors (such as how bright the sun is on this map, or how cold/warm it is), these indices can often be unbalanced towards one faction, making an "index victory" for them far more tempting. If the Auroralites create too much forest (for their useful lumber), then there's a chance the Infernites can set the whole forest ablaze and achieve an easy victory. There'll be several instances like this where the index victory may jeopardize or interfere with the regular mission.

As is usual with this sort of game, defeating the game with one faction is not enough: Both campaigns must be fought through and won. Only then will the third side be unlocked: the combined forces of the various peace-loving denizens of the world who are tiring of this pointless and destructive war and wish to end it by removing both of these cults before they can enact their respective apocalyptic scenarios. Which leads to the inevitable "peace was the solution and the Gods return after heeding the spiritual brightness radiating from a harmonious world and its peoples" 'true' ending. Obviously this third side would be at a severe disadvantage on most maps, with their small numbers relying mostly on subterfuge, sabotage and making sure both sides are taken down at the same time, which is why you needed to have played through the campaigns of both cults and gained the experience first.

Game Reviews: Valkyrie Profile 2 & Super Paper Mario

2007-11-13T19:26:00.000-08:00

Special birthday edition, since I only ever seem to get games on my birthday these days. I know, your hearts are bleeding and struggling to play tiny violins with their various arteries and veins. Man, that's actually pretty messed up. Perhaps you should visit your local surgeons or something.

Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria

The Valkyrie Profile series has earned its reputation from being both fantastically fantasic and also over-complicatedly complex (new birthday thesaurus is working great!) and nothing has changed in this sequel. Or prequel. I've always meant to check if prequel meant "to be viewed sequentially after the original but set chronologically before the original" or not. I'm going to assume yes, because this game makes a lot more sense if you've played Lenneth (aka Valkyrie Profile 1).

Most factors remain the same, so this review will just assume the reader has played the original. If not, stop reading this blog and go do that mess right now. If you've just come back from playing it as per my suggestion, than welcome back and I hope the last few months have been kind to you. Regardless, the general crux of these games is that Odin (the big cheese) has somehow cheated or wronged the Valkyrie that the game is centered around and she's on a mission to right the situation. Throughout both games, you find disembodied spirits clinging to some material possession of theirs from before they died, which the Valkyrie materializes in the form of an einherjar: the "glorious dead" of the Norse religious mythos that are fated to fight alongside the Aesir in Asgard during Ragnarok. If none of those words made sense, don't worry about it. They're basically just dead warriors who died noble deaths that will fight alongside you.

The combat system of this game is what I wanted to talk about. A bizarre hybrid of real-time and strategic turn-based action, where time only moves when you do, you're able to plan out the battle by standing perfectly still and predicting where to go. Any action uses up Action Points, which don't regenerate unless time is flowing (or if you get hit) so you can't simply stand around lobbing spells at distant enemies. If you trigger a combat, you are then able to manipulate your four player characters into fighting an opponent. Using the right attacks in the right combination (so a leg sweep that would knock the enemy down should be followed by a downwards strike) is key to doing the most damage that are you able to do.

What I found really cool about this system is that you can use your attacks to concentrate on a body part of the enemy, hacking it off once it reaches a certain damage limit. These hacked off pieces can sometimes become items that you can use as accessories, or to sell to shops for a tidy profit. In fact, there are times when I would go out on a "butcher run" to collect a lot of valuable dismemberments that would be useful for some project or other. It's a brilliant example of something that appeals to both the insane power-gamer type ("So, if I aim for this piece in particular I have a 15% chance of getting this item I really need..") and the relaxed casual-gamer type ("Whoaaa, that arm went flying off! Awesome!") in equal measure.

I'll just end this review by mentioning that the super-difficult bonus dungeon is actually worth spending time on in this case. For serious. Not only does it have some of the most imaginative puzzles (and, unfortunately therefore, most frustrating) but there are several hilarious instances of the main game getting parodied (there's a notice to say that you should go and finish the game first to avoid spoilers). Finally, after each of the floor's bosses in this mammoth dungeon, you'll receive some of the player characters that ended up leaving your party permanently due to some story event. If you really liked the warrior guy that just happens to end up betraying you halfway through the game (this is an example, so not spoiling anything) then he'll rejoin you after a particular boss so you can continue using him - at the unfortunately low level he left you at of course.

Super Paper Mario

Considering the new Super Mario Galaxy has just appeared with rave reviews, it's likely that Mario's first Wii effort (it's always difficult in the morning..) will be overlooked by the European crowd as they - due to some messed up timing by Nintendo HQ - get both games almost at the same time. Nevertheless, it's an entertaining mix of both the Paper Mario RPGs and a solid, standard Mario platformer. The range of powers one receives, either through the other player characters or the Pixl fairies which grant various powers, means there's always something new to explore or check on a previous level, should you be so inclined. The sheer level of depth, so to speak, is a welcome fixture of the Paper Mario stable which I'm glad to see has not diminished one iota for this semi-"dumbed down" entry of the series. In fact, I'd dare say the puzzles are even more fiendish than usual. The only issue I take is that it doesn't seem to use the Wii's motion sensor very effectively, allowing only a "what is this?"-style pointing to ask about objects or enemies (and sometimes uncovering invisible objects) and a weird little bonus you can do by jumping off an enemy and performing a special move if you wiggle the wiimote at the right time. Of course, there may be more powers to come that use the Wii's unique effects, since I'm only about halfway through.

So I'll probably be picking up Mario Galaxy before too long, as well as hopefully Metroid Prime 3 and some more PS2 RPGs. Or failing those, some more games currently stuck in backlog hell. Until then, then.

Design Genres #16: Quasi-3D Dungeon-Delvers

2007-11-13T14:43:00.000-08:00

Yeah, yeah, a little late this week. Which is why this post will be immediately followed by a game review, free of charge. Friggin' winter maladies.

What I mean by Quasi-3D Dungeon Delvers is that popular RPG system on home computers in the late 80s/early 90s where you walk around a 3D dungeon in four directions. Though these games usually had the depth of a 3D game (in the literal sense) in that you could see a monster down the corridor moving towards you, it was by all practical metrics a 2D game with sprites instead of polygons. Dungeon Master was probably the first and most prevalent of this genre, seeing how it sold like hotcakes during its original production run in 1987 on the Atari ST (1988 for Amiga). It was followed by other highly acclaimed series like Eye of the Beholder and Captive (a sci-fi variant). A game called Dungeon Hack, which was released some years later in 1993, was the first of this genre to feature Rogue-like randomly-generated dungeons based on an algorithm that the players could edit before starting (such as editing how many floors the dungeon would have, and the overall difficulty of the monsters they would meet).

I have a couple of ideas for making a new instance of this genre that would be sufficiently different from its predecessors to avoid a basic rehash. The first is incorporating Disgaea's Item World system, using a randomly-generated dungeon to represent the inside of that item where you would find additional treasure. This would work by creating a dungeon in the shape of that item. So for a helmet's Item World, it would be a dungeon with a map shaped like a helmet, with each square room on the grid representing a pixel (since most of the graphics in such a game would be presented as pixel-based sprites). Obviously, the more ornate the helmet (like having horns, or an elaborate visor) the more varied the resulting dungeon.

The second idea, and one that I didn't just steal wholesale from another game, is to have a fully 3D map which is represented as a cube. At certain points within the dungeon, you can flip the square rooms on either of its four sides and continue going. While potentially too complex to figure out initially, a decent difficulty curve (Such as starting small, with a 4x4x4 cube) and an imaginative and helpful mapping system (such as only highlighting the 2D plane you're currently on and shading out all those above or below you) should alleviate most of the discomfort. The sheer potential of these cuboid dungeons means that you can boost the exploration factor several times over. I think this system would also make a trippy Escher-esque avatar system for some kind of social networking site, like Habbo. Special cliques could be formed for people who walk on the ceiling, as they stare bemusedly at the newbies milling around above their heads. Well, it's an idea.

Two Mini Ideas

2007-11-03T18:47:00.000-07:00

Still kind of stuck on the ideas front; that list of 100 kinda took up a year's worth of material. So instead I present a couple of smaller ideas, which can be shoehorned uncomfortably into a generic game model of your choice.

Palette Swapper

Since time immemorial (well, the NES and early home computers, but that's about as far back as you can go in this case) RPGs have used the cheap-as-heck method of palette swapping to create new enemy sprites out of existing enemy sprites. The reason being, of course, that enemy sprites take up a considerable amount of the sprite artists' time and short-cuts are necessary to meet deadlines. Since we've come along a ways and now have more sophisticated ways of editing a second similar enemy's appearance (such as adding a couple of horns or something), we can warmly homage this ancient practice with this new feature.

In this scenario your odd, occasionally fourth-wall breaking additional secret character learns an attack where they can change the palette set of an enemy they're fighting. What this does is entirely dependant on the enemy and the palette colour/scheme you give it. If you have the "Red" palette attack, for instance, in most cases the enemy will become a fire-based enemy. It'll also occasionally turn them into a much stronger/weaker variant of that enemy class, which will either increase the difficulty for a better reward or make the battle slightly easier in exchange for a lesser reward respectively. A sneaky design team might even hide special, powerful items by making sure an enemy drops them only when they've been turned a specific colour that boosts their stats. In fact, a lot of the earlier dungeons may suddenly become home to many potentially devastating enemies and the inevitable fantastic rewards that come from accepting such a challenge. Old-school RPG fans (in fact, they don't even have to be all that old-school because games still actually do this) will appreciate the meta reference too.

Clone Spell

A lot of games have tinkered with the idea of a clone spell or an effigy of some sort, in which you'll have something that will take damage for you or distract the enemy while you're busy elsewhere. In this idea, you have the ability to create shades of yourself that can only do one of the many things you're able to do. So in a dungeon, you're able to use a shade that can open chests but nothing else - no jumping, no fighting and no disabling traps. But you also have a shade each for all those things too. You might also have a few dummy shades that can simply be fodder for whatever trouble you might face. They can only be used once per dungeon, and it's up to the player's discretion to use them at the appropriate moment.

The twist is that these shades can be powered up if you use them right. If you use the chest-opener as an enemy distraction since you're pretty confident you're able to open all the chests in this dungeon without its help, it won't earn any experience as it is not fulfilling the role it was meant to fill. Levelling your specialist shades will allow them to surpass you in their given speciality. A chest-opener in this case will find better treasure or more money than you would have normally. A fighting shade will be stronger than you and perfect for bosses or otherwise particularly tough bouts. Choosing to squander or ignore even the most mundane of shade abilities (like a shade that can only jump up a small cliff) may have unexpected consequences later on (in the example given, that shade will eventually be able to jump a huge, impassable cliff in a later dungeon and activate a footplate that will lower a ladder).

Obviously, we can't penalize players too strongly for choosing not to do something at an earlier, now-missed stage of the game, but we can take nice rewards away from them for not playing ball. Because we're asses like that.

Okay, so, maybe there won't be a cop-out post next week. No promises though.

Game Review: Riviera: The Promised Land

2007-10-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

Thought I'd write about this neat little GBA RPG I've been playing recently. Created by Japanese company Sting and localized by those amazing fellows at Atlus, who appear to be leading a one-company campaign to release all the awesome Japanese RPGs that the western market missed the first time, Riviera is a RPG with a turn-based battle system and cute anime graphics. But that's pretty much it for the cliche stuff. The rest of the game is very different.

For starters, the main game outside the battle system (known as the Quest Mode) is very much in the style of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel, where you can make decisions to explore the surroundings with various consequences or just walk on past. You may be asked to perform a reaction-based minigame to disarm a trap, or come across hidden treasure in otherwise mundane background dressing. Since you have a limited number of TPs, or Trigger Points, which are necessary to search or explore background icons, you have to choose wisely. Or simply remember which choices you made the first time and explore a different group of objects on the next playthrough. You gain TPs from the battles, with particularly well-fought battles gaining you more TP (for a maximum of 4 per battle).

As well as this intriguing Quest Mode, the battle system offers many interesting features also. For instance, all the weapons in the game bar the Angelic weapon your hero comes with has a durability limit. Though horribly constricting in earlier applications of this system (thinking of the GB Final Fantasy Legends in particular), it actually works much better here. You won't run out of 50 charges for a basic weapon any time soon, since you'll only be in about six or seven battles before something better comes along, and the super-powerful game-spoiling items have a very limited lifespan which is more than fair. A great little addition is that all five of the characters can use items in different ways. A large sword, for instance, can only be used effectively by the main fighter (this sword being his prime weapon type), though it can be used to a lesser extent by three other characters. The fifth can only throw it at the enemy, causing low damage with a low chance to hit. Other items, like magical artifacts or armour, can also only be used by certain characters. Things like potions or food tend to be usable by all five characters, though occasionally one character can do something special with them, such as turning healing herbs into a potion.

In fact, it's these different applications that present the game's level-up system. You don't gain XP for winning battles, but you do gain weapon points for using weapons continually, which eventually levels up the weapon and gives you a much more powerful attack you can perform with it. At the same time, the character gains hit points and stats like a regular level-up. This is where the game's Practice Mode comes in: A random battle system that won't use up a selected weapon's durability, allowing you to level-up weapons in peace without them breaking away from the main game.

If I have to give the game a list of cons, I guess one would be the Love/Trust system the game uses. Since all the player characters bar the hero are female, you can get one to like you more than the others by treating her better (or treating the others worse). This will effect the ending, as you will end up with your chosen girl at the end. It's a bit harem-ish and Dating Sim for my liking. Practice Mode can get a bit repetitive if you have to level several weapons at once, which can often take a while. It's necessary grinding, unfortunately, because enemies can start to get tough if you don't have the HP to survive their special attacks (called Break Outs, which occur when you've sufficiently pissed off the enemy side with constant attacks and fatalities). Otherwise, this is a fantastic game with a lot of humor and exploration elements (which I adore) and is sufficiently different to pretty much any other RPG I've played to keep me interested. The longevity is boosted by wanting to try all the things I didn't on the first playthrough, due to a lack of TP, so I imagine I'll be playing through it a few more times before I'm done with it.

Design Elements: Non-Linearity

2007-10-20T09:02:00.000-07:00

[I figured this was more of an element than a genre thing, since non-linearity can apply to pretty much any genre.]

The concept of non-linearity is a constantly developing idea within the world of video games. In the earliest games, you didn't need to worry about plot or any kind of progress, and you'd simply repeat the same bit of addictive gameplay over and over until you died and wrote A.S.S. in the high score table. Later, as games created all these varied stages to follow, you went along for the ride to see where it would take you. Arcade staples specifically, like the Beat-Em-Ups and the Rail Shooters, would just be one long road between the start point and whenever you ran out of quarters.

Games started experimenting with the idea of having different paths to take around this time. The earliest factor, and one that is still relevant today, would be the risk vs reward element, where you could choose whether or not to go for a bonus item for a higher score, despite the increased danger that going for that bonus would present. It is non-linearity in its most basest form: the first factor besides simple endurance that allowed a skilled gamer to rise above his inferior peers score-wise. This is what I call the "Bonus" or "Basic" model of non-linearity, where you purposely go off the easier, pedestrian track for a potentially higher score or a potentially earlier "game over".

The second is the also familiar "Branch" system, where you are offered choices and dilemmas which affect the rest of your playthrough. A classic early example would be the "go right? go left?" conundrum of the original Pitfall. Other, non-stage-based platformers (so excepting Donkey Kong, Manic Miner and Lode-Runner et al) would also frequently have alternate paths to take. The Mega Man series is famous for presenting all eight of its early stages simultaneously, and asking the player which stage/robot master he wishes to take on first. There's usually a "correct" path, which would lead to you getting the weapon from one robot master that is strong against the next one in the sequence, but most players had to figure it out on their own or would otherwise experiment with their own sequences. The Branch system is by far the most prevalent form of non-linearity, though how much it can deviate from the norm will often depend on the game: having to choose between doing two levels and then doing having the level you didn't choose right after, for instance, isn't deviating a whole lot.

The final system that is used with frequency and certainly more often in recent games, is the "Freeform" or "Sandbox" form of non-linearity, which started with the Roguelikes and continues with the ubiquitious MMORPGs of this era. In these games, you can pretty much do anything you want, or at least anything you want from a list of options that are available to you. If we're talking one-player games like GTA or Oblivion, there's usually a string of story-vital missions and quests that you must follow (eventually) to bring the game's main story to a close. Otherwise, you're free to explore the world and its many side- and sub-quests. A lot of 3D platformers are the same too, with collection subquests taking you all over the place, often extending the game's longevity in an entirely optional extent.

A concept that hasn't been explored much, or has so far only enjoyed minor success, is time non-linearity. So far in RPGs and the like, you can have a hero at level 1, follow any career path you choose, explore dungeons and missions in a random order until the hero reaches level 100 and is some kind of unbeatable super person. The many branches and paths create a strong sense of freedom, but the otherwise linear progression of time is still an ever-present ball and chain. Common narrative devices for dealing with a non-linear timeline, such as flashbacks or starting a game in media res, are accounted for, but true non-linear time hasn't really been dealt with much in the video game world. I guess for good reason too, since no-one wants to see their character suddenly become 5 years younger and 10 levels suckier. The few examples I can think of include the SaGa series, which were generally confusing as hell, and the frequent mental trips into the past with Lara Croft's younger self, when she had far less experience and acrobatic/martial ability and so you had to rely on nothing but youthful enthusiasm to escape danger.

I should probably end this article with some novel idea in the realm of non-linear gameplay. A concept that I'm tinkering around with is having episodes of a game played through in a random order, just to create a kind of jigsaw puzzle that comes together the more you play. If you have the one hero, or better yet some non-combative underling/overling that links all the episode threads together, and follow a group of heroes taking out a bandit fortress or ice dungeon or what have you in each episode. As well as receiving treasure - which you won't keep between chapters, and will probably end up going into an overall pot or some kind of "episode score" at the end of that episode - you'll also receive clues and items that will come in useful for some other episode. For instance, you may receive a Ruby Key in a crypt which actually opens a door in the volcano dungeon a few episodes ago (or a few episodes down the road). You may also see part of a combination in an abandoned mine which opens a safe in the bandit fortress.

This game would have around 50 (or maybe 49, since that works as a 7x7 grid) such episodes/dungeons, with the cast lists of each varying depending on who survived a previous episode. If you have an axe-wielding dwarf at level 10 for one such random episode and keep him alive, he may come back in a different episode at level 30. If you help one lovestruck hero find a piece of treasure to win over his potential sweetheart, she may appear alongside him as an additional hero in a later episode. Likewise, interesting things start happening if you go back in time. A hero that dies in one episode at level 40 by falling into some lava might mention during another episode (where he's younger and still alive) how much he dislikes extreme heat. Okay, that one's a little silly, but you might be able to do things that shouldn't have happened according to the timeline you're establishing, causing a red mark to appear on an episode you've already completed but somehow messed up by killing a character earlier on that was still alive when you originally did that episode. The repercussions of which I'm not too sure about yet: it may dock you on your overall score, if I decide this game has one, or it could simply allow you the choice of repeating the episode with all this new information in hand.

There are other things too, that may alter the future of some of the episodes. If you're particularly antagonistic or fail to adhere to the whims of a certain hero, he may not come back in future episodes. Inversely, treating a hero with a lot of care and attention may make him return in future episodes in which he wouldn't have otherwise appeared. If you have a favorite character, or one that you despise, you may want to keep an eye out for ways to make them want to come back or stay away. If you attempted a high-level episode but only had a bunch of weak characters and got wiped out, that high-level episode might look a bit different later on if you've befriended a bunch of power-gamer type characters in the meantime. The game really does offer all kinds of choices and decisions, plus a cast list that never stays static. You might want to aim for a hero to show up in almost every episode (which some kind of bonus for creating a regular character). Alternatively, you might keep killing heroes off to make new ones appear. There could be a collectible sidequest (there I go again) for the cast list, keeping in mind all the triggers that will cause them to eventually appear, such as finding an egg and keeping it so it'll hatch into a friendly monster player-character a few game years later.

Well, that's kind of a wild(ish) idea for a new(ish) type of non-linearity. Episodic non-linearity, I guess. If we could convince developers to stop trying to equate a gaming experience to sitting through a movie, we'd hopefully see more games that are open to weird and varied non-linear storylines just like it (I'm thinking the high sales figures of GTA and Oblivion should help).

Game Idea: Sky Citadel

2007-10-13T04:08:00.000-07:00

Part Sim, Part RTS and Part RPG-style exploration, Sky Citadel has you lead your own flying fortress in a world where the ground is a distant memory. There are a few floating islands around which people make their home, but they tend to be sparsely spread around the known world, making trade difficult. Most people live in flying ships of some kind: Some are new, built at great expense with the limited resources available while others are ancient relics, created in a more prosperous time, that have been recovered and recommissioned to meet demand.

You are one of the lucky few to have discovered a Sky Citadel, an entire floating city supported by elaborate engines and propellers: A true treasure of the ancient era. Fortunately, for your benefit, the citadel is also heavily fortified from the constant attacks you'll suffer as you defend your prize from jealous rivals. As well as maintaining the citadel, you can also upgrade it, build on it and house a large population of citizens looking for a home to call their own. The citadel also has various means to be self-sufficient, including a massive grappling hook for salvaging all sorts of items from the unseen depths.

This is pretty much how the game goes: Chase down rumours of treasure below the skyline or hunt after pirates that have gotten rich off the suffering of others, make money, expand on your citadel and continue to grow as a presence. Explore the world in your own way and collect any refugees that appear like they could be of some use to your operation. There'll be an overall plot involving an evil empire, with their own sky citadels, but the main plot won't be as obtrusive and railroad as in other games of this caliber. Get around to it whenever.

Just to go over the three game modes:
Overworld mode, which is where you'll move your citadel to the next destination, or look for treasure with the grappling hook.
Citadel mode, where you'll build all the additions, when they become available and when you have the resources/cash to build them. You can also configure the existing populance, assigning them quarters inside the citadel and jobs to perform (such as Repair or Engineering).
Battle mode, when you find yourself attacked by enemies. You can actually fight back in two ways: by assigning NPCs with a high accuracy score to the citadel's cannons and letting them take down the enemy as you move the citadel around for best coverage, or you can assign yourself to a cannon turret and take down the enemy personally in a FPS mode. There are also other ways to fight back, including magic and occasionally with the grappling hook, if you wanted to capture crippled enemy ships for their valuable resources.

There'll also be a captain's log for keeping up to date on your recent exploits, plus rumors and clues you find that will tell you where to head next. There's also a giant ancient map of the world that you'll be able to follow - and often need to edit as you discover changes made since the citadel was originally created.

Game Idea: Abyss Divers

2007-10-06T19:47:00.000-07:00

Back to good ol' traditional, long-winded game ideas this week. This one is another experiment in combining RPG features with a separate genre that rarely, if ever, employs them.

Set a moderate amount of time into the future (wow, how non-committal) and mankind is exploring the galaxy with faster than light travel. Which is possible in the future. But it wasn't an easy ride to get from light speed to faster than light speed, and we kind of goofed up a few times along the way with mad scientist-esque techniques involving powering through alternate dimensions and creating warps in the fragile space-time continuum. As such, there remains many, many minute tears and anomalies throughout the explored universe from that turbulent time. Occasionally, these tears manifest themselves as dangerous portals to universes we'd rather not have any encounters with. Which is where you come in.

You lead a squadron of starfighters, specially-shielded from the bizarre energy signals and various cosmic radiations created by these fabric tears, whose task it is to reconnoiter these rambunctious irregularities and find a way to close and/or repair them before too much undesirable alternate-dimension "warp-product" finds itself in our galaxy. This generally involves travelling to the anomaly as a group, defeating all the elements that managed to escape, heading inside and splitting up into two teams: one to fix the tear from the inside with some kind of laser (I guess) and the other to defend the repair team from outside interference from that universe's usually hostile (but not always) natives. Once the tear has been repaired sufficiently enough, it starts repairing itself on its own and this is your cue to get out of there. After which, you need to eliminate all the entities that escaped into our universe during the mission.

Gameplay-wise, I want it to be one of those old-school PC space-sims where it's all in first-person. I expect the various alternate universes and their inhabitants to be as bizarre and unsettling as possible, and this effect would be exponentially increased if you were seeing it all first person from your miniscule starcraft. As well as the usual hell dimensions, pink whirly dimensions, eldritch elder alien dimensions and "everything is the same but evil and with moustaches" dimensions, I also want to occasionally go all the way to crazytown. Like one dimension is a colossal recreation of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, where Chairy is several thousand miles tall and Globey is actually the size of a planet. Or another dimension is made out of chocolate, with chocolate starships and starfighters. Big mystery with that universe is how their ships can use a propulsion system that won't melt them.

I mentioned RPG elements, so I'd better deliver. Basically, we're following the "make money to spend on improvements" system, which can increase your fire power, shielding, and also buy various luxuries like a fuel funneller (to refuel your ship on the cheap using natural sources like suns or whatever weird energy things the alterno-verses use) and a tractor beam. The tractor beam opens up a secondary means to earn money: collecting souvenirs. Rare altero-verses items can fetch high prices with collectors, though poaching these items are generally looked down upon by the various space authorities out there, what with their desire to close these things as quickly as possible to stop their content leaking into our own. But then you have to pay for these upgrades somehow. As your department gets better equipped and gains more renown, more pilots (far better ones than the "darn it, they're trying"-level volunteers you start with) will ask to join you. You'll eventually start getting famous explorers, bounty hunters and even space pirates of the universe accompanying your team to help out, some with their own specially-equipped starfighters. Find the best combination to use when heading out to a new anomaly.

Game Feature: RPG Boost Wagers

2007-09-29T12:49:00.000-07:00

So I promised you a game idea, and I have one. Of sorts. It's actually a feature that any RPG could use, but for my sake let's say it relates directly to one of my other console/non-linear RPG ideas. So I don't sound like a big liar.

Boost wagers are specific tasks given to you once you level up which, if successfully accomplished before the next experience level, may give you an additional bonus to a specific stat or even a new ability (or even strengthen an existing ability). You get a short list of randomly generated tasks and challenges which you can try to fulfill before levelling up again. I have a few ideas about what these tasks may specifically ask you to do, but they will all fall into one of two general categories: Digital or Analog.

Digital boosts will have a simple "yes/no" victory condition behind them, where you either reach it or you don't. Killing a certain number of level-specific enemies for example (or killing a number of any kind of enemies in a certain way, like shooting them with a bow). You can either reach the target amount and receive the boost, or you don't reach it and get nothing. Analogs are a little different as the victory condition for those will be on a sliding scale. For instance, if you're told to take as little damage as possible for a boost, you will still receive the boost (probably to HP) for getting hit a moderate amount, but it won't be anything like the boost you'll receive for barely getting hit at all.

These boosts won't matter a whole lot to the actual game's plot, being as they are randomly generated, but it will certainly make proceedings easier and will give you a healthily competitive character to use for online contests. The tasks will always be possible for characters of that level and they won't start getting really taxing until the higher levels when the player is a little more experienced and the boosts can make the difference between the game being a challenge or being a cakewalk. Obviously, the strongest bonuses for each level will also be the hardest to achieve. A list of the current boost wagers available (keep in mind that old ones get deleted - whether you achieve them or not - once you reach the new XP level) will be kept alongside the regular Quests and Side-Quests in the game's log/journal or equivalent.

The reasons why anyone would want to adopt this system are twofold: First, it gives the player different ways to play the character. If they want to raise their character how they choose they're entirely free to do so, but if they're also given varied tasks to do for additional boosts it may be worth their while to factor in a style of playing they're unfamiliar with so they can net those boosts. If they're a distance whore, keeping back and taking everyone down with arrows, a significant strength boost wager for taking out enemies in close combat could come along and may convince them to change tactics for a short while. It'll certainly allow them to get more out of the game and stop it from being too repetitive (at least in the "how will I fight these guys?" respect). The second reason is so the type of players who want to be competitive and have a character that far exceeds its peers can actively chase down every one of these boost wagers before levelling for all the potential benefits out there. Plus, that same gamer can start over and have a completely different set of boost wagers to follow for the new character. If they get a character with a super-rare or super-powerful ability that takes a really difficult and esoteric boost wager to achieve, it'll be like a trophy for them and will certainly give them an edge in any kind of online competition that the game might have.

So there you are. Boost wagers. Entirely optional, but entirely worth your while to chase after.

Random Update: CDGs

2007-09-22T20:03:00.000-07:00

Dang, haven't updated this in a while. Ol' idea well's still burned out (though there will be one next week for certain) and I can't really follow reviews with more reviews.

This does give me an opportunity to go over one of the increasingly prevalent design features of RPGs in recent years: Character Development Gimmicks (using gimmick to mean a device in this case).

In the olden days, when your RPG characters approached a new experience level, there were two basic systems in place. The first of these is the "you get what you're given" system; where you were arbitrarily handed new powers and stat bonuses upon reaching milestone experience levels. Several games that have low memory and/or deal with many player-controlled protagonists at once (Pokemon is an excellent example) will use this system to keep the level-up bonuses mercifully simple, though at the cost of removing all player interaction with their character's continuing development, besides simply not getting them killed between levels. The second usual system was giving the players a choice of options upon levelling, which were generally reliant on the character's profession and current skill level. The D&D system is well-known for this, especially with the introduction of Feats with the third edition. Even something as minor as rolling your new hit points created a perception of being directly responsible for the character's growth.

We then come to the intermediate systems, where players are encouraged to be actively involved in what characters learn which skills and abilities and when. A rudimentary example would be the AP (or JP) that various console RPGs use as a separate experience point tally. They either go into the currently selected job class (FF5, Blue Dragon), a weapon with an innate ability to be learned and used by the character (FF9, Vandal Hearts 2) or the points can be used by players to "buy" the abilities they like the look of (FFT). Certain games will level up the skills and weapons you use the most, offering an incentive for players to focus on what they'd like their characters to excel in; a system used by the Grandia and Elder Scrolls series and many others.

Then there are the advanced, slightly convoluted and always initially daunting systems that games spend a lot of time during the design aspect of development in producing. These tend to be unique and are especially made (at a reasonable expense one supposes) to give the game an equally unique character. Final Fantasies, after VI, tended to make systems as purposefully confusing as possible, reaching a zenith with FFX's Sphere Grid (after which they kind of cooled down a bit).

I'm not sure which is the best system to use, as a designer. Obviously you want the players to have as much control over their characters as possible, but on the other hand you don't really want players to be spending 10 minutes going over options every time you level up. Especially if there's like three rooms left in a dungeon and it's getting close to 2am or something. RPGs are beginning to fan out into different sub-subgenres within their already under-established subgenre-classification system: such as the confusion with what exactly makes a Console RPG/PC RPG, when you have Anachronox on the one hand (a PC RPG that uses common Console RPG traits) and Champions of Norrath on the other (a Console RPG series that's very much in the Diabolo/Rogue PC RPG mold). Perhaps one day we'll see an additional "complexity" score in the reviews of these games--along with graphics and longevity and what have you--to help those who want an in-depth character-development-driven RPG and those who just want to hit something and see numbers fly off them to let off some steam figure out if the game's for them.

Buncha Reviews

2007-09-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

OK, back on Fridays now and after that long, arduous peregrination through the realms of creativity, I'm kicking it with some reviews instead. Usual Supertacularness review system: I only care about the game features. Pretty much anything else (sound, graphics and so forth) you can figure out yourself from looking at a screenshot or watching the trailer.

Bioshock

Flavor of the month, current Big Daddy doing the "best game evar" rounds. System Shock 2, only underwater and in the '50s.

**PROS**
* Easy come, easy go Ammo system - A common institution in most FPS games, sure, but somewhat of a rarity in the realm of the "scary shooter", where you're told constantly to conserve your ammo and just run/sneak past the hordes of enemies. This game makes even the most powerful ammo fairly common, if you know what vending machine to hack.
* Plasmid/Tonics/ADAM - Provides the game with a neat collection thing that directly benefits the player with various power-ups, both Active (Plasmids) and Passive (most of the Tonics). They can be generally bought by harvesting the ADAM (sort of like XP/AP building points, where EVE is the MP needed to use them) from the rather unsettling "little sister" enemies. Other power-ups need to be sought out through detours, which gives the game a neat exploration angle that most FPS games eschew.
* The Setting and Atmosphere - It's obvious that someone went to a lot of trouble with the plot and setting of this game. I wasn't really into it all that much, but as a Designer I can respect when someone goes a long way into describing every little thing (through a series of optional audio diaries) without really needing to.
* This shouldn't really matter, but the Achievement scheme for this game is about perfect: You can get half of them just by playing through the game, giving you a nice amount without really focusing on it (which can often detract those on the first playthrough). The diehard completists will still take their time to get the full 1000 available. I suspect that soon, if not already, the difficulty/design of a 360 game's Achievement Points map will become an additional factor to consider when purchasing/renting said game.

**CONS**
* The length of the game is pretty short, despite the various side-missions and collectibles. Can't really be helped due to its FPS nature, but it doesn't really have much replay value either if you got everything the first time around.
* Respawning enemies are a pain. It does make you wonder where they're all coming from, since people appear to be trapped in separate areas of the city by an almost defunct bathysphere transportation system.
* Likewise, the various cameras and turrets get tired fast, especially when there's several crisscrossing a wide area. Being able to hack into them and turn them against your enemies almost absolves this though.
* The hacking minigame is fairly uninspired. I played it back when it was called Pipe Mania, and I also played it as a hacking minigame back in Anachronox.

Blue Dragon

An RPG, made especially for the XB360 by a team comprised of RPG aficionados, with Final Fantasy's creator Hironobu Sakaguchi leading the pack. Traditional "bunch of kids save the world from ancient terror" scenario.

**PROS**
* Lord help me, but I loved all the searching. You can search practically anything, for various rewards that get less impressive as the game progresses. You can quite literally spend an hour in a new town or city searching every single pot and item. Best of all, the game has a secret subquest that gives you various powerful items for all the otherwise disappointing "Nothing"s you find, which is such a great idea that I'm going to steal it one day.
* The Job System, liberally stolen from FF3 and FF5 (but that's coo' since the FF dude is the one in charge), has been polished to reduce the amount of jobs one can train in for the benefit of more powers and abilities to unlock for those jobs. Some of these abilities can have a distinct change to the tactics you employ, as they all start to become very powerful.

**CONS**
* Very, very cliché. This was intended to give the game a nostalgic appeal, similar to what Final Fantasy 9 was meant to do to that particular series to recover from Final Fantasy 8. There's nothing really wrong with repeating the same instances over and over, per se, especially for those new to the genre (or gaming in general, since it is aimed at a younger audience). But for the type of genre fanboy (hi there) who would likely buy this game it'll probably be a disappointment.

Rogue Galaxy

Sci-fi planet-hopping RPG from the makers of Dark Cloud 1&2, only a bit more traditional than that iconic series.

**PROS**
* Those boys haven't lost their taste for side-quests, which a whole bunch more that almost triples the game's playthrough time. As well as following your mission objectives (which are handy little star indicators), you can also fulfill bounties (optional bosses and specific totals of lesser enemies), compete in an "Insectron" tournament (which parallels the fishing minigames of the DC series) or create new items in a factory simulator, which mixes Pipe Dreams (a lot of that going around lately) and the Georama system of the DC series. In fact, if you liked that game (as I did), you'll probably like this too.
* Continuing the comparisons, the battle system is also heavily based on DC's: You have to fight in a real-time environment, using either your main or sub weapons and a bunch of powers you unlock through something called a Revelation Chart. This power-up system is sort of similar to the License Grid of FFXII, only you need to trade items instead of XP points, with rarer items unlocking stronger power-ups (the items are subsequently unavailable until later in the game).
* The teleporter system makes getting around a breeze. You can travel to anywhere you need to within seconds, though the transporters all need to be unlocked first. Most games use a similar system, but I found Rogue Galaxy's to be extra convenient. Plus you can save and heal at them too.

**CONS**
* If it shares DC's plus points, it must also share its negative points too. The most significant of which is the amount of tedium one can feel by traversing the large dungeons that are scattered throughout the worlds you visit. Added to which is the decision to use random encounters (of the "they weren't there a minute ago" variety), which occur often when trying to move between places.
* To be fair, a lot of the subquests above are less intriguing this time around. The Insectron Tournament in particular, since catching the things, spending the time and cash to raise and breed them until they reach a respectable level of power takes hours and hours to accomplish. Similarly, trying to defeat 30 particular instances of a monster that NEVER EVER SEEMS TO SHOW UP can be a little frustrating. They are optional, and I appreciate that, but for the diehard completists (another shout-out to you guys) it isn't as great. A bit of time to mark certain areas as hotspots for otherwise rare monster encounters to alleviate the waiting time for those who care to seek these areas out would've been a nice touch.

Back to ideas next week. But only one at a time. I've had enough of lists for the time being.

100 New Game Features X

2007-09-06T14:50:00.000-07:00

Whoa, Game Features X. Gives it an impressive-sounding aura. Soon dispell that.

091. Ancients
This game is based on that age-old Jap RPG premise of an ancient civilisation wiping itself out from its hubristic attitude concerning its devastatingly powerful technology. You are a high-ranking official of this ancient (currently present) government, plagued by nightmares about the extinction of your way of life, and struggle to convince your peers about the dangers that lie ahead. Unsure of what will fail first and how, you decide to put together a squad of highly trained and capable agents and put them into a deep stasis, far enough below the Earth to survive the imminent calamity that will burn the world to cinders. When the agents awake, they are to discover how exactly the world fell (by finding the now ancient ruins of their world and checking for clues left behind) and to broadcast back in time to the official, so that they may somehow prevent it from happening. The game is split into two modes: a standard RPG system that follows the agents on their trevails in the post-apocalyptic future and that of the official, as they use both legal (using their governmental powers, which will slowly shrink in stature the more they interfere with government sectors that don't concern them) and steathier illegal (which is the faster and, soon enough, only) means to prevent the disasters that the agent team in the future are able to identify. It always seems odd in these games that a civilisation that can do anything are always powerless to prevent their own destruction, so this game aims to give them a fighting chance for once.

092. Animal Cussing
OK, this isn't so much a game idea as just changing everything the animals in Animal Crossing say (nicknames for you and such) to swears. It's pretty juvenile. How about Animal Kriss Krossing? Including a Jump-Jump minigame and the option to wear pants backwards. Animiller's Crossing? "I can't live... I can't live out here in this little house in the woods! Like a dumb animal! Look in your heart!". Um, let's skip over this one.

093. Shakespeare Game
There aren't enough games based on Shakespeare's plays. Disregarding all the "hey nonny nonnys" and "oh shit, am I learning something? to hell with this game!" disputes for a moment, the Bard's plays are pretty darn violent and filled with potential XPs for the hack'n'slash crowd. A game would probably go something like Kingdom Heart's episodic nature, though far less cutesy of course, where you'd join up with a hero of one story to see it through to its proper conclusion and then move onto the next tale. And in the case of something like Hamlet, loot all the dead bodies before leaving. Plus, Kenneth Branagh can be a recurring boss!

094. Sinistar Remake
Man, just imagine this: A fully 3D space-sim based on Sinistar. Think how many times more menacing Sinistar would be as a gigantic ass skull space station thing in its full 3D glory. You'd be given an arena (more like a big cube of space to fly around in) like usual, filled with asteroids that you have to harvest the Sinisite crystals from to build your Sinibombs before ol' Skullface's minions can rebuild their master, who you'll be able to monitor mid-construction in the center of the little quadrant you're flying around in (complete with space-scaffolding and what have you) due to how friggin' massive the dude is. Like the uncompleted Death Star of Return of the Jedi, only even more pants-crappingly intimidating. Play with a friend to defeat Sinistar and his goons, or play against them as they help transport the Sinisite back to the Hungry One.

095. Special Wizardry And Tactics
A Fantasy-based SWAT team in other words (based on the one seen in the Hawk and Fisher novels. They're good readin') that take on dangerous illegal fantasy elements in all shapes and sizes. Have a group of werewolves barricading humans inside a building? Call SWAT. Some kind of mystical ancient being escaped from its eldritch bonds? Call SWAT. Escaped mental patient with a Wand of Turning Inside Out? Call SWAT. And a cleaner too, while you're at it. You'll configure and train your own SWAT teams, replacing casualties and making sure you're well stocked on fighters, healers and wizards to tackle any problem the city throws at you. And you thought the regular SWAT teams had it bad.

096. Consciences
This is something a satirical cartoon-based game could use as a mode of getting into small places to find a key or some other useful item. When presented with a small opening that the main character is unable to pass through, there's an option to ponder the morality of what you're currently doing. This causes two extra characters to appear: Your tiny "good" self, with halo and wings, and your tiny "bad" self, who wields a fork and horns. Your Good self can pass through the opening and use his extra jumping skills (thanks to those wings) to get around the passage and find what you need to find. The Bad self can't jump as high, but his attack power is considerably higher and he'll be able to fight any monsters that might be hiding in that small gap. Use whichever's appropriate for the type of obstacles you'll be facing. Plus, performing good or evil deeds will power up the respective figment appropriately, enhancing their stats and possibly giving them new powers to use.

097. FPS Spoof
This could be based on something like Hot Shots Part Deux or Sledge Hammer or a dozen other spoofs of overly violent shooter movies. Basically, everything seems to do way more damage than it actually should. If you shoot anything, it'll explode. If you shoot some dude he'll fly backwards 50 yards and spastically go all ragdoll on the way down. And then explode. You gain points for sheer carnage and eventually the plot evaporates in a series of non-sequitur cutscenes that vaguely point you in the right direction to the next series of explosions. You also get a one-liner generator to use, hitting the right function key for it at the right time after killing someone will deliver an apt pun based on the situation for bonus points. There's no ammo or reloading, since this is an action movie spoof, so fire away.

098. Instances
While exploring a new space phenomenon, your explorer/hero character ends up getting trapped within the phenomenon's considerable gravitational pull and he and his ship fall into this space anomaly. He emerges unscathed, only it appears he is now in six different areas of the galaxy, approximately the same distance away from the anomaly in six opposing directions (imagine faces on a cube to understand what I mean). All six instances of the hero are linked, meaning you control all of them sort of simultaneously (though for game purposes, you control one at a time). Furthermore, since all six ships are actually just the one, anything that happens to one ship will happen to the other five. You must shift between the instances and get them all back to the anomaly so they can merge together back into one entity. Ships in fortuitous conditions (like being in friendly-owned, explored space) can seek repairs for fixing the damage done in situations that less fortunate ship instances find themselves in (such as enemy space or some weird corrosive gas cloud). One ship in particular is flying near a black hole, distorting both nearby space and time, which means you're unable to free him from the vast gravitational forces holding him in place until the ship is upgraded. Focusing on an "easy" instance until it comes back to the anomaly and then switching is one plan, but if that easy instance is within the range of easy repairs and stock resupplies, it might be best not to call on it until its needed. Inversely, concentrating on one "hard" instance until he gets home (to get it out of the way with, sort of a common gaming thing) will make the game far more difficult than it needs to be, since you can help get him through his tough battles easier by finding ship upgrades with the other instances. Since they're all moving simultaneously, you will effectively pause one instance's progress when switching over to another. This example should hopefully explain how the game uses it's shared timeline to switch between instances: If you take instance #3 for 30 minutes and switch to instance #4, you'll be back at 0 minutes on the shared timeline since instance #4 hasn't done anything yet. If you want to go back to instance #3, it'll continue from the 30 minute point on the shared timeline. The downside to this system is that if instance #5 upgrades their weapon banks for more damage at the 3-hour mark on the timeline, all the other instances will only receive their weapon upgrade at the same mark, meaning they all need to be 3 hours into their journey back before it'll happen. So obviously, those in a difficult situation may need to go on the defensive until some other instance can get the upgrades needed to continue. You can fast-forward time at will to eliminate long waits, though keep in mind that having nearby enemies will make this feature potentially hazardous with frequent use.

099. Turn-based Powers Tennis
OK, so the first impression you might get with a title like that is "Huh?" followed closely by "Won't that be unbearably slow?". Well, the tennis in this game is slightly different. It follows a super-powered, RPG type of system where powerful serves and volleys are accompanied by various magical powers and special attacks. You need to find the best way to get to the ball, aim for the spot you want to hit the ball to, and let it fly. You get the choice between power (lowering the ability to return your shots), speed (getting to the ball quicker) and finesse (misdirection and things like spin), as your character will be superpowered in any of those three fields. You'll be defeating opponents like the Trickster, who can create illusionary balls along with the real one, forcing you to choose. There's also the Pyromaniac, who can set the balls alight, forcing to only return the shot once the ball's flames have gone out after bouncing once. The whole tournament will be crazy like this and you'll need to use your chosen character's strengths to progress through the competition.

100. Protagonist: The Ultimate Video Game
In this game you assume the protagonist from a great many classic video games, forcing yourself to evolve your graphics and become bigger, stronger, faster and more colorful and better rendered. You start as a pong bat and need to earn enough points to evolve yourself into an arrow, becoming the star of Asteroids. Or you can focus on your bat form and turn into the hero of Arkanoid. Further upgrades in the arrow direction will turn you into a crude spaceship for Galaxia/Galaga, while further evolutions of the bat form will allow you to become Snake, that long, apple-eating line that adorns many a mobile phone. You'll pass through the early arcade era, to the 8-bit era and the 16-bit eras and finally turn yourself 3D. You can stick with vehicles, passing through the arcade shooters and reaching various RTS and Space-Sim games, or you can evolve yourself to become a human being (or humanoid), and take part in early adventure games like, well, Adventure or Manic Miner, using Pacman as a bridge between "random shape" to "person on a mission". Any games you unlock through your transformations will be replayable and you can go back to any previous transformation at any point to try a new path, or to simply gather evolution points at a game you're good at. Find the ultimate evolution of each form, unlock every game and become the perfect video game protagonist.

100 New Game Features IX

2007-08-30T16:53:00.000-07:00

IX is neat because if you turn your head, it kind of looks like a cylon. Or Leia in that bounty hunter disguise. Hey, you knew this was a nerd blog when you started reading it.

081. Theme Park RPG
Not a version of the Sim game, or even a full game idea, but rather the use of a theme park in a dungeon-delving RPG type scenario. The park is either haunted or with some other weird circumstance going on (it could be a virtual/futuristic park gone wrong, a la Westworld, for instance). The game would be more like Zombies Ate My Neighbors rather than the usual swords and magic fare, with people equipping shotguns from the disused Shooting Range game and so on, and the bestiary being comprised of classic B-Movie cliches. I was thinking that the rides themselves would be self-contained dungeons of variable lengths and difficulty (which would be altered to match the player, allowing them to pick any of the dungeons in any order they wished) and the rest of the park being the traditional RPG hub of goods and services like the village in Diablo.

082. God of War: Odyssey
Just a neat idea for a new God of War game. It could part of Kratos's journey to kick the asses of every mythological figure of Ancient Greece in the inevitable third game, or a separate chapter that uses the same engine and gameplay but focuses on Odysseus/Ulysses as he makes his way back to Ithaca. In fact, hell, throw in the Iliad too. Kratos at the siege of Troy would be just as awesome. Even more awesome would be a video game version of Ulysses 31, but now I'm just rambling. Crazy rambling, that's all. Move onto the next one.

083. Adventures of the Gummi Bears: The Game
This is less of a "what a great idea this would be to do now" and more of a "what a great idea that someone should've done during the NES-era years when this show was still on TV". I mean, Gummi Bears was one of Disney's earliest and most significant high-quality animated TV shows, which ended up being overshadowed by DuckTales. Which got its own game. This one did not, to the best of my knowledge. Let's review the show to find out why it wasn't video game material: A) It was set in a psuedo-medieval fantasy world. Yeah, those don't often appear in video games. B) The protagonists (the bears) were naturally bouncy. But what possible genre of games, ubiquitous in that era of gaming, could use a group of heroes who's talent was to jump high? Onto platforms and such? Drawing a big ol' blank on that one. C) Let's not forget that the cartoon was intended for children, and those guys never play video games nor have video games based on licenses marketed directly to them that I'm aware of. I'm incensed at the injustice of all of it. Well, mildly perturbed.

084. What A Twist!
I love plot twists. Not the "Aha, this guy is really the murderer, and not some mild-mannered reporter" kind of twist. Wait, that's Superman. Superman doesn't kill people. But you get my point, those kinds of twists are predictable in the sense that you know there is a twist because it's a murder mystery or thriller and it comes with the territory. I'm talking about the twists where the movie/game seems to completely change track midway through with something completely random and off-genre. Take From Dusk Till Dawn for instance. It's a pretty violent crime drama following these bandits and a family of hostages to this joint in Mexico. And then it suddenly turns into a vampire movie halfway through, which is more than a slight surprise if you didn't realise they'd be there. The Orion Conspiracy is another example, which was an infamous point and click which followed a guy looking into the apparent murder of his son on an experimental space station. Violent shapeshifting aliens appear halfway through an otherwise inconspicuous murder mystery story and start killing and replacing most of the human cast you've been interrogating for the best part of a day or two. I've written too much about awesome plot twists to even write a game idea for them. Ah well. Here it is in 10 words: You direct the game's story by selecting the plot twists. Informative. A bonus word for you there.

085. Slasher Movie
A cheesy slasher movie, set in a summer campground as is tradition, where you play the most interesting character: The cheerleader that gets killed with her boyfriend just after or before they do it. Okay, I actually mean the slasher. The slasher has powers, being some kind of mythical zombie figure akin to Jason or Michael Myers or Ghostface, but he needs to first establish his terrifying mythos. In order to do this, he needs to generate the most horror possible in his victims before killing them, leading them on merry chases with the most appropriate weapon available - axes and machetes do more damage, but are kind of passe (your psychotic demon cares about this sort of thing you see). Killing people with a stapler instead is somehow more horrifying, though considerably harder to pull off because it's... a stapler. Better yet would be some kind of ironic death, customized for each victim. You must also leave one teenager alive for the status-boosting ghost stories when he gets back home. Your horrible murdering monstrosity can even be customized appearance-wise, allowing the player to choose their own face-obscuring headgear which will become part of their identity. Use a hockey mask, drama mask, Shatner mask, ghost mask, Phanto mask (Drop the Key or Die!), spaceman helmet or perhaps a beekeeper hat. You know, in case you wanted to murder people with bees.

086. Modern Deity
How would a newly appointed deity go about his business in this day and age? Gathering followers and demonstrating divine powers to the unbelievers? It was easy enough in other God games like Populous and Black & White, what with the humans of those games living in the Stupid Ages and being impressed by fire and round objects, but in modern times leaving such an impression would be a little more difficult to pull off. The game follows the player/god in a sort of management fashion, starting with the community of homeless around them in the big city in which the game takes place, and slowly working your way to converting the hardest skeptics and intelligentsia of said city to your message. Make decisions that will win you the most support, or the kind of support you're looking for. Becoming an attractive figure to criminals could grant you all sorts of slightly darker powers, or you could win over the just and noble by performing good deeds. There'd be rival churches of course - not existing ones, since this is a fictional world and we don't want to get into trouble, but rather other trainee deities with slightly differing starting areas trying to make their way into this new pantheon of gods and goddesses.

087. Super GTA
Well, not so much GTA as a free-form crime-based action game with a difference. GTA's non-linearity and genre-mixing has won various awards and has been imitated in various forms. So one more shouldn't hurt. I mentioned a difference, and here it is: You're a supervillain planning robberies and all sorts of misdeeds. Now I know it sounds a little like that City of Heroes add-on thing where you play the bad guys, but this is more of an action game, so it'll be all real-time action gameplay rather than the standard MMORPG of levelling and raiding. You get missions, like GTA, usually involving some new piece of treasure about to be revealed at the museum, or the president's daughter coming for a visit. You need to pull off the crime you've been planning, and then avoid both the police and the association of superheroes that are constantly on your trail. Of these superheroes, you'll be meeting the crappier ones for the minor crimes (which you'll need to do initially) and working your way up to the unstoppable Superman types for the major heists. The gameplay will be basic enough initially, though as you gain in power and infamy, new modes will be unlocked, including but not limited to: Flight, invisibility, walking through walls, beam weapons, shapeshifting and absorbing and channelling vast amounts of energy. Most of these powers can be used for both the heists you pull as well as the inevitable getaway from the authorities. Best of all, your exploration range increases with these powers, as they often allow you to reach previously unattainable destinations.

088. LEGO Back To The Future
So we've played the two Star Wars trilogies and now there's news of an Indiana Jones trilogy on its way in this suddenly playable series of license games from the LEGO people. So what's the next awesome trilogy of the 80s worth Lego-ising? Back to the Future of course. There's plenty of action to follow to make a game out of it, including the Libyan terrorists of the first movie, the Hoverboard sequences of the second movie and the Wild West shoot-outs of the third movie. Your choice of hero is pretty much limited to Marty McFly and the Doc originally, but there's also George McFly, Marty McFly Jr., Jennifer (both of them) and Clara Clayton, Doc's love interest from the third movie. Plus, you got all the Biffs, Griffs and Mad Dogs too, and a whole bunch of other supporting characters. Really, this idea is here for two reasons: A BTTF game to finally make up for the traumatising memories of playing the original license games and also because this is #88 of the list. Yeah, I'm pretty predictable.

089. Anagram Treasures
This is for any RPG, really, and can be used for random chests or better yet as a bonus after defeating a dungeon or boss. The idea is that all the treasures have jumbled up names, and the player must type the correct names of the treasures to win them before the counter counts down to zero. Basic items tend to have smaller names, from "gold" to basic "swords" and "HP potions" and the like. The more ornate the treasures get, the more lengthy and drawn-out the names of those treasures become. A powerful sword, for instance, could be called the "Four-Winds Sword" or has another, unfamiliar synonym such as "falchion" or "scramasax". Other valuable treasures would just have names like "priceless emerald" or "moonlight diamond", the difficulty of the word(s) would be directly proportional to the value of the item. Players are given a list of 10 or so of these jumbled treasures and a short time limit to get as many as possible. They can concentrate on the difficult rare ones or try and sweep up all the simple smaller words as quickly as they can for a bigger payload.

090. Super Mario Dodgeball
Yeah, Mario could just jump over the balls, which would actually be turtle shells, and fight against all sorts of teams comprised of common Mario enemies. The Boos could turn transparent to let the balls pass them, the Hammer Bros could deflect them or send them straight back to you, and the Goombas can just suck like they always do. Okay, there's not much to recommend this one, but then they've pretty much done every sport that isn't some schoolyard reject of an excuse of a sporting activity.

100 New Game Features VIII

2007-08-23T06:13:00.000-07:00

More new game features to throw out into the ether of the internet. Or the inter of the ethernet.

071. How To Do a Proper South Park Game
South Park has not had much a track-record with video game conversions, with one crappy FPS, one crappy quiz show thing and a pretty crappy Mario Kart clone. This is because South Park's early humor was hard to pin down in one genre, since it relied on various non-sequiturs and oddities mixed with swearing and fart jokes. Might've possibly had something to do with the low production values of these games also. Now that they've moved almost exclusively onto spoofs and all-out satire, a South Park video game that makes fun of other video games and conventions seems much more workable. Using a 3rd-person action/adventure engine to tie it all together, each new chapter will introduce the denizens of South Park getting embroiled in some kind of video game cliche and have the boys (or Randy Marsh) rescue them. For instance, you could have the Visitors come back, only make them really squeaky and annoying while you try and fight them in a jeep that keeps flipping over. Another chapter could have rival gangs descend on South Park (invited by honorary "crips", Jimmy and Timmy) and you need to spraypaint tags in their territories. Prevent a Zerg Rush from demolishing the City Wok. Take out the goths before they can use their fog machines and static-emitting radios to turn South Park into an eerie place. Shoot Spanish-speaking homeless people in the head claiming they're "infected". Considering how seriously some of these games take themselves (not to mention the fanboys), it's ripe territory for the South Park fellows to exploit.

072. Sim City Cop
Modern versions of Sim City have actually allowed you to see the city you've built as one of the many occupants of the city, staring up at the majestic skyscrapers and landmarks that you yourself were responsible for. This, in turn, partially led to making a game focusing on the person instead of the city in which they live, becoming the acclaimed Sims series. However, there's so much room for development in the city part. Plus, city-sims that also employ other genres aren't unheard of - consider the blog-favorite Dark Cloud 2 for example. So in this idea, you are able to deal with problems in your city directly by assuming control of police officers, fire-fighters and other men and women of action in an equally action-orientated gameplay mode, as well as assuming the regular overseeing role as mayor. The ways in which you can help your city increase several-fold, creating a much more immersive and lasting connection to your city of choice than you would get playing some bureaucrat willing to demolish a few useful buildings for the profit.

073. Hackmaster (MMO)RPG
Hackmaster, a fictional, satirical reimagining of the older AD&D (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons) system that characters in the D&D comic "Knights of the Dinner Table" use, became an actual system a few years ago. As a satire, it tends to humorously portray some of the stranger rules and character elements from the original systems and adds plenty besides. So far, no attempt has been made to produce a video/computer game using this system, presumably since much of the humor lies within the players and DMs (or GMs in Hackmaster lingo) themselves making up bizarre rules and decisions and generally ignoring any attempt at the sort of plot or game cohesion that one would expect from a logically-programmed video game. A properly customizable RPG with online capabilities, maybe not an MMO but something like the casual online system employed by Neverwinter Nights for instance, would be perfect. As long as the somewhat solid rules system stays intact, players can feel free, or even encouraged, to add their own content.

074. Game Demo Screensavers
Simple enough, really. You have a series of little games that play as a screensaver whenever you're away from the computer. Sort of an extension of that one where you go through a maze, only it plays out all sorts of games that look good on a single full screen like Pacman or Elevator Action. The environments change each time and the protagonist is AI controlled to take a sensible (but not constant) route to complete the level. Pressing a specially-configured key (instead of just any key, which would end the screen saver) would allow you to pick up from where the computer leaves off in case you come back from your lunch break a few minutes early or something.

075. Nanobot Nanomischief
An RTS of sorts, Nanobots are invading our machines and taking over, one electrical appliance at a time. You control their struggle to take over a household by working up from electric toothbrushes to toasters to fridges and finally the home security system. Each new venture is accompanied by an RTS-themed campaign against the machine's indigenous coding before you're able to take it over. Sometimes, taking over one electrical object that doesn't seem vital to your plans (you want to be steadily increasing in size as you move between new electrical gizmos) may end up containing data that can be useful for your future battles, such as new vehicles or buildings (or nanobot variants of the usual RTS fodder). The Nanobots get around inside a microscopic UFO that contains all the data you've discovered so far and transmits it to agent Nanobots in the field, allowing your itty bitty minions to be constantly improving themselves.

076. Pocket Universe
You have somehow found yourself in charge of a pocket universe, an empty void with a breathable atmosphere (installed before your acquirement) that you decide could use.. well.. anything. The first thing that gets introduced to this world is your own house, which floats in the center. It'll do for starters, plus it gives you somewhere to crash while you're not floating around trying to figure out what to do with this generous gift. Eventually, you discover a way of guiding this bubble of reality close to other, much larger bubbles that comprise of all the worlds of the multiverse. Because of the strange laws of reality that control the bubble, you're able to step outside it (providing there's something to step outside to) and then shrink your bubble so you are able to carry it around with you. While this all sounds weird and complicated, I wouldn't worry about it. Just hover to any reality you like the sound of (a Fantasy world with dragons or such, or maybe the Cyberpunk town the next world over) and find as much interesting tat to "decorate" your own pocket universe with as possible. Think of it as something like the Sims' house-building mode, only you can have anything you want as long as you're able to run off with it. Sure, a couple of blaster pistols or a futuristic computer terminal from the Cyberpunk world would be nice, but so would a giant neon billboard that animates 3D images or a patrolling police hovercar. Simply wrap your pocket universe around it and then sort out where it will go later. Finally, like Animal Crossing, you'll be rewarded for how idiosyncratic and varied your pocket universe looks, by bizarre entities that claim to know about this sort of thing. Scoring points with the creators of the pocket universes (and possibly, indeed, the universe itself) may even reward you with larger pocket universes to fill with whatever you desire.

077. Besieged
A siege simulator of sorts (whoo, alliteration!), Besieged is a tongue-in-cheek action strategy game that puts you in the command of either an army breaking into a castle or a defending force trying to hold out against invaders. As well as directly monitoring the sheer force of the armies of either side, you'll also need to set up traps to deter the stealthier or more ingenious ways of sneaking into your castle and, inversely, coming up with said ideas and plans to sneak in and lower the drawbridge. Each castle is vastly different, with different factors to take into account (such as a moat, or the castle being built into a mountain). Send spies, ninjas, forces via air, forces via the sea/moat (maybe inside a submersible), hire monsters, bribe the enemy forces already inside the castle or anything else that will get you and your fighters inside the castle. Likewise, deploy traps, archers, detection systems, moat monsters, watch out for traitors and use ninjas of your own to block any attempt at taking your fortress. Play a two-player game (or more, with the players assuming two teams) for even more deviousness, using the resources available to out-think your opponent.

078. Enchanted Sword
These things are always such fun in video games. Who could forget Lilarcor from Baldur's Gate 2, for instance? In this game, you assume the role of one of these intelligent blades, trying to make its way in the world. Obviously, you won't get much done lying at a bottom of a treasure pile, so the game starts the moment you're picked up by an unsuspecting peasant. You need to cleverly work your charms and powers as a magical object to see that you're in the hands of someone truly worthy of your abilities. Like the warmongering King who is scoring victories all across the land. He'd be a good place to start. Though you don't directly control whoever happens to be holding you, you can use your considerable will to effectively point them in the right direction. Shape the "Chosen One" who picked you up into a lean fighting machine, or simply find ways of getting him killed and allowing you be recovered by the obviously stronger opponent. Work your way up to the big-name fights and make a name for yourself as a legendary weapon. You might finally beat your overachieving brother Excalibur or all the other talking swords that you'll meet (and often be clanging against) on the way up. This game would be ideal for the Wii, as you control the blade itself with the Wiimote, rather than the hand holding it.

079. Mutant League Basketball
OK, so the "Mutant League [Sport]" is getting kind of old. Well, this list doesn't have one yet, and I seriously think a Mutant League Basketball could be the best basketball game since NBA Jam. Imagine having a hell-demon that's literally "on fire". Or rock golems on defence. Or gargoyles who use their wings to gain airtime on their shots. And Will Smith could even show up, reprising his cameo role from NBA Jam. His special move would be to brutally tackle the Alien player and say "Welcome ta Earf!"

080. Super Robot Wars vs. Robot Wars
Super Robot Wars: an SRPG series where mechas from all sorts of giant robot anime, strongly focused around the various Gundam series though often including Patlabor or Evangelion. Robot Wars: a show in the UK that features home-made vehicular robots made from lawnmower motors and painted scrap sheet metal trying to flip each other over. Put these two groups of metal warriors together and who will come out on top? It could really be anyone's fight. Sure, the bigger mechas have laser cannons that can vaporise an entire city. But does it have a little lever that allows it to right itself if it gets flipped onto its side?

100 New Game Features VII

2007-08-17T03:52:00.000-07:00

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?

100 New Game Features VI

2007-08-10T12:18:00.000-07:00

Part 6 of this juggernaut of creativity and this time there's no slightly discouraging self-deprecating remarks to introduce them. This is because I was too stupid to think of any.

051. Toy Space
A space sim game with a slight difference: Everything is made out of toy-related elements and materials. For instance, your ship and crew are stuffed and you'll come across all manner of popular (public domain! public domain!) toys of yesteryear in the vast cosmos of this toy universe. Despite the setting, the game will be sufficiently complex and action-packed to appeal to any older age group; though a toned-down and simplified version would be available for the young-uns since I always thought it was cruel for purposely-kiddy-looking adult-themed cartoons and the like to have an aesthetic that appeals to children only to exclude them because of the mature content. Bit of a rant there. Yes. So really, the point of having this kind of look is to include all kinds of weird random things that you'd expect to find in space if you watched as much Star Trek as I did, only in toy-form so it's not as difficult to handle. Like a giant space amoeba lifeform thing made out of that green toy slime that was dropped on people on "You Can't Do That On Television" whenever they said "I don't know". Don't expect the computer sensors to know either, humans! er.. Humanoid toys! Whatever!

052. Suikoden Guess Who
I was racking my brain to come up with another game that would benefit from having 108 protagonists and the only one I could think of within five minutes (after which my attention invariably drawn to something more shiny) is that old board game with the clicky portraits, Guess Who. Going with traditional RPG cliches, I'm thinking the questions would go like "is your guy.... a moody loner?" or "ok, does your guy have blue hair?" or perhaps "carries an inexplicably large sword?" or maybe "turns out to be a prince of a distant country?" or even in a random leap of stunning illogic "came from an orphanage but forgot?". You could have literally minutes of fun with this game. I'm thinking the gimmick for the video game version, excepting "getting the pants sued off us" as a gimmick for the moment, would be to have to fight the characters you successfully managed to exclude from your search. This would force the players to make their enquiries far more elaborate and specific to avoid a larger confrontation: for instance, asking if the guy has an eyepatch and getting a "no" would get you into a fight with all the eyepatch guys you eliminated, which would probably be a small number. Alternatively, asking if the character is a girl will cause approximately half the cast list to suddenly attack you.

053. Warioware: Think Fast!
In this edition of Warioware the microgames last milliseconds instead of seconds, forcing you to hit a random button and hope for the best. Display your highscores online to be surreptitiously abducted from your home by men in black suits to be enrolled in a faster-than-light aircraft experimental facility. Turns out that the field of hypothetical superluminal physics always has a use for people who can pluck nosehairs and swat flies faster than they can think.

054. Helo
A chat program for kids that play Halo. Instead of promoting badly-spelled leetspeak diatribes about the ethnic background and dietary habits of your apparently transgendered mother, however, the program actually records and rewards "frags" for witty, well-timed and perfectly spelt putdowns, with bonuses for referencing classical fiction within the burn. Pwning noobs with Shakespeare quotes about "how a fool is a fool whenever a wise man is not being a fool, so sayeth I" (possibly paraphrased) is a future of erudition I want to see from these kids. In actuality, the future I want to see for the average 12 year old who frequents Halo servers is, ideally, an incredibly short one. But that's neither here nor there.

055. Happy Reaper Game
Right, so there's a few Death/Grim Reaper games out there where you control "the bloke in the cloak" directly or play as some kind of minion or salaried employee doing the same job. These games are generally as gloomy as a funeral (gee I wonder why that is), though some (like Grim Fandango) inject a fair amount of humour and joie de vivre in the underworld's goings on. Or joie de mort in this case, I guess. French puns; that's a first for me. In this, you're busy scooping up dead souls as usual, but everything's made more cheery and hopeful. Life, in this game, is horrible and depressing and thankfully short and the Reaper's job to end the harsh existence of the mortals for a happier existence of fluffy white ghosthood couldn't be peachier. With the right style of bubbly, friendly art to display a more positive underworld and Katamari-style uplifting music (or failing that, some reggae) for severing mortal coils to, Death doesn't have to be nearly as depressing.

056. Sole/Halibut
A competitive fighting game that involves hitting each other with giant fishes during that confusing period of history at the end of the 16th century. Will you be the first to find the sacred fish weapon: Holy Mackerel? Will you be able to defeat the dreaded ghost-pirate/pirate-ghost Sardines de Leon? And, more importantly, is this yet another Monty Python reference in this list? You betcha.

057. Myspace: The Game
Nope, this is not one of those "let's market something popular to kids in some vapid licence game because those little guys never seem to run out of money and stupid". Not entirely that, anyway. What this is is a detective game that exclusively uses Myspace and its various tools to allow your protagonist to solve all sorts of crimes. See, your guy was put into intensive care when his luck changed on a particular case. Since you're unable to move from your bed, sort of like the Bone Collector but not at all like that because I'm an original thinker, the only way you can continue to follow clues is via the internet. Obviously, there are things that can only be taken at face value, since the internet is one big web of lies - though certain little things show up on the Myspace pages of people involved with the case. Stuff like the occasional photo with an accidental clue in the background, or a comment about a date and place that turns out later to be the crime scene. Maybe the annoying MP3 has something to do with the case, though the computer the detective is using is left mercifully mute whenever sound isn't important. Type, click or use the stylus (depending on system) to point to clues and record them and then put the whole thing together in time to save the next victim. Or at least in enough time to get the suspect arrested before he can upload another 50 Cent track at full volume. Protip: Anyone who puts "Interests: Killing" is probably a suspect.

058. Optional Collection Subquest for Tomb Raider
Probably see this one coming from a mile away: Collectible deaths! For every interesting way you can get Lara killed, you'll receive a token of your "achievement". Collect them in sets, such as "falling onto stuff", "getting eaten by things", "traps aplenty" and "pot luck". You'll need to get creative to find all of them, so never pass by a suspicious looking switch or wobbly floor panel without checking them out first. Find every single fatality and you'll unlock a special bonus tirade of slurs and insults directed towards you from the heroine herself, for the strange people who like that sort of thing.

059. Megaman Wars
You know, the odd thing about Megaman, especially the online cyberspace one from the Network games, is that despite being a robot he's never cloned or anything. It wouldn't even be cloning, they could just get a whole bunch of them off a production line. Wily can produce thousands of those little Met helmet bots, so how difficult would it be, really? This game is an RTS that uses a whole squad of Megamen, some of which can be modified with extra powers by defeating specific robot masters in a campaign, as they invade the lands of one robot master after another. You'll need to send the right group of Megamen to fight the hordes of varied opposing robots (using Needle Man's powers to pop balloon-shaped enemies, for example) in gruelling wide-scale RTS combat zones. I'm still confused with the duplicate Megaman issue though. Didn't they have duplicates in that soccer game they made? And what was all that about, on an entirely unrelated tangent? Probably should wrap this up now.

060. Soylent Hill
Health Drinks are made out of people! And everything bad that happened is caused by Moses euthanizing his own wife and feeling guilty about it! And Pyramid Head was the name of his beloved childhood sled!

100 New Game Features V

2007-08-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

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.

100 New Game Features IV

2007-07-27T17:20:00.000-07:00

Dang. More of these, huh? "Let's get scratchin'", to paraphrase Jet Set Radio (only in this instance I'm referring to the proverbial barrel).

031. Highschool RPG Clique Powers
So, in this scenario we have something like the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, where a bunch of stereotypical teenagers from our world are sent into a fantasy universe with super powers. Only this is more in the style of a Final Fantasy turn-based RPG affair rather than anything to do with rolling amusingly shaped dice. The Jock is an expert with unconventional weaponry (like a hockey stick or baseball bat), The Cheerleader can boost the party's stats like a bard and best of all the Pop Culture Nerd can summon cult movie personalities to perform damaging attacks in a similar vein to FF's famous aeon/eidolon summoning. Their repertoires are based on their HS clique and you get to decide which party to take with you, judging by how useful you interpret them to be or the type of challenge you want to face, similar to Maniac Mansion (or Final Fantasy 1 if we're continuing the FF comparison). Try the game with three Jocks for a smash-a-thon (and presumably a lot of drinking) or try it with three Goth chicks who have discovered that they can actually raise the dead now by sitting in a graveyard and writing poetry, rather than just getting unfortunate medical conditions from sitting on cold tombstones all evening.

032. Cutscene Chaser
You're a secret agent slash mercenary with ADD: In order to concentrate on your mission, something needs to happen every five minutes. That something is a cutscene. An exciting cutscene full of action and danger and a lot of talking usually. Failure to reach the next cutscene results in you getting distracted and wandering off somewhere. Into enemy fire. What with you needing to be sneaky in this non-specific satirical game idea. In a cardboard box, perhaps? A non-specific cardboard box.

033. Final Philately
Hell yeah, stamp collecting! An oft-overlooked arena of thrills and excitement if there ever was one. Collect stamps.. and then organise them! In sequential orders of value and/or the date they were issued! Considering dozens of games employ collectible stamps as some kind of sidequest/reward system thing, this idea isn't as ridiculous as it sounds.

034. Shapeshifter Detective
No, not like Kameo. Or those other guys who change into monsters and such. This is a point and click affair with a private detective, sort of like Gabriel Knight or that Broken Sword series, only you're able to transform into other people. There's some kind of stipulation to limit who you're able to turn into (you need to have shaken their hand or own something of theirs) which also adds an additional puzzle to solve. If you need to ransack some files to find out who killed whoever, you can "borrow" an item of the main dude in charge of those files - the File Dude himself in other words - and then turn into him to get past the laser eye security. Which will laser you in the eye if you're not the File Dude. Point and clicks are coming back, thanks in part to the renewed accessibility to the P-n'-C classics that the Scumm emulation engine provides as well as the DS and its stylus' natural affinity for pointing and clicking on things. So it'll be natural to see more of these in the future. Only with less File Dudes involved, most likely.

035. Claymation FPS
With the Neverhood Chronicles movie on its way, based on a series of bizarre and awesome claymation-based action/platformer games, it's about time to start thinking of riding the innovation train all the way to EasyMoneyville, with stops at Ripoff Junction and Potential Copyright Infringement Suit Lane. See, the industry works in veins - find a wealthy vein of commercially viable content and bleed it dry of blood/ore/oil/coconut. Whichever's more applicable. In this FPS, you'd have fully destructible clay environments to wander around in and shoot to pieces. Kind of like Black. Only with clay. And gameplay.

036. Pacmin
Organise your lovable but ravenous Pacmin on this journey of fabulous wonders and team management. The Pacmin are round yellow guys who will eat anything you tell them to eat: As their ranks swell from eating ghosts and other--hopefully more corporeal--creatures, you can eventually get them to chew through anything en-masse discovering a vast wealth of, I dunno, cherries. Or gold. Gold cherries. I already did a Pacman thing, didn't I? Well, I just thought having your own little stable of pacmen to order around would be adorable. So sue me. Unless you're Namco or Nintendo, in which case please don't.

037. Qolor-In
A DS game, like Qix, only instead of using lines and boxes to fill in the screen, you're actually coloring in the screen with the stylus. While the stylus is pressed on the screen, a pool of paint will flow from it, coloring the surrounding area in a circle. The longer it's held down, the more paint flows out from it, though you'll be in more danger from the wandering enemies around the place while the stylus is touching the screen. If you move the stylus or lift it from the screen, the paint stops flowing out. You could, alternatively, color-in the screen with fast strokes, only pausing briefly for a few small pools before moving on. Keeping the stylus touching the screen for as long as possible (either moving or stationary) will accrue various bonus/combo points. The backgrounds are constantly changing from cartoony backdrops to slightly more eccentric and far-fetched, like art masterpieces and the like. And as well as having just the one screen, you can scroll in any direction by motioning the stylus towards that side of the screen - the top screen would reveal the picture in its entirety with the current section in the bottom screen highlighted.

038. Forensic/Crime Scene Investigator Video Game
The life of a forensic whatsit in a video game is very difficult. Nothing like these TV shows where they have the power to zoom in on a piece of fluff on the floor of the victim's immaculate apartment and before David Caruso can put on his sunglasses, they've already discovered it's a towel fibre that came from the hotel where the victim was murdered. Instead, forensic guys in the video game world have literally seconds before their victim blinks a few times and vanishes and so must ascertain all they can in that short time: Was the victim hit by a hurled barrel? Did he get shot with a three-way laser gun? Did the victim have another guy left? Because then the victim could explain what happened once he comes back. The game follows one of these investigators in a series of common video game genres: The first level might be a Platformer type who fell down a hole while the second is some impossibly entangled body who was the unfortunate victim of an FPS with ragdoll physics.

039. Musical Silent Hill Monsters
Just a crazy idea, but instead of radio static, monsters in Silent Hill set off specific rock numbers? Like Journey would suddenly start playing if one of those straitjacket crazy demon things is on its way. You might get distracted by all the rocking out to not notice it. All right, so most of the creepy tension would fly out of the window and sure, there may be Clockwork Orange-type repercussions in mentally linking awesome music to horrible demon figment things, but still. Journey. And maybe the Scorpions whenever Pyramid Head shows up. Here he is, indeed. Best yet, the XBox version will let you assign a custom soundtrack to all the monsters so you can listen to your favoritest tunes while something is trying to tear out your eyes.

040. Knights of the Round Redux
A 3D remake of that classic beat-em-up game where you select Arthur or any of his knights and go off to kick copious amounts of ass in a historically-dubious rendition of the medieval world. I'm thinking of something like a Dynasty Warriors 3rd-person thing, but instead of seeking/protecting/killing people with identical sounding names (hello racism) you're just out there to get as much glory and honor as you can. A little gold wouldn't go amiss either, since Camelot's an expensive place to do up. Find the grail, save the innocents, hit everything and everyone else with swords until they blow up somehow. Lots of fun.

100 New Game Features III

2007-07-20T15:42:00.000-07:00

Another one of these! Hooray!

021. Reverse RPG
So, you start at the end right? Take out the big evil thing and save the world from not being big evil thinged. But alas, you've sacrificed so much on your journey, like losing the love interest and having to kill the childhood friend that turned evil, that when the good gods and goddesses agree to your wish to turn everything back to how they were the consequences of that wish become apparent: You're forced to take your journey backwards, undoing all that you've done. This means running around the place, resurrecting evil warriors and creatures (who are now friendly again since you've removed the big evil thing's influence) and then smack them around to heal all their damage so they're nice and healthy. You also have to make sure to put all your best gear in the precariously located chests provided, replacing them with your crappier stuff as you drop levels. Finally, you'll return to the tranquil life you left behind, with the world all but mended and the big evil thing just a memory. Of course, there'll be various plotlines involving the big evil thing's minions following you backwards in time and such, but I'd just love to see the expressions on those hardcore grinder power-gamer types when they're told they have to throw their +7 Greatswords away and drop a few levels before they're allowed to leave the dungeon. And then resort to those missions where you go deliver a bag of rice to the farmer down the road. Or... take it from him.. I guess.

022. Something With Superheroes
OK, so you have this superhero, doesn't matter which one (Batman would be the ideal choice though) and you have to fulfill specific quotas of crimefightery to retire to the batcave (dammit, I was trying to make this non-specific) or what have you for the night. These quotas aren't based on bodycounts, or successful arrests or even fighting your way to the Joker (dammit!) or someone and then taking them out. Nope, the quota you have to meet is in big comic onomatopoeic sound effect bubbles. Five "Zok!"s, four "Kapow!"s and two "Smackk!"s oughta do it for the first level. The sound effect you get is based on a number of factors that you'll need to familiarize yourself with, including using certain weapons (a baseball bat might always produce a "Whockk!" effect, which may be easier to achieve with the bat than with some cumbersome unarmed combo attack) and aiming for an opponent's face rather than his body and so on. As you progress, the sound effects you need to collect become all the more difficult to achieve. Fortunately, you'll have a training dummy to test the various punching/kicking/thwacking combos on (the game would be like a beat-em-up with all that technical fighting jargon that the one-on-one fighter games have). Try and unlock the various easter egg noises, like "Newt!" and "Mint!".

023. Madden 2017
Not necessarily a sci-fi variant or anything, I just wanted EA Sports to make a version of Madden based 10 years into the future and see how accurate it ends up becoming. Anti-gravity zones would still be interesting though.

024. Robocrusher
You've been sent by some kind of hostile alien star empire to conquer the Earth but due to a slight mix-up, you're actually smaller than the people you're trying to overthrow. A lot smaller. Thanks to your sleek T-1000 design however, you can stealthily collect metal and add it to your own body, increasing your size gradually. Part Katamari, part Chibi Robo and part Godzilla Smashes Stuff Simulator, you'll take your pint-sized destroyer and buff him up with whatever metal deposits you can find. Here's the twist: While you can grow relatively quickly by simply eating common metals like copper and iron, you'll inherit the defensive properties of those same metals. That is to say, not a whole lot of defence against things like gunfire (and later missiles). Instead, you want to make an effort to snobbishly pass over such weak materials and only go for things like stainless steel or possibly something like titanium (which is very rare). Your metal composition, which will continue to grow and change through the game, will dictate your power and defence levels as you get bigger. You can whizz through the game with the cheap stuff, but you'll find it hard going towards the end: You need to seek out the good stuff and stay under the radar until you're ready. Those fleshy earthlings aren't going to take a steel colossal giant down very easily.

025. Popular Online Encyclopedia Battlers
As an Admin, it is your mission to monitor your domain and deal with any and all trespasses made by interlopers to your kingdom. Because this is a video game, instead of simply editing text changes to the Wik..errr, Popular Online Encyclopedia entries you govern, you need to head in there with some kind of internet spaceship dealie and shoot the edits down in a scrolling shooter variant. While simple typos tend to make up the bulk of the misinformation forces, they lead all the way up to conflicting opinions and original research: the deadliest of all edits. The game is based in real-time, so your territory will be constantly under attack. The longer you leave a zone alone, the more corrupt it will become from outside influence. As it heads from green to yellow to red (states of emergency as it were), cleansing them will become more difficult but ultimately more rewarding. You can exchange high amounts of points for moderator locks, protecting some of the problem zones by blocking all outside edits, so it's worth your while to go after the big ones.

026. Chess RPG
It begins as a simple chess game: move the pieces, avoid getting taken, wear down the opponent's defences and take the King. Add to that a variety of powers, personalities and playing possibilities and you have something.. well, pretty ridiculous. But that's the fun of it. For instance, the Black Queen is a master (mistress?) of the sword and she cuts down her enemies with a grim satisfaction while the kinder White Queen uses a staff to disarm her opponents. Bishops can use magic; Castles have techniques to defend themselves and allies alike; the Knights, though encumbered with the L shaped movement, have some of the most powerful attacks in the game. The pawns are basically comic relief. Though you face your traditional enemies a lot on the battlefield (the black side or the white side, depending on who's story you're following), there's all sorts of other opponents and monsters in the world out there, most of which are based on other famous board games. Like a clan of warrior checkers. Or that Dog from Monopoly.

027. Sim Sandwich
In this innovative title, you... well, you.. okay, I'll come even with you, this is a Simpsons reference. And I want a sandwich. That's why I wrote this one. I'm... I'm sorry. For everything.

028. Gritty Pacman
There's a burgeoning market for gritty. Gritty Bomberman, for instance, sold like hotcake. Now comes gritty Pacman, a journey into drug abuse, compulsive feeding and hallucinations about supernatural terrors. Terrors that never die, their eyes constantly wandering. Watching. Pacman's world has become dark now, black as night, and his only companion is constant, repetitive electronic music to emphasize his dire plight. A bit of a departure, sure, but this is what the kids want these days.

029. Call of Cthulhu: The Party Game
Like Mario Party, the game is split into two parts: One is a boardgame where you compete with others in the long term to discover the terrible secrets that lie beneath the veil of reality that mankind has shielded itself with for millennia untold. Then there's lots of fun minigames. Like "Don't read the weird old book under any circumstances" and "Whatever that thing was, I don't want to know". You'll be gambling with the malevolent and pernicious forces of the eldritch underworld and with your own fragile sanity, but great rewards await those who dare. Like power stars and candy. A party game the whole family can enjoy.

030. America Declares War On Everybody
A strategy game released to the generations of gifted video game players everywhere. For the public, it's a satirical statement made by supposed liberal game developers. For the US government, it's the Last Starfighter made real. You get 200 XBox Live Achievement Points for nailing China.

100 New Game Features II

2007-07-14T17:54:00.000-07:00

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.

100 New Game Features

2007-07-06T17:26:00.000-07:00

In a sort of tribute to the 300 thing I mentioned a while ago (which sadly petered-out at 50, partially because of the vast amount of effort and illustrations that accompanied them), I've decided to make my own little list of never-before (as far as I'm aware) game features, at the rate of 10 per week for 10 weeks.

Basically, instead of any detailed game mechanic or full game idea, I'll just post some kind of random premise or gimmick a game could factor into its gameplay structure somehow. I'll try and keep the genres varied and will also try not to make any of these too crap (though I'm not promising anything). If they are too crap, they were meant to be satirical. If you didn't get the joke, then the satire is too complex for you. Now that I've covered my bases and insulted your intelligence, we'll begin.

001. Base of Operations is a Living Creature
Not just one of those "Whoa, we're inside a monster for this level! Check out the viscera! And the squishy things that are trying to kill us!" generic scenarios but rather a kind of parasite/symbiont thing where you control either one or many little guys as they go around and, I don't know, take over what they think is the world but is actually a suburban home. After each launch or jaunt or whatever, they head back home to their chosen host body to go over their conquering progress. If you think the idea of having a beloved pet or even a person as some sort of meat castle thing to set up camp in is a gross idea, then you may have inadvertently stumbled onto why this idea is totally tits.

002. Mighty Max Game Hub
Now this both equally applies to a game starring Mighty Max himself or just games that follow a traditional platformer kind of "no two stages are anything alike" pattern. The hub world, like most hub worlds, allow you to travel from one level to the next with the occasional hidden bonuses or whatever. For an example, consider the hubs and lobbies of Rare N64 platformers like Donkey Kong 64 or Banjo Kazooie where you could find important shit just lying around the vanilla starting areas of the game. Instead, you would explore various static playset models of the level you are about to embark on, finding the exit and all sorts of other cool stuff just by exploring the playset as a little toy version of your hero, checking behind walls and opening flaps and what have you. It would even be done in a photorealistic style, to make it seem like you're playing around with a real life model. Once you find the way in, though, the game resumes with its normal (and no doubt cartoony) graphics and action-packed gameplay.

003. Terror Ducks
Ducks are cute. There needs to be more games where you take over the world as them. Maybe play as a Terror Duck turned good (the Mellow Duck), preventing his brethren from destroying all life as we know it. There'd probably even be puns involving the word quack, god help us.

004. Final Fantasy Fables: That Walking House Thing With a Cannon
I mean, what's his deal, really? We FF fans deserve to know.

005. President Evil
George W. Bu

005. Resident Evil: Type Veronica
A better Res Evil parody, in this one they break Sega's monopoly on zombie related typing games with their own version. The added difficulty level is that all the sentences are in terrible Engrish and involve crappy dialogue, often causing you to subconsciously correct or improve the garbage that is coming out of their mouths and die in the attempt. Now imagine a Dead Rising typing game! Even more difficult, because you won't be able to see a single fucking word on the screen without satellite dish eyes.

006. Ahnuld Megapack
An FPS with a slight difference: All the levels are based on Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and you play the governator himself. The themes, weapons and often the very rules change between each level as you enter a new movie and fight your way through to the inevitable bloody climax. Fight an unseen jungle menace in a Predator game that doesn't suck for once. Obliterate an island fortress in the Commando level's unique "buckets o' bad guys" engine. Shoot, hack and slay through an action-packed brawl-fest of terror, giblets and heavily-accented one-liners (and that's just the "Jingle All The Way" stage). The end of game boss will be the kid he gives birth to in Junior. And like all good action games, he'll even fight his own twin! (which won't last long considering it's Danny DeVito sized) Bonus Feature: Unlock all the exceptionally crappy license games that the movies spawned during their theatrical releases! We might as well call this game the "Ocean Anniversary Pack" come to think of it.

007. James Bond - Something is Everything
I sort of had to make the 007 slot be about Bond. In this game, he still has the fantastic gadgets only he spends a lot more time shooting those free-running freaks like the one at the start of the last movie. I mean, they can bounce off walls and defy the laws of inertia! They must be stopped before they find a way to use these powers for something other than being French and sort of artsy pretentious about their hobby of jumping off tall structures and not dying 9 times out of 10. Keep an eye on the "traceur" dude in the new Die Hard movie if you want a good laugh.

008. Clerks - The Video Game
The movie licenses keep on coming. The Clerks game will be like a Kevin Smith version of a LucasArt adventure game, where you play as Dante and solve mysteries around the small NJ town in which you reside, only to have the action frequently interrupted by the fact you have to serve customers in your dead-end convenience store clerk job. Choose the best dialogue options to avoid incident and be ever mindful of your foulmouthed companion Randall before he does or says something typically inflammatory. Lots of nonsequitur comedy and video game/movie parodies abound. I am of course basing this game on the superior cartoon adventures.

009. Item Presto-Chango Device
During Dungeon Crawlers, you find all kinds of random crap that you can't do anything with. What to do? Put them in this little gizmo (which could also be a spell of some kind) and hope something good happens. The effects are mostly random, with the potential reward (or punishment) equal to the quality of the item placed inside. You could end up with cash, XP, a weapon or something you could actually use or just some horrible demon chicken monster thing that will pluck your eyes out. After about five or six eye-pluckings, you may finally learn something and decide to leave that useless crap on the floor.

010. A Realistic Racing Game That Does Something Unexpected
Thundering through a flat city landscape around an uninspired circuit a dozen times and repeating the process for a slightly better time? Sounds... heavenly. So how about on the third lap you see Godzilla walking around blowing shit up? How will that affect your driving performance, seeing him torch downtown Tokyo while you're trying to carefully take corners without too much spin? With that deafening roar of his drowning out the horrible synthpop music? Without actually affecting the car's performance or the track too much (since apparently racing game enthusiasts are into that boring bullshit), the usually normal background areas beyond the track could explode with all sorts of random happenings-on, ranging from an all out meteor-storm, fire-n'-brimstone Armageddon (which will, curiously, be over once the race is complete) to something completely bizarre and often very subtle, like the moon growing in size with a big scary face on it (a la Majora's Mask) each time you complete a lap. For new players, it will friggin' blow their minds to see all the buildings suddenly flip upside down or something, hopefully causing an accident and creating entertainment to whomever has to watch this dreck.

OK, so that's 10. I'll do another 10 next week. Hopefully I'll be funnier/more innovative by then, but I wouldn't hold your breath since I'm not exactly getting paid by the word here.

Game Idea: Deep

2007-06-28T16:06:00.000-07:00

Deep is an exploration game based on digging. While digging games exist - and I refer to famous examples such as Mr Driller, Dig-Dug and the various incarnations of Boulder Dash - they mostly rely on action. In these games, you get a cartoonish side-view depiction of the land you're digging and the gameplay tends to focus on frantically clearing dirt to reach diamonds or enemies or just to find the way down as quickly as possible.

Deep is slightly more RPG-based. Your goal is to scan the undeveloped area around your city for interesting signals and then purchase that area so you can dig it up. As you make money from your discoveries, you are able to upgrade your equipment in order to detect new and interesting things which will result in even more cash and you progress through the game in this manner.

Brief background to the game: The year is somewhere in the 8000s AD (though there's no-one alive who can remember the old date system). Humanity has managed to develop itself up to an advanced age where faster than light speed is possible. However, each time this is accomplished, a mysterious disaster resembling an earthquake packed with electromagnetic energy destroys all the technological advancements and drags humanity back into a pre-industrial age. Anyone who survives the earthquake wakes up to find no trace of their achievements and humanity has to rebuild from the ground up. Nobody is actually aware of this, but this event has occurred four times in humanity's past.

It is now a time period analogous to the 1940s (though without the war speeding things along). Humanity has been slowly recovering from the last Event and is only a few decades away from once again approaching the first steps into space exploration. You happen to be a Digger: someone who makes their living by using metal-detection equipment to scour the now-empty lands for materials you can sell to the developing cities. Because of the unique nature of this world, the ground is filled with remnants of several thousand years of technology, now inactive debris. Because these past generations of humanity at the peak of their advancement has all but stripped the natural resources of valuable metals and minerals of the planet, the only way to recover these necessary materials is by digging them up in "wealth zones" (actually the decaying remains of highly advanced cities). You live right on top of one of these.

Your detection equipment is limited to metallic elements close to the surface and so you must dig up the various near-surface scrap materials in order to raise money. You don't need to purchase land for this early segment as it's simply a tutorial about how you detect items and then dig them up. Eventually, you'll come across an actual find (which will be sent back to the nearby city for analysis) which will fund the next part of the game.

With the advanced detection equipment that your friends will research and create for you, you can start finding even bigger pieces of scrap metal to sell to interested parties. You'll start finding intact traces of the old civilisations too, which you can sell as cultural oddities. The game will eventually lead to clearing huge amounts of the Earth to recover entrances to whole buildings which you can then explore in a team and recover anything of use before destroying the entire building with concussion mines and selling the whole thing for valuable scrap. You'll also slowly start solving the mystery of where all this ancient stuff came from and why humanity seems fated to repeat its technological advancement over and over.

Gameplay-wise, the game will be split into three modes, the last of which won't be available until late in the game. The first mode is a digging simulator where you start digging at the most interesting places (you'll be dealing with several hundred feet of square land, so there's plenty to find). Anything dug up will be sent to your associates in the city to analyze for metallic components by your assistant on-site, which basically means anything dug up (including the ground soil) will be automatically be sent away for analysis. You'll start with a simple shovel initially, making progress slow, but you'll be able to upgrade digging equipment (as well as other things) as you progress.

For the second mode of the game you assume the role of your associates in the city, who are part trading company and part scholar research team. They actually receive discoveries from all Diggers in the areas surrounding the city and reward them for their findings, but since you'll soon outshine them (due to fortunate circumstances on your part) the company will end up being yours later in the game. To begin with, all you'll have available is a list of menu options to process the materials from your Digger protagonist. They will also clean up and preserve any intact items you will find. Both the metallic-compound search (in the soil you've dug up) and item clean-up are optional minigames you can play, though both can also be processed automatically without needing your control.

When the game gets to the point where you can start exploring whole subterranean buildings and outposts, you'll be assuming the lead of an exploration team and carefully exploring the dilapidated underground ruins for anything salvageable. There'll be various traps, both intentional (such as still-functioning security equipment) and incidental (such as doors that automatically open and shut at random). This exploration system will work in an FPS mode to properly recreate the feel of exploring the age-old ruin. It may also use a Metroid Prime-esque scanning system so you can continue to use your progressively-updated scanning technology underground. Your team is comprised of the protagonist Digger (who you will assume the first-person POV of) as well as several members of the research team in the city. Like the Digging mode, this mode will become more complex as you continually upgrade your tools using the discoveries you find.

I'm hoping to make this game an engaging mystery story going on as well as a highly playable sci-fi-esque treasure hunt. The storyline I have in mind doesn't simply involve aliens who zap us whenever we get close to reaching our potential: the story goes much deeper than that, with secret revelations and twists aplenty. Which is what one should expect from a game with a name like this.

Design Elements #3: Planet-Eaters

2007-06-21T17:01:00.000-07:00

Planet-eating. There are various movie/comic villains that eat planets. Galactus is one. Unicron is another. There's probably two or three of them in Star Trek lore. The Death Star didn't eat planets, it just 'sploded them. And now, I've decided to create a game idea that will allow the average gamer at home to eat planets.

"Why eat planets?", I hear you exclaim.

Because eating planets is cool. Duh.

You'll control one of these nameless/lots of names ancient (like, "from the dawn of time, two minutes after the big bang" ancient) planet-eating things as it goes about its daily grind. Which is to eat planets. The planets you pick are dependant on your tastes: You get more energy from occupied planets but they're slightly more difficult to get close to because of stupid sentient species who like their planet and try to attack you with spaceships. Damn nuisances. So what you do is you eat all the spaceships they send at you. And then eat their planet.

You sort of use an intergalactic radar to identify nearby planets and their relative worth in the field of nutrition: Is it a tasty planet? Teeming with juicy life? Is it one of those volcano planets that might cause a tummy ache? Maybe you shouldn't eat that one. Poison planets will poison you. Acid planets will give you acid reflux. Gas planets are no good for obvious reasons. You travel to planets you like the look of, then eat them. You'll receive an energy burst and maybe a neat little planet recipe card (with fancy French calligraphy) to add to a growing collection of eaten planet cards.

Maybe there'll be cameos. The general universe of planets will be almost entirely generated at random, but there may be one or two special ones that show up. Like a candy planet. Or a cowboy planet. Eat two planets perpetually stuck in Prohibition-era Earth (for some reason) and you could unlock a special gangster fedora for your planet-eating terror to put on. He can wear it at a jaunty angle while he genocides entire sentient species. Maybe impress the lady planet-eaters and have a baby planet-eater (or... moon-eater.. I guess). Maybe you'll eat a planet the Prince of All Cosmos rolled up or one of those ones from Spore populated by creatures with butts for eyes. Depending on which industry figures we can get on board this planet-eating extravaganza.

While the life of a planet-eater is generally all milk and honey (and planets), there'll be a fair share of challenges, even for you. For instance, black holes could unexpectedly eat a planet before you get the chance to. Or the Phoenix Force blips one. Or that Death Star I mentioned. Then there's the spaceships - always, always the spaceships. While you can generally eat everything (with a particular preference for planets), you may want to outsmart these other cosmic-scale troublemakers. Maybe stick a straw into a planet and eat all of its insides first, like Homer did with that wedding cake. Just because you're a creature a bajillion metres long who's very voice can destroy a planet's natural magnetic fields with its sheer sonic power, it doesn't mean you can't be sneaky.

People would want to play this game because there is no game yet, to my knowledge, that'll let you eat entire planets. There are several which lets you blow up planets and more than a few that will let you eat part of a planet. If you want to see more planet-eating games in the future, give me money and I shall spend it on things that I like. And then maybe create a planet-eating game.

Game Idea: Litermancy

2007-06-13T14:29:00.000-07:00

Not so much a whole developed game idea than another mechanic or potential RPG character gimmick.

There have been many "make words to score points" games in the past, starting with the boardgame grand-daddies Scrabble and Boggle and moving down to things like Wordtris and Bookworm Adventures. There's also a couple of RPG-ish ones like Dungeon Scroll, a game I'd recommend to anyone wanting to waste a few minutes building their vocabulary.

This idea is a little different from all of those. For one thing, it isn't about building the biggest words possible; you will in fact be limited to three letter words. Your character is learning the forbidden magical art of litermancy (which may be changed to wordamancy depending on which one sounds less dumb after I've slept on it), which relies on combining three runes to create various powerful effects. Of course, knowledge of what, exactly, each combination of the three runes does has been lost for centuries and will need to be rediscovered by your character.

While you planned on learning this idiosyncratic but potentially powerful art in relative safety and secrecy, a call goes out from your native Kingdom for all registered magic users (those able to use magic being rare in the kingdoms of this world) to be drafted into the Guardian Army to protect the state from an imminent invasion of evil-doers. Thrust out into active combat almost right away, you need to figure out your chosen magical art form and get good at it quick before you get killed; either by the enemy for fear of your emerging skills or by your own army for your wildy unpredictable magic.

The story follows a series of set battles, usually against a group of regular opponents or occasionally a single boss creature. You are taken to a screen with a bunch of jumbled up letters and must fill ten slots with ten three-letter words. The words you make become your magic spells for that battle, shuffled and given to you three at a time in a random order throughout the battle. Specific "real" words have unique effects based loosely around the traditional schools of magic: for instance, a RAT or CAT spell will summon the appropriate animals for a duration, doing damage and blocking enemy attacks towards you. GAP might conjure a hole in the ground to swallow up opponents (or give them trendy clothes, who knows?). Things like RAY or POW will cause direct evocation damage.

Those are the easy spells. You can get more abstract with some words which may end up doing more damage than the obvious ones. For example, SOL, which may not be a well-known alias of our sun, will do horrendous damage with a solar beam - perhaps doing more damage than the more-obvious SUN. Using something like GOD or BOX will have all sorts of interesting effects. Many, many words will have completely insane or benign effects that will either not affect the battle itself at all (though may confuse an opponent) or could end up damaging/aiding either or both sides in some way. Part of the fun (that'd be a good word to use in-game) of this game will be discovering what all these different words will do and maybe incorporating the unexpectedly great ones into your next battle, rather than relying on the same ol' bunch of obvious ones over and over.

As well as forming actual words, the game will have a system where each rune (not necessarily every letter, so you could get two of the same letters with different properties) will have an elemental property attached to it. These elemental properties will disappear if you make a "real" word, superseded by that real word's specific effect. But if you make a three letter combination that is either nonsense or a word that doesn't have a unique effect (there are a hell of a lot of three-letter words out there so not all of them can have unique effects), it will rely on its elemental background for its overall effect when cast. So a word with a strong Earth leaning (three green letters in a random configuration), when cast, will perform a random Earth spell such as a damaging earthquake or healing the good guys. Though usually beneficial to you (as opposed to the often random real words), relying on these random elemental words will not get you too far since their effects will generally be minimal.

I was considering adapting this system to allow for combo spells: You could cast what appears to be a nonsense spell (SHA) and then follow it up with another spell (DOW) to complete a whole six-letter word (SHADOW) for an even bigger spell effect, with the downside being that you have to hope that those two piece-words come up in the same turn. Because you can form 10 words (and this number may go up as your character gets more talented) and only have three available per combat round, you could pepper your arsenal with several of these twin-combo words and hope for a chance to use them. If not, they'll just default to their elemental spell effects. This would add a whole new bunch of unique words to the engine though, which will overload the memory along with all those unique three-letter words. Combine it with the possibility for nine-letter words and it's just getting ridiculous.

While this could go for it's own game easily enough, it could also be adapted into one of those ensemble RPGs where every character has a unique talent or skill. It may be a little dull to make all the new words each time in the latter's case, but it should still prove to be an interesting addition. With all the potentially humorous situations your apprentice magic-user could get into to with his "talent", combined with the amount of exploration to be done (into the words themselves), the game should be pretty awesome fun. IMO.

Game Idea: Braintrain

2007-06-06T21:38:00.000-07:00

Note: I'm currently working on the Item Quest Design Doc, covering all the aspects of the game save the Master Item List (MIL.. 'cause, like, there's a million of them), which is going to take a long while. I'll be cribbing from all sorts of places to fill that list (and not just from other video games, which I will steal from like the hack I am). I want to also want to bring some attention to Squidi's Three Hundred Mechanics thing he's got going on here:
http://www.squidi.net/three/index.php
I'll be posting nitpicks and suggestions in the forum until he gets tired of my backseat-designerisms and kicks me out. The dude's good at coming up with that stuff and, unlike me, he actually includes pictures. Which really do help.

So, this idea then. It's inspired in part by train simulators like Railroad Tycoon and an old PC/Amiga game called Transartica, which was a strategy game set in a post-apocalyptic future where the world is trapped in a nuclear winter in which rival train/delivery companies moved vital supplies over the frozen landscape to remote subterranean settlements. Like Elite, it involved buying goods you can trade off for a higher price at another destination and fighting off the various smugglers and pirates that attack you on your journey.

This game builds on that somewhat. It's the future, where intergalactic travel and terraforming technology exists, but is still in their respective infancy stages. In newly terraformed worlds, settlers are dropped in the just-barely livable conditions and are expected to make the best of it and develop the land. The game is set around one of these worlds, a planet close to Earth but in its initial stages: volcanic and often dangerous. You play a merchant who has travelled to this planet to use your knowledge of trading for the great wealth that is supposed to lie under the planet. As such, you've developed technology that will allow normal trains to run on nothing but steam and the various inexpensive minerals that the planet has in vast quantities. Developing a train route between the various outposts on the planet (which are pre-generated by the computer, as you only control the rail aspect), you slowly build up your rail empire and find new and better ways to develop your trains and railtracks for optimum trading opportunities.

Although you have regressed in technology from the space-age facilities of your home planet (Earth), you still have correspondence with the space-faring trade company your family owns. Occasionally, they'll provide resources and technology for you by delivering them via launched space-containers: This relatively inexpensive mode of travel is basically dropping cargo from nearby deep space, aiming various containers made of a hyper-strong and space-worthy material towards your planet, so that you may find where they crash and use them for your operation. Of course, as this technology is cheap and affordable (since it is just a cannon in space firing things at your planet), there are times when the containers are delivered somewhat off-course from your home base. Part of your journey around the trading routes will invariably involve finding and securing these containers. In return, you're expected to launch containers full of valuable mined material (received in trades from the mining outposts you deal business with) back into space for your relatives to find and sell back to interested parties.

The game works in stages, or, more accurately, eras. The planet only has a few outposts initially so your trading route is basic and newbie-friendly. You're introduced to new technology and challenges to overcome as the game progresses so the difficulty curve will be kind to you as you gradually learn the ropes. Eventually, should you fulfill all the trade requirements and goals in the current incarnation of your merchant empire, you'll skip ahead to the next generation (that is, your original character's children) about 20 years later. This new stage will have expanded your people's established civilisation on this planet, based on your success as the planet's driving merchant force, and will have bigger and more elaborate outposts in higher numbers. You'll be able to see how Earth's occupation of the planet is going over the years as you play. As you and your off-world company grow in wealth (what with all the successful trading), you'll have access to improvements in your train and rail technology.

Eventually, though you'll be dealing in meagre human trainrobbers and bandits in the first few eras, you'll meet a few rival alien merchants who have had the same idea and plan to usurp your valuable operation for the same important minerals to export to their own planet/empire. Some of these alien interlopers will be fairly harmless and fair, acting as rival traders eager for their own piece of the pie and friendly enough for you to trade with, since you're not always going after the same valuable materials (one man's trash is another man's treasure, so to speak). Others will be far more hostile, sweeping the planet for anything valuable and often attacking both trains and outposts alike for their mined treasures. Your trains will be able to upgrade themselves with weapons (like gun turrets and ground-to-air missiles) and even have passenger cars for small security forces with which to combat these hostiles. Also watch out that these same bandits/aliens don't collect the various cargo drops from space that you're relying on; you'll get prior notice of new arrivals but it won't help if the containers land too close to where an enemy encampment is and you're not there in time.

So yeah, this idea borrows from games like Transartica and Elite and the sci-fi epic Dune somewhat, but the core of the game is trade. Upgrading your train to be an unstoppable death engine full of turrets and soldiers is one route to take, but you wouldn't be able to hold much on your train if you did it and you sort of need those traded minerals for your business to stay afloat. Similarly, making your train too big or too weapons-light will make it an easy target for trainrobbers and alien menaces alike. Maintaining your age-old (or at least it will be age-old in the later stages) rail empire against increasing dangers for increasing profit is the goal and it should be pretty enthralling for train sim and strategy game enthusiasts alike.

NB: The name comes from what I'm expecting to be the game's major antagonist in the later stages of the game: A sentient alien train that usurps the same track system to attack your own trains for their trade goods. The engine out in front will just be a giant alien brain and face on wheels. Sort of goofy, I know, but then I was a big fan of Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors as a kid.

Game Idea: Choose Your Own Video Game

2007-05-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

OK, my game idea is particularly meta this week, possibly even downright postmodern.

It starts with the concept of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were all the rage 10 to 20 years ago. Maybe they still are, I don't know. Like I know what kids are into. iPods and Youtube and "Weblogs". With this kind of generation gap humor, I'm so close to a syndicated comic strip I can taste it. But I digress. In these books you started at Blurb #1, and very quickly found yourself making decisions that would affect the course of the rest of the story, turning pages until you discover the results of the latest monumental decision. Then you had the morbid kids like myself who would just scan the book for all the end-game scenarios that resulted in gory death. Like, not even to cheat, but just to read about how the dude fell down a dark hole and was eaten by a grue.

Anyway, this idea sort of takes that concept and exaggerates it. I'm not talking about branching storylines so much; they're everywhere in video games already. Instead, what this game does is judge the decisions made by the player and changes the genre of the gameplay accordingly.

You start with a simple third-person 3D Platformer format, since that is generally the most basic and easily modifiable (when adding subgenres) of modern game genres. You are given a basic plot hook (rescue the princess; save the big diamond; defeat the bad guys) and set off on an adventure. The levels will be episodic like a normal 3D Platformer, with self-contained worlds and various goals to achieve in them. The first level will be mostly tutorial in nature, giving you the controls and instructions of the current "basic" form. However, you'll reach a small, somewhat ominous area before the next level where you'll receive the first power-up of the game.

And, of course, this power-up will be based on a multiple choice decision.

You have a table with three items: a sword, a gun and a staff. Choosing the sword means that, subconsciously (or at least this is how the game will interpret and promote its gimmick), you want to play a game with lots of hand-to-hand fighting and beating up bad guys in close-combat, setting up the first Fighter beacon (a system of beacons will be used to demonstrate what genre you're heading towards: I figure they'd be like the batsignal, but with an icon that depicts the current genre focus in the light beam instead). The next level for the sword guy will feature far more enemies than the previous, which will be fought in a Scrolling Fighter-type smashfest. However, since this is only the first Fighter beacon to go up, the gameplay will still mostly resemble that of the original Platformer, just with a few "A, A, B, A" fighting combos. If you continue making "Fighter game" type decisions, the game will adjust the gameplay to match the hack-happy thought process behind those decisions.

Similarly, choosing the Gun will shift the game's genre to a TPS (third-person shooter) game, which also share the same kind of "horde attack" of the Fighter scenario but with more TPS-unique situations (like using cover, or switching to different guns depending on distance/accuracy/necessary firepower for bosses). The staff will hint that an RPG is more your thing, which subsequently gives you arbitrary stats and changes your health bar to a numerical "HP" amount. These stats are completely irrelevant and are more for display after the first RPG beacon goes up, but getting more RPG beacons will change the game world and your character's abilities to match these stats, and may even eventually start making everyone move in turns like proper well-behaved RPG antagonists.

Each level, after its completion, will give you another chance to shift the game based on the unconscious desire for the type of game you really want. A future level's decision might ask you what tactic you plan to use for assailing the enemy's stronghold: Sneak in? Go in the front way by gung-ho force? Find a way to magic yourself in? Find allies? The first decision may start adding Stealth-elements to the gameplay, while the fourth could add an RPG party (if you're focusing on RPG elements) or some kind of squad-based shooter (if you're focusing on TPS elements).

A factor of this game is the collectible items: In Platformer games, this secondary goal is generally a capricious collect-fest of useless knick-knacks. As the genre "evolves", they start to mean something. If we have a bunch of common yellow items and a rarer red item or two, this could translate in the TPS world as "bullets" and "new guns". In the RPG world it would be "money" and "new equipment". In the more spartan Fighter games, maybe just "bonus points" and "food/heal items". This way, the levels can be generally the same (the layout will be more or less equal no matter what the genre, but the content will change) without too much manipulation.

Another thing about the levels: Although most of the early stages would be the same (for the purposes of not having to make a unique game for every decision made) as soon as a solid genre is decided upon by the gamer, they can start to move away from this linear progression. Subsequently, if you've been deciding on a majority of TPS beacons/decisions, you'll eventually reach the TPS version's endgame which would be a series of levels based on the TPS genre and culminating in a proper TPS end of game boss (a giant fellah that needs several good rockets to the face would be my guess). Likewise, the RPG genre version, once realised enough with plenty of RPG beacons/decisions, will turn into a proper dungeon crawl with a Lich or Dragon as the end of game boss.

One last note about this system is the cross-genreing that could go on with indecisive players who started with a Fighter but wants to switch to the gun-happy TPS mode: You get a chance to do so. The game will keep the hand-to-hand cronies, but also introduce bullets and guns as the collectible items. Thus, you can start shooting away at the burly gang-members that affront you. Choosing "Fighter" again at the next decision will take away the ammunition lying around and replace them with "Fighter" items (but not the guns you already have, giving you a slight but only temporary advantage), and choosing "TPS" again will take away the burly gang members with chainwhips and replace them with gun-toting enemy soldiers. Likewise, you could make decisions to change the fancy schmancy medieval RPG scenario into a Fighting-fest, allowing you to spin kick the cliché blobs and skeletons until a more solid bias can be made between the two conflicting genre types.

As well as the TPS/RPG/Fighter decisions, as you progress with one specific genre in mind, you can add subgenres to it with future between-level decisions. For instance, both the Fighter and the Shooter can be given Stealth elements if you choose to "sneak into" the enemy stronghold. This will make the enemies both more dangerous but less alert, prompting you to take them out without too much backfire. It'll also give the enemies things like line of sight and hearing, so that they stop unerringly honing in on your position (like most confrontational action games) and start walking around a set pattern allowing you to get past them /take them out with careful planning. You could instead introduce the idea of a sniper rifle to the Shooter genre instead of the shotgun, making the patrolling enemies far more nonchalant with a reliance on their powerful weaponry (hence needing to snipe them safely from a distance) than the bloodthirsty (but relatively less damaging) hordes you would mow down with your close-combat pump-action or chainsaw bayonet.

This is my favorite part: After every game playthrough, you can save the finished product of your ADD genre-mixing and start the game from scratch with this hybrid genre in effect right from the get-go. If you found the perfect mix of action and strategy with a Fighter/TPS mix with squad-based combat thrown in at later levels, you can play that game right from the start without all the decision-making interrupting the gameplay. As you unlock each of the end-of-game scenarios (remember, they branch out into a unique few levels and a boss towards the end), you'll have more choice over what the perfect version of the game would be like. Stealth? Fighter? RPG? Maybe even a Racing element or some kind of regression back to the initial kid-friendly Platformer mold (which will take some very mild decision making, such as letting the captured bad guy from level 5 off with a warning instead of putting his head on a banner to lead into war with a la the more violent game modes available.) You could even choose to send your RPG hero into the world of tough TPS action, once both scenarios have been completed, giving you a bizarre playthrough as you duck for cover to block enemy gunfire as you fireball their asses.

Obviously a multi-genre game of this magnitude would be a little resources-heavy to pull off, not to mention the sheer dissonance between game styles and the subsequent lengthy playtesting that would need to be done with each genre-merging, but it's not entirely out of the question with a developer that's crazy enough to take it on (sounds like a bad movie tagline..). Not only would it be a kickass game for someone who doesn't know what they want or isn't always in the mood for the same type of game each time, but it would also be a cool thing for obsessive completists like myself who wants to see each end of game boss and each possible combination, with the evolution of the main character from Regular Joe to gruff army colonel or effete spell-lobber or a badass kung-fu bandana dude or shady ninja or an anthropomorphic cartoon character of some kind... or even some mixture of the above.

Damn, I've never been more excited about a game idea that couldn't possibly work since that one where 50ft-tall cheerleaders take over Manhattan.

More RPG Hybrids

2007-05-23T16:01:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm three days late, so I'll do three game ideas today to make up for it. I think that's fair.

Continuing on from the previous Design Genres article, I wanted to come up with more ways an RPG subgenre can be latched onto games that traditionally don't feature any kind of in-depth character development.

Idea #1: RPG/Pinball

Video game Pinball has come a long way from the simple bonuses and buttons on one or more highly-realized pinball tables (because why not just play the real thing?) to franchises like Pokemon Pinball, where you have a separate goal beyond just breaking into the highscore table to find and collect as many Pokemon as possible and evolve them, completing the in-game Pokedex. Also, and more relevant to my own idea, are the Odami and Metroid Prime pinball games, which have enemies on-screen that you must defeat with the pinball to proceed with the game.

The RPG Pinball idea is similar to the Worms/Strategic 2D Platformer idea last time as it involves a PC (player character) wizard who uses the pinball itself as a sort of magic missile to defeat enemies. Exploring a dungeon, which may be four or five "tables" in length, you can defeat the guardians to proceed further and unlock all kinds of treasures and equipment to use. You may even gain additional powers, allowing you to adapt the regular pinball into something more damaging (like a fireball or a cannonball) to do more damage or unlock specific hidden bonuses - you could shoot a fireball into a tapestry, burning it down and revealing a treasure chest.

The game would have XP (experience) and GP (gold) like a regular RPG, and between dungeons you can use these values to purchase new skills or power-ups to use in the field. Your XP will also dictate what dungeons are available, as tougher ones will continue to open up as you climb XP levels. As well as the pinball spell and variants (fireball, etc.) you can use special spells such as Lightning Bolts (which bounce around the arena at random, damaging enemies sometimes deflecting the pinball) or Time Slow to stop faster enemies from moving around too quickly to hit. Instead of one or two highly-complex tables to work off, there would be several smaller ones with their own traps, bonuses and enemies to take care of. They could range from normal castle-like dungeons to natural (maybe volcanic) caves to goblin fortresses to ancient marble temples full of undead.

Idea #2: RPG/Sports

Now, this one sounds a little daft. First off, I should point out that there are many sports games that allow your players to gain stats and get better between games by training or what have you. There are several managerial franchises that depend on this sort of development from a young potential signing to eventual star player.

However, this is where the "daft" comes in. The game is set in a vaguely Middle Earth type world where demons are spilling out of dimensional portals and generally causing a ruckus. A group of wizards have found a feasible way to create magical anomalies (which are in various shapes) that will close any portal it is sent into. There are special conditions for each one, however, which means each dimensional portal can only be closed in a specific way.

You control the leader of a group of mercenaries/adventurers who will transport these anomalies to their portals and try and get them past the defending demons to seal the dimensional portals forever. Each of these scenarios will be played out like a sports game, where the demons are actively trying to recover the anomalies you've made and destroy them before they can close their gate to this world. The adventurers have to pass/kick/throw the anomalies between each other to get it out of the demons' way and then somehow get it to the "goal" to finish the match. As you move around the world, you will have to play a different sport for each new area. For instance, in the cold arctic north, you may need to play Ice Hockey. In the aquatic island region it could be something like Water Polo or Volleyball.

Obviously the game would have to be a little tongue-in-cheek to adhere to the respective sports' rules, instead of just having the team of adventurers kill the demons and reach the portal like in a normal RPG. Maybe some kind of magical gaeas or something. As well as traditional sports stats such as endurance, strength, reactions and speed, you would also have a miscellaneous RPG trait or two. For instance, your winger could be an Elven Archer who could shoot an attacking demon if he's about to tackle another player, distracting him long enough for the player with the ball to get past him. In which case, he would need an accuracy stat for his bow. Likewise, you could have special attacks and tricks for other players in the field: An Illusionist could recreate a clone of the player with the ball, potentially fooling a demon into going for the fake one. A Dwarven Berserker could take the ball and charge downfield ignoring attacks made by the demons. You would have to configure and train your group of adventurers and use them for the appropriate sports. Casualties are to be expected, so make sure to heal often and hire new talent to replace those lost.

Idea #3: RPG/Katamari Damacy

OK, it may seem like my desperation for trying to come up with three different genres to attach an RPG element to is becoming evident. But this is as far from the truth as you can get. Maybe. The goal of Katamari Damacy is to build one's Katamari as big and as quickly as possible. It really doesn't need an RPG element, since the gameplay is nearly perfect in its simplicity as is. However, I'm not one to shy from a challenge, or at least a chance to ruin a better game designer's great idea out of spite.

In each Katamari level, there are various hidden or rare items that may take a modicum of searching or a bigger Katamari than can be feasibly expected to roll it up. These items give you a big "happiness" bonus, as they happen to be one of the King of all Cosmo's "favorite" things about Earth. More often than not, these bonus items will be pictures, sculptures, origami models or engraved coins which all feature the King himself in some way (the modest type that he is).

Let's take the usual first stage of a Katamari game as an example; someone's living room or bedroom. As well as the usual objects, there are five of these special "King" objects; A coin (which is inside a box full of other items), a shampoo bottle (which is high on a shelf), a statue that resembles an Oscar (which would be very heavy/big and therefore need a large Katamari to find), a novel about the King (which would be on the bookshelf with other books, so you'll need to roll them all up) and a child's drawing of the King (which is underneath a box or something on the floor). All of these objects would be hard to find/reach/roll-up, but they'll give you a bonus at the end of the level.

These happiness bonuses can then be traded in for powers and accessories, sort of like those available in the second game. Powers include: Iron Prince, which stops you losing so much from the Katamari when you get hit; Eye For Taste, which allows you to spot hidden King items when you're close enough; Camaraderie, which lets you identify what cousins are available and where they are in a stage and Magnetic Personality, which allows very small items to actually be attracted towards the Katamari.

In the levels where success is determined by the type of items you rolled up over the sheer quantity (such as that level in We Love Katamari where you needed to roll up expensive items), the King items would be worth considerably more than others. Finding all the King items from every level may even unlock a surprise or two. The King is a very vain fellow, so pleasing him with all these fan items will no doubt have beneficial consequences.

Well, three more ideas about how specific game genres could employ an additional RPG trait. Of course, whether or not these games would actually prosper with this RPG aspect is entirely academic.

Deconstructing Qix

2007-05-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Game Idea: MoM in Space

2007-05-06T16:11:00.000-07:00

MoM, to the uninitiated, is Master of Magic, a game I'm always singing the praises of. It's Civ with magic. That's pretty much the shortest statement one can make that adequately describes the game.

I'm not too sure how many turn-based strategy games are out there that involve intergalactic warfare as opposed to just the regular international variety, but I figure there must be a few because of how easy it would be to knock the classic system up a notch. Instead of towns/cities, you have planets. Instead of units of spearmen or phalanxes you have units of cruisers and starfighters. Instead of monsters, you have space monsters (which are a lot bigger). Instead of dungeons and other cool shit, you have mysterious space phenomena that can be explored. And finally, instead of a boring 2D map you have a 3D map which picks out planet coordinates and does all that calculation mess for you when figuring out distances. You could link planets together with space-gates, which can warp ships from one side of the galaxy to the other (like roads). Pretty much anything you could have in Master of Magic could potentially be translated to space with the scale of it boosted appropriately. Why rule one world with your powers when you could rule many?

So, in a sense, this could be the sequel to Master of Magic. After ruling the twin worlds of Arcanus and Myrror for many hundreds of years, your legions of loyal followers have progressed and prospered in the peace resulting from your ultimate leadership to the point where they can now construct starships and the like, and Arcanus as a whole becomes your first "town" on the galactic map. What next?

Well, your power reserves can now be powered up by tapping planets and become even more powerful - able to reach the furthest areas of space. Other planets tend to have one or two races controlling it, and taking it over adds to your army power, food and cashflow. These planets often are primitive or at a technology level far below yours, in which case you can use it for food or mining production. If they're around the same technological level, however, you can use it to build new ships.

Like the nodes of the previous games, jungle planets (earth), nebulae (sorcery) and stars (chaos) can be tapped for their magical energies, but you'll need to defeat the local beasties first. This can be done with the traditional MoM battle system, sending in smaller units to empty the place of danger before a magic spirit can be melded to it (which can safely travel through space like it could over sea and land).

As well as smaller units, you can produce certain larger units too. These will mostly be things like cruisers and starships which can transport smaller units between planets. Some of the summoned monsters will be colossal larger units though, and will be able to enter large-unit scale battles. For these guys I was thinking of something like Lovecraft: huge monstrosities that float about space and are maddening to look at. The large-units would appear with the smaller units but look much bigger than them, since I'm pretty sure modern turn-based strategy technology can handle having titanic-sized units and small units on the same screen.

The spells are all accounted for. Most will be changed to reflect the larger scale, so city-spells will now be planet-spells. Summoning spells can produce both small and large units. Your enhanced powers will allow you to fire spells halfway across the galaxy, like how you could do so from half a continent away. Since most of the regular scale battles will still exist, most of the spells are still relevant too. Of course, there'll be several new ones especially designed for outer space exploration: maybe a spell to allow normal units to travel through space quickly, or a spell to summon a black hole next to an enemy planet (which would work like Call the Void) to throw a spanner into their gears.

I dunno how amicably the high fantasy and sci-fi worlds could be merged, but when you consider similar attempts have been made in the past (take the D&D module of Spelljammer; a sort of fantasy space-faring system that uses the d20 D&D rules) it could be pulled off if we keep space as interesting as what's going on planetside. For instance, the Myrror version of space could be a lot different from the outer space we're used to...

Nothing too radical would need to be changed about the core gameplay, and with this you'll be able to load old save files from the previous game and let those powerful wizards have a whole galaxy to conquer. Alexander wouldn't have needed to weep about having no new worlds to conquer if he had figured interplanetary travel out in time.

Design Genres #15: RPG Hybrids

2007-04-27T15:28:00.000-07:00

A slow-burning subgenre that has been picking up speed lately is the RPG Hybrid: A game that generally keeps to the conventions of a specific non-RPG genre and then adds a developmental RPG trait to it. So far, an additional "-RPG" tag has been applied to many separate genres. Here's a few examples:

Scrolling Fighter/Run & Gun - Guardian Heroes
Fighter - Tobol 2, Soul Calibur's "Quest" modes
Puzzle - Puzzle Quest
Space Sim - Sigma Star Saga
Card Games - any CCG game
City/World-Builder Sim - ActRaiser, Dark Cloud
Strategy - FFT, any Nippon Ichi SRPG
Platformers - any modern Castlevania, Metroid (to a degree)

Plus many other modern games that contain RPG elements, most of which only have a small subtle effect on the gameplay.

This week's idea sort of combines the Worms/Scorched Tanks arena of strategic combat, as well as a Lemmings-style "figure out how to get around the obstacles without dying", with an RPG. You control a mage with a range of spells and abilities, and must travel the lands looking for wealth and power (like any good RPG hero would do). These battles take place in Worms-esque 2D landscapes, which are partly pre-generated (the placement of certain traps and treasures, for example) but has a degree of randomly generated topography that you can vary to a lesser/greater extent in the options menu.

You start by selecting a square on an overworld map grid to "explore" - after each of these grid squares have been "explored", you can travel past them for the unexplored squares beyond. Each square opens up into a 2D arena like the one described above, depending on the square's features (if it was a hill, for example). After defeating the various wandering monsters (if any), you can take advantage of any dungeons you find on that square, exploring it by selecting the newly conquered square grid from the map and then on the preferred dungeon (you could potentially fit more than one dungeon there). You will then need to successfully complete several more 2D arenas (the appearance and structures of which would depend on the type of dungeon you're doing, similar to the geography of the overland map) in order to acquire the spoils within.

Like Worms, you (and your party, since the system could afford for hirelings to help you with bigger dungeons) can move and attack on a turn; after the attack your turn ends and the next enemy or ally in order (based on speed, like SRPGs) would take their turn. Many of your spells work the same way as the weapons in Worms: A fireball, for example, would need to be fired at the right angle and velocity to hit a monster and it'd be up to you to get those figures right. Other spells and attacks work like other weapons in Worms, or in a completely new unique way: Lightning works like Air Strikes (death from above!) and a Mud spell could be fired onto the floor near an enemy's feet, severely limiting movement for a patch around him - or you could just zap him with a Sleep spell, which would have an Area of Effect (AoE) and may knock out other enemies near him. You are also able to walk up to creatures and hit them with your chosen weapon, though this may put you in danger as the majority of enemy creatures attack hand-to-hand and are better than you at it. You can control your hirelings too, who will be a lot more limited in their arsenal, but be careful you don't let them or yourself get hit by friendly fire. The amount of firepower your mage character has is dependent on his/her level, though you can choose to lessen the effects of many of your spells (like the aforementioned fireball spell) in order to conserve mana; if an enemy only has a small bit of health left or just needs a gentle nudge to fall into some convenient lava, it would be a waste to use a full-strength fireball on them anyway.

As well as simply killing everything to get gold, you could sneak past them to where the treasure is hiding (though it can often be buried in the landscape, needing some dirt-moving spells) and escape without messing with the more challenging beasts. You may also need to figure out how to get past certain traps, discovering ways that your spells can help you get over a pit, for example. Killing monsters gives you XP, which will level you up and give you higher level spells to work with (as well as more mana to cast these spells). You can also buy spells from the hub town once you've earned enough cash.

With this idea, I wanted to sort of build a dungeon-crawling version of something like Worms with the occasional puzzle-intelligence of something like Lemmings. To be honest, an idea like this would've been more at home around the early 90s when 2D was still being explored to its fullest potential and the two games I've referred to would've been closer to the peaks of their popularity. I still think this would be an awesome game, especially if you could join up with friends (over the internet or in turns around one machine), and the amount of gigantic, beautiful-looking sprite monsters you could fit into such a game with today's technology would be super neato. Why spend five hours on WoW with your fellow nerds and then an hour of online Worms to cool off when you could combine the two?

Design Elements #2: Ninjas

2007-04-19T18:27:00.000-07:00

Ninjas! Everyone's familiar with these dark-clothed assassins, and they've appeared in many, many games. Often taking advantage of their sneaky ways and combat prowess, ninjas tend to show up in many action/adventure titles that usually involve stealth in some way. Notable ninja games include, of course, the Ninja Gaiden games, as well as the Shinobi games and the Tenchu series. They've also appeared in RPGs (especially Japanese ones) and the atmosphere of their games run from deadly serious tales of honor to the somewhat lighter "blow up everything" types. So, indeed, how does one come up with anything new for the genre?

My first idea was to create something like Ultimate Spider-Man or GTA, in which you have a large sprawling city landscape to conceal yourself in, and fulfill various missions which come your way. You'd have a focused main objective which will be fulfilled in a series of important "story" missions, involving the recovery of your ninja clan's most prized treasure from the impressively tall skyscraper HQ of an imperialistic Japanese businessman who unjustly took over your temple and all of its possessions. Other missions would include finding money and allies to help pull off the heist, allowing you to make the decision to follow noble goals (like helping someone escape from a corrupt cop) or less noble ones (assassinate a rival mob boss). You'd get about the city with an array of ninja skills and equipment, similar to Spider-Man webslinging his way from one district to another. But then I figured this or something like it would be getting made soon enough, so I moved onto idea #2.

Idea #2 is a game that's a little more multi-player compatible. It is, in a sense, similar to Counter-Strike or Halo or any of those frag-fest multi-player types. The difference being is that every player is a ninja of a specific clan, and these clans are continually at war with each other for wealth, power or simply to acquire each other's secret powers. Every ninja clan has its own mystical scroll which teaches the senior members of that clan a very specific ninja skill. Players have to decide which clan they want to be a part of based on how efficiently they can use that clan's power when fighting rival ninjas. Another factor is how these powers become enhanced as the player grows stronger, though in the sense of fair-play all other ninjas playing become equally adept in their chosen mystical art.

Some of these ninjas will have stealthy powers, befitting the traditional ninja image: These included limited invisibility while moving (akin to the Predator's light-bending cloaking), the ability to hide in shadows limiting their movement but making them almost impossible to see (advanced players can even use one major shadowed area to warp into another one) and the ability to climb walls and ceilings with ninja ropes to conceal themselves in places players won't expect to find them.

Other ninjas will be more martially-inclined, forgoing the stealth for more firepower. One such clan will be able to use spirit blasts: fireballs that increase in power as the player becomes stronger. Another may be able to wield two weapons at once with equal efficiency for double the chance to hit, or could mystically power up their weapon just before striking for extra damage.

The weaponry would be dated to around 19th century but with several ninja-specific enhancements, allowing for mystically sharp blades and shuriken-shooting crossbows. Ninjas can also throw shurikens and kunai (ninja knives) relatively fast. They are also adept at setting traps involving needles and possibly even explosive materials, which would act as a sort of proximity mines for interlopers in your clan's building or can be set up on the fly for someone to trip.

The one-player version of the game would be somewhat like The Warriors, in that one clan is trying to take over the territories of all the other clans while remaining under the radar to the authorities governing the land. Taking over a clan's territory by eliminating all the ninjas in that area will eventually allow you to take on their base, defeating their leader and recovering their secret power for you to use. At the same time, other clans will be warring against each other using an advanced AI to calculate how well one side is prevailing over the other. If the player keeps his attention focused, he may even be able to discover which clans are currently at war and could take out the weakened clan before their enemy does. Each of these clan battles takes part in an arena based in that region of the country (of Japan, of course, though it may be a fictionalized version), and a player may need to take out opponents in bamboo forests, trap-filled temples or rustic, apparently calm villages full of hiding places. Eventually, you might get one of the Emperor's samurai wandering through the arena, whom are extremely powerful AI opponents and may wipe out any ninjas in the area if they don't skedaddle (creating a sort of time limit). The game may end up with you, as the only remaining ninja clan, taking on the Emperor himself for dominance of the country.

Though such an online system invites campers and the like, it may give players a touch more challenge than usual depending on their opponents. If they wish to just run and gun it and rack up frags like no-one's business, they can do. They can also play to their stealthy strengths and take out the loud obnoxious players as they stumble around without looking around fully. There will be individual servers for both the all-out offensive/martial players and the stealthy players, as well as several servers to accomodate both simultaneously. The inter-clan warfare could end up becoming very interesting considering people make clan-based collectives of non-clan games such as CS anyway, especially if we give players the ability to design their own clan insignia and use it on their ninja uniforms.

Plus, I just think it'd be cool to play as a bunch of ninjas fighting other ninjas. Seems like foolproof awesomeness to me.

Game Idea: Item Quest

2007-04-10T15:32:00.000-07:00

Note: Yeah, yeah, sort of need to dust the cobwebs off of this thing. I have both the Design Documents done now (including 80+ Simpson NPCs and their in-game fighters), still need somewhere to upload them. It will be sorted soon, and then I'll finish up some more ideas.

This game idea is a bit meta. The name is sort of a joke on "quest item" (a term used to describe an important game item) and the various "_____ Quest" games that are emerging or have been around for a while, which tend to be a little experimental. Most notable of which would be Progress Quest: an online RPG that is entirely automatic and continues to run without player input, though still employs the usual "fight, collect, return to town to sell stuff, repeat" pattern. Though I should also mention here the wonderful new DS game Puzzle Quest, which is basically Zookeeper with some interesting modifications to the gameplay, including a large range of abilities/spells you can use on the puzzle grid.

The idea of this game is to have a huge installed inventory database numbering in the many thousands, including - but not limited to - sets, collections, figurines, postcards, etc. - the works. A lot of my games tend to have a collection subquest of some kind in them, but the intention here is to blow it up to extreme proportions and have fun with it. The game would have fairly standard dungeon crawling, with all manner of places to visit, and to cope with the scope of the amount of items and places in the world to find said items I was thinking something like a 16-bit SNES-era-esque 2D game with top-notch pixel/sprite graphics, with which to detail all the stuff you can find or fight. I could make it something huge and 3D like Oblivion, but I have a feeling this isn't the kind of experimental meta-game that developers would be willing to throw that kind of money at. Plus, making it a simple 2D program will allow it to be easily played over an internet-ready computer or on an online handheld/virtual arcade type deal, which would mean additional item packages can be continually produced and downloaded by players.

The story would be based on the common "adventurer looking for his fortune" story in a world where possessions = power. As you collect items and sell off spares (since having two of the same kind is generally pointless), you can upgrade your home base to include more buildings/wings/facilities for showing off your spoils to interested parties. As you upgrade and build up your base of operations, certain items will start appearing in the dungeons you're taking out (so without a portrait museum room, for example, you won't find nearly as many portraits). What little treasure you find that you're unable to display will be sent to your vault.

You also have adventurer peers working against you. They are also similarly building up collections, which you can observe if you wish. They may even be willing to swap their duplicates for yours, depending on their disposition towards you. Of course, you'll also have them attempting to thieve (or hiring folk to thieve for them, depending on their wealth and interest in your stuff) which you have to fight off or help the police/guards to arrest. You could even be challenged in direct battle for your possessions. The spoils go to the victor, and you could end up inheriting the collections of adventurer NPCs you fall in battle. If the game ends up being online, these peers could be other players and you can see your friend's collection of stuff. You'd obviously have the option of not accepting challenges or letting them theive off you (like a non-PvP thing). It's sort of like seeing other peoples' Animal Crossing houses or their rare drops in World of Warcraft, taken to the nth degree.

Another factor in your collecting is the age-old "good vs evil" aspect in RPGs. Certain.. items (slaves, trophies, stolen goods... demonist/necromancer iconography?) become available only to evil players, and its up to the player to decide how badly he wants a full set of items. This is sort of calling into focus the general misanthropy that people who prefer things over other people feel, though we don't want to concentrate on that too much as those folk will be the game's main market. The game would open up some interesting new avenues for item collections, including some very seedy contacts to buy/sell from.

The actual battle aspect should be relatively simple, but interesting enough to keep people wanting to keep playing and finding new stuff for their collections. Dungeons would be found by scouting areas, and you can even hire scouts to check places for you while you scout elsewhere. After finding a dungeon and doing a preliminary search of the surroundings, you will get a short blurb with details about that dungeon for you to check and decide whether or not to hit it. I'm thinking dungeons could be displayed by:

A) Their type - This may define the treasure/monsters they're likely to have. For instance, a Cave-type may be more likely to have natural treasures like gems and would also generally have more wild animals rather than undead or bandits.
B) Their total total treasure value - This gives you some idea of how worthwhile a place is to hit without giving too much away about what you could find. A high treasure value might just mean a huge pile of less valuable items, or one or two really priceless ones. This value will be more exact, to the closest 10000, 1000 or 100, depending on your scouting skill or the skill of the scout you hired.
C) Their total list of creatures - you would use this to judge your chances of victory. If the enemies sound a bit tough (and they usually have some hint, maybe color-coded like FFXII's wandering monsters) you can mark it and leave it until later. The clarity of this list is again dependent on your scouting skill, like the treasure value. At early levels of scouting you may just get a general monster class ("undead") or even an incomplete list (which may lead to a nasty surprise).

Battles would be automatic, and would determine your success on some variables: the opponents you're facing, your equipment and level and a few additional "decision" modifiers you can toggle on or off. These modifiers include the decision to be sneaky (if you pull it off or are a generally sneaky character class, several unobservant creatures could be taken down without a fight, though really observant creatures could get the jump on you while you're trying to sneak past them) or the decision to pack weapons that have been blessed by the local chapel (the donations to receive them would be costly, but beneficial if you're fighting a lot of undead). These decisions could be either beneficial or disadvantageous, so it will be up to the player to decide on what to use.

After the automatic battle, you will see the results. Generally, if you lose, you will retreat with whatever treasure you managed to find and will need to rest a few weeks to get your strength back to try again. If you win, you claim all the treasure in the cave and may even find a second level to the dungeon, which would be scouted for you instantaneously and ready for your next sortie (after sorting out your spoils, of course).

You will also find a lot of money, as well as duplicate items. As stated, you can sell off these duplicates, either to the local stores or a fellow collector (sometimes in exchange for other treasure, the rarity of which is based on what you're offering). The money can be used for upgrading your base, purchasing new equipment or purchasing new means to carry treasure from sacked dungeons (which range from pack mules a la Dungeon Siege to a device that transports it all back home instanteously).

Though doing away with the actual battling might sound like a duff move, I think it would help in the long run. People get tired of continually whacking monsters, and the strategic element of only taking on what you can manage (and using the modifiers correctly) will give players sufficient challenge to keep them entertained. Having these huge displays should be interesting too, since games with collection subquests (Katamari Damacy, CCG games like Megaman Battle Network, some Zeldas) or a large range of collectibles which you can show off and personalise (Animal Crossing, The Sims) tend to be absurdly popular. Like most of my ideas, I also intend to have lots of humor and in-jokes regarding the items you can find, so it could be good times for all concerned. Maybe.

Excuses!

2007-03-31T09:17:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I haven't really been keeping up with the weekly blog update, but that's because I've been working on Design Documents for both the Simpsons RPG idea and the Hammerspace idea. Expect to see both sometime later this evening. Be warned: They're around 6000 words each and rising.

Online Design Documents

2007-03-19T06:32:00.000-07:00

Update: I finished Final Fantasy XII at last. I guess my comment referring to a giant dragon boss with a dozen healthbars in the last update occured to me unconsciously from a boss in FFXII called Yiazmat: A bigass dragon that takes several hours of fighting just to whittle down its massive HP count. I guess it's this obsession with finishing everything that can be done with a game that makes me reluctant to try MMORPGs, since I'd be stuck in an endless loop of conquering every little bit of new content that is added. That, and the persistent bugbear of spending the price of a new game for the same one each month.

What this update is actually about, besides just bragging about beating a game, is an idea I have to upload some Design Documents somewhere for people to read if they're interested in the nitty gritty of all these game ideas. As it stands, I barely scratch the tip of the iceburg with these blog entries, even though they are often the length of a small novel. What I may start doing now is drop the word count by about half and just introduce a few concepts with the game idea, and then have a link to where I've uploaded a Word document (or just a .txt file, since I won't be doing too much with the presentation at this point) with the vast amount of detail I have in mind for the game at this stage and then keep updating that document whenever something new strikes me or I want to add a table of potential enemies or power-ups or something.

With this system, any visitors to this blog can just skim through the game idea posts a lot quicker. If the idea sounds intriguing, you can read further by following the link to the .doc . If not, skip it and read the next one. If you're able to read twice as many of these "nutshell" posts during a lunch break or what have you, it would help the chances of finding one that interests you. In time, I hope to translate these documents to browsable websites with different pages for each section (characters, features, playing stages) of the game idea.

There are a few problems with this that I can see so far:
1) I may need to rewrite the 20+ game ideas the blog has had so far for this shorter format. I think the best thing would be either to delete the old ones and have new and improved re-writes, or just leave them and use this new short-post system from this point onwards. I will, of course, make design documents for my older ideas too at some point.
2) It will take a lot longer to produce full game ideas, since I'll be investing more time in them. Thus, when a new game idea is on the blog the design document for it will be pretty short, because it hasn't been around long enough for a lot to have been written about it. I figure between new game idea posts on the blog I'll also do a "what design documents have been updated this week" round-up, mentioning what has been added to which document.
3) There's always the threat of plagiarism by putting largely developed game designs out there instead of short blurbs, but my low self-esteem assures me I have nothing to worry about there.
4) Storing doc/txt files somewhere on the internet. Obviously size isn't important, since the bigger ones will still only be about 300k at the most, but finding somewhere that'll host them for free.

Design Genres #14: Scrolling Fighters/Beat-Em-Ups

2007-03-14T06:58:00.000-07:00

The Beat-Em-Up genre is one that has grown old and retired, now reliving its golden years on various online virtual arcades available on the Wii and XBox 360. Though it did make the transition to 3D, sort of, with games such as State of Emergency, Hybrid Heaven, Dynasty Warriors and others - these games are all classed as "action/adventure" and therefore do not really fit the bill of that classic 2D genre. However, there are still plenty of great scrolling fighters available for the handheld market, which is the last true outpost for the 2D generation of games.

While it is safe to say that Final Fight, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe and Double Dragon are perhaps the best known of the "traditional" scrolling fighters, we shouldn't overlook the Konami classics of The Simpsons and TMNT, Technos' other great scrolling-fighter River City Ransom and Treasure's phenomenal Guardian Heroes, which still counts as a scrolling fighter. I guess, technically, we could also include Castlevania titles. Viewtiful Joe is perhaps the last scrolling fighter to do something new with the genre.

Before I start, I should mention that I've already created a B-E-U (boo!) game idea in this blog already, as part of the "Spam Fighter" series of games comprised of content generated from online junk mail, but I sort of wanted a proper Design Genres for these games since I played so much of them as a kid.

My idea starts out like any of the above series: You control a street-smart fighter out to recover his girlfriend from the criminal gangs of the city you reside in. Cliche enough premise you might think, but it's important to keep this aspect deliberately old school initially as you'll soon see. You can have up to four players, learn attacks and gain health bonuses like any other games. You can find objects and use them: but the twist is you have to "learn" how to use more complicated weaponry by training, and you can also learn how to do more damage with more mundane items. Enemies drop money and sellable goods (treasure, in other words) like River City Ransom.

As the game gets on, it starts becoming weird. For instance, entering an underground subway to take a shortcut to enemy territory (it's a popular destination for games like Final Fight) puts you head-to-head against sewer zombies and all manner of evil subterranean creatures. As you emerge, you find out that the criminal gang has somehow been able to summon demons to take over the city. But it doesn't stop there, as after you enter the tower that the criminal gang has taken over, they start transporting you to various dimensions they've taken over. You end up having to take out robots from the future, medieval dragons and knights, and a hellish dimension of colossal Cthulhu creatures - all of whom bear the symbol of the criminal organisation. You find out that the criminals are actually an incredibly powerful secret sect that has been planning the apocalypse for millenia and taking your girlfriend was the final step; yet no matter what they throw at you you're able to beat the crap out of it with "video game kung-fu" moves and a headband.

The game is sort of both a spoof and an homage to all scrolling fighters. You frequently take on opponents many times your size and strength, and have to figure out the best way of kicking it in the face. While also keeping the gameplay simple and layering on the epicness boss fight by boss fight, there is a degree of RPG-esque development for your character: You can extend damage dealt, health and defensive power by earning "XP" from opponents. This XP is frequently flowing in from the hordes of creatures you're fighting. As well as the above augments, you can also make yourself "luckier" (increase drops), upgrade and modify combo attacks as well as purchase "summons": an additional fighter controlled by the computer who will fight on your side for a limited duration. These summons may be related either to older scrolling fighters - Abobo may show up therefore - or simply kickass warriors in general from all sorts of media. Having the T-800/Conan/Bruce Lee/Rocky/whoever on your side would help out a lot.

Because the game wants you to keep moving and not worry about levelling yourself, you can decide a general path for the XP to go in, letting it choose your next power-up for the sort of fighter you're suited to. If you like mindless tanks that wade in and clobber everything (and who doesn't?), the game will aim for power-ups that increase defence, health and attack power and ignore some of the more technical stuff. If you want to be a technical fighter though, it'll attempt to integrate more special attacks and combo modifiers in lieu of flat-out stat bonuses for the advanced player. You do of course have the option to keep track of what power-up you'll next receive - all XP goes towards one new power-up at a time, and you can assign which power-up should be the next one you learn - but if you have three other friends playing along this system can be set up to be entirely automatic in order to avoid long pauses during the fun.

The intention of this game is to start with beating up thugs on the street with five inch health bars that say "Slick" or "Morris" on them to massive bosses like giant skeletal dragons called "The Terrorwyrm" with seven or eight full screen-length health bars that go down just as rapidly as the thugs' did as you pummel it with atomic spin kicks. Awesomeness and lack of any kind of intelligent stimulation is the aim of this game, and I hope to design something like the above that will deliver on this front.

Final Fantasy XII

2007-03-08T02:04:00.000-08:00

I promised myself I wouldn't do any more game reviews for the blog for two reasons:

1) Opinions on the internet.
2) Going on about how great other games are sort of highlights the amateur status of my own ideas.

However, my month-long obsession with this title warranted an article, simply because I've been unable to play or think about anything else. As a huge fan of all the Final Fantasy titles, I can safely say that this is my favorite.

Rather than go on about the graphics (amazing, but FF games are always top notch in this department) or music (again, amazing, especially the epic boss themes) or even the story (which is pretty standard) I'll concentrate on what makes this FF stand out above others.

First of all I should mention the battle system. While the manual introduces the game's combat as "the brand new Active Dimension Battle system", it's actually more a progression of Vagrant Story's strategic real-time combat and the real-time battle systems of a few other FF titles, notably FFXI (and many modern MMORPGs in general come to think of it) and FF:Crystal Chronicles. Making the game considerably more interesting than the usual endless chain of random encounters, players are now allowed to go where they want and take down the opponents they choose. You can often just go exploring the entire continent instead of following the next story goal, levelling yourself up to become inhumanly powerful and finding all sorts of hidden bosses and areas. You can follow the game's Hunting subquest which rewards you for taking down powerful monsters, or look for secret Espers (monsters you can summon) or even kill specific amounts of common enemies to learn secret information about new items, background on the areas/maps in the game or just jokey anecdotes in and about the world of Ivalice. Non-linearity of this scope in a Final Fantasy game is a new and welcome change.

The two new much-lauded features of FFXII are Gambits and the License Board. Gambits are a brilliant way to introduce configurable AI strategies for your characters to automatically follow in the field. It ranges from simple commands such as attacking the closest enemy and healing when low on health up to those such as casting Cure spells on undead enemies, using Potions on characters if you have more than 10 left, casting high-level black magic on your own characters when they have Reflect on them... The system allows for some amazingly complex planning and allows you to sit back and watch your stratagems go to work. Best of all, the game frequently introduces new Gambits as either treasures or buyable items, allowing you to test the waters with the simple modifiers before diving right into the more complex set-ups. Or you can ignore the Gambits and direct the characters manually if you so choose.

The License Board is less innovative though. It's basically FFX's Sphere Grid dumbed down a little using the old standard of Ability Points to direct your characters' developments. Like the Sphere Grid, you can choose the direction of how you want a character to grow; either using the old job system as a rough guide (a "warrior" character might acquire weapons and strength boosts and forgo magic) or abandoning it altogether. Unlike the Sphere Grid, all six playable characters start in the same place pretty much, so right at the start you have full command over who should become the short range fighters, the healers, mages, thieves and so on. Special areas of the License Board allow characters to learn Summonings and unique moves called "Quickenings" (nothing to do with beheading Immortals), these squares are then removed from everyone else's boards forcing you to develop your characters uniquely so they can all work towards acquiring their own seperate Quickenings at the edges and corners of the License Board.

Quickenings (which are the game's version of Limit Breaks - a classic FF staple) are controlled in a fast-paced mini-game of sorts where you quickly (hence the name?) follow one Quickening attack with another, and continue the chain for as long as possible. Damage is usually random, so one or two Quickenings may end up doing far less damage than even a normal attack and since they drain all your magic away such a result would be very bad indeed. Of course, getting a chain up into the 10s and 20s may end up destroying the boss in one hit, so it's a choice you may want to consider. Again, this make-or-break super-attack system is another example of FFXII giving players choices, instead of making the Limit Breaks mandatory if you want to take down a particularly difficult boss like with previous 3D FF games (spamming Renzokuken with Squall in FF8, for example).

I guess I'll finish by saying how the world of Ivalice is really starting to become a welcome "home" for the FF universe; the races and history of the world are fairly constant but the games are all different enough to stop it from being too overplayed. The new Summons are all bosses from FFT (a game I love which has a lot in common with FFXII) while the old summons (Shiva, Ifrit et al) cameo as the names of the gigantic airships of the token evil empire. FFTA is closely linked with this game too, bringing that annoying moogle commander Montblanc and most of the game's inventory across.

It remains an indefinable pleasure that FFXII is trying new things and a whole new battle system while still maintaining that innate FF charm and playability. I suspect I'll be playing it for quite a while longer.

Game Idea Stage 2: Simpsons CCG/RPG

2007-03-01T18:37:00.000-08:00

Refer back to the Design Licenses: Simpsons article for the foundations of this game idea.

When I wrote about the Simpsons game idea last time, it seemed a little unfocused. Well, moreso than usual. This is an effort to expand on that idea. This article is keeping the ideas that A) the entire town of Springfield is obsessed with a new electronic game fad, which kind of half resembles Pokemon and half resembles Megaman Battle Network [I'm sorry it resembles anything, really, but comparisons always help illustrate an idea better] and B) that it involves 1-on-1 battles with various citizens of the town.

You play as Homer, Bart and Lisa in alternating shifts, challenging people at the new craze that's sweeping the town: BattleBlitz, an excessively violent competitive video game that stages versus battles between two players in a turn-based RPG style. You follow each of the three Simpson family member's days as they find friends, co-workers and other Springfieldians to battle with their own unique characters, which grow develop as they win matches.

Homer is the Kwyjibo, a burly ape-like monster that focuses on strength and a lack of any kind of subtlety. Bart plays as Bartman, the hero he made up to enter a comic-con for a discount price, whom focuses on speed and Batman-esque techniques and gadgets. Lisa is the Blues Mage, a magician that uses a saxophone to cast all manner of spells and therefore relies primarily on intelligence.

On any given day, you can choose to follow one, two or all three characters on a pre-determined series of events. So, for example, Bart would spend the day going to school on the school bus, having recess and trying to sneak in a few matches in the middle of class then going home after completing his blackboard punishment for being caught playing the game - each of these events have their own opportunities to challenge various opponents. During each "stage" of that character's day, you have a selection of opponents to play before moving onto the next "stage" (you can choose to skip the current stage if you've already defeated the opponents available). Whether you win or lose against an opponent during this stage, in either case you cannot play them again until you either meet them again in a later stage of that day or meet them the day after. Characters like Milhouse you'll meet several times if you're Bart (and occasionally as Lisa) since they're best friends. However, characters like Mrs Krabappel or Martin Prince are rarer, since Bart tries to avoid them as often as possible.

Beating a character in a duel nets you not only XP (which you need to level up your characters and get strong enough for more difficult opponents) but also "medals", which give a permanent boost to your character's fighter. These range from simple stat-augmentations to new special moves and other bonuses (the ability to always attack first for example, or an immunity to the poison status). Collecting as many medals as possible is the main focus of the narrative, as the Simpsons are attempting to become the regional champions of whichever state they live in.

At the end of the day, if you've finished playing as either Bart, Homer or Lisa or a combination of the three, you can swap medals (a medal won by Homer, therefore, can simply be given to Bart and Lisa without them needing to earn it themselves), train (if you use one family member more often than the others, you can fight amongst each other to raise XP for the weaker characters' fighters) and save the game. After which, the day ends and a new one begins. The game will use an in-game calendar, so that you'll occasionally have weekends come up allowing a "free-form" day of challenges; i.e. you can choose any family member and let them wander around town challenging anyone from the other two characters' sets of regular opponents, and even some special rare ones that are only accessible on weekends. This is a good opportunity to get medals from story characters that the usual family member that faces them finds them challenging to beat; for example, if one of Homer's opponents (say, Karl) is resistant against physical attacks, that opponent would be tough for Homer's purely-physical fighter but far easier for Lisa's magic-based fighter.

As the Simpsons' combined medal collection increases, you'll become far too overpowered for most of your regular opponents (though they level up as you do, to a degree) and so the game unlocks stronger opponents as you increase in ability, which had at that point had been hidden. An example would be Bart beating Nelson, who has a very strong fighter, and attracting the attention of Jimbo Jones for the first time, unlocking him as an opponent. After defeating the higher level opponents, the Simpsons will be able to fight in leagues with various Springfield personnel, eventually becoming the regional champions. And then I figure it'll be revealed that the whole scheme was a "Last Starfighter"-esque charade from Kodos & Kang. Or something. I'll iron out an end-game later.

Each of the opponents (and there are many, comprised of various classic Simpsons characters) has a unique fighter character styled on them, sometimes based on an in-joke, or on their personality or even from some kind of non-canonical dream sequence or Halloween appearance in the series. The idea of the game is that you need all three of your characters to face the unique opponents they individually meet, pooling the medals and becoming strong enough to defeat any challenger. Simply concentrating on Homer, for instance, won't allow you to defeat many of the opponents that come his way. Even if you level up on weaker opponents, the short supply of medals that Homer will have won't be enough to defeat stronger opponents.

Sharing even the most mundane or effortlessly won medals can be vitally important to another Simpson in particular, since each medal will have a different effect on each of the three characters: Lenny's medal may only give Homer's fighter a measly HP boost, but it could give Lisa's fighter a whole new special attack, for example. The reason for this is because BattleBlitz is configured to give bigger bonuses from medals earned from opponents that would be very hard for that style of fighter to defeat: Since Lenny's fighter could easily overcome Lisa's magician (maybe Lenny's fighter is immune to some forms of magic), Lenny's medal is more valuable to Lisa. Since the Simpsons members are sharing medals between their three very different fighters, a difficult opponent for one Simpson is "defeated" (by another Simpson) far more easily than they should be.

The original goal of my old game idea for the Simpsons was to create an idea for a Simpsons license game that allows, fully, the humor of "The Simpsons" to be showcased, and an in-universe competitive RPG game seems like a pretty open-ended way to give those characters a chance to shine, as opposed to making them trivial tertiary characters or cameos in the background. I'm hoping for a chance to squeeze in a lot of in-jokes and references too, since - like many fans of the show - I can't stop quoting them. Don't judge me, dammit.

Picross

2007-02-24T10:34:00.000-08:00

Picross is a Japanese puzzle akin to a wordsearch or crossword, only more math-based (so more like sukodu then). You are given a grid and a series of numerical clues and you have to shade in parts of the grid to make a picture using those clues. It starts out easy enough, once you figure out how the game works, but gets ever more cerebral when you decide on where the potential shading squares might be and where they definitely are. It's a bit like Minesweeper in that respect. It's impossible to describe without actually playing it, so my advice is to look for a ROM or check the link near the bottom of this article.

I contemplated turning this into a "Designing Genres" post, but there's nothing that can really be done to this genre, since the "gameplay" has basically stayed the same since the puzzle was invented. Instead, I'll talk about the video game conversions of this puzzle to date.

The earliest version to actually receive a western audience was the GameBoy title "Mario's Picross", which combined everyone's favorite plumber mascot with the world of Picross. Though actually part of a long series of GB Picross games, Mario's Picross remains to date the only Picross game to have been released outside of Japan. I've recently been playing Picross DS, which has various graphical features to assist you in playing the game.

First, and this is pretty cool, you have a puzzle "theme" (such as space or zoo animals) and you shade in special grids made for each theme. So for the space theme, the shaded squares become little airlocks that open/close. For the furniture theme, the whole grid is bubble wrap and you have to pop the squares that need shading in. The picture, once complete, turns into a little animation to help you identify what the image is displaying. Just little touches, but it makes the experience a whole lot more enjoyable. Designer subtlety is always something I try to keep an eye out for.

The final thing that needs to be said about Picross is that a western version actually exists in the form of "Griddlers", basically the same puzzle with a bizarre fast-food-type name. You can access Griddlers at their website, which is full of puzzles (and has a few demo puzzles if you don't feel like signing up): http://www.griddlers.net/

Not only are the grids significantly larger than anything the GB/DS games can handle, but they also experiment with different colors and shapes you can use, which can make the puzzles easier or harder depending on the picture. Each puzzle is rated by a computer "difficulty", which uses some kind of programming logarithm to decide how long it would take someone to solve the puzzle via logic (rather than just guessing what the picture will look like) and award you that many "points" accordingly. It tends to become one of those bookmarks you always click when you have five minutes free from work but still need to keep your mind sharp.

Common Video Game Annoyances

2007-02-20T21:12:00.000-08:00

Oh right, an update and such. Well..

Today I'll be talking about stuff that grinds my gears. Though I'll be making sure to mention things that are universally annoying and/or reviled, as opposed to the things only I dislike (usually because I suck at them).

The first are compulsory puzzles in action games: Now, there's a fair degree of monotony in some action titles. You run over here, shoot a dude, run over there and shoot a dude. It's all good in the 'hood if that's what you're into, but sometimes having to use your noggin to get around a problem alleviates the repetitiveness and challenges the smartness centre of the brain instead of the part that just likes to watch things blow up. Some games, like Tomb Raider and Zelda, wouldn't be anything like what they are without their intriguing puzzles and mysteries to solve.

However, I do believe there is a line that can be crossed with these puzzles. And it can be crossed in two ways: Difficulty and Monotony.

Difficult puzzles are entirely unwarranted in an action game, especially when there are no hints that difficult puzzles exist anywhere in the game description (and no, calling them "action/adventure" doesn't count). I've been told that sliding puzzles (where you shift squares around a block to make pictures) and the ones where you hit switches to make some platforms go up and some other ones go down are the two biggest offenders for "What the hell? I just want to get through this friggin' area and save it. It's 1am, I gotta work tomorrow" angst. The monotony part is when you have to go to the opposite ends of the Earth for some key or other, or you have to find a full set of items in order to continue for no apparent reason (and one of those items can only be found by doing a sliding puzzle). Of course, if the puzzle is for an entirely optional benefit and not something that is in your way, it's fine. Better than fine, even.

In fact, since it's right next door I'll just go onto compulsory subgames which attempt a different game genre than the one the rest of the game is in. The most prevalent of which are racing mini-games in action/platformer games, jumping puzzles in FPS games and stealth sequences in games which don't have "STEALTH" anywhere on the box. Seriously, no thanks. The reason these extracurricular subgames tend to blow is usually because a designer decides to add a mini-game at the last second. A mini-game which just happens to need an entirely new batch of code and end up being rushed and buggy. While optional versions of these mini-games may also be terrible, they are entirely exonerated by the "optional" part.

Platformer games which take away a series of collectible items if you die, making you start over. Sort of personal this one. It can be seen in the original Mario 64 (you lose all your coins and need to start over) and Acclaim's Vexx (which had enough going against it already).

Sailing. Relaxing for some, monotonous for others. Suikoden IV and Wind Waker both seemed to slow to a crawl because of excess amounts of sailing to places.

Cameras in Survival Horror games. But then, this is sort of like the gamer nerd equivalent of "Man, what's the deal with airline food?". This doesn't include actual cameras in Survival Horror games, by which I mean the Camera Obscura in the Fatal Frame/Project Zero series. The game would be kind of short without your main weapon.

If I come up with any more of these or read about other folk having issues with a game for whatever reason, I'll bring them up. I figure by listing all these unappealing game flaws, I'll be less likely to accidentally use them myself at some point in the future.

Design Elements #1: Dinosaurs

2007-02-13T13:39:00.000-08:00

*** Note: I'm now the owner of a shiny Nintendo Wii (at long friggin' last) so not only is this a note to say "I'll be playing the Wii a lot instead of updating regularly like I'm supposed to" but also to say "look out for Wii-related ideas in the future now I know how the technology works first-hand".***

So, this is a new section where instead of taking a genre or license to build a game idea around, I take a single element of.. well, anything, really. Generally pop-culture related, but often just a setting or item pulled out of thin air. I then try to craft some sort of newish game idea around that element. It's sort of like an Iron Chef (Steel Designer?) ingredient, if you will.

I'll just do a quick summary of dinosaurs in video games first of all. Usually standard fodder in various RPGs and Prehistoric-themed Action/Adventure games, dinosaurs are just mindless beasts that happen to be really friggin' big. Games that have put a little more focus into Dinosaurs include the Jurassic Park series of games (especially the Genesis version of the first movie, which allowed you to play as "the Raptor" following a storyline mirroring Dr. Alan Grant's) and the Res Evil-esque Dino Crisis. Tomb Raider is another series that likes to give you dinosaur-related challenges when you least expect them, including a T-Rex that comes out of nowhere midway into the first game. Turok was a famous console FPS series which identified the eponymous hero as a "dinosaur hunter", and so dinosaurs were regular enemies in the games.

You usually get the antagonistic and intelligent Raptors as common but dangerous adversaries in these games, whereas the gigantic and considerably more powerful T-Rex-types usually only show up as supertough bosses or as a challenge you cannot defeat with force alone and so must find another way of getting past them.

For this game idea, I'm considering taking the raptor protagonist idea and taking it to the next level: a game that utilizes their hunting pack structure. Half RTS and half squad-based strategy/action, your job as alpha raptor is to procure food for your clan/group by organising hunting parties and defending the creche (nursery) from harmful predators. As the younger raptors grow up, you can select them to join you in taking down bigger prey more rapidly. As your numbers grow, so too will the size of the dinosaurs you will be able to defeat as a group.

Your first task is to set up a nest in your beginning area and then scout around for smaller prey. This exploration is done on a scaled map, and functions in the same way as a map in an RTS game does. While exploring you can scroll back to the base to see how they're faring (and you'll receive warnings while away from the nest if something happens to it). Though limited in what you can effectively "build" (raptors aren't known for their technological prowess: opening doors is pretty much it), your nest area will advance as you naturally discover ways of protecting the eggs using the nearby geography. For example, you could block off one path heading towards your nest area by employing a gang of raptors to push a boulder from its place on a hill onto the offending path, protecting it from wandering predators.

Like most RTS games, you'll only grow as far as you need to to achieve the goal for that map/campaign; this goal condition may be increasing the size of your nest area to cover a certain percentage of the screen, or to have a large army of hunter raptors under your command, or even destroying one particularly deadly predator nearby thereby guaranteeing safety for all nests in the predator's territory. Once this goal is complete, you can move onto the next map and start anew.

The combat in the game will be squad-based, as stated previously. You'll need to scout a potential target and its movement patterns to find out when it is at its most vulnerable and then take it down with your raptors. Most prey in the game have a certain raptor requirement for you to defeat (which is given as an approximate number of raptors needed), but like the measures you can take to protect the nest, you can also employ tactics to take down huge creatures or at least injuring them for your raptors to finish off. If pressed, you can drag down the creature's energy with constant quick hit-and-run attacks (though be careful of retribution) or flank it so that your raptors can attack from an angle where they are safe (usually best to avoid the target's tail or mouth). Since the RTS map is out of scale, the game will "zoom in" on a target as you approach it so you can more effectively mount an attack. Like with most real-time squad strategy games, your raptor will be able to bark commands to his subordinates, instructing them to stay clear or attack when it is most opportune.

Though the game loses something in the strategy area by doing away with building, it also adds a pure strategic feel to the game in its place. You have nothing but your wits and your instincts to help you in this ancient world full of danger, and there's no excessive amounts of power plants or tanks in reserve there to save you. If the squad-based raptor combat system ends up being as fun as I visualise it (sic-ing half a dozen hungry raptors on an unsuspecting triceratops at a watering hole, for instance) then this could be something worth spending an inordinate amount of time on. But then the chances of something like this being made (if it hasn't already; I don't follow the RTS market that closely) are pretty good already, so I shouldn't worry.

New Update

2007-02-09T18:41:00.000-08:00

The first part of my top ten favoritest games ever was supposed to be this week's update, but since I started it several days ago and Blogger is such a bitchy bitch bitch man, it's actually dated 29/01/07 and is somewhere else in the blog now instead of the front page. So there. Definitely updated this week.

Later this week: A game about dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are still cool, right?