Games With Good Concepts That Never Flourished

[racketboy]

I received this email a while back and thought I might share it.
If you have anything to add, feel free and maybe we can expand it into a full article...

...................................

I really liked the idea of making the list of the games that
"requires a sequel", or that "nobody played but should". If you don't
mind, I can propose you a list of game "That had good ideas behind,
but that was never reused".

It's a list of video games that had behind it's design a good concept
that was either badly implemented or was never re-implemented in another
video game. The list is not complete, but I am sure you can add other
games to this list.

NightShade (NES)
It's a mix of a king quest style game mixed with a fighting game. You are
a super hero wanabee in a trench coat who wanders in a city in order to
find the 4 boss underling and the mastermind behind all the crime in the
city. If you get captured, you are placed in a trap and you must try to
escape to continue your quest. The theme of the game (crime fighting) is
really interesting, there is some bad intentional humor ( In the credits,
there is a "Bad joke designer") and a bit of investigation. The combats
are limited, making a better combat system would be good. It would have
been better has an adventure game with the possibility to save your game
and randomise a few things to increase the replay value and much more
investigation stuff to do.

The Magician (NES)
It's an adventure game where you play a wizards who learn spell on the way
(Each spell will have syllabs combinations). It's much puzzle oriented
like: use this
spell or this item at this place, but there is also some realtime combat.
The drawbacks are that the play controls are bad, you are always
running out of
mana, you must manage you food and water, the battles have no strategies
and there is little replay value. It would have been better to have a
bigger world to explore, with different kind of spells for strategies in
battles and also different quest to do.

River City Ransom (NES)
A mix between an adventure game and a brawler, you must rescue your
girlfriend from the bad guy. You buy stuff on the ways with your ennemies
pocket change in order to improve your character. The problems with this
game is that the map is pretty much straight foward, there is really few
other things to do in the game besides going from start to end. A map with
exploration, side-quest and equipment to buy could have been better.

Overlord (NES)
A real-time strategy and action combat that does not look at all like
WarCraft. In a stellar system, you fight against another player to control
the whole system. You must terraform planets, and set buildings on the
planet to produce. The colony developement is managed in real time. Your
ressources like food, fuel, energy and population increase regurally. The
combats are done like in an arcade game, you move your tank or control the
planetary defenses and shoot. The draw back of this game is that most of
the gamming time is spend to move and manage your ressources. There is
also
some limitations like a ship cannot attack another ship. You are also
limited in the number of buildings you empire can make limiting your
number of colonies. Making the colonies easier to manage and being able to
control fleets of ship would make a good game. Arcade action combat gives
the game some style.

King arthur's world (SNES)
A lemming type of game where you move different group of units ( archer,
knights, engineers ) on the battle field to capture castles. What makes
this game cool is the idea of sieging a castle and countering all the
traps in the castle. It looks a bit like a puzzle game.

Fighter's Destiny I & II(N64) : A fighting game where the concept behind
was to make the combat look as a sport rather than a fight to death.
The idea is that a match is made of many set of rounds. Each round
you can score points according to how the round end, if you accumulate 7
points, you win the match. There are 6 ways to win points : Judge(1pts),
Out of the ring(1pts), throw down(2pts), counter attack(2pts), Knockdown(3
pts), Special Knockdown(4pts). I am not really good in fighting game, that
why I did not hook too much to the game. The graphics where really bad,
even for a N64, but making the battle as a sport really changed the
strategy, some rounds can be really short too. Finally, it's the only
video game where you can fight against a cow(^_^).

Destrega(PSX)
This is a simple fighting game made by koei featuring
wizards. The idea of making wizard fight is cool and the combat system is
really simple and easy to use. The problem is that there is really few
stragety in the game since your player always cast directly toward your
ennemy and the spell you are casting does not matter much. So it's
basically, you run around on the map to avoid spells and push the attack
buttons a few times to attack your ennemy. It would had been better if you
would need to target your ennemy, if you could make some spell
incantations with a casting time ( push a sequence of button after
entering in incantation mode ). It would be cool if you could summon
creature, cast spell with limited durations ( flying, protections), have
magickal items and expandable item, etc. In other words, there is much
space for improvement.

That's for now the list of games I have. If I check back my nintendo
power, I am sure I can find other potential games.

By the way, I prefer Strider as an adventure game (Like on NES) than as an
action game. I played Strider on PSX and it was really boring. It's pretty
much : Hold attack, move foward and finish the game.

Finally, I am old-school gamer who prefer old games because:
- There are faster to play(in general), better interest in replaying.
(ex: Zelda -> 2 hours, Zelda 64 -> 20h+ )
- Old games are not interactive movies.
- The game itself matter more than the graphics.
- And a few other I am forgetting.

Long live old school games!

[Espio 1919]

I would say the concept for the Lost Vikings games didn't really flourish; the only other game I have seen with this build is MDK 2 on the Dreamcast. It was great, a sidescrolling action game that created complex puzzles so that your trio had to work together and utilize each other's abilities in order to advance to the next level.

[racketboy]

I would say the concept for the Lost Vikings games didn't really flourish; the only other game I have seen with this build is MDK 2 on the Dreamcast. It was great, a sidescrolling action game that created complex puzzles so that your trio had to work together and utilize each other's abilities in order to advance to the next level.

I didn't get very far on MDK2 (it's stinkin' hard), but don't certain levels have you playing as different characters?

[wyatt]

I didn't get very far on MDK2 (it's stinkin' hard), but don't certain levels have you playing as different characters?

Max, Doc, and Kurt, hence the titles, are the characters you play. They are a standard run n' gun character, a crazy scientist, and a talking dog with four arms, each with it's own gun.

I've never played a game as difficult as MDK2 that wasn't cheap about it. My favorite game for the DC, I spent a lot of time on the last boss and never won. Kurt was my favorite but was the hardest to win the final battle with.

[elph]

There is a large debate about what MDK actually stands for. Some say Max, Doc, and Kurt while others say Murder Death Kill. It's just MDK. Apparently it was the code name during development, as well as an inside joke for the developers. When it was released, they just used it as the title.

[fastbilly1]

(I know we mostly talk about console games but this is the title that popped up in my mind after reading the topic title)

I will say Darklands - its an old pc rpg set in 15th century in Germany during the an extend for of the Tribulation (book of Revelations). So for some reason you fight the horsemen, the women ontop of the many headed dragon covered in blasphemous names, etc. The combat system was remarkable, realtime rpg combat with tactical advantages based on countless factors - a system that I still feel has yet to be topped. A character development model far greater than that used in any other game I have ever played, choose your age between 16 and 120 (I believe it has been some time), choose from a host of jobs, then stat point allocation - were talking micromanagement to the nth degree if you so choose. Couple all this with passable graphics, an awesome story concept, and so much theme it could make you sick.

So how could something I describe as that awesome be a "game with a good concept that never flourished?" Well for one it came on 10 3.5 Diskettes, it was riddled with enough bugs that would crash your pc and screw up your save game, and I am not going to begin to explain how much it sucks to have a program that has memory leaks when you only have 24 megs of ram and the game requires 32...Couple that with the fact that it was relatively obscure in stores (atleast in my neck of the woods) and that it required a beefy machine (note the aforementioned 32 megs of ram) and you have yourself a nice setup for a game that could not flourish.

Does this mean it is a bad game? Well it is in my top 20 games of all time, and I view it as the best pc rpg (even moreso than Planetscape, Fallout, and my beloved Daggerfall), and it is in my top 5 for rpgs in general. Making it work on xp is a bit of a pain, even with dosbox, moslow, and vmdsound, but that is why we have 400 mhz windows 98 boxes.

[Bev]

I remember playing a demo disc of Destrega with my brother years back. It's one of those game which is quite fun, but you have absolutely no idea why. I just remembered the name of it a few months back and was going to buy it for the novelty value so we could play again. Looked around expecting it to be quite cheap as most PS games now are. Unfortunately when I found it copies are roughly £20 each, and it's an alright game, but a novelty title like that isn't really worth it in my opinion.

[marurun]

I think Zelda 2, side-scrolling action RPG. Not many games have tried to do that since that era, not in that particular manner anyway.

[racketboy]

I think Zelda 2, side-scrolling action RPG. Not many games have tried to do that since that era, not in that particular manner anyway.

Popful Mail comes to mind, but that was pretty obscure in the big picture...

[marurun]

That would make it a good concept that never flourished ;)