Robot Rascals - http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?id=917
I played the C-64 version. This is by the people who made MULE. It was a 4 player scavenger hunt where the items you needed to scavenge were decided by a real-life deck of cards. Some of the items you picked up were good, some were bad, most were neutral. There was also a deck of Luck Cards that made you do random things. It was cool because the game didn't know or care what you actually did with the cards so you could make up house rules and stuff. It was weird even among the plethora of weird stuff for the 64 and was probably expensive to produce with all the cards.
Back when Electronic Arts was actually daring and innovative...
Games With Good Concepts That Never Flourished
This is a great topic IMO.
The major one I spout off the top of the head is "Abuse" (see also "Walker", by DMA Design) - last time I talked about this everyone else thought I was asking for an abuse sim, or something
One Must Fall 2097 put some RPG elements in 1v1 beat em up. There are some brawlers with RPG elements, but 1v1 not so much.
Don't remember anything else without thinking about it. Maybe later.
Ivo.
The major one I spout off the top of the head is "Abuse" (see also "Walker", by DMA Design) - last time I talked about this everyone else thought I was asking for an abuse sim, or something
One Must Fall 2097 put some RPG elements in 1v1 beat em up. There are some brawlers with RPG elements, but 1v1 not so much.
Don't remember anything else without thinking about it. Maybe later.
Ivo.
Zelda Majora's Mask comes to mine. Being a Zelda game I'm sure it sold bucket loads but I havent seen its concept used again.
The same 3 days played over and over again seemed great to me. Kind of like the film Groundhog Day.
The same 3 days played over and over again seemed great to me. Kind of like the film Groundhog Day.
360 Gamer Tag = Kinn, PS3 Tag = xKINNx, Wii = 3036 8283 1247 3110
Overdosed on Gaming
Overdosed on Gaming
RoboWar. The game is still available and all the previous tournament bots are still around. If you don't know what this is, it's a game in which you program and configure your own robot to fight in an arena. It started on the Mac but now there's a Windows version. It's free, open source, and not very popular. The graphics are incredibly simple, each robot being represented by simple, small 2D icons.
You get a certain number of points to customize your robots shields, energy max, weapons complement, energy recovery, "CPU speed" (reaction time, basically), and core durability. Then you use a basic programming language, stack style, heavily inspired by the old HP calculator programming language, to set up your robot's operating parameters. You can have your robot move in certain ways in order to deal with various simple sensor inputs. You can detect collisions. And you have to worry about where your turret is pointing, because you have to aim your shots and you can only see and interpret what's in the direction your turret points.
Even non-programmers have been known to enjoy this game because the language is simple enough, and really, it's cool to carefully configure your robot for a particular style of combat and then write his core operational programming to match your design configuration.
The ultimate goal is to let your robot loose in an arena of a few other robots and see who wins. You can either let it run contests invisibly and just tally the results or you can watch each match (and speed it up or slow it down as necessary) individually to see why your robot sucks or succeeds. You can even set up a tournament roster and tell RoboWar to go to town and just check the results when it's done hashing it all out. Every year the main goal is to figure out how to beat last year's champion.
All this said, games that mirror this concept, what few there are, haven't done very well. If someone could simplify the programming to a purely visual construction process (icons defining various behaviors with vary few numerical parameters to type in) it might have a chance of catching on in certain crowds.
You get a certain number of points to customize your robots shields, energy max, weapons complement, energy recovery, "CPU speed" (reaction time, basically), and core durability. Then you use a basic programming language, stack style, heavily inspired by the old HP calculator programming language, to set up your robot's operating parameters. You can have your robot move in certain ways in order to deal with various simple sensor inputs. You can detect collisions. And you have to worry about where your turret is pointing, because you have to aim your shots and you can only see and interpret what's in the direction your turret points.
Even non-programmers have been known to enjoy this game because the language is simple enough, and really, it's cool to carefully configure your robot for a particular style of combat and then write his core operational programming to match your design configuration.
The ultimate goal is to let your robot loose in an arena of a few other robots and see who wins. You can either let it run contests invisibly and just tally the results or you can watch each match (and speed it up or slow it down as necessary) individually to see why your robot sucks or succeeds. You can even set up a tournament roster and tell RoboWar to go to town and just check the results when it's done hashing it all out. Every year the main goal is to figure out how to beat last year's champion.
All this said, games that mirror this concept, what few there are, haven't done very well. If someone could simplify the programming to a purely visual construction process (icons defining various behaviors with vary few numerical parameters to type in) it might have a chance of catching on in certain crowds.