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Horribly Bad Game Designs
A reader writes: "WomenGamers.Com takes a stab at coming up with some horribly bad game designs. Check out their latest editorial, "What if? ... No Scratch That..." This article made me laugh -- the driving game inebriation was a great idea. What's your worst game design idea?
There was a car that had a computer attached which could 'slow your reflexes' so that it would be like driving drunk. (Slogan: This car drives drunk, to make sure you won't ever.)
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100% pure freak
Who needs to drink? One of my favorite driving game experiences is as simple as firing up Nascar Racing or something, and then taking off around the track- backwards! Not in reverse, I mean circling the track clockwise while everybody else is going counterclockwise :) you can try to evade the other cars but it's also fun to play "Smash the car until it cannot move" and see how many crashes it takes to render the vehicle completely inoperable :)
A new FPS.
Actually, I'm somewhat surprised nobody's made a Columbine High School level for Quake or Half-Life or something...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Theme Park and Theme Hospital both prove that you can "sim" pretty much anything and get a fun game out of it. Sim Zoo, Sim School, Sim Office...
The sim game I'd most like to see is Sim/Theme Pub.... and here's a verbatim copy of a post I did elsewhere not so long ago...
I guess it would be a Theme Park type setup, with punters milling around:
- getting upset by the queues
- wanting a fag
- upset by smokiness
- liking/disliking the decor
- wanting louder/quieter music
- liking/disliking the jukebox selection
- wanting/not wanting a DJ / dancefloor
- liking/disliking the choice of drinks
- getting less fussy as they drink more
- drinking themselves into comas, getting you into trouble with the law
- having fights
- mooning / getting tits out (erm, maybe as a reward for good pub management)
- drinking less because the food portions are too filling
- wanting larger tables, to accomodate large groups
- wanting more small tables for couples and small groups
- hogging the pool table / dartboard / giant Jenga
- clustering around the open fire
- despising the open fire as too traditional and not trendy enough
- trying novelty drinks (Aftershock, Red Bull and Anostura Bitters... mmmm..)
- enjoying peace and quiet / pining for a more lively atmosphere
- getting apoplectic with rage
- ... you get the picture
You'd probably have more than one pub on the go at once - perhaps you'd be trying to cater for all tastes in a given town. You'd have a spit'n' sawdust gigging pub, a wine bar, a novelty theme pub with crazy crap around the walls, a real ale pub and a trendy pre-club type bar (having worked up from one tiny local on the corner of a residential street).Multiplayer you'd be competing for the same clientele and they'd wander from one pub to another.
On top of that you'd have Theme Park style research units, you might have to do some stock management (That always irritated me in Theme Park though: reordering stocks was just a chore... I think you ought to be able to set thresholds where if the stock drops to a certain level you automatically reorder... in a pub you'd have to adjust the thresholds by season...).
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And of course, in my favourite tasteless game, Diana Death Driver. It was a driving sim that someone did a while back in Shockwave flash. You had to drive a Mercedes through a Paris tunnel while avoiding the paparazzi...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Several police forces already use a Drunk Driver Simulator for "re-educating" people who failed a breath test.
DIY/Home Improvement sims already exist at an infant/kindergarten level; here in the UK we have TV ads for a game that features a children's activity set which overlays a PC keyboard where they can hammer, saw etc (ideally using the plastic toy hammer and plastic toy saw provided, I suppose, but for stress relief I'd use the real thing).
I remember that SimElection games went through a brief period of popularity in the 1980's as text based statistics games in the same vein as Football/Soccer Manager games. And isn't there a certain element of this already present in the tax raising subroutines of SimCity?
Professional Painter... well I definitely recall playing a a Commodore 64 game where you were a poster paster (probably called "Poster Paster" I guess) who had to put up advertising hoardings, that's pretty damn close.
As for Ruthless Revenge or The World's Oldest Profession, well don't Dungeon Master and Leisure Suit Larry already contain these elements?
Now if you want *really* tasteless, who can remember "CAN OF WORMS", a ZX81 compilation including "ROYAL FLUSH", where you had to unblock the drains of Buckingham Palace without disturbing the Queen on the, er, throne, as it were? Was advertised in every single damn issue of the UK's "Popular Computing Weekly" magazine ever published IIRC.
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Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
When I was 16 I worked briefly at an Amiga store.
One of the crackpots who came in nearly every day always had a great idea for a game, but wanted us to write it. He called it Metal Detecting From Hell.
You were the metal detector, and things would pop out of the groubd and attack you.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
That sounds like a blatent ripoff of Pimp Wars.
I have to support you, Frosty.
This article wasn't News. It wasn't Nerdy. And it doesn't matter.
Slashdot's star is rapidly fading, in my opinion. Moderation has been a significant failure: as a meta-moderator, I saw many posts mis-moderated, and as a reader, I see many posts that are two-bit opinion, idiot babble or off-topic. The quality of stories is declining: less newsworthy, less innovative, a poorer quality of writing and simply not interesting.
My user id is in the low thousands, and only because I didn't bother logging in for a month or two. For the number of postings I've made (a few dozen), I've got good karma: as far as I remember, I've never been marked down below my bonus score. I've meta-moderated with care, I've provided feedback and suggestions to the Slashdot team, and I've been a faithful daily reader.
But in the past week, I've given up moderation, have become utterly disinterested in reading comments, am about to move my postings threshold to three or four, and may just walk away from Slashdot entirely.
My hope for this posting is that it'll be moderated up to a level 5, so that it gets some attention from the alpha geeks.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
There was a very early Spectrum game called "General Election", based on trying to get a party through a British general election. Essentially a monopoly-like board game on a computer. Very dull.
And as far as a boring Cops-style game (where you play camera operator while everything in the viewfinder overacts) is concerned, there's one for the kids - Pokemon Snap!
This one actually exists. Travel around town, buying and selling illegal drugs, run away from the cops or try to kill them with your gun. See how much money you can make in a month. A free Windows version is available from Beer Mat Software. Politically incorrect but a lot of fun.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
One of the only two FPSes I can play without getting seasick, Rise of the Triad had psychadelic mushrooms that made you stagger about, lurching to and fro, as all the active items in the level palette-spun. Pretty Nifty.
Forget driving games... try firing a drunk missle while high on mushrooms: most of the time you accidently unload them into the floor or wall next to you. Ludicrous Gibs!
(Incidently, the other FPS was Doom. Anything after that seems to have the perspectives slightly off, and I can't handle it. ROTT was farkin' fast, so it's not a speed issue, and I've played Quake 2 on a SOTA gamers maching, so it's not the frames per second... dunno. I also tend to get sick in the back of large vehicles. )
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Come on, guys! Way, way before inebriation levels appeared in driving games such as Carmageddon, eating mold corpses in Nethack produced wonderful effects.
In fact, I know a 9-year old kid who for a couple of weeks played Nethack only to find the nearest mold, kill it, eat it, and then run around the levels.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Umm...I believe you are taking the previous post way too literally. Try thinking about it a little more. The results are amusing and entertaining.
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
It's already been done in Redneck Rampage, another simulation of sorts which puts you in the body of someone with an odd number of chromosomes.
Any game with "Drink Beer" and "Take A Leak" buttons is ok in my book.
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
Oy, you kids. Never played Percy the Potty Pigeon, huh?
And speaking of crap games, the denizens of comp.sys.sinclair have been holding contests for the past few years to see who can make the most tongue-in-cheek parodies of rotten games past (and present). The results are the comp.sys.sinclair Crap Games Compos. This year there's a similar competition for Commodore 64 fans as well. These guys are totally bent, I tell ya. Scan these pages and look at how many of the ideas all of you are coming up with that've already been done.
The object of the game is to guide a naked, horny, General Custer across the screen while avoiding incoming arrow fire. Waiting at the other side is a naked Indian maiden, and you earn points by... scoring. The slogan of the game was something like "When you score, you score!"
http://www.classicgaming.com/rotw/cu ster.shtml
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Select from a bunch of nerd-related 'news' stories on a simulated 'bulletin-board' style website!
Read the comments other gamers have made. Post your own reponses in a truly 'InterActive(tm)' fashion!
Then wait as the cruel 'Moderators' play the 'Troll or Funny game' Wait in trepidation for their verdict on your comment! Soon, You Too will do anything for Karma!
As you progress through the game, *you* may even become a 'Moderator' yourself!
*Cheer* as another 'grits' post is moderated down
*Swoon* as your post is moderated 'Off-Topic'
*Wonder* at the re-posting of ancient stories
*Thrill* as you bribe a moderator with the cheap $3 crack.
*Wince* at the replies to your comments.
Coming soon - version 2 - Now you can play Online!
Apologies to moderators - I know the cheap $3 crack isn't what it used to be.
In Princess Maker, your little girl could end up as a princess... but she could also end up as an of about 50 other things. Including a professional dominatrix.
-Dave Turner.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
I once had a 5.25" floppy game which I believe was originally shipped with PC Magazine (or something like that) in the middle of the 80's or so. The purpose of the game was to BE the "whiz kid" Bill Gates! It was all in text mode but with colorful rectangles and menus or something, and you had to make the right decisions to make the business a success! Unfortunately I probably formatted the disk, if I even have it anymore.
Y'know, given the terrible voter turnout in the US in recent decades, maybe we need something to convince people that voting is important, and politics doesn't have to be evil.
Then again, I admit I'd probably resort to double-dealing and backstabbing to get elected to my virtual office, too. Plus, there would of course have to be the optional intern PWAD....
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
The cake is a pie
CmdrTaco has written a small bit of fiction in this page in his personal webspace.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
The referred article wasn't very funny; I could have forgiven the non-nerd, non-relevant characteristic if it had been. Perhaps he just meant to foment discussion, but this was below the quality that I expect of /.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Actually, I thought Sonic the Hedgehog was a poorly designed game from the get go -- it was supposed to exhibit the "speed" of the Sega Genesis over the NES, but it chose to do so by creating a game where the "hero" frequently flew around the screen in a blur, somewhat uncontrollably.
Wasn't this story already posted before the quickies article? Now it has a newer date stamp...
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E2 IN2 IE?
Ages ago I seem to recall seeing a news story about an educational driving simulator where you could dial up the inebriation level to demonstrate to the student what DUI feels like in the hopes of discouraging it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Even in the multi-player games like Ultima Online, you really can't get that true kick-a-puppy kind of evil going, since getting PKed is such a common experience and death is not really ever a setback.
The gaming industry is wide open for a game that truly allows you to role-play an evil character with true-to-life results (IE: You usually get ahead doing it.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
One of the first disapproving news stories about video games that I ever saw came out because of that game! Ah, those were the days...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Probably the worst game I've ever seen was this Draconian Overlord Simulator that came with my first PC. The people who bundled it must have been really proud of it, since they set it to launch on startup, but I couldn't see the point. It was some kind of political sim, but it really sucked! It didn't have any graphics, just a stupid blinking cursor. So I tried entering commands like Destroy Insurrectionist Rebels (good thing I knew computer types liked acronyms) and a bunch of wierd-named factions in my country appeared. If I typed DIR and the name of a faction, everything changed. After a while I tried to be softer on them and Delegate some of my powers, but that made the stupid game crash!
I see the Draconian Overlord Simulator all the time on my friends' Linus computers. It can't be a very good system if that's the best game they can get their hands on...
- Michael Cohn
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
There are some really funny ideas here, of course I feel I should point out that many of the 'inebriation' Features suggested for driving games already exist in one form or another in the Carmageddon games (I had the honor of doing some coding on a couple of it's incarnations).
This has my vote for troll of the year
Once I had this dream (more like a nightmare) about a game called SimKampf. As you can probably gather from the title, it involved building and maintaining a concentration camp, as well as harvesting "resources" for new construction materials and technology.
The really disturbing part was that in my dream, the game was addictive as hell, sort of like the original SimCity. It even looked similar; imagine that instead of drawing power lines with your cursor, you had to draw electric fences. Oh, and there were no residential or commercial area's. Just miles and miles of factory-like buildings, complete with smoking chimneys...
Needless to say I was kinda freaked out when I woke up the next morning. I mean, it was probably just a late-night-pizza-and-war-movie-induced dream, but I couldn't help but feel ashamed. It was, without a doubt, the single most horrific game idea I've ever had.
Hee-hee. Dying tickles!
I remember this from the heady days of the Sinclair Spectrum - you had a screen full of "grass" (green squares) and a man with a lawnmower. Your mission was to cut all the grass, upon which you were greeted with the next level - another screen full of grass! Endless hours of mowing fun :)
Nice list of games - but they've forgotten some of the more interesting ones:
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A really new concept would be
SimSim - the ultimate simulator simulator! Simulate simulated worlds, simulated flight simulations,
As for politically (in)correct ones, how about
SimMurder - kill someone for no particular reason just to see if you're intelligent enough to escape the cops. A must have - and great to gain practice before doing it in reality!
SimMicrosoft - play Bill and all. Create products that suck and crush all the better competition by stealing their products, making them worse, and marketing it as innovation, expand your monopolies to other sectors by illegal means until you own the world!
For spinoffs, how about some of these:
RealityTV: The Game - film people dying instead of coming to their assistance! Block off ambulances to get more scenes of people suffering, and thereby higher ratings!
Oh, and, of course, there's always SimToilet, including a stench synthesizer card for your computer.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Here's a game: a desktop, with folders on it, and some of them open up when you click on them. The object is to do "work", in spite of the interference from talking paper clips, and absence of serious productivity applications like grep, emacs and latex. The major obstacle to success is that the whole system will periodically undo everything you have not saved...don't forget to save often!
Of course, no-one would ever make anything as silly, tedious and pointless as this, let alone play it. Would they?
See what I've been reading.
Who here rememebers Life and Death? It's an ancient DOS game that ran in four colors, 320x200 or something like that. One of the first games I ever played. You had to memorize a LOT of rather arcane medical facts, poke a patient's belly, operate, and basically screw up and kill the person. A few of my friends got good at it. I played it just to be weird and see the human agony.
The worst part was operating. Usually you had obtained a warez'd or copied version of the game, and had absolutely no documentation whatsoever. Lots of strange, inhuman tools sat before you. I remember giving a patient atropine because I thought it was anasthaesia. Oops. He didn't live long.
I also had a thing for this one game in whence this blue hedgehog in red sneakers ran around grabbing gold rings for no good reason...
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
Factory was deliberately designed to be dull and boring. That's the whole point.
But while we're on the subject, why not create a new parody of the Sims. We could call it the Reno's.
kwsNI
-Earthman
Earthman
Say it to me face w/ out wasting space...
Elian: The Rescue!
-Earthman
Earthman
Say it to me face w/ out wasting space...
While I'm at it, how about a TamaGeeki?
We've already got Tamagotchi variant in the droves, including a Tamagothi, but there's room for niche markets (are we a niche, or what?)...
Comes in a variety of cases, such as chrome, beige, fishbowl, and penguin. Has Jolt, Ramen, Quake and Flame buttons to allow you to interact with your little pet coder. Depending on how you treat your Geeki, you might end up with a CorpSuitGeeki, an OpenSourceGeeki, a QuicheEaterGeeki, a PerlMonkGeeki, and many more! Treat them right, and they might even start producing their own kernel patches, perl poetry, or maybe even start reverse-engineering proprietary protocols!
And if you tire of your little abomin... er, pet, there's a special recessed "Indict" button to make sure you never hear from it again...
(Warning - do not use TamaGeekis with IR ports in the vicinity of Furbys. OK? Don't say we didn't warn you.)
Escape from Titanic: The Movie. You get to be Jack, try to defeat the script and survive that icy Atlantic ocean, getting the girl and the necklace!
No. This should be "Escape: from Titanic the Movie". In this game, your aim should be to live as regular a life as possible, whilst avoiding everything connected with the aformentioned film. Go to the video store, gain points for hiring out a Hong Kong action film and a piece of French surrealism, but lose points for catching sight of a Titanic poster as you pass the "Really Popular Films" section. Take a taxi ride to a hip alternative nightclub, but get penalised for hearing Celine Dion wailing over the car stereo three times on the way there, and for hearing a couple of young girls trying to get into the club gushing about Leonardo is just so to die for.
The possibilities are endless. Completely inane and pointless, but endless...
Oooh ooh ooh! Let's try to duplicate the action and flow of MYST! yeah, and make it even harder this....oh wait, nevemind..
Striving to achieve a lower state of conciousness