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Games Entertainment

Horribly Bad Game Designs 206

Posted by Hemos from the really-really-bad-ideas dept.
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?
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Horribly Bad Game Designs More

Horribly Bad Game Designs

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  • 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.)
    -----------

  • My vote (Score:1)

    by whoop ( 194 )
    I vote for Quake 3, a nonsensical rush for rockets.
  • Speaking of bad games and ripoffs... is it me, or is Something Aweful [somethingaweful.com] just trying to steal all of Old Man Murray [oldmanmurray.com]'s jokes?

    :wq!

  • Already being made as a Rogue Spear (the sequel to Rainbow Six) scenario... complete with a briefing by Reno.

    I'll see if I can dig up the URL, but it's still in development (and no, it's not an official scenario, heh).
  • 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...
  • Gamecenter and their readers [gamecenter.com] suggested stuff like this twice already. ...But it's still fun. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Sim games (Score:4)

    by slim ( 1652 ) <johnNO@SPAMhartnup.net> on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @02:38AM (#1096048) Homepage
    Sim/Theme games in general are always the first to get suggested when "your ideas for games" are brought up.

    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...).
    --

  • In WC3, if you stay in the bar too long during a full alert, you're stone drunk when you do go out and fly. The controls randomly change axes--hmmm, to go left, I push down and right...oops, not anymore.....

  • For the anti-adventure fans, there could be games like Professional Painter - travel around town in your overalls, painting people's houses in 47 different shades of ecru.

    There was a game (in Finland) for Commodore 64 called PainterBoy - game based on characters of Tikkurila paint factory TV advertisement characters... Not a bad game, though, but it quickly got boring.

  • It exists.. it's called VM Ware
  • 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

    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...

  • 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.

    --

  • 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.

  • That sounds like a blatent ripoff of Pimp Wars.

  • There was a type-in game in one of the old issues of ANALOG Computing (for the Atari 8-bit), sometime in early 1983, called Dark Horse. It was basically SimElection, where you took a out-of-nowhere candidate through the election season, hoping to be elected president. I seem to remember similar code from mid-70's era Creative Computing.
  • It gets worse. As a brit abroad, I occasionally get the urge to "bum a fag", which in england means to ask for a cigarette, whereas in america...

  • Actually it was a home computer game (I forget the platform, ither C64 or Speccy, possibly both) called "Bomb Buenos Aires", and it was a pretty simple bomber-style game where a plane flew across the top of a static screen, moving down a line when it wrapped, and dropped bombs on buildings, until it either landed (having destroyed all the buildings), or crashed. Typical cheapo scandal cash in.

    There was also a game called Harrier Attack where you flew across a scrolling island, but IIRC there was no explicit falklands imagery invoved.
  • Actually this is a game that is already being played[out] most evenings in bars across the nation[planet]. The object of this game is to nail all the tail that err.. isn't nailed down. The fun really starts when you get "bonus" items during your nailing. The round is over when you get a "bonus" item and you have to go to the penalty box for a period of time. Some "bonus" items require a permenant departure from the game, and some relegate the player to the penalty box for the remainder of the game. Then you can only "play" with other penalty box members. You win the game if you can survive the dreggs and find a suitable mate and still produce viable offspring without having to have a crotch transplant.

    There are many variations of play available, but the virii are varied and plentiful. Batter up!

  • Uhm... you've got your wings reversed. Mr. Buchanan is rather right winged.

    --Joe
    --

  • First things first: If we're talking about an American politician, wouldn't it be most appropriate to classify him using the American sense of the terminology?

    As for whether American and British senses of the terms "left wing" and "right wing" are reversed, I can't comment specifically. Here in the US, "right wing" is generally accepted to mean "Conservative" and "left wing" is generally accepted to mean "Liberal". And yes, I know the meanings of "Conservative" and "Liberal" are unclear as well. (Consider Japan's most conservative (by US definition) party, the so-called Liberal Democratic Party.)

    The current US political definitions puts Liberals on the "gov't can solve social ills" stance, advocating civil rights, and often advocating bigger taxes to pay for it all. Similarly, it puts Conservatives on the "family values" plank, which ends up meaning "lets push the narrow minded religious views of a vocal minority on the nation as a whole", and are supposedly more fiscally minded (read: tax cuts for the rich). I don't subscribe to either side's beliefs 100%, but I lean further liberal than conservative. And I'm certainly not Libertarian. (And yes, I've taken the little "Are you a Libertarian?" political quiz that Libertarians are fond of handing out, and came out rather on the liberal axis, rather than the libertarian axis.)

    The US's right wing is closest to Britain's Conservative Party, and the US's left wing is closest to Britain's Labour Party.

    Anyway, that ends my politics discussion for today.

    --Joe
    --
  • Carmageddon II (great game) has a drunk mode and a psychedelic mode. Looks like they beat them to the punch.

    logan

  • Maybe Resident Evil (and it's spawn) fits this category. Bad acting, boring plot (boring game!), and stupid characters. Only the setting is slightly off. Yep, it's been done!

    logan

  • 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.

    --
  • 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.
  • OOH! Creative Computing. Ive still got all mine in a box somewhere...very cool magazine...I wish that there was something like that out there now...
  • Yeah, but only the yellow ones.

    If only identifying real fungi were so simple....
  • OK, sure this is bait.

    I'll start with agreeing with you - I think indeed that the "women's movement" was about equality; also that there are some truly weird-ass losers out there who do want vengeance or superiority or something.

    But I don't think that womengamers.com fits into that latter category. I visit the site from time to time; they seem pretty sane.

    Now, consider your own logic - I can see why a minority needs a special interest group, but
    women, making up more than half of the Earth's population, are hardly a minority anywhere    .

    Now I won't go into the need for a continueed women's movement and that being a minority or a majority isn't everything. Check out Amnesty International's womens' human rights campaign [amnesty.org] if you ned more on that score.

    Bet with regard to this site: isn't the whole point precisely that women are a minority on the net and as gamers? We have to put up with all sorts of crap from some of the guys, as you see every time someone posts something about women on slashdot. (Watch replies to this and see it grow.) I'm glad you're not one of them, but please - give us a break when we want a time out from the verbal abuse.

  • heh (Score:1)

    by Phexro ( 9814 )
    need for speed: high stakes _has_ a drunk mode. the controls are horrible, you drift and slide, and everything on the screen blurs horribly. you need a gameshark, and the codes are here [nfs4.com].

    this is nothing compared with the "water effect [aug.edu]" in nitrus oxide - it's a trippy effect where everything on the screen is warping and moving.

    --

  • Don't tell me how it ends - I haven't seen it yet.
  • The worst game ever has to be Bard's Tale. Having to get back to the guild just to save the damn game was dreadful - I'm glad I never actually paid for that game.

    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!

  • I saw a game where you were a drunken driver.
    http://www.ghettosoft.com/windrunk.html [ghettosoft.com]

    it was pretty funny but it was meant to teach you about not drinking and driving
  • 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 [beermatsoftware.com]. Politically incorrect but a lot of fun.
  • Well. You don't how to spell "misogynistic"

    That's true. I must have been thinking of "dyspepsia".

    and I'm confused why you are using this term in this context, considering the word means "having or showing a hatred and distrust of women"...

    Then you should check out their website [womengamers.com]. It should clear things up for you.
  • I've tried that sort of game (I don't know if it was the one you refer to) - it shows pretty clearly how bad you're driving when drunk...

  • Back in high school we used to write all kinds of ridiculous games, some were actually pretty fun. But my friend came up with the worst. It was called Galaxy.

    First he spread the rumor that the game had been in secret development for a long time (several months was considered a long time, back then) and hyped it as the greatest game anyone had ever seen. Hype was applied quite liberally, until the release, when it was turned loose on the unsuspecting users.

    The game would display a few startup messages, and then "Initializing the galaxy..." and I think some kind of activity indicator. Then it would just sit there.

    Eventually, users would tire of the "initialization" and press Ctrl-C. At this point, the amount of time that they had waited (before pressing Ctrl-C) on the initialization screen became their score. They would then proceed to the High Score screen, which showed the most gullible/patient users.


    ---
  • No, its not pointless or inane - those words (probably) describe the film. I have been playing this game since the run up to the film's release, and I haven't succombed to anybody's pressure to see the damned film yet, and I hope never to have to. I try to play this game with all films that are hyped beyond what anybody would consider reasonable - I haven't seen Star Wars - Cashin One yet either. Why waste my time and money becoming a box office statistic? I highly recommend this game to anyone that might enjoy the challenge of overcoming popular pressure.
  • ... how many outraged flames I would receive by email following the inauguration of my own hypothetical ultra-hyped-up gaming site, MachoGamers.com, featuring a rendition of the planet Jupiter with the male symbol on it as the background picture?

    Jokes aside, this whole thing boggles me. I fail to understand how "men are inferior to women" is in any way a better ideology than "women are inferior to men". I fail to understand why men who want men-only institutions are chided and labeled as chauvinistic pigs, while more and more women-specific organisations, web sites and special interest groups show up. (On that last one: I can see why a minority needs a special interest group, but women, making up more than half of the Earth's population, are hardly a minority anywhere.)

    I thought the "women's movement" was about equality - to be respected and considered as fellows and worthy competitors to men - and not about a "war against men", moved apparently by little other than vengeance.

    To clarify, I myself am not a sexist of any kind; I believe in civil equality. However, that seems to be far from the case whereas the "women's movement" is concerned, and I'd like to understand that. Otherwise, I'd just give up and say the world has gone crazy.

    (Nice article, by the way.)

    Moderators take note: the above post was not a troll, nor was it flamebait.
  • I heard Americans are the ones with reversed wings, so the original poster is correct in British (European?) terms.
  • and you get to play either side.
    You too can be an auditor tracing 'entertainment' expenses to porn sites and massage parlors.
    You too can hide away millions, gambling your deception spells will hold

  • .
    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. )

    --
    Evan

  • 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
  • I don't remember the URL, but Cnet did a spot on the top ten games that should never be made. They included games such as Seal Clubber (as gruesome as it sounds), Geriatric Racer (tear down the streets in your rambler at speeds up to 20 mph!!!) , SimDictator, and my personal favorite, Barbie's Cosmetic Surgery Makeover (submit your worst and see if you can get Freak of the Week!)
  • 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.

  • Flipcode [flipcode.com] has a "lame game" contest, where the object is to make the most laughably inferior game possible. Some of the submissions there are hilarious, for instance "Chicken Racing II". Go check it out, if you have DOS -- most of the lame games are made for this lame OS.
  • Ah, Slashdot -- that great purifier of souls -- a karma-enhanced confession booth. While we're here, let me tell you about a dream I had once... it was about a game called "Drag Racing", except you didn't race cars, but there were cross-dressing midgets...
  • There were some strange games back then. I had "KKK Cookout" where you had to roast pointy-head robed guys with a flame thrower. So many new (but not neccessarily good) ideas have been tried in the past, but you never would know because they've been replaced by shoot/fight/click/whatever endless derivatives. Ok, I'll go take my Geritol now...
  • Actually, I know some kids that made a game where you would input your build, weight, and other factors, and then drive around while drinking. Your steering got worse, as did your vision, and you ended up hitting people. It was really quite funny, and was actually well-designed: they ended up showing it at the Engineering Open House.

    Colin Winters
  • It's already been done in Redneck Rampage [interplay.com], 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.
  • A friend of mine actually coded this.
    The point of the game was to press the Q key over and over until time ran out.
    The game would display the number of times you pressed Q and then tell you whether you won or lost.

    The length of time the game lasted was random... somewhere between 5 and 60 seconds as I recall.

    In addition, whether you won or lost was random, having nothing to do with either
    a) The number of times you pressed Q or
    b) The length of time you were allowed.

    Man that was a great game...

    - StaticLimit
  • Back in the C64 days I made this really bad game with 6502 ASM: a giant cock appeared on the screen, you had to move the hand back and forth until an ejaculation came out... score was calculated with the elapsed time and there were levels too, it was just about raising the movements required to ejaculate every level. A bit tasteless but I was 13... anyway I made a lot of copies of this one to my friends! Great success for that year (83), I gave away at least 30 tapes!
    Too bad I've lost the original tape...

    --
    "The crux of the biscuit is the Apostrophe(*)" - FZ
  • there is a program geared at highschool students which already does this, except instead of a computer game, it's an actual car. they rig a dodge Neon with a laptop that controls how the driver's input is handled. the program on the laptop can be set to any theoretical blood alcohol level, and the higher that number is, the harder it is to control the car: sluggish wheel and break response, hyperactive accelerator response and so on.

    in my estimation this is not a bad game design, but an ingenious informative tool for teenagers who think they are indestructible and can handle their liquor.

    though i must admit i am drawn to the concept of drunken Poll Position.

  • My friend Lahclan wanted to make a game where you were a bird flying around a city, and you would get points for shitting on as many targets (people's heads, windshields, etc...) as possible withing your timelimit...
  • Anybody remember "A Rockstar Ate My Hampster"? Some of these ideas remind me of that. Also i thing there is an enebriation level in "Redneck Rampage", where the more you drink the less coherent the contol response is, and the less accurate your aim is (so you have to switch to the smooth bore scattergun to actually hit anything...) =:-)

  • yeah horrible game design, and it has been implemented also.

    Basic idea: you are a demo scener in a party, trying to improve your fame level. Each time you talk to some elite you gain fame level when you talk to your fellow lamer afterwards. But beware of the evil orgas!

    MAZM97.ZIP [mpoli.fi] (dos)
    the real thing [assembly.org]
    .
  • You really should see our #5 demo from Assembly '96 [scene.org].
    It might work in win95 dos shell or it might not. It might work with emm386 or it might not. 8 bit graphics modes WON'T work.
  • Strange though it might sound, I can actually see where a game could be made based on that plotline. Like Laura Bow with a Scream like twist.

    I probably wouldn't play it, but it might appeal to someone.

    -Restil
  • I did something like that. Instead, I got to Leap Over All Linux Insurrectionist Nerds.

  • And Gremlin Graphics's last Monty Mole game worth mentioning, Auf Wiedersehen Monty, included bottles of wine that had unpredictable effects on your controls if you grabbed one. Rather a pain if one of the required items was surrounded by bubbly!

  • Oy, you kids. Never played Percy the Potty Pigeon [digitalsea.net], 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 [freeuk.com]. This year there's a similar competition for Commodore 64 fans [commodore64.org.uk] 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.

  • Remember this for the Atari 2600 VCS??

    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 [classicgaming.com]
    ---

  • Okay I'm Chinese, but this is the greatest game I'd ever played! Not because of the Japanese Fetish (TM) stuff, but the best graphic I'd ever seen for a 8mb game!!!!!!!!

    Yes there is a zillion different endings. All depends on how you treat your adopted daughter. If I can't make a living by drawing stuff with my hand in the future, at least I'm a big anime/manga fan. This thing's drawing quality can be rated the right up there with Mr. Miyazake's movie posters! The Sequal is very good too, but by that time (95?) I don't play game anymore. My tears can fall down right now when I think of the fun I had playing this game.

    CY


    /_____\
    vvvvvvv../|__/|
    ...I../O,O....|
    ...I./. .......|
    ..J|/^.^.^ \..|.._//|
    ...|^.^.^.^.|W|./oo.|
  • wanting a fag

    I know that in the UK this means cigarette, but not everyone knows that here in the US.

    Reminds me of the time, me and a buddy of mine was down in the Underground and my friend lit up. A cop quickly came over and said "Hey, No fags allowed in the Underground!". My friend didn't know what "fags" meant in the UK and almost decked the Cop. I fell over laughing!

    Steven Rostedt

  • I thought this *was* the game (Score:3)

    by chazR ( 41002 ) on Tuesday May 02, 2000 @02:06PM (#1096105) Homepage
    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.
  • 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.

  • I used to like Beer Run and Roach Motel.

    Beer Run was a levels game, there the goal was to collect beers.

    Roach Motel had this little hotel on the screen. Bugs would run out, and you would try to squish them with a big foot.

    Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
    Mitsubishi ad
  • I thought up this idea for a game awhile ago. You could be the Executive Producer (or something) of a TV Talk Show (like Ricki Lake or Donahue). You get to choose who hosts the show, and the different topics from week to week. There some good potential for brawl cut scenes.

    If I only had either a whole bunch of time on my hands, or a whole bunch of money. Or both.
  • dammit, my first attempt to post this got posted as an AC! argh! i hate these lab computers! Anyway, "Peacekeeper" is by far the most twisted thing my friends and I could come up with (props to vincent dalgara(sp) who isn't reading this)

    the idea is simple. its a first-person shooter. you play a national guardsman in the 60's, quelling peaceful protests and such with guns. the first level is Kent State: kill all the rampaging hippies before they get a chance to run away!

    have fun
    dongoodman

  • I remember 'playing' this teaching aid back in grammar school on an Apple II. Basically the same concept as windrunk, but with a Space Invaders clone as well as the driving sim. I remember it being particularly graphic considering the age demographic it was aimed at, not so much blood as the messages you got when you crashed the car. "You just killed a mother and her son. How do you feel?" etc etc
    Of course in our classroom it became a competition to see how good people could get at the games, despite the handicap of ever-decreasingly responsive controls. And yes of course once the teachers realized we actually ENJOYED the damn program they yanked it. =)
  • Engage in anti-competitive practices and use the best of creative accounting [billparish.com]. Buy out your opponents, freeze out those you cannot buy, cripple software interoperability and force the market to buy every upgrade you ever put out.

    Then for the grand finale, see if you can out do the real Microsoft in dealing with the DOJ. Can you stall until you buy Bush the presidency and save the company from a break up?

    When you've finished, graph your performance against the real Microsoft. Do you have it in you to be smarter and nastier than Bill Gates?

    tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose

  • The problem with modding up comments like this is that they're posted to EVERY story possible usually, so you get to read it ump-teen trillion times (still a pretty good parody song though)

    tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
  • Carmageddon 2 had a power-up called "Drunk," I know there have been some games about political power (Machiavelli's: The Prince comes to mind, but that just had the bribing of senators and gossip-mongers), KingPin had some life-of-crome ideas, as did TradeWars 2002, where being Evil paid off hugely, but got you blown-up frequently. And while it isn't precisely a game, there are home creation utilities that could be interpretted as a "Paint the world" game.
    ~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
    "Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
  • 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....

  • While in high school (Who over the age of 16 would think of this?) some friends and I seriously discussed an idea for a game called "Operation Insemination", which took things from the POV of a sperm.

  • CmdrTaco has written a small bit of fiction in this page in his personal webspace [cmdrtaco.net].
  • 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 /.
  • 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...

    --
  • 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.
  • Dungeon Keeper (Which I used to play from time to time back when I had DOS on my system) tried for that whole Draconian Overlord evil is good thing, but they don't do a particularly good job at it. You just don't get the satisfaction of being truly evil in the game (And it doesn't particularly encourage strategy since you can just dump monsters anywhere in the dungeon.)

    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.)

  • 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...
  • Yeah, /. does appear to be a RPG. You have experience points, and when you collect enough you learn new ways to manipulate reality (well, of course everyone here plays a magic-user). I'm still questing for the elusive "meta-moderate" spell.

    And then there are the trolls, fireballs, multiple planes (freshmeat.net, or the closely-guarded nyt.com), gods/wizards/implementors, and famous characters ("...BREAK HEAD WITH OPENSOURCE CD!!!"). And the all-important plusses. Sadly, I myself am stuck on a cursed -3 box of windowing...

    - Michael Cohn

  • Draconian Overlord Simulator (Score:5)

    by laborit ( 90558 ) on Tuesday May 02, 2000 @02:04PM (#1096145) Homepage
    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
  • 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
  • I remember a really cool Mud that has a 'bladder pressure' statistic, drink (particularly alcohol) caused it to climb faster and sooner or later you had to relieve yourself. There was a really great section where you were stuck somewhere with no conveniences and had to find a way out before you exploded. Does this ring any bells, I would love to know what game this was and if there are any incarnations of it still online.

  • 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.

  • 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:

    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.
  • 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?
  • 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...

  • It's been done. The Simon Weisenthal Center [wiesenthal.com] has been griping about "KZ Concentration Camp Manager" since 1995, and working to get it suppressed, with considerable success.
  • The "boring factory job game" has been done. Factory came with the original Mac CD-ROM player in the early 1990s. You start as a trainee, doing an easy assembly line job, for piecework. There are pay rates, chargebacks for damages, and overtime. At the end of the week you get a pay stub. If you do really badly, a voice says You're fired! If you do well, you get to advance to the next level, with a harder job and a higher pay rate. Meanwhile, a grouchy foreman looks down from a balcony.

    Factory was deliberately designed to be dull and boring. That's the whole point.

  • Really ironic if you read his sig, eh?

    But while we're on the subject, why not create a new parody of the Sims. We could call it the Reno's.

    kwsNI

  • Pharmasist! Measure dosage, check side effects, Watch out for counter-reactions! Make a little extra money by "watering down" the cough medicine! But be careful, this game could prove addictive...

    -Earthman

  • New Rainbow 6 game! (Score:3)

    by DgtlGhost ( 155814 ) on Tuesday May 02, 2000 @01:41PM (#1096218)
    The mission is to rush the home of a poor, immigrant family and save a misstreated youth from the care of peace loving, capitalists to return him to his communist, possably abusive "Papa".
    Elian: The Rescue!

    -Earthman

  • Perhaps not-so-dumb game idea... (Score:3)

    by Morbid Curiosity ( 156888 ) on Tuesday May 02, 2000 @02:13PM (#1096223)
    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..

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