One thing I've always wanted is a game that looks like a cartoon.
Thing is... nowadays that basically exists. Cuphead, Ni no Kuni... but more specifically I'd like to see something that looks like an 80s cartoon. Like imagine a Transformers game that looks and feels like you're playing a 1980s episode. Or an anime game with a style that looks like it was actually animated in 1991.
It kinda sucks that whenever you see someone wanting to do 1990s retro art, its always specifically gaming retro art. If they ever wanna capture a cartoon vibe, its always either modern animation, or animation of the really distant past.
There's a lot of potential there. A Saturday Morning Cartoon style shooter that riffs off GI Joe, or superhero cartoons, fantasy stuff like Miyazaki, or adventure games in a wild style like Ren and Stimpy.
I strongly prefer aesthetics that are based on artwork (like paintings; Transistor looks like a watercolor, Disco Elysium deliberately looks like oil paintings, Apotheon looks like pottery) or cartoons (Cuphead) for indie games, but a huge chunk of games are pixelshit, it's very self-referential. I sometimes think that gamers have a tendency to be overly insular like they don't really consume media much that isn't just other games. The retro gaming artstyle has even leaked out into other media, like all those weird Garfield memes where Garfield is imagined as a Game Boy horror game (I'm salty about those because I loved the old school Garfielf videos was the manic scribbles and music).
Edit: ooh, another one, Deadly Tower of Monsters had a god tier claymation/puppet/sci fi flying saucer held up by strings B movie aesthetic and even had narration over it framed as directors commentary on a movie.
And god do I want to see claymation games.
I'll add onto this:
I think East vs. West should have been finished. A proper Cold War-era Grand Strategy game with an economy simulator, modeled Nuclear Triad, Space Race mechanics, espionage and revolutions, and conventional war mechanics is something that I and many other HOI4 guys would love to see. Too many HoI4 mods with any sort of "Cold War" treat nuclear war as a game's "failstate", instead of taking the time to actually model different nuclear exchanges at different points in history. A nuclear exchange between NATO and the Pact in the 1950s (limited amounts, delivery systems, and yields) would look vastly different to one in the 1970s (massive stockpiles, ICBMs, and multi megaton warheads).
Maybe even throw in some mechanics for the later years of the Cold War like SDI for the USA or терра–3 for the USSR to allow for a "winnable" nuclear war. Crank up the alt-history too! Let's see what happens if NATO intervenes for Hungary in 1956, or if Stalin doesn't die of a stroke, or Kennedy survives his assassination attempt.
I was very interested in East vs West but also knew it was going to suck, from the name to it having entire groups like "European" be one culture to the general feeling it was focused on being a wargame (a HOI game) and not a broader state simulator. I expected the economy and diplomacy to come out shallow.
I tried the DEFCON demo and hated it, and the experience I think gives a decent insight into what it takes to make an engaging nuclear war game, which is a focus on the build-up. Yeah, you can play tactically with nukes - DEFCON does - but nuclear tactics are not engaging enough by themselves to make a symmetrical, fixed-resource scenario work. The interesting thing about nuclear warfare is the four-fold combination of arms race, brinksmanship, programming, and aftermath. Arms race, as in, the decision of what to invest in, the efforts to get technological breakthroughs, maintain a missile gap. Brinksmanship, having incomplete/asymmetric information on what the other side has, not knowing for sure if their threats are credible, if they're holding back or playing themselves up, if their intentions are real. Programming, the actual act of planning out your strikes (I think a nuclear grand strategy game should have that be a whole menu where you can construct, in code, instructions on what to launch, when to launch, include conditional launches, and then when the time comes you can just turn the key on your UI and it automatically executes.) Lastly, aftermath. You know more about nuclear war than me already, I'm sure you know full well that nuclear winter was basically an anti-nuclear canard and those massive arsenals had a lot of redundancies built in, nuclear war would not end the Earth. When the bombs stop falling, if the government has still survived in any capacity (and it probably has), the next stage of play should be scrambling to rebuild and survive the literal and metaphorical fallout of it.
A limited nuclear wargame could exist with these aspects, but for them to really live up to their potential I think you do need it to be embedded in a broader state simulation, because the act of choosing what city to drop what nuke on is the least engaging aspect of waging a nuclear war; the war was waged and won before it ever started, the sides just don't know who did. (In that regard it's like what Paradox claimed Victoria 3 should be, which was wrong seeing as there are TONS of times conventional forces have won a war despite having worse logistics or a worse military).
Espiocracy plans to implement a lot of that mindset into its depiction of nuclear war, but since it has the player be confined to the espionage agency - steering policy through its actions but not setting it - it doesn't actually let you
fight nuclear war. (It
will let you militarize space and drop rods from gods on the Soviets! I would also be happy sticking more cannons on Soyuz.)
A game like Luigi's Mansion, except you're not in a mansion, you're in a whole city. And instead of ghosts you suck up hobos.
If you just want to terrorize innocent hobos, that's what Condemned is for. Or, you can play Hobo: Tough Life, the only survival game that lets you shit your pants as a gameplay mechanic.
Luigi's Mansion in a city, as a real idea, could be a really sick Ghostbusters game.
