Games You Wish Existed - The vidya we'll probably only see in our dreams

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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Lol, the thing about surviving underground reminds me of the book World War Z. As the zombies spread, the Nirth Korean population up and disappeared. Nobody knows where they went, it’s assumed they went underground, but nobody’s going to check. Could be their civilization is hibernating, could be zombies got loose in the bunkers and there’s tens of millions of zombies ready to stream across the South Korean border.

The idea of a country “going dark” and then re-emerging is great.

I’m curious what could of come from full planned economies surviving into the Information Age proper. Just having more computer management wasn’t going to stop making them dystopian nightmares, but it could have helped.
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I read WWZ, but I honestly never "bought" that part of the book. I was thinking more like a mix between Metro and Fallout's "Societal Preservation System", but actually being what it says on the tin instead of a science experiment.

And fun fact, the USSR could have had an early form of the internet a full decade before ARPANet, called OGAS ("ОГАС"), or the "National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing", which the concept was to link all the major economic centers of the USSR to Moscow, allowing for real-time monitoring of production output. But, sadly, bureaucratic nonsense made sure OGAS never got the needed funding.
However, had such a system been implemented widespread into the USSR, they might not have had the economic crisis of the 1980s, which itself was the culmination of close to 20 years of bullshit reports and "high production" not actually amounting to anything. With real-time monitoring of the economy, the USSR could have been able to better shift production for various needs, and better able to cater to production and transportation of consumer goods. Another major reason for the USSR's collapse was civilian discontent with a (perceived, later found to be real) lower standard of living than people in the West and constant shortages, and a system like OGAS could have allowed the GOSPLAN to better keep the civilian population happy.
 
A modern Def Jam fighting game 😭

How could you come up with such a great and amusing concept and then just fuck off after two games? I know EA and Def Jam Records don't have the best management, but damn. Bring that shit back, modern fighting game tournaments would love it too.
 
The Foxtrot said:
I read WWZ, but I honestly never "bought" that part of the book. I was thinking more like a mix between Metro and Fallout's "Societal Preservation System", but actually being what it says on the tin instead of a science experiment.

And fun fact, the USSR could have had an early form of the internet a full decade before ARPANet, called OGAS ("ОГАС"), or the "National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing", which the concept was to link all the major economic centers of the USSR to Moscow, allowing for real-time monitoring of production output. But, sadly, bureaucratic nonsense made sure OGAS never got the needed funding.
However, had such a system been implemented widespread into the USSR, they might not have had the economic crisis of the 1980s, which itself was the culmination of close to 20 years of bullshit reports and "high production" not actually amounting to anything. With real-time monitoring of the economy, the USSR could have been able to better shift production for various needs, and better able to cater to production and transportation of consumer goods. Another major reason for the USSR's collapse was civilian discontent with a (perceived, later found to be real) lower standard of living than people in the West and constant shortages, and a system like OGAS could have allowed the GOSPLAN to better keep the civilian population happy.
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Sounds a lot like Cybersyn that Allende wanted to implement in Chile. Given that the Inca managed to make a command economy work over a territory the size of the Roman Empire and without even having writing, I reckon the Soviets should have been able to do better. (Probably helped that the Inca were mostly subsistence farmers, though.) In economics we make a big deal out of the Soviets, laymen tend to think the big problem with Communism is the lack of incentives but it's not, it's the difficulty of successfully coordinating prices and output for millions of unique products and markets.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Given that the Inca managed to make a command economy work over a territory the size of the Roman Empire and without even having writing, I reckon the Soviets should have been able to do better. (Probably helped that the Inca were mostly subsistence farmers, though.)
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Well, to be fair, the Inca were also far more primitive than the USSR, and back in that era of Humanity, somewhere around 90% of the population were farmers. With that being the case, most of your "skilled" laborers were concentrated in your cities, so it is a lot easier to coordinate your economy when it's heavily concentrated in a few spots.
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
In economics we make a big deal out of the Soviets, laymen tend to think the big problem with Communism is the lack of incentives but it's not, it's the difficulty of successfully coordinating prices and output for millions of unique products and markets.
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A problem in some Communist countries, especially Romania in the 1980s, was that they could have more money, but there wasn't anything to buy with that money.

And don't forget the problem of the Central Committee demanding more "growth" from the economy, AKA, just give us more production! So factories were incentivized to just crank products out. Doesn't matter if they're shit products. Doesn't matter if they wound up rotting on the dock or in storage because nobody came to pick them up to deliver to their destination. Doesn't matter if nobody is actually buying the products anyway. Doesn't matter if the factory workers busted their asses for three months to fill their quota, then sat around, smoked, and goofed off on the State's ruble for the rest of the year.

All that does matter is the factory met its quota early and exceeded the production output of last year!

I will say that lack of incentive is an issue, but not in the way most people think. It's not "as long as they pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work", but rather, "Why go the extra mile? I'm working, right? So I'm getting paid either way!". There's little incentive to do a good job because you're getting paid either way, shit job or good job.

Not to mention the USSR's economy starting under Brezhnev became the definition of "Military-Industrial Complex". So the military got first call to electrical power, skilled workers, quality materials, and quality machine tooling. Consumer goods took a very distant secondary backseat. And thus the quality of life of the average Soviet citizen suffered.

And let's face it, how many ministers and Party members in charge of various aspects of the economy actually knew anything about what they were charged with overseeing? Or gave a shit? Easier to just handwave shit away and fudge your numbers.

With a computerized economic planning system, a lot of these issues could be completely solved, or at the least alleviated.
 
1950s Ace Combat

Open world 1990s Japan drifting game - make the car upgrade stuff like My Summer Car, have a bunch of side minigames like Shenmue/GTA, and have some weird subplot with a serial killer/murder cult.
 
If there isn't already this in some form I'd be surprised, but competitive multiplayer chariot racing. Chariot races are much more interesting than horse and car races, being de facto demolition derbies. AC Origins had good chariot racing, but that's a single player experience.

Idea i had a really long time ago, popped back into my head, Victorian hero shooter. Now, that might sound really stupid or ridiculous, but the Victorian Era (or little longer if we reach back into Napoleon/forward into Edwardian) encompasses a lot of territory for people to drawn on different genres, it's a setting where you can have everything from Western gunslingers, Confederate cavalrymen, Japanese samurai, Mexican banditos, British explorers/archaeologists, tricorne-wearing captains, French duelists, Cuban revolutionaries, Austrian noblemen, Zulu chieftains, Sikhs and gurkhas with scary long knives and beautiful turbans, Cossacks on horseback with a lance, Transylvanian monster hunters, mad German scientists, villainous Manchurians, shady Turkish assassins, Apache warriors, bomb-throwing Italian anarchists, British detectives...

You get my point, when you draw from a mixture of real life and literature there are tons of colorful, crazy characters you could write (Overwatch-style) from all around the world, and then you throw them into combat on maps that could be as diverse as Mississippi steamboats, Himalayan monasteries, Istanbul bizzarres, and London factories. It would be the coolest shit ever, and could have cool vehicles in it too, both as maps (multiplayer map set on a train moving at high speed, game mode with hot air balloon sniper duels above Paris) and as vehicles to ride (penny farthings, carriages to crash into each other, big fuck off elephants), maybe even in some maps ridiculous environmental hazards and animals like grizzly bears, tigers, lions, alligators. I said shooter, but in my imagination it's really more like a fighting game that just has freedom of movement and more than two combatants, but still something where you can flynn with swords and knock people around with environmental objects and stuff and use gadgets viably along with the guns. By gadgets, I mean gimmicks like lasso (for cowboy/gunslinger), whip (for explorer), stuff like that.
 
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A game where you're a 50s greaser living in Southern California (Central Valley with the Okies?) and you live out a junk yard and drag race, BUT the gimmick is you can build and repair cars, both to sell and for your own use. So it's adds a whole huge dimension to those weird junkyard/mechanic simulator games and to racing games by giving you:
Exploration (go out and find junkers, haggle with the owners, or just steal them I guess)
An economy (work on beaters to earn money to get better parts for your personal projects)
The sense of satisfaction and pride of winning races with a car that you didn't "unlock" or "buy" but actually put blood sweat and tears into finding the parts for and then putting together by hand
A damage system, so that when you wreck the thing there are consequences and those consequences make the race more thrilling and you can feel remorse (the pain of losing things in a video game is as much a part of the fun, like anyone who has vivid memories of losing a party member to permadeath)

If you don't like the 50s theme (nobody does except me), then let's just keep the core idea of mechanic simulator meets racing game. ALso I don't know if lowriders were a thing back then but I'm fine with throwing out the whole 50s thing to make it Mexican lowriders instead with lowrider dancing (god I loved my San Andreas Savanna, paint job #2).

Edit: Like, the thing is, there's lots of racing games and there's also crap like Car Mechanic Simulator, but for some reason noone has combined these two even though anybody who is interested in building cars is probably interested in racing them as well.
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
A game where you're a 50s greaser living in Southern California and you live out a junk yard and drag race, BUT the gimmick is you can build and repair cars, both to sell and for your own use. So it's adds a whole huge dimension to those weird junkyard/mechanic simulator games and to racing games by giving you:
Exploration (go out and find junkers, haggle with the owners, or just steal them I guess)
An economy (work on beaters to earn money to get better parts for your personal projects)
The sense of satisfaction and pride of winning races with a car that you didn't "unlock" or "buy" but actually put blood sweat and tears into finding the parts for and then putting together by hand
A damage system, so that when you wreck the thing there are consequences and those consequences make the race more thrilling and you can feel remorse (the pain of losing things in a video game is as much a part of the fun, like anyone who has vivid memories of losing a party member to permadeath)

If you don't like the 50s theme (nobody does except me), then let's just keep the core idea of mechanic simulator meets racing game. ALso I don't know if lowriders were a thing back then but I'm fine with throwing out the whole 50s thing to make it Mexican lowriders instead with lowrider dancing (god I loved my San Andreas Savanna, paint job #2).
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It sounds like a very chaotic GTA spin off that takes place in a southern city in the 50´s
fuck it...I want to play it
 
1. City builder like Cities Skylines but optimized for modding support
2. Cold War setting RTS / Grand Strategy games
3. More roguelikes with a survival and exploration elements like NEO: Scavenger
4. Rimworld but with Z-levels
 
Okay, hear me out
There was that god game way back in the day
And you all know how real old school RTS games had this expression "spirit of the nation" to describe the role of the player (not being any sort of specific character, but just directing the civilization like a hive mind)

So let's say there's a Manor Lords-like (city-builder with tactical warfare), set in Mesopotamia, but you explicitly play as the tutelary deity of the city. You are Yahweh. You are Marduk. You are Ashur. The other cities, against which you war on the same map (or, say, only the cities proper are rendered but there's countryside to war over between them on the strategic map), have their own tutelary deities that are just as real as yours. You may start from one simple breakaway warlord and his retinues and clan (like Abraham) and try to build from it a mighty empire like Assyria or Babylon.

And, like Age of Mythology but kind of reversed, your ability to intervene in the world - your power as an entity - depends directly on belief (one of those settings where belief makes things real, which I think is not far off from how Mesopotamians really thought?). Temples, sacrifices, various wasteful things are not just tools of social control but give you the "fuel" for smiting enemies mightily with plague, blight, drought, storm, locusts. And if your followers are spurning your laws that weakens the efficacy of their worship, so you may just have to turn those tools against them to smack them back into line.

Woe befall you if your idol - your physical tether to the world - should be taken hostage, or even worse destroyed, as befell Marduk. That is basically the game over condition (If you play Jerusalem, the Ark of the Covenant IS your idol).


Combat medic game (there is one coming up, but it looks like jank garbage like most niche stuff), with the gimmick that you have a unit of actual characters AND permadeath for the characters AND you're a pacifist like Desmond Doss. Desperately try to rush to get guys out of fire and tend their wounds, practice triage, dodge bullets from Japanese. Or, something like combat surgeon/MASH/Civil War surgeon. I know those are pretty different, but I'd think there'd be quite a bit of interest in a more serious surgeon simulator game (Surgeon Simulator itself is just the Goat Simulator of medicine) which could involve flying helicopters and base management type stuff, and Civil War surgery is like full on nightmare horror stuff (how quick can you cut a leg off on a fully lucid man?).
 
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Might sound a bit unpopular, but i think we're lacking on blitzkrieg-like and sudden strike-like "giant map and heap of men and resources" kind of strategy games. Like, if you combine logistics and plane controls with good graphics and physics and improve on AI, then we'll be alright. Might also work as mod platform for different ages.
 
The ultimate water sports game set in SoCal or Hawaii. Surfing, sailing, big time fishing on the sea (the sort where that fishing pole is mounted to the ship like its artillery), scuba, all of it. Or a game where you're a Polynesian warrior exploring the vast ocean, finding islands, settling them, waging war, and surfing.

Mostly I just wish I had been able to scuba this semester (turned out too expensive) and want to learn to surf.
 
I honestly think there is enough mainstream interest in Simo Hayha (among people who matter) for Sniper Elite 6: Finland to exist, and it could cash in amazingly on selling itself as the WW2 game where you fight against Communism instead of Nazism.


Edit: Fuck, you want to cash in on Ukraine faggotry, make a game (open world, linear, who cares) about being Ukrainian Insurgent Army, fought the Soviets, Nazis, evil homophobic Poles, everyone altogether. (Though what I'd really really rather have is anything, at all, doesn't matter genre even, set in the Russian Civil War.)

Also, team-based management game where you run a (or, the crew of a) fancy French restaurant. I think high cuisine is wank, but I'm still captivated by it from things like "King Georges" and "Somm." The concept of a brigade de cuisine is something that has basically been adapted into every restaurant, but the explicitly military nature of the French restaurant is interesting to me. I think you could make a really neat half-narrative RPG, half-programming puzzle game (what I mean is, a game where the puzzle is developing the routines to have automatically execute to achieve what you set out to do), little bit of management and interpersonal drama in the workplace/between restaurants/with the critics, could be really interesting. (Yeah, I know there's probably a million of these, but all of them phone games made for women.)

Refining earlier idea: Medieval monster game, you are actually a genuine monster. No revisionist "wHaT iF hUmAnS aRe ThE mOnStErS" garbage. Immoral maneater at best and evil more likely. Giants, dragons, mermaids, traditional folkloric vampires or other terrifying grave ghouls are the sort of thing I have in mind. Play is about doing monster things and trying to not get yourself killed off. What your central goal is could depend, giants for example may have a thing where they start out kind of small (like, say, 10 feet tall) and grow bigger as they eat, but their appetite also gets bigger as they eat, so you progress from just being an exceptionally tall and stocky hominid to towering big enough to climb cathedral spires like King Kong and eat whole wagons of produce. Dragons would have to eat, but their goal would be more to hoard gold, don't know what the fuck they do with it (use it to attract mates? magical abilities?), but they'd have a problem where their hoard would also attract adventurers. Vampire, suck blood, explains itself, maybe more stealth-like and involve having to think ahead about frustrating investigations because all they need to do is find your coffin and you're fucked (they'll destroy you in daytime). Mermaids, maybe a shitty idea but a thing where you're sort of trying to trap/ambush instead of tear shit up, lure sailors in to their death/manipulate weather, and then eat them like some kind of horror shark. Skinwalkers too, not as in the creepypasta type that's just another hominid ghoul-looking thing, but the original Navajo skinwalkers that are shapeshifting witches.
 
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I want a remake of HOMM3 with the same maps, objects, castles, creatures, races, etc. Also with a good redactor and modding possibilities. The game is so good that you don't even need to add anything. Just renew graphics, add new cinematics and a couple of scenarious or campaigns. I would buy it, but in the CuReNt YeAr the remake will probably suck a massive dick anyway and botch the game.
 
Turned out my build cars-then-race-them thing actually exists, just as DLC for Car Mechanic Simulator... Not like some open world thing with driving around towns and stuff, literally just one track, but hey, better than nothing, go rip that DLC for free.
 
I wish I could have seen what Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney had been like with the original vision of not having Phoenix Wright in it. Capcom forced them to put Phoenix in, and it caused Apollo to get overshadowed in his very own game.
The way Phoenix is portrayed in the game also comes across as oddly spiteful. "Oh, you want us to put him in the game? Well, here he is, and he's nothing like his original self. Happy?"
It says a lot that the next mainline game was basically written to undo everything that had happened to Phoenix.
 
Id like to see something like the first ghost recon game with modern graphics and technology. Basically, leading a commando team on big open maps. Squad commands. Lots of planning and customizing your team. Choosing where you insert and extract. Variability in mission objectives like you go in to get a hostage but you don't know exactly where they are on the map. Random enemy patrols and locations. Maybe make it about a team of mercenaries for hire and successfully completing objectives gets you more cash to buy crazier equipment. I don't know the old school rainbow six and ghost recon games have almost entirely disappeared.
 
Actual genre: the old times cozy game.

Obviously a lot of the rambling junk posts I spew here are basically "this X in [insert historical/decade setting]." (Mostly because there's a ton of aesthetic variation and "fantasies" that can be done that aren't typical fantasy/science fiction/contemporary garbage.)
Now, there's this whole "cozy game" thing going around now, which Yahtzee thinks will be the next big thing. And I've complained before, with farming games the whole damn genre is either sperg driving tractor games or its cozy games, your Harvest Moons, Animal Crossings, Stardew Valleys. I tend to feel a bit of disdain for stuff that plays up its "coziness" because it tends to feel infantile and I can easily envisage unemployed Internet Communists and rainbow flag furry pedophiles playing them.

But, quite a lot of what I think of is basically cozy games, just in a different way. Cozy games that don't ape a cartoony (or at least not the usual shit, I would love more Cuphead-like exploration of real world artforms) style, but that draw their coziness from the feeling of mimicking distant, romanticized past. I happen to prefer oldies to most modern popular music and have an interest in the evolution of it, and I also like the visual art of the American Century, but it's more than just style, it's tone too. Our culture has spent so much time rolling in vile self-hatred, critique, satire, that it has reached a point where almost anytime you see something in a 50s or other old setting, it's just to shit on it and call it racist/sexist/imply everyone's grandma was a drug addict, and I have trouble even enjoying that stuff for the art anymore. There is clearly something deeply appealing to many people in the aesthetic, or people wouldn't go gaga over Fallout soundtracks or retropunk stuff all the time. But the spirit of it is dark. (There are some exceptions; the movie "Big Fish" that came out recently was a wonderful fairy tale set in mid-century Alabama.)

I want to see stuff that embraces the image of Norman Rockwell America, including literally in that art style (we have games that look like Greek pottery, games that look like oil paintings and watercolors, we can have that). I want to see stuff that, whatever the actual concept or gameplay may be, evokes the feeling we associate with images like old men sitting on the porch of a general store playing checkers, grandmothers holding a quilting bee, children bicycling around town, or the mild but pleasant feelings of Andy Griffith, Lucy, Gomer Pyle, or the restrained melodrama of things like the Waltons. These things which were corny but, to watch them now, are remarkable in how - contrasted to most modern media - they don't feel like they leave a greasy stain on the heart. Many of these things could be easily gamified. It's a Wonderful Life, for example, can be gamified as a local savings and loan simulator where you are the "Tom Nook" of your town (bear the burdens of being moneylender to people you know, but also watch as smart lending nourishes the town and helps it to grow.)

In a sense, it's like white woman in a wheat field but for the other aspects of life that disappoint.
 
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