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[Bongo Bill]

Say you've got a strategy tabletop wargamey thing (or something like it) where you take your guys and you can have them Move and then you can have them Do Things. Here's how you could use another, better game to manage that. Specifically, cribbage.

The player whose turn it is deals. If the starter is a Jack then the weather conditions on that turn or something are favorable to that player. Then in the next phase, for every point each player earns he gets a certain number of points that he can use to move his pieces around the board. He must use them immediately upon receiving them or discard them, and presumably different pieces on different terrain types can move cheaper or more expensively.

Then when they count the values of their hands, the total point value of each hand is then spent making the various units perform actions. Points must be used immediately and any unused points are lost. Exception: the dealer combines the total point value of his hand and the crib, and then spends them.

[James Edward Smith]

For some reason I can never get the idea of game/movie/book that takes place in the arctic and begins with the investigation of a crash of some sort.

I like the idea of a game that starts in a barren arctic setting and we can see just behind a small hill that crops up out of the snow and ice, some black smoke rising up. The player is in a helicopter that is already flying towards this crash. I immediately give you control of the copter but there is no where else to go in this game world other than that crash, so you can fly off in some other direction, but you only have so much fuel so you can become a crash yourself or land and wander out into the cold and die from exposure or whatever, but if you're smart you'll just play ball and fly towards the crash, would you kindly?

Anyway, the radio crackles to life and you get some generic instructions to look for survivors once you land over the crackly radio. You probably won't be able to make out a lot of it but the details don't seem important. And this is it for instruction, this is all I will ever tell you to do. You are in the arctic aproaching a crash site and the rest is really up to you. Once the radio transmission stops you have no key to press to call back or anything, just the sound of the copter blades and the blowing wind of the arctic.

Once you land you can see that the wreck is actually a submarine that has come out of the ice at a rather bizzare angle. Some searching around will reveal foot prints, blood, and then finally a wounded Russian Submariner. He will only speak Russian with no in-game translation and will probably promptly die or may threaten you after rambling at you in Russian nonsense and then proceed to assault you if you don't stay away from him. He will be very irrate and crazy and will probably die from his wounds rather quickly in game time.

The hatch he crawled out of will be easy to find and will take you into the sub. The rest of the game will take place in the submarine and below it...

[Cannon]

and what if like

there is some kind of alien that can assimilate and imitate humans or other lifeforms

Not so keen on the false choice at the start, and if there aren't irate ninjas in the submarine, then I will be disappointed.

[Koah]

there is some kind of alien that can assimilate and imitate humans or other lifeforms

But there is no infection here, Cannon.

[Brentai]

Oh, thanks.  I didn't want to be the first one to draw the obvious but ultimately false parallel to The Thing.

[James Edward Smith]

Oh, thanks.  I didn't want to be the first one to draw the obvious but ultimately false parallel to The Thing.

Yeah, I sort of Like The Thing. The old movie of it is pretty good and everyonce in a while I think to myself that someone should remake it nowadays, but then I realize that would probably suck since the original is pretty cool already.

They made a game of it as well, I think, where you had to shoot the alien things and maintain good standing with the sanity meters of the other humans in the station. I don't know if it was any good or not. It seemed pretty generic to me.

But yeah, in this there's no infection and no sort of social cabin fever thing going on. Although later in the game there may be the aspect of meeting other human characters and always having to think twice about trusting them or being fearful of them.

Not so keen on the false choice at the start, and if there aren't irate ninjas in the submarine, then I will be disappointed.

A big part of the feel of the game that I'd want to have is the feeling of isolation and freedom as well as the harshness of the environment. I want to force you to cling to whatever oppurtunities seem to arise hungerly because I've made you realize that too much hesitation or fucking around in the wrong way is quickly unfruitful.

As for Ninjas in the sub well, the sub itself will not hold any hostile encounters, at least not with creatures. If you try to leave the sub once you have entered it for any significant length of time, you will step out of the hatch to find that the whole crash site is now surrounded rather spookily by a group of inuits. They look like the Inuk of old, their wooden slit-snow-googles coving most of their faces. Approaching them or attempting to talk to them will only get you pushed back forcefully or a warning spear thrown at you. They will slowly encroach on you to force you back into the sub if you stay out there long enough and if you try to stay out there past that, they will just club you to death or maybe just club you and you will awaken in the sub with only hatch out sealed.

Other than the sub, the arctic barrens around it, and the main area of the game, there will be four other main areas; a tropical forrest in South America, a mountain range in asia, and an area in that dried up sea in the Ukrane.

[François]

They made a game of it as well, I think, where you had to shoot the alien things and maintain good standing with the sanity meters of the other humans in the station. I don't know if it was any good or not. It seemed pretty generic to me.

It's probably pretty good if you really really like fixing fuseboxes.

[James Edward Smith]

There were a lot more oppurtunities there to edit in parts of the movie to make for a funnier review. AVGN would have done a better job.

[Disposable Ninja]

I've been toying with the idea lately of making a comic* about a man who, as a child, played and almost beat Polybius, and since then has been haunted by horrible images of death, and thus has spent most of his adult life searching for the game so that he could finally beat it. The climax would have him find the elusive urban legend in an abandoned warehouse, beat it (complete with all the windows in the warehouse exploding and flocks of doves taking off a la John Woo), and screaming "I'm free! I'm finally free!" as a horde of demons drag him to hell.

*Although I think that it would make for a killer rock opera.

[Brentai]

Replace Polybius with Time Traveler and you've pretty much got my autobiography.

[Disposable Ninja]

A magical universe in which interplanetary travel is accomplished by committing suicide.

[Catloaf]

If you believe Disgaea in that heaven and hell are just planets in a distant galaxy, that could be reality.

[Guild]

Say you've got a strategy tabletop wargamey thing with cribbage.

I'd play this. I'm a card game and wargame whore. I'm assuming that the actual cribbage game has no real value other than resource fuel.

[Bongo Bill]

Say you've got a strategy tabletop wargamey thing with cribbage.

I'd play this. I'm a card game and wargame whore. I'm assuming that the actual cribbage game has no real value other than resource fuel.

You assume correctly.

[Bongo Bill]

Take any old violence-based MMO where large groups of characters can fight each other. Add to that this nifty feature: those so authorized by their guild can, instead of playing normally, enter "general" mode, where they A) issue orders to guild members who are in the battle, and B) take limited RTS-style control of guild member-owned characters who are not currently logged in, with their owners' consent. The characters controlled in this way have rudimentary AI for making tactical decisions and the general does not have fine-grained control over them, and their stats are not changed in any way aside from their current HP and temporary buffs/debuffs/whatever. If you log in a character who's participating in a battle, you can choose to wait until they're killed, jump in the battle immediately, or resume from where you logged out before the battle began. Generals are optional and you can maybe also enable an AI general if needed. You don't need to be fighting a big group of enemies, either - you could do it in one of them "raid" things you kids are so keen on nowadays.

[Detonator]

An MMO Natural Selection, although keen, would seem largely unnecessary.  But then again, who hasn't dreamed about commanding armies of soldiers who are controlled by real people?

...enlisted

[Kazz]

It's tough to do.  In any teamplay experience, griefing is always a problem.  It'd be easy enough to incentivize following the commander's orders, but the commander shouldn't be ordering everyone to suck frog pee.  Unless it is a game about sucking frog pee, in which case he shouldn't be ordering everybody to not suck frog pee.

[Bongo Bill]

The idea is to graft it onto an existing, more-or-less-working setup, and make it voluntary. The character you're currently playing as has no more reason to obey the general now than you have to normally listen to whomever your guild put in charge of coordinating things, and your other characters can easily opt out. You can go off and do your own thing playing the normal game, but large-scale activities can now be much more coordinated and much, much bigger.

It rewards the most dedicated players - guild leaders - by giving them a new form of game that is close to what they were already doing. It creates more reason for people to make alts, which makes them stick around longer. It lets more casual players feel useful in spite of their limited playtime, which encourages them to join guilds and also to stay in them even if they don't play enough themselves. It makes it less of a hassle to coordinate a huge event or boss fight, which means more huge events and boss fights can happen and they can be huger and fightier. And for those who don't want to deal with it, it just means they have more meat puppets to fight with in whatever sort of PvP there is, since AI-controlled characters can't think tactically as well as a meatspace player can. It's a great novelty, adds a new fun mechanism and a little layer of depth, plus possibilities for further exploration of the idea, really highlights the social features, and overall just increases the value of the game.

[Disposable Ninja]

Been done, I believe. Can't for the life of me remember what it was called, but I remember it won (or at least was nominated for) some independent game award.

[Bongo Bill]

Good ideas are meant to be stolen!