Listening to a podcast of Retronauts, I heard Parish and the Shark musing about how they really should have made a quick-draw centric gunslinger cowboy game for the Wii by now and that it would have been a lot better than Link Has a Crossbow.
This reminded me of how before the Wii ever rose out of the ashes of the gamecube I wanted to make an iaido* game. In my head it would be an arcade game that you would play on a fairly large mat or playing area with a screen on all four sides of you. On every screen would be a dipiction of of your avatar who would come under attack by assailants. You would have a sword controller in your hand that was maybe just a sword hilt with no "blade" on it so that you didn't hit anything in real life and you would have to slash around to defeat your attackers. Because you were actually monitoring the action on the screens in 3rd person, you would beable to exercise the sort of sixth sense people like Musashi probably actually had and there for react to multiple attackers coming at you from all sides in a fairly badassed manner.
The encounters or stages, would be based on the actual iaido katas that iaido practicioners do for gradings. So if you know any iaido, you could actually attempt the levels by performing the real katas only you'd get to see these virtual ronin getting dispatched by your attacks rather than just imagining opponents and what they might be doing. But if you don't know any iaido, it doesn't matter, just react and try to survive. Your performance on each level would be measured on how quickly you killed all your attackers and how hurt you yourself got in doing so. With this in mind, it could be quite possible to get higherscores by coming up with your own techniques that actually kill everyone faster.
I'd have lots of other levels after the main kata based on other less well known katas from less mainstream schools perhaps and other sources, and of course crazy made up ones where you are attacked by giant toad summoning ninja and such of course.
Then the Wii came out and I thought "Hey, you don't need some big arcade set up that only a handfull of big arcades and theme parks would ever bother buying and installing. You could make something like this for everyone and their grandmother to play thanks to the Wii!"
Then I played Red Steel and blocked out this entire idea from my head.
But now with the release of the wiimote upgrade and the glowing reviews I've seen of the sword fighting Mii game that comes with it, I'm thinking something like this might actually be possible again. The Retronauts Clint Eastwood simulator inspired me further into thinking that maybe this could be made even broader and cooler by making it less Japanese swordsmanship edutainment (not that I wanted it to be too heavily that anyway) and more of a crazy anime styled fap fest by making the game about either a samurai and a gunslinger or one character who is both at the same time controlling his sword with one side of the nunchuk and his peacemaker with the wiimote.
It could all be one game where you could use a sword, a six-shooter or hell, maybe even a whip to try and survive ambush after ambush. I'd call it something like Kenjuro the Wanderer, A Stranger Came to Town, Momment of Truth, Life's Edge, Time to Die, Faster than Death, or my favourite; Die Like the Rest.
* samurai sword techniques were the openning move is an attack straight from the scabbard and then the final motion is to return the sword to it