Inverting games
(Visited 5793 times) Game talk
Aug 152006
This Inverse Shoot Em Up (where you play the base and launch squads of ships and weapons against a single superpowered fighter) suggests other inversions:
- Invert Pac-Man: you have four ghosts trying to catch the snarky little jerk who steals all your dots.
- Invert Donkey Kong: you must protect your innocent yet gullible princess from the Italian Casanova who’s climbing up to her secluded bedroom.
- Invert Qix: the field has been subdivided into little bits, and you must remove the fences in order to give free roaming to the imprisoned beast within.
- Invert Tetris: a solid grid of blopcks must be decomposed into shapes that are all exactly 4 blocks, with no blocks left over.
- Invert MMO: hordes of barbarians have entered your world and made it a mess of semi-literate murderers unearthing ancient artifacts, damaging local cultures, and obsessively climbing some pointless social ladder. You have to find a way to return the land to a state of innocent bliss, perhaps by eradicating all the people.
Of course, this latter one’s been made. A bunch of times. By accident.
16 Responses to “Inverting games”
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Those all sound hilariously fun. Inverted Tetris sounds similar to Snood and other break-away games.
That’s bad. Don’t be mean. 😉
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I’ll take the inverted MMO for 500 if I get to play say some demi-godlike creature that gets to leave the instance 1-3 times a week and wreak havoc on those Barbarians, indiscriminately of course *insert evil laugh here*
Inverted Social MMO: You get to build things, own things, and socialize (EVEN fLY) but there are still players using it to “cyber” almost the minute you walk into it. Oh wait thats my first SL experiance from last night….
This was the case when I logged into SL last night for the first time (researching what kind of data points would be relavent to capture for a Socially Oriented MMO) I wasnt even off the Help Island when I ran into a Naked version of the Burger King wielding an axe and dancing with his equally naked girlfriend….I would suggest some kind of lockout of that area except for Noob players..I was trying to learn how to interact with the SL enviornment with a Naked Axe Wielding Burger King grinding up on me (at least they got thier collision detection working well, or maybe uh…this isnt a good thing…lol) anyhow Allen Niles first night in SL wasnt super fun, maybe I oughta try getting a tour guide, that place is BIG!
Actually there is something close to inverted Pacman called “Pac-Man Vs.” for the Gamecube. It worked by having 3 players playing ghosts with limited visibility on the television and one pacman player on a connected Gba. It’s a lot of fun actually and not too far off a totally inverted pacman game.
Patrick, that strangely sounds like Goldeneye for the N64.
Not a computer game, but “Monsters! Monsters!”, by Flying Buffalo… You play the monsters, raid the villages, kill adventurers, etc.
“Dungeon Keeper” and “Evil Genius” are both inverted games.
The idea I had years before “Dungeon Keeper” came out was to have a PvP dungeon-building game, where you could build elaborate and interesting dungeons, and other players could send adventurers in to try to beat your dungeon. Players could use the resources they won to either upgrade their adventurers or outfit their own dungeons. There’s a bit more that goes into it, to make the balance and economics of the game work, but the core concept was basically pitting a traditional model against an inverted model, and fixing the symmetry problem by allowing people to experience both sides of the competition.
Ideas:
In the vein of Monsters! Monsters!, “Deer Hunted”… You’re the deer and have to avoid getting shot.
Or “Jeffries’ tubes” – You’re an engineer who has to fix the Star Ship Enterprise while it’s in battle with the Klingons/Romulans/etc. Wander around the jeffies’ tubes fixing stuff and hope that the one you’re in doesn’t get blasted. You are wearing a red shirt after all.
“Dungeon sweeper” – Clean up the mess left by all the adventuerers and monsters. The toilets are always the worst part. 😉 Avoid both the adventurers and monsters, since either will kill you on sight.
“Orc mother” – Raise baby orcs so they can go out into the wide world of a MMORPG and survive all the adventurers trying to slaughter them. Kind of like a pet-rearing game. (I think there was a discussion about MMORPGs being about genocide at some point.)
I always had a suspicion that the customer service and management of ____ ____ ________ over at _._._. viewed the customer base in this mannor…I’ll take this as confirmation. 😛
ps…this really isn’t too bad of an idea for a game
[…] https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/08/15/inverting-games/This Inverse Shoot Em Up (where you play the base and launch squads of ships and weapons against a single superpowered fighter) suggests other inversions: […]
[…] Comments […]
“Dungeon sweeper” – Clean up the mess left by all the adventuerers and monsters. The toilets are always the worst part. 😉 Avoid both the adventurers and monsters, since either will kill you on sight.
That made me think of Dungeons & Denizens.
Dungeon Keeper was the best game… I often find myself wishing they’d come out with a current technology version… unfortunately, the games are horribly buggy and play poorly on a current winxp machine…
I could go for a reverse fantasy mmo tho. it could incorporate dungeon building, monster raising, and elements of some RTS’s…
Throw it into a persistant world setting, and you could get into some really fun interactions with other players!
Invert Pac-Man’s been made, sort-of, as Pac Man VS.
Oh gawd Raph, I have never laughed out loud while reading one of your posts. Brilliant. 😀
I had forgotten about Pac-Man Vs, which I thought was a really cool idea when it was announced. 🙂