I had a quick idea about a possibly cool game. Back in the day, the best Nintendo games were side-scrollers: Metroid, Bionic Commando, Strider, MegaMan, etc. I had a thought as I was working (my brain is funny that way) about a side-scroller. I might plant this seed in my brother’s head, since he’s going to the Guildhall school for games as an artist.
The idea I had was a game that mixed Metroid, Bionic Commando, Strider, a PC game called Abuse, and Lode Runner. The first four are fairly straightforward platformers, but Lode Runner had a bit more puzzle solving. You had to collect gold and make it to the exit on each level. The cool part about it was that you had a kind of acid gun that could melt through the floor in front of you, allowing you to drop down or block paths. It was kind of cool because each level was a puzzle. I’m not sure if that would fit very well in this design, but the puzzles aren’t what I would use. I would use the graphics layout. Your character was small and you could see alot of the environment. The other platformers I listed only showed you what was about 10-20ft. around your character. Seeing more of the environment would be important in my game.
I would take the bionic arm from Bionic Commando, spinning jumps and wall jumping from Metroid, and the sword from Strider. Here’s how it would work: You control the character using the mouse. This is the scheme from Abuse. Your mouse pointer is a target reticle and your character looks and aims wherever your cursor is. The right mouse button makes your character fire his bionic arm to where the cursor is pointing. The left mouse button fires your weapon to where the cursor is pointing. The A and D keys (or the Left and Right cursor keys) move you to the left and right. The space bar jumps.
With that control scheme, imagine running to the right, firing behind you as you’re running. Now imagine a pit of spikes on the floor in front of you and a wall beyond that. A shaft leads up. You jump over the spikes, fire your bionic arm, grab the wall and pull yourself against the wall. Then, you jump up, away from the wall toward the opposite wall in the shaft and fire your arm to pull yourself against it. You keep doing that until you’ve effectively climbed the shaft. The shaft leads up to another room. To get out of the shaft, you have to fire your arm to the ceiling of that room, then swing out. This room is a chemical storage room. There are vats of chemicals that you have to swing across to get out. You swing, disengage your arm, fire the arm at the ceiling ahead of you, and Tarzan it to the other side. Now that’s fun and challenging.
With a good physics model, good 2d animations, and good level design, that would be a great game. It may even be easy to control using console controllers (XBox 360, PS2/3, etc). I’d love to see it on XBox arcade like the game “Wik and the Fable of Souls”. Put a good storyline with it (like Metroid) and several save points to make it easy to play for a short time, and you’ve got a great game.

