News You Can Bruise for 2004 April 13 (entry 2)

(8) Tue Apr 13 2004 19:55 They're Playing Sports!: OK, I've kept you waiting long enough. Remember that Game Roundup where I speculated that many games could be improved by replacing humans with cars, a la "Soccar"? Well, Kevan has upped the ante with his discovery that you can improve any game even more by replacing the humans with dinosaurs! Witness Football-o-saurus, a shareware Windows game in which dinosaurs play football (they are British dinosaurs). Brilliant execution; only one thing bothers me, Holmes. The spectators seem to be human. Why?

Now that the scales have been lifted from my eyes I see that all those stale game genres can be revitalized by refocusing them on their rightful subject. Imagine a first-person shooter that's actually a first-person mauler--you are a dinosaur biting or clobbering other dinosaurs. A real-time strategy game in which you deploy your herd of dinosaurs against a rival herd. Even, say, a Monopoly clone in which everything has some strained connection to dinosaurs!

Since the pure, eternal "idea" portion of a project is the hard part, and since the implementation work and will to see it through to completion pales in comparison, I expect these games to start coming out next week now that I've done all the heavy lifting. Hey, I'll even help you out. Look--I started a SourceForge page! It's as good as done already!

Update: despite their British origin, Kevan assures me in comments that the dinosaurs are playing American football. I was kind of wondering where the goalie was in that screenshot. This conclusively identifies the dinosaurs as Paralitian stromeri.

Comments:

Posted by cola at Tue Apr 13 2004 22:46

Why are the spectators human? Because humans like to watch
dinosaurs play soccer.

Posted by Kevan at Wed Apr 14 2004 01:59

Actually, the dinosaurs are playing American football, rather than soccer. Which seems like a bit of an evolutionary dead end, with tiny forearms.

Posted by Paul Boddie at Wed Apr 14 2004 04:33

Surely "The Flintstones" covered all this ages ago.

Posted by Brendan at Wed Apr 14 2004 11:50

Surely you agree that the "magic concept" isn't nearly as important as the "cool name," which I've just come up with, and it's "Pachy Attacky," so get to work.

Posted by Leonard at Wed Apr 14 2004 14:01

That reminds me--where's my colorized logo? You've had *hours* to do it, and you even had the idea ("The logo, but in color") to work from!

Posted by cola at Wed Apr 14 2004 14:28

Argh. ^_^; The sizes of dinosaurs range over a whole order of magnitude.
How can they all play football together?

Posted by cola at Wed Apr 14 2004 14:39

Oh, they're all the same species. I sound like a FAQ.

Posted by Leonard at Wed Apr 14 2004 15:23

It would be neat if you could build a team by choosing small, fast dinosaurs vs. big, slow dinosaurs and maybe a rhamphorhynchus or pteranodon to take those long passes. For more situational games there are many other dinosaur abilities to use: egg-laying and -stealing, signalling using the hollow bones of the skull, etc. The sky's the limit (if you are a rhamphorhynchus or pteranodon).