Ten Things Videogames Need More Of
Given recent discussions I thought it might be useful to create a list that demonstrates how videogames could be categorically improved. Of course, there's a difference between this and other such lists. The difference is that this list is better. Thanks to coincidence, a game incorporating all these elements is guaranteed a 100% perfect score on Metacritic.
10. This:
9. Uncanny German plasti-retro-future (via John Coulthart), which should definitely be the setting for a Sims 3 expansion pack:
8. The Ethiopian Jazz of Mulatu Astatke. There is almost no first-person shooter soundtrack that couldn't be improved by this:
7. The armoured mammals of Jeff De Bouer, for a unique twist on the horse armour concept:
6. Theo Jansen's kinetic sculptures (but not BMWs), as vehicles for Unreal Tournament 4:
5. Things that travel along the ground at 10,430 kph and then collide with a wall. "Rocket Sled Manager" would be an ideal simulation tweak game, in my opinion:
4. The SA-60 airship prototype. Seriously, look, this has to be the basis of a game where you float ominously over farms in Kansas:
3. Historical bleakness. Forget six-shooters, horse-races, and gatling guns, what about starving to death in the wilderness? Here's some surreal literary bleakness via Cormac McCarthy, from his nightmarish Wild West novel, Blood Meridian. Ideal for a videogame design document:
"They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing. All night the wind blew and the fine dust set their teeth on edge. Sand in everything, grit in all they ate. In the morning a urine-colored sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature. The animals were failing. They halted and made a dry camp without wood or water and the wretched ponies huddled and whimpered like dogs. That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone, but fear."
2. This thing as a new pet/mount in World Of Warcraft:
1. Parties! We never have enough parties in videogames. Here's the kind of fun time you can expect to have at a party:
What do you think videogames need more of, readers?