Clever game design

[miyabi95_]

What I mean by that is what are games that take a common trope of its era and give its own personal spin?

I'll start for example. We all know Kirby right? Eat everything, take powers, la la la, a fun and quirky adventure.

Now let's take a look at an old gem for the Famicom: Yume Penguin Monogatari. Simply put, your girlfriend decides to dump you because you can't stop stuffing yourself with food. She goes off with some creep who wants nothing to do with you, so he ends up trying to stop your efforts of losing weight in order to win back your loved one. The game itself has a similar vibe to the many Kirby platformers, except you have to think about what you eat, otherwise you'll gain weight. So, unfortunately you're not a round puffball that has an infinite vortex inside of him, you're just an unhealthy penguin.

So what are some games you can think of that put a clever spin on a genre/trope of games?

[DarkGrievous7145]

Not sure if this counts, or how accurate it is, but I was talking with a friend about goat sim, and he was mentioning it was created basically to mock / parodize the other '<x> simulation' games and their hilariously abysmal physics and weird glitches.

what's sad is i probably have played plenty of games fitting the categories you describe, but remember few of them

off the top of my head, upgrade complete: 3mium mocks pay-to-win games especially well.
It's better you just play it than me try to explain it...lol

[Zero Kirby]

When I think of games mocking the medium, Metal Gear Solid 2 is one of the first that comes to mind.

Just about nothing escapes mockery - player avatars, escapism, "virtual training," the idea and redundancy of sequels, even the contrivance that is the final boss. Even as Raiden is able to destroy literally a couple dozen Metal Gear and is basically way better than Snake, he still gets stripped naked and mind-raped and constantly reminded of how uncool he is in comparison to Snake.

Some of its mockery was even way ahead of its time - play the game now and tell me that the Patriots' evil plan wasn't to stop Twitter from existing.

I also think of Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days and its utterly savage destruction of awful fancharacters.

[Gors]

I wouldn't call those "clever" in its own conception, but rather "alternative".

This is not to make the game sound bad, though. Anything that exists borrow concepts from other things that already exist. This referencing and mutation of said concepts is how creativity works.

Given your example, you said that Yume Penguin Monogatari is clever (and it is), but that does not make Kirby less clever. Which in turn doesn't make Mario less clever, and so on. Those are simply derivative of already existing concepts - alternative concepts, if I may call them that.

Breaking the mold can be usually seen as clever, but it's worthy to note that even if the game or any work follow a solid premise even if it's not totally groundbreaking, that would be clever too.

An example of cleverness without regarding alternative gameplay is Atari 2600's Pacman. It was poorly received at launch and is widely regarded as one of the games that buried (lol) Atari's reputation in the gaming scene, but it was a programming feat with many interesting features.

The game was sereverly downgraded from the arcade version, but the game had its own spots of brilliance:

1- The game's orientation was changed from vertical to horizontal screen to better accomodate in the TV screens;
2- The pellets were changed to brown wafer biscuits - so that they could also be used to make the wall bricks in the maze;
3- The limitation of the console cut down on the number of the ghosts on-screen and only one could be displayed at a time, causing them to flicker. However this exploited the humans' persistence of vision and the poor quality of the CRT monitors, so since they flickered fast and the screen didn't refresh as fast, the ghosts appeared to be transparent.

Again, this game was a flop, but in retrospect, the game had a great deal of cleverness within its development..

[Koh]

Gors, I think you're mixing clever and innovative. Innovative requires the thing to bring something new to the market (like say, Portal, but not Pokemon Go, since Go is just a reskin and gutted version of Ingress, and also not Minecraft since it's Infiniminer with more blocks). To be clever could just require the devs make interesting design choices within their chosen mechanics, limitations or level designs.

For example, Fairune on mobile. Often to progress, you have to play close attention to your surroundings and notice oddities to interact with, or just think outside the box to progress.
Here: https://youtu.be/gg4OxN4GqbI?t=315 The tiles lead you to that area, but also if you play close attention, the tree is missing a stump.
Here: https://youtu.be/gg4OxN4GqbI?t=519 Only rock on the screen, something has to happen.
Here: https://youtu.be/gg4OxN4GqbI?t=1139 We can walk behind tall things. Is there something there? Secret Found!
Here: https://youtu.be/_PYy3j8cx_I?t=189 This keeps happening, but we can't use them yet. What purpose do they have?
Here: https://youtu.be/_PYy3j8cx_I?t=938 Hint hint...

[Gors]

I'm not mixing anything, the thread title is literally "clever game design".

Kirby and Yume Penguin Monogatari were alternative (and innovative) at the time and are clever on their own, but that does not remove the cleverness from some more "traditional" games for reasons cited above.

[Omega]

Splatoon comes to mind with the floor painting instead of shooting other people as the goal

[miyabi95_]

All great examples  I guess what I meant by clever was more the meaning of ironic. like something you wouldn't normally expect. But in a way, it's clever.

And it doesn't even have to be between companies. Nintendo did it to themselves with Majora's Mask. Zelda games are usually very fairytale-esque where everyone wants to talk to you and there are close to no signs of corruption (outside of dungeons and whatnot). Majora's Mask paused the tradition by making everything so chaotic. It's like the Evangelion of video games. I think it might have started the tradition of giving video games such a cynical atmosphere.

---

I'm not mixing anything, the thread title is literally "clever game design".

Kirby and Yume Penguin Monogatari were alternative (and innovative) at the time and are clever on their own, but that does not remove the cleverness from some more "traditional" games for reasons cited above.

of course not c:

[Gors]

i'd guess that Minecraft is a pretty clever game, too. Basically it's less of a game and more of a 3D modelling app at times, and I feel like it's a very intuitive game once you get the hang of it.

Of course the focus in creativity and modeling kind of hurts the action part of the game, but all in all it's a game where the satisfaction is not exactly on conquering an objective in particular, but being able to build a shelter and thrive in it

[Koh]

I get Minecraft is virtual Legos, but the one thing I really hate about it is the crafting system. It's not intuitive and a hindrance, and the only way you'd know how to craft anything is to use the wiki. If you need a 3rd party, outside of the game resource to progress, that's a sign of bad game design.

[psychospacecow]

Extra Credits is doing a design club week on Baldur's Gate if anyone wants to look into that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWgc20zbRXk