Weird gameplay mechanics

[Anonymous No.948784]

ITT let's post games with weird or unique gameplay mechanics, doesn't matter if the game is actually good or not, as long as the gameplay mechanics are weird/interesting. Also .. try to post a screenshot of the game and describe the game a bit.

[Anonymous No.948794]

>>948784
Op here again ...
I'll start with Yu Yu Hakusho: Tokubetsu Hen for the super famicom.
It's a weird fighting game, and it's kind of difficult to explain but I'll give it a shot...
Each "round" you gotta press one direction on the d-pad to get the little red bar at the bottom to fill as much as possible,
then you press a button to take action.
Depending on the button combinations, your actions vary from normal punches, defense, weird magic and super attacks. You gotta attack as fast as you can otherwise your opponent attacks too fast/too hard and makes you lose your turn.
Now look at the screenshots, everytime something happens it's shown in really cool animation, the whole fight looks like that.

[Anonymous No.948815]

I'll humor you OP with two games both are actually good.

It's a text based choose your own adventure civilization builder, where your choices matter and consequences happen further down the line depending on your previous choice. You can go to war or you can make peace with rival clans, and you can piss off immortal creatures that'll destroy your clan.

[Anonymous No.948821]

>>948815
This is a fantasy kingdom builder, where you are king, and you recruit heroes and give them goals via reward flags (for attacking or exploring), each hero is guided by its own AI, and you have tax collectors and shit going around to get you money

[Anonymous No.948834]

The 2 Captain Tsubasa games for famicom, Captain Tsubasa 3 for Super Famicom, and Tecmo Cup for genesis.

Really cool but weird series of games, it's pretty much a combination of Rpg, Sim, Tactics and soccer.
Basically you run around the field playing soccer, avoiding the other players, making passes and shooting the ball, but you do all this throgh menus.
You run around like you normaly would, but the moment you want to shoot, pass or someone from the other team approaches you, menus pop up.
Here you have to select your actions, each action uses MP (guts) and running around consumes your MP too, so you have to be careful not to get your players too tired. Everyone has levels and after every match they gain 1 level and their stats get better, but if a character scores many goals he goes up several levels in just 1 match.
It's really a cool series of games, the best one is captain tsubasa 2 and it's really worth checking out.

[Anonymous No.948843]

Dragonball Z V.R.V.S.
It's some Japan-only Arcade-only Punch Out-esque fighter that I found out about just looking through MAME ROMs. There are two punch buttons, one for each arm, and a jump button that automatically either puts you far away from or right in front of your opponent. You charge things by holding a punch button or back on the stick, and the fifth opponent you fight is some original villain that takes your form and literally copies every attack you do until you spam buttons enough to make it desych or something (from my experience with it). The game was going to be ported to the 3DO with Cell added, but that fell through.

It's also funny because they have English names of each character on the select screen.
>Son Go Kuh
>Son Go Han
>Vegita
>Piccoro
>Trunks

[Anonymous No.948883]

>>948834
That game came out over here as Tecmo Cup Soccer Game, right?

[Anonymous No.948896]

theres a weird yu yu hakusho game for the genesis that plays like a adventure novel type of game, but you can get into fights with demons and the battle gameplay is weird and confusing. its a nice short game though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H04mtHiajXc

[Anonymous No.948904]

>>948883
>Tecmo Cup Soccer Game
Yeah, that's the 1st tsubasa game.

[Anonymous No.948915]

Been a while since I've played this, but I'll try to describe it as clearly as I remember. It's an RTS game that takes place on floating islands with geysers of mystical energy you can harness, however to connect them you have to build roads to from randomly selected "road parts" with specific turns and crossroads (think Pipe Mania/Tetris) upon which your harvester dudes can move to collect the energy. Your primary offensive power in the game are towers, each faction has different ones - one faction might have a turret that is relatively shortranged but can shoot in any direction, while another has a powerful long-range cannon that can however only shoot in the direction it's built in. IIRC the main goal is to capture the enemy "priest" (a hero unit of sorts) by hitting him, then a harvester dude can take him and sacrifice him at your altar building.

[Anonymous No.948947]

>>948784
>>948794
This game was flippin awesome. I remember a few of my friends used to play it pretty religiously. We had a ban list and everything. Good times.

>>948815
This looks really interesting. Could I trouble you for the name of it?

[Anonymous No.948997]

>>948947
Looks like King of the Dragon Pass

[Anonymous No.949004]

>>948915
>>948915

sounds like a really fun tower defense game

[Anonymous No.949008]

>>949004
Best part? God tier multiplayer

[Anonymous No.949017]

>>949008

meh, I'm not into multi. I'm also not into tower defence, but I'd play that

[Anonymous No.949021]

>>949017
Go ahead and play it then, it's easy to get hang of. And it's not really a tower defense game.

[Anonymous No.949037]

The enemies are invisible. You gauge their location through a sensor that beeps in various volumes in accordance with their direction.

[Anonymous No.949063]

>>948821
That sounds like an awesome idea. Imagine combining that with procedurally generated worlds, and adding mini-dungeons or stealth missions to play in as the Champion or Spy of the realm.

[Anonymous No.949067]

>>948821
Oh, and what the fuck is the game?

[Anonymous No.949081]

Gekisha Boy, this game plays mostly like a side scroll plattformer with some rail shooting mechanics, the objective in the game is scoring points by taking pictures. I guess you might take the game as a Proto-Pokemon Snap.

[Anonymous No.949090]

>>949081
Love that, it's so friggin' crazy !!
If anyone's interested there's a sequel for ps2 called polaroid pete.

[Anonymous No.949141]

>>949067
Majesty

[Anonymous No.949145]

>>949067
Not >>948821, but if you're interested I highly suggest the Majesty HD collection. Majesty 2 sucks.

[Anonymous No.949170]

Already posted this one in another obscure games thread. Doukoku Soshite is a non-linear point and click adventure mixed with some dating sim mechanics. In this game the main character has to escape from a Mansion where he is trapped with a group of people (there are some girls and some guys). Characters will get killed if you can't save them. There is also a sequel on DC, Revive.

[Anonymous No.949202]

>>948784
This IS a genre. I'm not sure what to call it. But there are some others like it. Uh.. Battle heat and this Far East of Eden game for the pc fx. One Zeno game like this for the super famicom. These sorts of games seemed to fall out of style before hardware with more ram (ps2 ps3 etc) appeared.

Probably a matter of nobody wanting to spend the money to hire the animators it would have taken to continue the genre. Example: (and a whole other topic) 2d fighting game seemed to die off just as hardware had advanced past cps2/3/neo geo levels of storage space.

[Anonymous No.949205]

I don't know how many other games put a boss advancing from the background.

[Anonymous No.949218]

>>949202
2d fighters died off because of a massive flood of shit games that attempted to cash in on the popularity of the genre though. Mortal Kombat 1, Shaq Fu, Primal Rage, Clayfighter, and the like were all mostly just blatant attempts to cash in, and after a while, the consumer started to get wise.

You can actually see this happening in the resurgence of fighters that happened a few years back as well. While many newer "bad" fighters don't really suffer the same quality issues the old cash in fighters did, they are still plagued by horrible balance and almost no support from companies who would rather you shell out $15 for an "expansion" than make a quick balance patch to solve some issues.

Back on topic though, it's kind of sad this style of game didn't advance beyond this stage. I played YYH3 quite a bit back in the day, and it's a mad fun game.

[Anonymous No.949219]

>>949202
*zenki for the superfamicom. Heh.

[Anonymous No.949224]

Change Air Blade

It's a cross between a shump and a fightan. Best two out of three, switching from top and bottom sides of the screen each round. Person on the top is the "boss" (with health meters) person on the bottom dies in one hit (up to three times). Special meters fill up depending on how much you dodge and shoot, and when the top players fills up their meter, they get to dock with a boss ship, taking up the entire screen.

Greatest game ever to play with bros.

[Anonymous No.949227]

>>949202

There is also Shura no Mon on Genesis, it kinda plays like those games.

[Anonymous No.949236]

>>949218
By that logic 2d fighters died off in the early to mid 90's just because the cheap copycat companies stopped trying, or at least trailed off. They didn't. SNK and Capcom (the only two companies who ever had any business making fighting games) had a whole range of super high quality fighting until 1999-2000. Right about the time next gen hardware was available to consumers. There just weren't enough skilled animators in Japan to make multiple fighting games every year at a level that would have been considered "next gen" or 64-bit graphics. That is, the market would have expected animation levels beyond SF3 or Mark of the Wolves. Capcom abruptly stopped making fighters. And SNK never recovered... Sad.

[Anonymous No.949258]

>>949236
It is actually, because G:MotW is one of the greatest fighters of all time, and the KoF series has rarely disappointed.

But, yes, I'm aware there were other reasons for the decline in fighting game popularity. I'm just saying a market flooded with crap was a pretty big detractor for fans of the genre. The advent of multiplayer console FPS' certainly didn't help matters either.

Though I have to admit, a few gems came from the era when fighters were largely overlooked, namely Weaponlord, Soul Blade, and to an extent Flying Dragons.

[Anonymous No.949453]

The 4 Dragon Ball Z rpgs for famicom, and one for the super famicom.

Okay so these DBZ rpgs are interesting and pretty cool.
I never understood all the rules and how exactly the cards work but I'll try to explain it anyway...
It's a rpg, but you have cards wich work as commands in battle, each card has a kanji wich determines what it does (attack, kamehameha etc), the cards also have numbers and other weird symbols, I don't know exactly how they work but your attack speed and strenght depend on the symbols.
It's not like you have a deck (like in yugioh or something), the cards seem to be generated at random, each time you use one in your turn it dissappears and another random card takes it's place, but once a card appears it stays in the menu 'till you use it, so it's wise to save good cards. Also you have to use cards to move each character individually in the world map, if they get too separated they'll have to fight solo. A neat detail is that you don't have levels or normal stats, you just have power levels (like the manga) and everytime you fight they go up.
The games are awesome but they are brutal, you have to grind a lot and even then the bosses are almost unstoppable. Remember how fucking overpowered Goku's enemies where, and how all battles seemed hopeless ? It's the same here but much much worse.

Storywise the first 3 games follow the story of the anime, from the point where you fight Raditz to a battle with Cell. Then the 4th one is just some boring original dudes that have nothing to do with the canon story.

[Anonymous No.949510]

>>949453
reminds me of dragon ball z: legendary super warriors for gbc. i don't really remember how that game works, though

[Anonymous No.950756]

>>949453
>>949510
Speaking of DBZ games I have no clue what the hell I am doing while playing DBZ Legends. I was expecting a pretty standard beat em up and ended up with something entirely different.

[Anonymous No.950769]

>>948834
God I love 3 so much, I don't even know jack shit about Captain Tsubasa or soccer really but it's just so fun.

I'm stumped on games with weird gameplay mechanics, I'll post some if I think of any. I always love when game designers try stuff out of the norm, sometimes it's utter shit and sometimes it's just awesome.

[Anonymous No.950775]

>>950756

Oh fuck I remember that game.

You beat the piss out of your opponent until that gauge on the bottom fills one way or the other. When it does, special move cutscenes are unleashed, which is what does the actual health bar damage. If I remember right, you can even go 2-player mode on the same team. Some of those fights can take a damn long time.

[Anonymous No.950774]

Crossed Swords.

It's basically an on-rails melee game played in a third person over-the-shoulder view.

You move from battle to battle and they're mainly 1-on-1 duels with various monsters and demons.

Near as I can figure the object of the game is to immediately get stunlocked from full health to dead each time you pop in a token.

[Anonymous No.950779]

>>950774
There was a similar game but set in modern times and you are a secret agent. People shit on those two a lot but I always thought they were pretty neat.

[Anonymous No.950915]

Not like this one's a well kept secret or anything, but Vagrant Story is so convoluted you can barely play it without reading a dossier on the games finer mechanics.

On it's surface, it appears to be a typical dungeon crawl action RPG with an odd sphere based targeting system that allows you to target individual body parts. As you do damage to a specific part of the body, enemies will take negatives based on the body part hit. It also includes a timing based combo system, with specific combo moves giving you bonuses such as weapon repair, damage based on your lost health, status effects, ect.

What really throws it out in left field is the "risk" bar, which increases exponentially with every additional hit you perform. As your risk goes up, your accuracy goes does, but you do and take more damage, but once it goes above a certain point, you'll almost never hit anything and get one shotted by just about everything.

It also had a fairly deep weapon customization system for it's time, and tons of other mechanics that barely make any sense, but man was it a lot of fun once you got it all down.

[Anonymous No.950932]

>>950915
you had to be pretty dumb not to figure the game out

There is an in game manual that covers everything.

Also Risk is a pretty cool concept for realism. You get tired with every swing of a weapon, as you get tired you accuracy goes down so does you blocking ability. It's a pretty basic concept.

[Anonymous No.950948]

>>950932
I figured it out, it just doesn't change the fact that you have to read for like an hour before you know what's going on, and even then, the in game tutorial is only vaguely helpful in the grand scheme of things.

It's still not really like any other game I've ever played.

[Anonymous No.950965]

Not even a decent fighting game but the first I seen personally where you not only pick your character but also your stats.

By giving yourself 0 special just to increase your strength or defense by a single point you lose your ability to use any of the possible special moves.

[Anonymous No.950969]

oil baron (1992) - strategy board-game where you are a shareholder and you expand your company through buying grid tiles, trading shares and causing mergers in the process.

capture the flag (1996) - strategic turn-based capture the flag where players can walk, run, crawl, hide, etc based on action points.

[Anonymous No.950986]

>>950969
>Straight up game of Capture the Flag in which there are just a space of woods separated in two with two teams sneaking around
Oh lawd. Best thing about Summer Camp right there. I knew that particular patch of woods like the back of my hand, and I could probably describe it accurately today.

[Anonymous No.950989]

>>950965
reminds me of tae-kwon-do for the snes. you can upgrade various stats, as well as different moves for your fighters. the moves have different strengths and weaknesses and timing is important for comboing/knocking your opponent off-balance.

[Anonymous No.951335]

>>950774
Crossed Swords is ultra awesome !!

>>950779
Super Spy is the name of the game. (also pretty rad) pic related

[Anonymous No.951336]

>>951335
Sorry, forgot Super Spy's screenshot....
here it is ..

[Anonymous No.951358]

>>950774
Is that one fps .gif of the guy ripping the the shark in half from the mouth from the same type of game?

[Anonymous No.952073]

Woah, there are lots of weird Dragon Ball games.
There are other 2 for super famicom:
Dragon Ball Z Super Gokuden : Totsugeki-Hen
Dragon Ball Z: Super Goku Den — Kakusei-Hen
Both are like a combination of text adventure and rpg. The whole game plays as some sort of text adventure and then you get rpg battles but they are really weird ....
Wish I could explain more, but I just played a the roms and since I can't read moonrunes, I had no idea what was going on and I coudn't make it far. I could never beat Yamcha....
The games look pretty neat though !

[Anonymous No.952183]

>>952073
Well back then you couldn't really emulate the fight scenes exactly, so they had to branch out. They didn't start making games that actually emulated the feel of DBZ fights until the Budokai Tenkaichi games.

[Anonymous No.952204]

I think games like Dragon's Lair and Time Gal fit in this thread, because of the lack of games with this mechanics.

Bassically it's a almost non-linear (because you start in a random tage of the time every time) interactive movie (not like heavy rain, but more simplistic and reactive) when you may react to the events happen on the screen.

If you press the correct button in time, you can advance on the level, but if you fail, you need to do all over again.

[Anonymous No.952208]

>>948834
Are they playable without much knowledge of japanese?

[Anonymous No.952209]

>>952204
Not only there were numerous games with those mechanics back in the days, but do I really need to remind you that almost all modern games have these mechanics?

[Anonymous No.952218]

This is my favorite thread on /vr/ right now. Keep it up.

[Anonymous No.952229]

>>952209

Yeah, but that "reaction" feature is only a really tiny part, not the global game mechanic

[Anonymous No.952242]

>>949224
I love this game. It also reminds me Twinkle Star Sprites which was released before Change Air Blade and has similar gameplay and a decent sequel for PS2 in Japan.

[Anonymous No.952243]

>>952208
Since you are interested in playing...
there's an english translation patch for Tsubasa 2.
As far as I know there's no patch for 3 ... but it's pretty easy to play the game without any knowledge of japanese. I was able to beat the games without knowing any japanese or reading any faqs... I sort of learned how the game worked by randomly testing all the commands i nthe menu...
That was like 10 years ago, nowadays you can find plenty of faqs that explain how the menus and all that work. It's pretty easy !

Give it a try, you won't regret it.

[Anonymous No.952253]

>>952204
Too bad this genre died so long ago ....

Imagine how awesome a hentai game like this would be...

>pic totally related

[Anonymous No.952259]

>>952253
You know that's actually a guy in your picture, right?

[Anonymous No.952271]

>>952259
What ?! How can this be ?!

[Anonymous No.952275]

>>952271
Yeah, it's from a Jap porno. I've seen the cover for it before. I wish I saved it, but sorta' don't.

[Anonymous No.952276]

>>949170
Oh Fu... I don't want to remember it again... I felt really sick when the girls died one by one... I particularly remember of a girl who died get "cemented". I was kinda freaked out back then...

[Anonymous No.952282]

>>952243
That's nice to know. It's because I plan on beating 'em on my own Famicom console.

[Anonymous No.952329]

>>952282
That's totally rad !!
Just let me give you some advice...
the game starts pretty easy but later on the difficulty is ultra brutal. You are gonna lose a lot of matches, but that's okay.
When that happens your stats stay the same (and sometimes they still go up), you'll have to replay some older matches, wich will level up all your players even more, this is pretty much the only way to beat the game.
The final matches are pretty much impossible if you don't do this a couple of times.

[Anonymous No.952529]

>>951358

This is from The First Funky Fighter, which is seriously just a whack-a-mole game with a ridiculous story and gratuitous violence.

[Anonymous No.952534]

>>950915
>upscaling
me eyes!

[Anonymous No.952538]

Has anyone tried that Dragon Ball VR arcade game? I tried emulating it once randomly, poked around with it for a minute or two, and stopped. I really don't get it, it looked kind of like OP's game but much rounder, almost like it was made for a circular screen.

[Anonymous No.952546]

I'm a little surprised that SaGa didn't pop up in this thread. It's become a little more well-known around here, but SaGa is Akitoshi Kawazu's darling series of weird JRPGs, where he tests all manner of experimental mechanics. I know that 1-3 on the Game Boy are all released in the west as Final Fantasy Legend 1-3 (note, Final Fantasy Legend in Europe is not SaGa 1, but in fact is Seiken Densetsu 1. In the US it was called Final Fantasy Adventure). There are other games in the series, like Romancing SaGa 1-3, Unlimited SaGa, and SaGa Frontier, but I have not played those ones, nor do I know of translations for all of them (or if they were released in the west or not).

Pretty much any game from Kawazu is sure to have some unique experimental JRPG stuff. For reference, he was behind FF2 and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles as well.

[Anonymous No.952558]

>>949453
I think I remember this. It had some crazy options that allowed you to either mimic the events of the show or do something completely different. Like when you're fighting monkey Vegeta you can cut his tail using the Yajirobe card or Krillin's Kienzan attack to make the fight a lot easier, and you could make Goku go super Saiyan on purpose by letting his friends get killed. IIRC you could even win fights you were supposed to lose which would slightly change the story and give you extra characters, like not letting anyone die in the fights against the Saibamen and Vegeta/Nappa, which would allow you to bring your whole crew to Namek alive and well.

[Anonymous No.952568]

>>952558
Damn, that's actually really cool.

[Anonymous No.952573]

>>952568
It is.

It's hard as balls though. I was never able to beat it without save state abuse.

[Anonymous No.952623]

>>948843

i love the vrvs concept

[Anonymous No.952646]

>>952558
that is fucking awesome, everything you said

[Anonymous No.952695]

How about Lester the Unlikely? The first I ever heard of it was in conjunction with AVGN discussion,but I admit I've never seen the video in question. I do think it's neat to watch. I dunno if there were many Prince of Persia clones back in that time period, but this appears to be one of them. The main weird part of Lester the Unlikely is how the character will, upon seeing a new enemy, become terrified and run away from it. He has a similar reaction to steep cliffs or harrowing jumps. It's all meant to be a story of a comic book geek rescuing himself from being accidentally shipwrecked on an apparently deserted tropical island, and when coupled with the character's animations and sound effects, the concept seems well realized. That said, I haven't ever played it, just watched footage, so it may be a complete shit game, I just thought it was potentially interesting and worth mentioning.

[Anonymous No.952986]

Way of the Samurai 2.

Think GTA in edo era Japan.

The odd mechanic: Your supposed to play this game multiple times to unlock every thing. You only spend 10 days in the village per play through. So how you spend your time actually matters. I enjoyed it.

[Anonymous No.953012]

>>952986
>fastest way to do stuff is jump around

1000 JUMPS A DAY

[Anonymous No.953346]

>>948834
it's fucking blitzball, downloading

[Anonymous No.953363]

>>950774
Crossed Swords had some really cheesy cutscenes.

[Anonymous No.953660]

>>952546
Romancing SaGa 1 got a PS2 remake and came to the US, Romancing SaGa 3 got a fan translation, SaGa Frontier 1, 2, and Unlimited Saga came state side. Only one you can't play without knowing moon is Romancing SaGa 2.

Also one thing I like is that in some of the games that it has a quest system in which when the time of the game world passes by quests can come and go with, or without any of your influence.

[Anonymous No.953931]

>>952529
One of the manliest games ever. They should make a smartphone port for it since its controls are ideal for a touchscreen game.
>>>>946579

[Anonymous No.953962]

>>952558
I still remember the games, and yeah it totally works like that, also if one of your characters dies.. he stays dead for the whole game.

Also, the second game starts on the way to Namek with all the characters alive. All the crew is there, Yamacha, Ten, Chaozu etc
The game is so friggin hard that there's a high chance that almost all your characters will die before even reaching Namek.
If you play your cards right everyone survives the trip ... and you guys can't even imagine how mega rad is to have all those fuckers in Namek fighting against Freezer's henchmen.

>pic related, look everyone's there !

[Anonymous No.953976]

Final Fantasy 8.
This one is common knowledge but still ...

>draw spells from enemies
>equip spells

[Anonymous No.954043]

>>952275
We need more details on this, skipper.

[Anonymous No.954609]

The Monster Maker series.

Basically it's an rpg but everything revolves around cards. Npcs are cards, your items are cards, enemies are cards etc...
The dungeons are really weird, the whole floor is covered with cards, everytime you move you step on a card and have to flip it to see what it is, most of the time it's nothing (normal floor) but you'll find treasure, traps and enemies too.

[Anonymous No.954626]

>>953931
>croctits
i approve

[Anonymous No.956720]

>>948815
I remember the threads on /v/

RIP in peace Clan Virgins

[Anonymous No.956882]

Dash Galaxy in alien asylum.
It's nothing too weird but it's kinda interesting ...
Your life bar also works as a timer.
In this game you have an oxygen bar, and it's constantly running out, and you also lose oxygen when enemies hit you.

[Anonymous No.956976]

>>949205
That's fucking scary, man