GregHowley.com

I was just thinking, in a steam of consciousness kind of way, about the ideas for some of these games that have come out recently. Ford versus Chevy? MTV Celebrity Deathmatch? The Apprentice? There are some bad bad games out there. If these are the ideas being pumped out by some game studios, maybe they'll read my blog and consider my suggestions.

• City of Wrasslers - MMOs are huge right now. World of Warcraft, Lineage, City of Heroes, Star Wars Galaxies, the list is nearly endless. So how about an online game about professional wrestlers? Players could design their wrestler's body shape, costume, and motif. Then, they could enter the ring to earn money and prestige, go for the hard training in the wilderness by wrestling bears or alligators, or just tackle people on the streets for some fun in their time off. As your wrestler grew more powerful, you could learn new moves, or even invent a signature power attack. Just imagine jumping not off the top rope, but off the roof of a three story building to land a double axe handle on your unsuspecting arch-enemy as he's on the way to a title match. Hoo-augh!
• Window Washer - This is a puzzle game where you have to clean dirty windows along the side of a building. The goal in each level would be to clean the entire building. But each building has four sides, and moving around on the hanging scaffold isn't easy. There would be a swing move, which would be dangerous, but allow you to clean portions of adjoining columns. And in later levels, the buildings would be larger, oddly shaped, and the wind and weather would get increasingly worse.
• Rex Luger, Library Book Bounty Hunter - When some nogoodnick fails to return a library book, what are the poor librarians to do? A combination of Grand Theft Auto and Pheonix Wright, Rex Luger would have you doing detective work to track down the fugitive book borrower and retrieve the book. From the innocent but forgetful hairstylist who misplaced her copy of Hairstyles of the 1970s to the aspiring terrorist who failed to return a number of chemistry textbooks, Rex's missions will take him from the upscale suburbs to the seedy underbelly of the city.
• Murder Simulator - The video game equivalent of Snakes on a Plane, sporting a title that neatly summarizes the entirety of the game's content, Murder Simulator is a game which Jack Thompson has been clamoring for for a number of years. I say we give it to him. Of course, Rockstar Games would have to be the publisher. The game would initially provide a number of scenarios with many configurable options of varying difficulty - murder a vagrant, a shop clerk, a police officer, a famous rapper, a high-ranking politician. When user-created mods for the game begin to be created, the game would likely be banned, further increasing its popularity as users create skinned victims resembling specific celebrities and public figures. Not my type of game - I wouldn't play it, but you know that it would be more popular than Barbie Horse Adventure.
• Bear Hunter - There are plenty of hunting games out there. This one would have a twist. You are the bear, and you're hunting the hunters. They have guns. You have claws. But you run much faster and have a near-bulletproof skull. You also blend in much better with your environment, whereas they have orange vests. Early in the game, the hunters would be alone, have bad aim, and guns which hold only a single bullet at a time. Later levels in the game would have hunters in camoflauge and camped out in trees, as well as large hunting parties and high-powered rifles. If you beat the entire game as a bear, you can replay as an elk, which is obviously much harder.

I've got many more ideas, but those are my top five. If you're a game design lead and you like my ideas, email me and we can discuss my other ideas, such as Ozzy's Rescue Rangers, featuring the likeness of Ozzy Ozbourne, and Twiggy's Quest, a spinoff from the old Buck Rogers show. Also, I can't believe that the IP for Gigli has gone this long without being snapped up for a game. And I'm dying to see a second-person shooter.