One aspect of games that I’ve always appreciated is innovation. When a game comes out that does something totally new or that bucks the formulas to which it might be expected to adhere, it’s hard not to stand up and take notice.

The most recent example of a totally new type of game I can think of is Scribblenauts. And while the game may not have succeeded on all fronts, being quite annoying at times, it did deliver on its promise to create nearly any object that you can imagine. You’re limited only by the words you can think of, and by how the game may misinterpret multi-word objects.

The game may be a full generation old by this point, but Shadow of the Colossus still stands out to me as an innovative game. It set you against sixteen opponents, and removed any possible distractions. No leveling up, no gear to acquire, and only two attributes to improve. Only sixteen unique opponents in the entire game. I imagine that this allowed the developers to focus on making the game a cinematic experience and making the colossi sufficiently epic, which they most certainly were.

Since Maniac Mansion and Myst, adventure games have innovated very little. Their text adventure origins led to graphic adventures, and then to point-and-click adventures. The advances since then have been small and incremental. While the genre certainly does have gems like Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey, and Syberia, they haven’t really broken out of the old formula at all. Games like Still Life have some limited real-time components, but not until 2005’s Fahrenheit (remarketed in North America as Indigo Prophecy) had I ever seen real innovation in an adventure game. Many people complain about the pseudo-quicktime events in the four-directional keys that take place during action scenes, comparing it even to old games like Dragon’s Lair. But beyond that, the fact that you had only seconds to reply in a conversation, the fact that they included stealth segments, and the inclusion of a sanity meter made the game new and different. There were even keyboard and mouse related minigames for completing everyday tasks that ranged from playing with a yo-yo to giving CPR. Not your standard adventure game fare. I’m looking forward to 2010’s Heavy Rain for many of the same reasons.

Perhaps Indigo Prophecy was a game mash-up of sorts. Mixing game genres is certainly becoming more popular, whether it’s Word Worm Adventure’s combination of word puzzle and RPG or Borderlands’s mashup of RPG and shooter. I think the first I’d noticed game genre mashing up was when I played Puzzle Quest for the Nintendo DS. That was certainly an innovative game. Later came Braid, with its mixing of platforming and puzzle genres. The time rewind mechanic as an alternative to losing a life may have been used previously in Prince of Persia, but in a 2D sidescroller, it seemed to be a totally different animal.

What are your favorite game mash-ups? What games do you think have been most innovative?

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

…or as we Americans know it better, Indigo Prophecy. They renamed the U.S. version for some reason when they removed the naughty bits. I’ve played through the somewhat more indecent Euro version, and the only differences are a sex minigame which is easily missed if you play a specific conversation wrong, and a sex cutscene near the game’s end, which is easily tame enough to show in a typical rated-R movie. Funny how things like that are fine in movies but taboo in video games.

Fahrenheit moves the whole adventure game genre out of the box by including quicktime events, timed sequences, stealth gameplay, and minigames. They also do a really good job of building suspense using split-screen multicamera. As much as the endgame plot stunk, I really love this game.