My sleak Pokemon Reputation
Sometimes I make an effort to give these blog entries the worst possible names ever.
In the area of Cute Monster Role Playing Games (CMRPG) I'm going to discuss a bit of a reputation based notion for these games. Using Pokemon as the example being used. Some might be upset at me not using a better CMRPG, of which there are several to choose from such as Digimon DS World, Shin Megami Tensei Persona, Shin Megami Tensei Devil Children, Dragon Quest Monsters and DQM Joker in amongst many many others. I'm merely using Pokemon since it will take less time to explain the contents of such a game.
If I were to want to see to an adaption of the Pokemon Adventures comic adaptation of the game characters and (loose) set of events in the story, I'd likely end up programming the game myself. Rather than try to fit it as a modification of one of the games Nintendo has released. While it would technically be possible to do everything that is in the Comics in the games... the effort to modify the engine, script and other parts, might be a bit more than I'd prefer to spend my efforts upon. If only due to how caustic Nintendo tends to be about people modifying their games.
My personal opinion is that allowing game modifications of a series indefinitely increases the life of any game. With the reason the games Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, Starcraft, Fallout 2, Doom, Quake, Ultima, Balder's Gate and other games from the early to late 1990s had the amount of life they did: the players could breath a breath of fresh life into their games.
The idea I am talking about came today when I put on the sleeves I put on. I looked at them and went, "you know, even if these did give terrible stats, I'd still wear them into a game."
That got me thinking: game fashion is nearly entirely decided by the stats such fashion gets in the games. So, unless of course you have some statistic added to the clothing, there is no reason to not go naked into battle for the majority of the players.
The clothing I was looking at were a pair of Music Legs Wonderland Arm Warmers... or particularly drug theme inspired emo gloves (my personal names never seem to be what people write on packaging). It would be extremely arbitrary to put onto these outfits "attack+1" or "Magic+3" or "defense-1 Magic+3" or something otherwise silly. However, it would make more sense to put some fashion element onto this. Either Cool, Cute, Beautiful, Smart and Tough... wait... that was extremely similar to the Contest and Super Contest system in Pokemon series.
What is more, thanks to the Pokemon Musical game added into the Pokemon series as per Gen V, most articles of clothing in the Contest system have hold spots on the monsters that they can be held with. To make battles not seem as tacky weird or indecipherable. Of course add this to the Capsule Seal System, it could nicely have those Cool, Cute, Beautiful, Smart and Tough categories be better done for any choices in clothing options.
The thing is, the only reason you'd do this is if you were wanting to build up a reputation of looking extreme cool, cute, beautiful, smart and/or tough outside of the battles. With the television reporting and random people talking to you about it after a while.
You'd have to remove them for the Pokeathlon to work in any manner, unless you modify the Pokeathlon to be more about appealing to the audience. Which wait... that changes it. There is of course one sport which is about strength AND audience appeal: Professional Wrestling.
Now my views on Professional Wrestling is that if it is indeed fake, from what I've seen is they only have a rough script of where it is suppose to head, the wrestlers need to work the audience and at the same time, manipulate the body of a heavy man, without seriously injuring the guy. The need to work the audience needs to make it so you are creating an improvisation based fight. People look at improv comedy like it is tough, but improv fighting with large men, that you gotta make look good and not injure as easy? No freaking way, if Professional Wrestling is fake, it becomes a million times more interesting JUST on what all that would require it involves.
I started watching Professional Wrestling because of claims of it being faked. Seriously, that would NOT be easy to perform. It being scripted out before hand would be a ridiculous addition into it. As you'd have the few choreography errors become obvious, like they do in dance, figure skating and Olympic competitions. So improvisation would be a more likely one. Making it like Whose Line Is It Anyways, but more bad ass than when they still had Clive Anderson on it.
Thinking about this, it would add to the gameplay. As the first thing I would add into the Professional Wrestling area of the game play would be: You Cannot Faint Your Opponent.
Anybody who has had issues catching stuff knows that additional rule spells death for much of them. As this is one of the more annoying parts of catching monsters. Fainting them, and it is messed up.
Then the battles would need to be a certain length. Battles Must Fit Into A Specific Number of Turns.
You cannot have the battle end too soon... you have to meet the number of turns. At which point something would be done to have the battle as over. So if it were a one on one battle, having it end before the specific number of turns would end discouragingly on your career as a Professional Television Monster Battler.
There is going to be other conditions that you will need to fill into the battle to follow the script.
Something silly like, "start off strong, and then weaken, towards the end of the battle" or "start off not paying attention to your opponent and only after you get to a certain percent of HP, start wailing on the guy" or "you cannot use your beams" or "you must allow another Pokemon to come in and rescue the first one, once it is on the ropes".
Silly slight level of story based notions that could be strung together at some level.
Of course Each Move Would Count for an Audience Appeal
What is more, you cannot repeat moves. You must use these appeals to have the Audience either booing your character, or cheering your character immensely.
You'd need to have Good Guy Wrestlers and Bad Guy Wrestlers
Part of the fun with Professional Wrestling is have people made into the villains and play the villain role. Or heck, play the good guy role in the game play. Allowing your PC to have a rather fun career as a villain on camera, and a good guy off camera. Your outfit clothing and choices would not really change if you are a good guy or a bad guy.. usually just it would have its colour scheme made more white or more black based upon your role of good or bad.
The character reward system for this.
You'd get certain amounts of money for how good you looked in the match. The more cool, cute, tough, smart or beautiful you handled the battle, the more money (or other ingame nonmonitary system) you'd get from these battles. If you failed any of these, like ending the fight too soon, fainting your enemy, not filling your good or bad guy role or missing the condition, you'd get a penalty on your reward.
With reputation appearing in the fights and on television for your in fight prowess and out of fight prowess. With the lines showing up all over "while [PC] might seem like a terrible person in the ring, [PC] is quite nice and helpful when not in the ring itself. Making for an interesting factoid on [PC]."
Your reputation would allow you to have more people asking for rematches outside of the ring, and have you getting a better return on the fights you have in the ring: based on ticket sales. With outside ring matches based on how many people you are fighting (and similar moneys regardless of reputation). Reputation would slowly degrade after you stop fighting for a while (never able to get down to nothing, you will have die hard fans) and would increase by constantly entering into the ring so as to spam the audience with your existence.
It would be an interesting addition into the game. I'm the sort that I kind of enjoyed the addition of Contests, Battle Tents, Pokemon Tower, the Frontier (in Hoenn), Russia (in Sinnoh), Super Contests, Pokeathlon and Musicals in the game series. I'd love for all of these to appear in a single game. I'm also a fan of the Nuzlocke Challenge.
So adding something like this, would have me wanting to play more. It would not be a core based set of game play, but it would add something wonderful to it.
It is the small touches like this, that makes me love the games. As well as the Pokemon following you in Heart Gold and Soul Silver, the Pokemon's Nature's effect in battles where the trainer cannot issue orders, Pokemon Ability affecting over-world items (and after battle affects, like Honey Gather or Pickup), the art style of the Ranger series, the flying aspect of Rangers: Guardian Signs and various other fun items.
These will probably end up appearing if I ever get to making a Pokemon Adventures fan game.
In the area of Cute Monster Role Playing Games (CMRPG) I'm going to discuss a bit of a reputation based notion for these games. Using Pokemon as the example being used. Some might be upset at me not using a better CMRPG, of which there are several to choose from such as Digimon DS World, Shin Megami Tensei Persona, Shin Megami Tensei Devil Children, Dragon Quest Monsters and DQM Joker in amongst many many others. I'm merely using Pokemon since it will take less time to explain the contents of such a game.
If I were to want to see to an adaption of the Pokemon Adventures comic adaptation of the game characters and (loose) set of events in the story, I'd likely end up programming the game myself. Rather than try to fit it as a modification of one of the games Nintendo has released. While it would technically be possible to do everything that is in the Comics in the games... the effort to modify the engine, script and other parts, might be a bit more than I'd prefer to spend my efforts upon. If only due to how caustic Nintendo tends to be about people modifying their games.
My personal opinion is that allowing game modifications of a series indefinitely increases the life of any game. With the reason the games Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, Starcraft, Fallout 2, Doom, Quake, Ultima, Balder's Gate and other games from the early to late 1990s had the amount of life they did: the players could breath a breath of fresh life into their games.
The idea I am talking about came today when I put on the sleeves I put on. I looked at them and went, "you know, even if these did give terrible stats, I'd still wear them into a game."
That got me thinking: game fashion is nearly entirely decided by the stats such fashion gets in the games. So, unless of course you have some statistic added to the clothing, there is no reason to not go naked into battle for the majority of the players.
The clothing I was looking at were a pair of Music Legs Wonderland Arm Warmers... or particularly drug theme inspired emo gloves (my personal names never seem to be what people write on packaging). It would be extremely arbitrary to put onto these outfits "attack+1" or "Magic+3" or "defense-1 Magic+3" or something otherwise silly. However, it would make more sense to put some fashion element onto this. Either Cool, Cute, Beautiful, Smart and Tough... wait... that was extremely similar to the Contest and Super Contest system in Pokemon series.
What is more, thanks to the Pokemon Musical game added into the Pokemon series as per Gen V, most articles of clothing in the Contest system have hold spots on the monsters that they can be held with. To make battles not seem as tacky weird or indecipherable. Of course add this to the Capsule Seal System, it could nicely have those Cool, Cute, Beautiful, Smart and Tough categories be better done for any choices in clothing options.
The thing is, the only reason you'd do this is if you were wanting to build up a reputation of looking extreme cool, cute, beautiful, smart and/or tough outside of the battles. With the television reporting and random people talking to you about it after a while.
You'd have to remove them for the Pokeathlon to work in any manner, unless you modify the Pokeathlon to be more about appealing to the audience. Which wait... that changes it. There is of course one sport which is about strength AND audience appeal: Professional Wrestling.
Now my views on Professional Wrestling is that if it is indeed fake, from what I've seen is they only have a rough script of where it is suppose to head, the wrestlers need to work the audience and at the same time, manipulate the body of a heavy man, without seriously injuring the guy. The need to work the audience needs to make it so you are creating an improvisation based fight. People look at improv comedy like it is tough, but improv fighting with large men, that you gotta make look good and not injure as easy? No freaking way, if Professional Wrestling is fake, it becomes a million times more interesting JUST on what all that would require it involves.
I started watching Professional Wrestling because of claims of it being faked. Seriously, that would NOT be easy to perform. It being scripted out before hand would be a ridiculous addition into it. As you'd have the few choreography errors become obvious, like they do in dance, figure skating and Olympic competitions. So improvisation would be a more likely one. Making it like Whose Line Is It Anyways, but more bad ass than when they still had Clive Anderson on it.
Thinking about this, it would add to the gameplay. As the first thing I would add into the Professional Wrestling area of the game play would be: You Cannot Faint Your Opponent.
Anybody who has had issues catching stuff knows that additional rule spells death for much of them. As this is one of the more annoying parts of catching monsters. Fainting them, and it is messed up.
Then the battles would need to be a certain length. Battles Must Fit Into A Specific Number of Turns.
You cannot have the battle end too soon... you have to meet the number of turns. At which point something would be done to have the battle as over. So if it were a one on one battle, having it end before the specific number of turns would end discouragingly on your career as a Professional Television Monster Battler.
There is going to be other conditions that you will need to fill into the battle to follow the script.
Something silly like, "start off strong, and then weaken, towards the end of the battle" or "start off not paying attention to your opponent and only after you get to a certain percent of HP, start wailing on the guy" or "you cannot use your beams" or "you must allow another Pokemon to come in and rescue the first one, once it is on the ropes".
Silly slight level of story based notions that could be strung together at some level.
Of course Each Move Would Count for an Audience Appeal
What is more, you cannot repeat moves. You must use these appeals to have the Audience either booing your character, or cheering your character immensely.
You'd need to have Good Guy Wrestlers and Bad Guy Wrestlers
Part of the fun with Professional Wrestling is have people made into the villains and play the villain role. Or heck, play the good guy role in the game play. Allowing your PC to have a rather fun career as a villain on camera, and a good guy off camera. Your outfit clothing and choices would not really change if you are a good guy or a bad guy.. usually just it would have its colour scheme made more white or more black based upon your role of good or bad.
The character reward system for this.
You'd get certain amounts of money for how good you looked in the match. The more cool, cute, tough, smart or beautiful you handled the battle, the more money (or other ingame nonmonitary system) you'd get from these battles. If you failed any of these, like ending the fight too soon, fainting your enemy, not filling your good or bad guy role or missing the condition, you'd get a penalty on your reward.
With reputation appearing in the fights and on television for your in fight prowess and out of fight prowess. With the lines showing up all over "while [PC] might seem like a terrible person in the ring, [PC] is quite nice and helpful when not in the ring itself. Making for an interesting factoid on [PC]."
Your reputation would allow you to have more people asking for rematches outside of the ring, and have you getting a better return on the fights you have in the ring: based on ticket sales. With outside ring matches based on how many people you are fighting (and similar moneys regardless of reputation). Reputation would slowly degrade after you stop fighting for a while (never able to get down to nothing, you will have die hard fans) and would increase by constantly entering into the ring so as to spam the audience with your existence.
It would be an interesting addition into the game. I'm the sort that I kind of enjoyed the addition of Contests, Battle Tents, Pokemon Tower, the Frontier (in Hoenn), Russia (in Sinnoh), Super Contests, Pokeathlon and Musicals in the game series. I'd love for all of these to appear in a single game. I'm also a fan of the Nuzlocke Challenge.
So adding something like this, would have me wanting to play more. It would not be a core based set of game play, but it would add something wonderful to it.
It is the small touches like this, that makes me love the games. As well as the Pokemon following you in Heart Gold and Soul Silver, the Pokemon's Nature's effect in battles where the trainer cannot issue orders, Pokemon Ability affecting over-world items (and after battle affects, like Honey Gather or Pickup), the art style of the Ranger series, the flying aspect of Rangers: Guardian Signs and various other fun items.
These will probably end up appearing if I ever get to making a Pokemon Adventures fan game.