Rejected Game Concepts #196: “Pretty Bad Ninja”
YOU are Chad Hopkins, a member of the deadly ninja: masters of stealth, assassination, espionage and martial combat. You are not a very good one. You graduated at the bottom of your ninja class (you missed a lot of classes because you were having problems with your girlfriend Jean at the time).
Now all the other ninja have been wiped out, and it’s up to you to save the world. And sadly, you won’t be able to, because as previously mentioned, you’re really not very good. You can’t jump more than a foot, your katanas are cheap replicas you bought off a guy with a lazy eye at a gun show in Houston, and you’ve been smoking since high school, so it’s pretty tough these days to clear a flight of steps without running out of breath. Plus you’re not getting any younger. You’re pretty much as good as you’re ever going to be, and it’s still not even slightly impressive. You’re sort of a joke in martial arts circles, to be honest.
CLUMSY MELEE COMBAT
Unresponsive controls, sluggish responses and blatant AI cheats combine to immerse you in the experience of being a laughably sub-standard fighter with limited range of motion
NO ACTUAL PLOT
Every level is randomly chosen without any context whatsoever, emulating how it would feel to not really know what’s going on at any time
STEEP LEARNING CURVES
Impossible-to-master moves, an incomprehensibly vague manual and infrequent save points will help you see through the eyes of a clumsy, uncoordinated idiot
CLOSED WORLD GAMEPLAY
A limited sandbox with few choices ensures you will affect the outcome of the game in NO WAY WHATSOEVER
CHARACTER REGRESSION
As you progress in the game, your character not only won’t learn new moves, he will actually forget things you’ve already taught him to do depending on his level of embarrassment as a result of enemies not really taking him seriously
November 28th, 2007 at 5:10 am
Sounds like an idea I had for a crime-thriller game, “Socially and Instinctually Inept Detective.”
November 28th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Your use of bold type is masterful, and makes what would merely be a great piece extra-great.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Reading this while looking at that guy in the picture is… its sublime.
November 29th, 2007 at 10:09 am
Character Regression is a very interesting subject for a game.
November 29th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
So would the cheat codes make him even more inept? Would it make the character like, have a nervous breakdown and poop his pants or something?
November 29th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
The God-Mode equivalent would just be him slitting his wrists and dying.
November 30th, 2007 at 10:20 am
I’d like an MMORPG where lag is a curse you can use on other players.
Anyway, this was so funny I’m now in pain. Thank you Jay.
December 16th, 2007 at 12:05 am
Some reason, its reminding me of the autistic/idiot savvant gangster movie I wanted to make.