5 Lost Video Game Mechanics That Need To Come Back

Perfect Dark's mode only worked with two players, but imagine this concept applied to next-gen hardware and online play. Think about playing a campaign in a game like the upcoming Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order knowing that every single stormtrooper you dismember is actually some real human earning points for actually trying to stop you, and given some ability to be creative in how they do it.

This means that every single playthrough of that campaign is unique ... and if you come back and play it a year later, you'll get a totally different experience, as stormtrooper player tactics will have advanced. You'd actually have an "ultra hard" mode in a game that isn't just turning every enemy into a bullet sponge.

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Each "level" puts your car a couple blocks away from a busy intersection and charges players with ramming into as many vehicles as possible and creating a massive pileup. Savvy players can gain additional points by slamming into explosive gas trucks or smacking cars hard enough to throw them into additional traffic, and Burnout: Revenge upped the ante by loading the car with a literal bomb that could be detonated at any time. It's basically one big explosive for-god's-sake-don't-try-this-at-home puzzle.

And sure, games like Demolition Derby focus on competitive car-smashing, while the Twisted Metals of the world task players with blowing up other cars, but only Burnout truly turns carefully orchestrated mayhem into an art form. The last game came in 2008. With more than a decade of technical advancements, tell me we couldn't get a game that lets you carefully stage an accident big enough to obliterate half the city.

Ultimately, Rockstar wanted to craft facial animations accurate enough that a shrewd couch detective could discern if a suspect was lying by studying their expressions. Unfortunately, though, the system isn't perfect. Just because you hire 400 actors doesn't mean they're all peak DiCaprio, some of the expressions are cartoonish, and the interrogation options are confusing. After a suspect speaks, players choose between three responses: Truth, Doubt, or Lie (updated to Good Cop, Bad Cop, and Accuse in the new edition). But it's still not always intuitive, and more often than not, all choices appear to lead to screaming in a suspect's face.

That was eight years ago, and apparently the industry decided that "gameplay based on reading facial expressions" wasn't worth pursuing, even though the flawed glimpse we got of it here was intriguing as hell. After all, it still worked well enough for some experts to believe LA Noire could be used as a tool to help people who struggle to recognize facial expressions, and the game did sell over 5 million copies.

Increasingly realistic graphics can't just be dedicated to making prettier brain platters or nicer backgrounds to ignore on the way to the next mission checkpoint. If we can't start to mimic the nuance of human emotion and interaction -- the basis of most great drama -- what are we even doing here?

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The first and most well-remembered mode is "The Crib." It sounds goofy now, but the idea is that players fill up a mansion with your standard trophies and achievements, but also with random cool crap like couches, air hockey tables, and bobbleheads. This type of gameplay loop has been superseded somewhat by PlayStation trophies and Xbox achievements, but it always kept me playing, as watching your mansion transform from an empty mausoleum into a gaudy shrine to your football eminence is a little more satisfying than earning 10 useless points for doing a specific end zone dance five times.

Sega

Also, because Madden is apparently so slavishly devoted to "realism," they've never created a Franchise Mode that allows my expansion team, the Memphis Mansacks, a chance at the title. But you better believe ESPN 2K5 let me do it. Meanwhile, Madden thinks it'd be more fun to try to win as the Jaguars for the millionth season in a row.

But my personal favorite tweak was the option to turn on First-Person Mode, which, while cumbersome, changes everything about the way you view the game. Completing even a basic pass feels like beating the Patriots because of how intense it is to scan the field with all those big sweaty men trying to turn your spine into creamed corn.

Sega

As gamers who love American football well know, all publishers lost the rights to make NFL games when the league and players union signed an exclusivity deal with EA, meaning Madden could be the only NFL game on the market. Monopoly secure in hand, any need to innovate, take risks, or compete at all vanished. If you wanted to play virtual football, you had only one option.

But even if we couldn't get these features in Madden, I think this kind of daring spirit would be a welcome treat in many modern sports games. I want LeBron James to smack the ball out of my hands in first person. I want to take the Durham Diddlers to the World Series. I want to fill a virtual mobile home with Gritty-themed upholstery. Is that too much to ask?

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Not that you're stuck in the shop all day. The stock has to come from somewhere, and when your inventory dries up, you're able to grab other adventurers and travel into dungeons to seek more loot. But even there, it's important to pay attention to how much you can actually carry, and to consider how long you stay underground. If a member of your team gets knocked out fighting a monster, you're going to have to abandon your loot and carry their worthless carcass out of the cave, much like in real life business.

I feel like this should be an entire genre by now, but there are only two other similar examples I can find. The first is a massively popular text-based game called Dope Wars from the '80s that people still freaking play. And the other is a pretty stripped-down version of the DS game GTA: Chinatown Wars that nobody should ever play. And while I understand why many might not want to run a quaint shop through their PS4, I imagine a robust shop minigame in open-world fare like Red Dead Redemption would both be immensely fun and also give players yet another reason to never, ever leave the house.

Jordan Breeding also writes for a whole mess of other people, the Twitter, and a weird amount of gas station bathrooms.

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