What would be in your perfect Atmosfear game?

[DarkWolff]

What I mean by that is, what features would you like it to have? Here's mine:

1. DVD format (of course) with the horror theme of the first game.
2. A multitude of characters. Take all the harbingers, rangers, etc, and throw them into the game. Have special rules for each of them.
3. The game board would have the artistic style of the first board, with a complexity somewhere in between Harbingers and Gatekeeper.
4. Difficulty:Moderate to Hard. I considering Nightmare 4 to be the hardest game of the series, and vanilla Harbingers to be the easiest. Somewhere in the middle would be great.
5. Length: Variable, but with a default of 50 mins - 1 hour (determined by playtesting). Perhaps a 6 player game would be 1 hour, while a 3 would be 45 mins.
6. Gameplay: I think Harbingers had the most interesting gameplay, as it gave you a number of choices of what to do that the other games did not. Soul Rangers did this as well (with the grunts) Again, it was also the easiest game (possibly because of this). The rest of the series has comparatively fewer decisions. Overall, I think the perfect game would have choices similar to Harbingers.
7. Key Powers: The DVD games have the least (Khufu has none, Gatekeeper has few, Nightmare has the worst). I like key powers (as shown when I made custom key powers for Gatekeeper). Harbingers seems to has done them the best, but I think they could be made slightly more interesting, as most powers were clones. Something like sub-keys would be nice; keys that don't count to winning, but give you something else.
8. Host: Probably the Gatekeeper (either, but I think the original is creepier), but I'd like to see Gevaudan & Hellin as hosts eventually (as long as Gevaudan doesn't say anything like "Ooooooooooutrageous").

That's just off the top of my head. How do other people feel about my list, and what would be on their own?

[Faust]

Nice thread, Darkwolff. Now you have me putting my brain at work.

My perfect Nightmare/Atmosfear game would include; a definite on the DVD format. DVD has done wonders for the game by not having to rewind a bulky VHS tape with the addition of randomizing game sequences. Characters I'd keep the same, but make key powers unique for the given character. I'd keep the Soul Rangers and have them as characters, much like Harbingers. The cat-and-mouse play was entertaining at times for me. The game length will be 60-minutes, but there will be an option to customize game time from 30-45 minutes and the difficulty from moderate to hard.

As far as the host goes I'll keep The Gatekeeper due to nostalgia purposes, but The Gatekeeper would have the Harbingers look as opposed to the new DVD Gatekeeper's. The game visuals will be eerie, dark, and foreboding and the music score will still stay the same.


That's all that I can muster up at the moment. However, if we get enough replies to this we should come up with an idea for a new game and send it to Clements and/or Tanner.


P.S. LOL @ the "Oooootrageous" comment.

[koky]

My perfect Atmosfear would be as good looking as Harbingers is. About the characters, I would add the Gatekkeper as one more controlable character, and also I would add Gemma, the character based on the spanish mitology who was to be included in the game but she was "banished" from the game before Atmosfear was out in stores.

As far as the host goes I would like to see Hellin and Gevaudan. I am a little tired and sick of the Gatekeeper He does not frighten me at all.

Of course I agree with DVD format, 60 min lenght, and all these things both of you have in common.

[soultaker]

I like the dvd game but as for the one i like most, i'd have to go with nightmare. Sadly the vhs tapes of mine are now useless but i'm hoping to find them to burn, which i found but for some reason the download seems to be excesively slow. I don't know but the videos for the vhs ones seem a bit spookier to me, which is my favorite reason for likeing them.

[GACProductions]

We should make the ultimate game.. All 12 playable charecters. Rangers & harbingers... Battling hosts.. Chaos. Modified gameplay.. Different charecter powers.

[GACProductions]

As far as the host goes I would like to see Hellin and Gevaudan. I am a little tired and sick of the Gatekeeper He does not frighten me at all.

Of course I agree with DVD format, 60 min lenght, and all these things both of you have in common.

Plus the new gatekeeper is not as good Nasul was way better.. This guy is cartoony.. I'm sure once the original gatekeeper started getting parts in real movies he was a little to high on payscale. But I don't mind the new guy.. Just wish they would get the last two charecters out of the way. Fuck.. Why doesnt cowboys just give capt gmc $100 for his videos and call it a day. Well besides them being French. But seriously.. Push forward.. Get it done. No need to go back to the gatekeeper every time.. Especially when you don't have the original.

[DarkWolff]

We should make the ultimate game.. All 12 playable charecters. Rangers & harbingers... Battling hosts.. Chaos. Modified gameplay.. Different charecter powers.

I've often mused on playing the Harbingers with all 12 characters by giving players a choice when they got to a headstone. Never actually played it, but I've been fixing for some Harbingers recently so now might be the time...

[amars464]

I would use the simplicity of Nightmare personally. I feel like there is more to build off of that way. I would add aspects of The Harbingers though, like having the different colored keys instead of them being color coded for each character, that way more interesting things could be done with key powers.

The Chosen One would play more like a Soul Ranger, giving it more of an active role in the game (instead of just being the Gatekeeper's Whipping Boy). The Chosen One cannot claim keys naturally, but instead must do some kind of duel system to obtain them from other players. There would also be more Fate, Time, and Chance cards dealing with The Chosen One. An idea like this could also be pretty easily adapjted to different hosts as well (The Dirtbag for Baron for example, or if someone did a fan project then, something like, a player ends up bearing the mark of the wolf or something.)

The format would obviously be DVD. I've never played the DVD game, but one big worry of mine is that because it uses randomized scenes, it loses the increased risk/reward system of the VHS games. What I mean is that as you ran out of time in the VHS games, The Gatekeeper would give out better rewards, and even worse punishments. It would definitely be possible to still do random scenes and do the increased risk/rewards, you would just need to tell the DVD to pull scenes from different collections after different times. Also, obviously I would take the OG, the Original Gatekeeper. I would also accept a host we have not seen yet.

Really between all of the Gatekeeper clips from Nightmare, Atmosfear, The Booster Tapes, and The Third Dimension, this all would be totally possible. It would just take a crap ton of work.

[DarkWolff]

Actually the DVD games have different collections that are randomly chosen at specific intervals (there was a nice post on the old-old forums from Marr0w that explained it well).

You could probably pick and choose different aspects from each game to make something that's a true ultimate Atmosfear, however if you go overboard you can easily make it a mish-mash of mechanics. I'm a fan of the duel-system in Soul Rangers as well as the extra playing piece, but just dropping that in the DVD game wouldn't do too well

[marr0w]

If I still recall correctly the DVD was broken up into several sections. The intro, beginning, about three or four middle sections, the finale, and the endings. Each one of these sections was about thirty minutes long and contained six possible chapters (smaller videos) as one title. As you watched the disk it would randomly generate a number for each title and then play the corresponding chapter as it moved from one title to the next. I believe in between the sections would load the character-specific choices if that character was in play (the sections where it called out specific names).

It's been a number of years since I've taken a look at it, thus my non-committed comments. If you'd like to see yourself try to extract (or play from a file browser) a single solitary title and you'll see each of the possibilities for that title play one after another. I still have all of the videos extracted on a pair of DVDs in a case somewhere and I could take a look at it again if anyone is really interested in it enough to request it.

At the time my friends and I had toyed with the idea of overwriting the titles with our own videos, effectively modding the DVD into showing random clips of our own creation. We used my old Chuck concept as the host, but when we looked at the test footage we found it boring and uninteresting. Not looking to ignore the amount of equipment and props we'd gathered, we started filming a talk show-style horror parody... and that was what led to creating Chuck's Zombie Petting Zoo.

Funny how things tend to work out. I still want to create a Chuck-hosted Nightmare video. It'll probably never happen though.