The Genre-Swap Game (or something like that)

I’m noticing a trend in games which involves taking a franchise and “rebooting” it in a different genre.  Usually this means taking a beloved game or series and making an FPS out of it, but I’ll save my angst for another post.  What interests me are the possibilities for this kind of genre-swapping.

Like many of my ideas, this one was born as I was playing around on my computer, specifically in Visual C#.  I was thinking about games like XCOM and Syndicate, and decided to write a simple program to facilitate my thoughts.  I loaded some genres in and basically created the equivalent of a hat filled with genres to pick out of (fancy, right?).  Then, I thought of a game…

My first thought was obvious.  I guess I wanted to strike back at the thought of strategy games becoming FPS, so I chose Call of Duty.  The genre I got was Puzzle.  Call of Duty: Modern Tetris?  Puzzle Fighter: Modern Warfare?  There were a lot of other funny results as well, including a popular action franchise becoming a Japanese dating-sim.

I wonder if Ninja Gaiden: The Dating Game would still be crazy-difficult...

I remember putting “Cooking Sim” in there just for laughs.  It never came up.

Call of Cooking: Modern Mama.  I’d totally buy that.

Try it yourself, you don’t need anything fancy.  Mix up the genres in your favorite games.

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