Great, so the game's forum can become smothered with Selfies.

One of my personal favorites, Stars!, uses an unusual and possibly unique race creation mechanic: rather than standard pregenerated (and prebalanced) options, you choose a primary racial trait, along with several lesser advantages and disadvantages, any of which are optional. These include tech perks and drawbacks (as you might expect), but also tolerance to temperature, radiation and gravity (on three independent scales, each ranging from picky to outright immune), population growth, tech research speed (in six separate fields, no less) and resource gathering efficiency.

The restricting factor is whether all of the pros and cons together add up to a net zero advantage, as defined by the game itself; if they don't, you won't be able to use that build until you tweak it further. So you have effectively an infinite number of options, but only within a broad and nebulous boundary. It's the only such game I've ever seen with this level of freedom; compare Master of Orion or Starcraft, or pretty much anything else.

Daggerfall and Battlespire actually do something similar with the class creation system. You choose your starting stats, primary/major/minor skills, and advantages/disadvantages to create a class. Daggerfall even lets you set your starting reputation with certain major factions.

Of course, the drawback of this sort of system is that these games aren't exactly what I would call balanced. For example, at least in Battlespire, Critical Weaknesses don't hurt as much as you would expect, and you get a lot of points for choosing them.

Also, I like the Spellmaker in the Elder Scrolls series, and would like to see more games try something similar.

What in the world?
I've never seen anything like that before.
That is amazing.

Yeah, I was pretty blown away by it too, very Max Fleischer and Warner Bros. Now, if someone could do a Warner Bros sanctioned Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote game, that would be the bomb! <grin>

Some awesome unique game features that spring to mind for me are both from Postal 2:

- ability to use a cat as a gun silencer, by shoving your gun up the cat's arse
- ability to urinate on people randomly

I haven't encountered any other games with that unique set of features to date.

Fixed it.
...that's probably a good thing. O_o

No way! :) Actually, I completely forgot about it but there is a mod for Skyrim that lets you pee and/or shit on everybody. No, I'm not joking. :)

I have not actually installed or tried that mind you, but I watched a video of it on Youtube. :)

https://youtu.be/ED2CNCMZB0o?t=52

Close enough ?

(It's a Ralph Wolf vs Sam Sheepdog sim, but it's still Chuck Jones. The difference is mostly in the nose colour.)

...I think I'll pass on clicking that. I did feel like eating dinner today.

Skill to predict enemy moves in Knights of Legends.

Being able to battle 4x99 enemies in the Bard's Tale games.

Monsters running away from superior parties in Might&Magic 2 and a few other games.

Splitting of party and time management in Magic Candle. You can actually do something useful when on a ship voyage.

Using a unique historical setting, but with all the superstitions of that era being real, in Darklands.

Provoking infighting of enemies in Doom.

The synergy of skills and items in The Aethra Chronicle

Destructive terrain in X-COM. Not unique, but still all too rare.

The non-PC protagonist of Duke Nukem 3D. So bloody refreshing when only playing it for the first time in quite recently.

"Glass cannons" (both player character and enemies) that can be killed in one shot in Outlaws. I'm so tired of HP sponges.

Active "point man" (scouting) and the ability to mod monsters' scripts in the Infinity Engine games.






I don't like the sound of that.

Actually, that's only possible in the first game. The second game has much smaller encounters; you rarely see more than 9 enemies in a group, and the final battle (with 91 enemies total) is a huge outlier. In Bard's Tale 3, enemy groups are limited to 31 each; if there are already 31 enemies in a group, any attempts to call for help will fail.
How does having the protagonist not be a PC (Player Character) even work in a game?

Edit: Here's another: Undertale's main character having a non-binary gender. This is nice because it allows both male and female players to relate to them (the game actually uses they/them pronouns to refer to this character on the rare occurence that it happens), as players can choose to imagine the character as either gender, and it's also nice to players who happen to have a non-binary gender themselves.

Related, in Final Fantasy (1), the sprites for the different classes are all gender ambiguous.

Edit 2: Also, Ultima 3 has a third gender option (press 'O' when asked for a character's sex).

s/Player Character/Politically Correct/

Hrm, how can you not like the sound of it? Since it's a silencer, there is no sound.

Well, ok... the cat makes a little bit of noise, I guess I have to grant you that. It's minimal though.

The term "Politically Correct" is meaningless; hence, the only PC term that would work in that context is Player Character. (There's also Personal Computer, but I can't think of any game that has a computer as the protagonist. (There are some with robots, but that's not the same thing.))

Don't feed the troll.