Much more tame, but when the switch was released one of the first games was 1-2 switch, which was basically a tech demo.
One of the coolest games is 'ball count'. All you do is tilt the controller. The force feedback is so accurate it feels like metal balls are moving inside of it, and you win if you guess how many balls are in the controller.
Never seen anything like it, and it changed how I think about the relationship of sound and what causes a specific sound. I'm trying to remember a TV show that joked about this, about some engineers making a device and a superior asking for the machine to make a different sound. The joke was that the sound any machine makes directly correlates to it's function, but this never made 100% sense to me until I played this switch game.
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Another game that comes to mind (although it might also be a stretch) is F-Zero GX, a Gamecube race game I got into well after the Wii was already released. To unlock every track you had had to take the GC memory card, find a F-Zero AX arcade machine, insert it there and win every race.
This was in 2008, decades after the arcade heyday. I was super lucky I lived in a big city that had an arcade (now closed) that also happened to have this machine. According to my research there were only a few in North America. So I found myself freezing in Toronto winter in my 20's throwing quarters in an arcade machine several nights. This added a lot to the F-Zero experience. (later on I found out I could have unlocked everything at home, but I'm glad I never found out until later). The era of Arcade gaming always spoke to my imagination so I was grateful to have this (belated) experience.
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I can go on. I think all my examples are by Nintendo. Pokewalker comes to mind and also Streetpass. All these ideas really speak to me. The common thread is probably that they all create some connection to the real world.
> To unlock every track you had had to take the GC memory card, find a F-Zero AX arcade machine, insert it there
I don't know in America but least in the EU version, winning the first 4 cups in Master difficulty was enough to unlock the AX cup; no need to go to an arcade.
One of the coolest games is 'ball count'. All you do is tilt the controller. The force feedback is so accurate it feels like metal balls are moving inside of it, and you win if you guess how many balls are in the controller.
Never seen anything like it, and it changed how I think about the relationship of sound and what causes a specific sound. I'm trying to remember a TV show that joked about this, about some engineers making a device and a superior asking for the machine to make a different sound. The joke was that the sound any machine makes directly correlates to it's function, but this never made 100% sense to me until I played this switch game.
---
Another game that comes to mind (although it might also be a stretch) is F-Zero GX, a Gamecube race game I got into well after the Wii was already released. To unlock every track you had had to take the GC memory card, find a F-Zero AX arcade machine, insert it there and win every race.
This was in 2008, decades after the arcade heyday. I was super lucky I lived in a big city that had an arcade (now closed) that also happened to have this machine. According to my research there were only a few in North America. So I found myself freezing in Toronto winter in my 20's throwing quarters in an arcade machine several nights. This added a lot to the F-Zero experience. (later on I found out I could have unlocked everything at home, but I'm glad I never found out until later). The era of Arcade gaming always spoke to my imagination so I was grateful to have this (belated) experience.
---
I can go on. I think all my examples are by Nintendo. Pokewalker comes to mind and also Streetpass. All these ideas really speak to me. The common thread is probably that they all create some connection to the real world.