This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
What's with the snap about the "Latest Hand-held Sonic Games"? Aside from Sonic Battle, they've all been pretty standard Sonic games, like the Sonic Advance and Sonic Rush serieses.
— Not only that, but post Sonic Adventure 2 — with the possible exceptions of Shadow and the PS 3/X360 Sonic — any individual game is highly internally consistent. I'm going to read, in particular, "don't get me started on Secret Rings" as "I never played Secret Rings in the first place." (That's not even getting into claims that Shadow is a GTA clone, which implies they haven't played either one.) I've tried to do a more accurate classification here, but I need confirmation on Sonic 360 having vaguely similar gameplay to the early Adventure ones.
- I vaguely recall some game on the PS2 where Genre Roulette was the entire gimmick: it was mainly a RPG, but it boasted about it had First-Person Shooter levels, racing levels, action-adventure levels... every stop on the Genre Roulette wheel, basically. The developers thought it was going to be so successful that they planned to make it a trilogy. The problem was that the main story was horribly generic fantasy-fare and because they split the game over so many genres (and so many game engines), no single part in the game really excelled; it was all quite average. I can't remember if it tanked right there or if they bothered to make a second part. Can anyone give me the name of this game?
- Found it. It was Haven: Call of the King. And they never made part two.
- So... wait. What exactly is this trope? I could've sworn it used to be the very "Genre Roulette in one game" that about half the examples now are, rather than a series constantly doing a Genre Shift in an attempt to find something that works. Do we have a separate trope for "Games that constantly switch genres"? Between half the examples here and a quarter of the examples on Unexpected Genre Change, we could do with one.
SynjoDeonecros: I've edited the intro of the page to clarify the trope; as you said, Genre Roulette is a Genre Shift every game in an attempt to find something that works.
- The explanation for this trope doesn't account for games that do this well... some examples on the page are merely games that include multiple types of gameplay, something that often adds variety to what would otherwise be boring and repetitive gaming. Something should be said about this.
