What mini-games would you enjoy in CoX?

Occasionally, as a gamer, you just want to kill some time or pursue an activity outside of your normal pursuit of justice and/or personal power.

What mini-games would you find interesting if they were offered as part of the CoX game environment?

By "mini-games", I don't necessarily mean actual self-contained games (though I don't mean to exclude such an idea either). From a certain viewpoint, crafting, playing the market, and arena PvP are all mini-games. The Architect is a pretty major "mini-game" all its own. They're all activities that proceed naturally from the game environment but that offer a change-up from the primary activity of preventing or enacting crime while exploring the story of the game.

I've been playing a lot of Mafia Wars on Facebook and it got me thinking that it would be interesting to have some kind of semi-abstract crime family management game in CoX. Something that could be managed in chunks of ten to fifteen minutes, and that garnered some kind of status as a reward. Story-wise, you could be functioning as a member of "The Family" under Sebastian Frost or as independently running your own "family" with advantages and disadvantages for either position. The flip side would be hero participation in an Organized Crime Task Force or some such.

The most important thing being that it would be a kind of low-maintenance (from a player perspective) side game that offers an alternative to the normal game, but that still feels connected to the normal game via game lore and mechanics.

What other sorts of activities would lend themselves to embodiment as a mini-game attached to the main game?

Monkey Fight Club gambling.

Super Bowling.

A side scrolling Beat-Em-Up retro arcade game featuring signature characters, with graphics that would made the Atari 2600 proud.

Something like this (stolen from Mr. Playskool's awesome thread):

To be able to have a few people gather around the card tables in Pocket D, or the Golden Giza and play poker together.

poker would be neat. but its gambling and that would raise the Teen rating to M i believe.

I wouldn't mind seeing some obstacle courses. Similar to the ski runs at the winter event. You could even throw in power suppression on some of them.

Bejeweled: CHV Edition. Signature hero and villain faces, on coins perhaps, the 10 main ones and their lackeys. The twist is that you have to put two of the same villain and a hero together, or two heroes and a villain. Perhaps you'll have to sandwich them, i.e villain hero villain. Lining up the 5 main heroes or villains together, either representatives of the origins or reps of the ATs, is worth extra points, and removes ALL of the other side's coins at once, then more new random coins slide down.

Actually this sounds less and less like Bejeweled.

Looking to games like Free Realms, Puzzle Pirates, and even EQ2 (the crafting mini-game, where crafting was akin to combat in many ways) as examples, I'd be interested in seeing a few activities added where the point is to play the mini-game in order to achieve a goal or reward in the main game.

Investigation, where the activity has to do with finding, organizing, and interpreting clues, would be a prime sort of activity to build something like that around.

Some kind of resource management game, involving your supergroup base or mob family.

Positron's original design for "crafting" an Arch-enemy (though I suspect that Cryptic probably owns that design now).

Activities involving rebuilding portions of Baumton and Eastgate, especially if a leaderboard tracked the results and the zones actually changed as a result of player activity.

Any excuse at all for scientific or magical "experimentation".

I'd like to see obstacle courses that specifically REQUIRED you to use your travel powers.

For instance, fly through hoops with flight, jump through them with SJ, run through a maze with Super speed and teleport through small holes with TP.

There'd be several courses per travel power, these would give out badges based on times and the top ten scores would be recorded.

QUICK TIME EVENTS!

"Press H to not die a horrible, instant death!"

One of the things many people have asked for in the past are random, on-the-street events akin to the fires in steel canyon. Things like a gang war starting up and you get to stop them or you rescue a hostage and she gives you a bank-style side mish across the street. Maybe even hunt the rikti/nemesis spy in a highlighted area of town.

I'd love to see a soccer field added where you can go and play soccer and kick a ball around.

I'd also like to see a save the baby/cat/help old lady cross the street events in zones lol.

Um, big red ball?

I'd definately LOVE various forms of Investigation and Detective WOrk and such to be added to the game. Back when the SSOOCS was first mentioned I loved hearing the little tidbits of concepts for doing other tasks using those skills. Magical or Scientific Research, Medical skills, Social skills. Things that could have fully out of combat effects as well as be integrated into regular gameplay as QOL improvements like the Veteran Reveal power is now or how Pets now appear on your Map or the upcoming Clue and possibly final mission objective locating.

Stuff that wouldn't be REQUIRED and you could play exactly as you do now if you want but if you wanted to pursue these non combat aspects would add fun sideline goals and games.

Of course the often mentioned reconstructing of zones as well as other classic heroic non combat things like saving folks from disasters or accidents would be great. I really like the idea mentioned in this thread as well of a resource management, optional gameplay idea.

This would really add to the red side desire to be more proactive in your villainy. With the heroic side having it's own take on it as well.

Lots of great ideas here. I hope the Dev's really look to expanding the game in this way as well as regular contant in the future. Now that the big ticket large new tech features are being finished I think it would be a valuable way for CoH to grow without alienating the current players with huge new graphical upgrades and such.

Gems