Most of the MSX games made by Konami I played when kid had just direction cursors and one button, including a soccer game (Konami''s Soccer) and a tennis game (Konami''s Tennis). Even more, Konami''s Pong (a ping-pong game), could be played with just the fire button! (the paddle moved automaticaly, and you could press another button to use the paddle reversed).

A more recent sample would be "Pink Panther: Pinkadelic Pursuit" for the PlayStation: there are some levels where the Pink Panther is skating, and you just had to jump. I don''t remember if you can also crouch to go faster.

theNestruo

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Ok

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Original post by OrangyTang
Diodor: heh, sounds like Jungle Hunt. Classic game.

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Wise man grbrg


How about a racing game? Continuous acceleration is implied, pushing the button turns left, letting it go turns right.

I''m seeing lots of ideas, some good, some... not so good. While a lot of things are possible with a single button, let''s try to also make the control seem intuitive. Here''s an example:

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Original post by Diodor
How about a racing game? Continuous acceleration is implied, pushing the button turns left, letting it go turns right.

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I think the more intuitive variant is to rotate that game 90 degrees clockwise and turn the vehicle into a helicopter. Constant forward motion, pressing the button pulls the yoke back and raises the helicopter, releasing it causes the helicopter to descend.

Keep ''em coming!

I recently made a pong game that uses one button:

Hold space to move to the left, let go to move to the right.

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Original post by Oluseyi
I think the more intuitive variant is to rotate that game 90 degrees clockwise and turn the vehicle into a helicopter. Constant forward motion, pressing the button pulls the yoke back and raises the helicopter, releasing it causes the helicopter to descend.

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Heh, how could I forget - I wrote exactly that game for my graphical calculator (a Casio fx9750G) during many idle study periods. It was about the only game it was possible to write at any decent speed. The great thing being that you only need to draw a single pixel every frame, the rest stays as it was before.

Quite addictive. I had randomly generated 'stars' that you had to manuver around. The higher the level the more stars. It even had extra lives you could pick up and saving. Saving was possible every 5th level, you held down the button right at the start to guide the line into a 'save box' right at the bottom of the screen.

The final edge on the right also had a 'window' you had to go though. Every level it would get progressivly smaller.


Edit: also, anyone remember Micro Machines 2 on the MegaDrive? 'Party Play' had 8 people simultaneously by using a total of 4 pads. Two people shared a pad, with constant acceleration and buttons for left, right and brake.

[edited by - OrangyTang on March 8, 2004 3:41:19 PM]

Control a one-feet robot jumper moving on a side-scrolling screen. Whenever the robot touches the ground, it jumps. Depending on the time the player kept the button pressed during the jump, the robot jumps higher or lower (think the launching of a ball in a pinball or a pool game). Again, all sort of obstacles.

Half baked idea: trains on a network of tracks. The player controls the direction of one of the junctions (one incoming railway, more outcoming ones). Each button click changes the direction. The purpose is to create some patterns depending on the color of the cars - or something, I''m somewhat confused.

I notice nobody''s cited rhythm games yet. There are half a dozen variants that can be generated to a basic button-pump game based just on the premise of hitting the button on time, every time.

ld

Directions + Button (Kinda Cheating IMO)
Puzzle/RPG, where you move your avatar around in a Zelda:LttP-like game. There is no combat. Pressing ''the button'' changes to an item-selection mode where you can use the directions to select an item you have (in order to use it) or a blank square to go back to the game.

The basic idea is that you go around, talking to people, completing tasks, attaining items, and you can use the items to build things(like maybe use board then a rope to build a bridge in one place to get across), give to people to get new items/unlock areas/etc.

I kind of feel like this is cheating since the direction keys are essentially acting as extra buttons (to move the cursor on the inventory screen) and if you allow this, you might as well allow a diablo-like game where there is one button (left click, lets exclude spells) but lots of GUI buttons (inventory, stats, etc).

RPG - pressing the button rotates the selected action - deciding how the player avatar handles the current situation.