   Wrestling monsters.
  I think that more games should have hand to hand combat with monsters, where the monsters use their legs to pin the player to the floor and then deliver a nasty bite / disembowlment.I say this after having tried to take things out of my little puppies mouth (or hold it shut if he is biting me), it just pushes my hands away with its paws! And it is surprisingly good at grabbing onto my arm and biting my hand.  Transfer this to a big animal and it would be scary stuff. 
  Maulings are a great element of fighting with beasts, but it''s tough to implement in a game.  I''m no wrestler, but I''ve done some fighting, and I know how terribly frustrating it can be when you''re in a position of disadvantage, and you know if you could just get a few good hits on the guy you''d clean his clock, but you can''t use that arm.How could you make a game that properly uses the nuances of hand-to-hand grappling without being absolutely infuriating?That''s why punches and kicks and slashes and the occasional throw are so much more common in games and movies alike:  It''s easier to see who''s winning, and it''s easy to see the consequences of getting tired.  If you manage to hold a guy down and whale on his ribs for a while, it''s tough to see if you''re really hurting him, or if he''ll just bounce back.  If you''re under a bear, and he''s chewing your head, you aren''t going to be able to get your fine broadsword of eviscerating into action, and so you can either hope your bear-proof hat really is, or you can try to get away, or you can hope someone rescues you.  That''s a frustrating battle. ;  Grappling could work as a specific situation.  In a group cRPG.  One character gets grappled by a monster and the rest of the group has to kill the creature without killing victim.It could even work in a FPS.  One small creature (or a swarm) attempts to grapple you while a much bigger, slower monster attempts to pound you.  Grapples also don''t need to last very long.  In the self defense portion of the martial arts class I take, you usually hold just long enough to throw the guy to the ground.  One way to maybe catch the spirit of grappling would be to use the mouse.  Something like you have a doberman pincher latch on to your arm you swing the mouse to the left the do a quick tight circle to the right to simulate general overall motion you used to get out of a grapple.  Or you make a J shaped movment followed by a quick right horizontal movement to indicate a sweap/takedown.  I think Black and White did something like this with their spell system but I never played the game so I have no idea how well it worked.;  Grabbing and swallowing and pinning have been done before, litke when a monster grabs a character in Final Fantasy.  It basically just incapacitates them until they can break free, but it isn''t really a grapple.  In a grapple, either party might gain some kind of advantage through prowess and strength.I studied ground fighting in the Police Academy, and the Benchmade system starts out standing up, but every fight ends up on the ground.  You try to position yourself such that by the time the perp hits the turf you can slap cuffs on him, but often as not you have to go to the ground to keep from getting stabbed or choked, and then take your chances down there.Basically, you''re always trying to beat the other guy, and you don''t spend any time "setting up" a move.  They''re all designed to win right now.  So you get in a fight, and you try to get a hold of the guy so that he goes down and you gain the upper hand, but if that doesn''t work then you both go down, and then you try to get up quickly enough to gain the upper hand, and if that doesn''t work then you try to beat him on the ground, and so on until the police officer wins.  Losing wasn''t covered in the training, because anyone can do that.So it''s a rapid engage-disengage-reengage kind of thing.  I''m no wrestler, but a few of the other cadets were, and they told me that in wrestling the same principles apply, but the "engagements" last longer, because more skilled wrestlers can do more without having to disengage, and they generally aren''t worried about the other guy having a knife.It would be very difficult to have something like this implemented into a video game.  I''d think you''d really have to automate a large slice of the action, because it would be too fast and hectic for a player to handle, unless it was a turn-based system, and even then it would quickly devolve into a rock-paper-scissors kind of thing, which is inelegant at best.  I''d rather see a "grapple" command, which would close with the enemy, making things like swords and bows far less effective, and then have the various stats of the characters involved determine the outcome.  Maybe the guy that gets the advantage will have the option to "disengage", "re-engage", or "attack", where "attack" tries to hurt the other guy, while "re-engage just holds them down until and keeps them out of the fight until another party member gets a chance to kick their butt with magic or an axe.  That would be handy for heavily armored opponents.  You could even do things like drown them in puddles or choke them out.This is a really neat idea.  It''s been addressed before, but it''s always fun to discuss. 