Nice idea for a thread! I love talking about game concepts and ideas!

In no particular order.....




Aww, that IS a cute picture! Reminds me of Tweenbots (previously discussed here). It's not really a game idea though, right? Real talk, a thread about discussing art style would also be interesting.





While I can't argue with those ideas, I also, well, can't discuss them really - you need to give a few more details than that, man!
There's one guy on screenshotsaturday doing a F-Zero/Wipeout-like game that procedurally generates it's tracks. Kind of makes content creation easier, or at least more interesting for us "programmer guys", I s'ppose.



Love Metroid, love non-linear exploration, love spaceships - idea is approved! Do you know the Captain Forever series? It does a similar thing with the creating and exploration.
In any event, I really like the idea. Metroid is great at conveying a certain "sense of place", of conveying an athmosphere, and sometimes also at telling stories without many words or any cutscenes. Perhaps we could learn from that - perhaps we can even do these procedurally, somehow? A well-placed dead-soldier-ragdoll can tell a story, I guess. Though I'm not sure how far beyond that we could go.




Aah, the horror genre.
A few weeks ago, I would have argued that you shouldn't limit yourself to old-school graphics like those we have in mind when saying 8-bit, but I think now that it should be possible to make that scary. Since I'm linking to other games all the time, why not here - do you know Imscared (the link goes to a Let's play of that - spoilers that way, if you're interested in playing it yourself, check out it's IndieDB page!).
That said, I'm not sure I can imagine the game you've described - since you're trying to bring back the old-school feeling, I guess you're targeting gamers with a history of those times, mostly? I dunno, right now I'm imagining a "scary" version of Pokemon or Zelda or something where I run away from a monster that cannot be defeated.





Cool idea! I like it. If it turns out that the asymmetrical gameplay you describe is too difficult (maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it seems that the Hackers-gameplay is more thought out, perhaps because it's more fun to imagine (and therefore the end result to play?)), it should be rather simple to turn it into a game where all players are hackers - either they both try to reach the same goal (and can slow each other down), or if you want to keep the defensive elements, the teams could try to intrude the other teams' systems. Allow several ways to win (several paths into it, perhaps?) to make sure it's not getting boring, and you have a winner!




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So here's an old idea of mine:



Back seven hundred years ago when I made those "Experimental games" series games, one of the concepts I wanted to do was a puzzle game in which you received distress calls or strange messages that you had to decode. There would be hints or messages left in there that somehow - different in every video - you'd have to decipher by replaying the video, slowing it down, playing it in reverse, only investigating the audio - the list goes on. It still sounds like a neat idea to me, but I doubt there's many out there who'd love to play this. Also, I am aware that this isn't well thought or planned out - you can tell I didn't spend too much time on this one back in the day!


Finally:

If you have never done this, you should really take a look at Wikipedia's "Mystery"-category. It provides an instant super-interesting starting point for videogames. Each of these entries could, probably, make for an interesting scenario to exploit in a game.
Perhaps combining this with "Investigation" gameplay that some games have (to a small extent the Ace Attorney series, a better example being LA Noire), you could create a very athmospheric, very interesting "X-Files"-kind of deal.


Thoughts on these "ideas" (more like, rough outlines of ideas) are much appreciated!