Editor's Note: Andrew Hiscock looks at a couple of games that reflect a grander, more ambitious idea about the evolution of gaming. -Shoe

I've always had a dream game. It would begin as a game of Pong and after short intervals of time, it would morph into a slightly more recent game and then another and another, until ultimately you are playing a Halo or Call of Duty with all the bells and whistles. Picture a more comprehensive and less license friendly version of Spore, and you are on the right track.

I don't anticipate ever being in a position to make this experiment happen. Fortunately, I've discovered two games that touch upon the idea of expressing game evolution.

Bit.Trip Core, available through Nintendo's WiiWare Store, is relatively simple. It is a rhythm game that relies on a single mechanic: pushing the D-pad in the cardinal direction and pressing a button to shoot a pixel as it flies by. Each hit is a note which syncs up with the chip tune-esque soundtrack. It is a post-modern mélange of style, drawing on various lineages of videogames for inspiration.

The true genius of the Bit.Trip series (this being the second of six), is the combo system. As you string successful hits together, you are rewarded by a greater complexity in the background graphics and music.

Conversely, once you start fouling up, you lose this complexity, until you are relegated to a simple and flat black and white screen, with no music, no on-screen display, no background aesthetic -- on the whole, a very Pong-like experience. This combo system invokes the evolution of videogames. While it is an aesthetic expression used in broad swaths, it is a clever and rewarding experience.

Upgrade Complete! is less concerned with style and is looking for laughs. The game is a light-hearted Flash-based shoot 'em up, now available at Armor Games and Kongregate, where everything must be upgraded. While this includes the various guns you can add to your ship, you'll notice that you'll have to upgrade the graphics, the music, the menu buttons, the logo...as I said before, everything.

While the game's design is mostly for humor, it does provide insight into the evolution of games and the development process. Starting with Atari-caliber graphics, it moves on to vectors, 16 bit, and ultimately the clean and straight lines of today's Flash games.

The aspects unrelated to gameplay, such as the legal text, the menu's background image, etc. are just as fun to upgrade. And instead of completing levels, you...yes, you upgrade them. Beginning with nothing (you even have to upgrade from a blank screen to the upgrade shop), you eventually have a full-featured game, complete with loading bars and achievements.

This ultimately becomes the game itself, with the shooting aspect becoming a means to an end. Once you have upgraded everything, you finish the game. While I won't spoil it, you can upgrade that, too.

Both of these games play with the evolution of videogames, but their ideas are limited to aesthetic, and the core mechanics are simple and consistent throughout. In any of the hierarchy of modes in Bit.Trip Core, you are attempting to string combos together, where the movement of the pixels is set by level, not by the mode you have achieved.

Likewise for Upgrade Completed!, the enemies never attack, they just become more plentiful and harder to kill. And with a three-button control scheme featuring the A and D keys, it only hints that someone somewhere used the W and S keys in between. Just not in this game.

Of course this is a perfectly sensible thing. Expressing the evolution of videogames at higher design levels is an incredibly hard thing to do. Look at Spore, a game that also aspired to similar themes. The gameplay followed a trajectory similar to that of videogame history as your creatures themselves evolved, but the entire package left critics lukewarm: While there was plenty of different types of gameplay, each type of gameplay did not realize its full potential.

When it comes to expressing the evolution of videogames, all three games mentioned here seem to point in the same direction. While it is easy to invoke the idea, it is much harder to execute through gameplay and design. This is because each great game in history relies on its own unique gameplay and design, carefully crafted and tested. If you can get it right just once, then you really have something special. To try to deliver all great games in one artistic statement is perhaps hubris.

Hey, at least a guy can dream, right?