What are your favorite games that nobody's heard of?

[Man_Over_Game]

I'm interested in great games that many people haven't heard about. Platform and age is no concern to me, but I mostly have PC games listed here. I'm really looking forward to what you guys have experienced.

---------------------------------


Puzzle Quest: Bejeweled meets Magic: The Gathering. 1v1 plot-based competitive Match-3 game. Eventually it was made into a free online game called Gems of War that is close to the predecessor, but grindier and worse plots. You gather mana by matching 3 gems, gaining mana of that gem color. Mana fuels spells to deal damage, heal you, or manipulate the board (turn all green into red, gaining 1 health for each gem changed). There are a lot of different strategies involved, and even has a PVP feature if you have friends on a LAN.

The Magic Circle: You are a game object, given sentience and the ability to reprogram things in a broken game. The game is omniscient, but unable to change anything, and his programmers are idiots and jerkbags, so he makes you to fix things. Remove the hostility function in a dog and convert it into a friendly. Remove the poison function from a mushroom and put it on your dog. Now you have a poisonous dog that will fight things for you. Take the mobility and friendliness of a dog, put it on a human corpse, and you now have a mobile friendly zombie. The game is full of flavor, and does well to make you think outside of the box. It

Iji: Free RPG Platformer, effectively System Shock in a platformer format. AMAZING game, especially when you consider it was made for free by one guy. The plot is great, playstyle options are plentiful, and has a few secret endings (including a way to be a pacifist).

Dungeons of Fayte: Free 1-4 player Zelda RPG. Imagine simplified DnD, played with 4 people on the same PC. Controls are very simple, allowing up to 2 players on a single keyboard and one playing on the mouse (so you can start playing with 3 people without need of a joystick). Has some cooperative events, some competitive mechanics, different classes that all focus on different things, and lots of humor.

CRAWL: 4 player game, equally competitive and cooperative. You play as one living person and 3 dead guys. The dead guys possess monsters to kill the living hero, the living hero tries to stay alive to earn money, exp, and other things. When the hero beats the boss (which the dead guys also possess), the game is over and the hero wins. HOWEVER, if a dead guys' monster ever kills the hero, the hero dies and the dead player now becomes the sole living player and starts trying to level up in the same way. Your living levels are retained per each individual player, so just because you died doesn't mean your progress is lost. The more a living player is winning, the more powerful the dead players' monsters get, so the game rewards those who lose and penalizes those who win, so it's always a challenge.

Super Robot Teisen (Also known as Super Robot War): Imagine you have a turn-based tactical RPG filled with every Gundam, every Zoid, every giant robot thing ever Made In Japan®. It has a LOT of tactical decision to make, when it comes down to individual powers of pilots, the fact that they're interchangeable with each of their mechs, which all have their own unique stats and preferences in combat. Some mechs have specialized weapons, but most can interchange them so you can provide enough options for your mechs in a number of scenarios. The games get harder the better you do, so it's naturally designed to always be a challenge. These games are intense, and while the plots can sometimes be difficult to get in to, and learning how each stat interacts can cause a steep early difficulty curve, it's a great series for people who like tactics games without much random chance. This game has the unique feeling that every decision and death was YOUR fault, with some way of preventing it, without much divine intervention to blame it on. There are a number of these on several Nintendo consoles.

Please post favorites of your own!

[Sian]

Original War, RTS with the gimmick of being strictly limited as to how many units you have, and if a unit die you’ll miss it for the rest of the game. (Plot being that America found a time machine in siberia, which is a one way ticket to 2.000.000bc ... with the only fuel being a cold fusion mineral only found in Siberia... prompting America yo send troops/ back in time to move the deposits, but stumbling over alternate timeline Russian that have gotten the same idea moving the cold fusion mineal, only found in Alaska, to Siberia ... and a 3rd faction consisting of a arabic group with European mercenaries)

Game was a miss because it came out at the tail-end of the RTS genres high times, just around 9/11 (making a sympathic arabic team a poor fit), and the advertising being complety nonexistent outside of perhaps Czechia and Poland. With the company quickly calling it a failure and selling off the rights (and support duties) off to the small East European community

[Kato]

Well, too bad, you have to take Iji off the list because I've heard of it and wanted to mention it :smalltongue:

[BeerMug Paladin]

I always liked Twisted for the 3D0. It was a silly game show where the winner got to leave the game world and become a real person. It was a pretty simple game, with trivia and little minigames and so forth, presented with FMV like the 3D0 did often. It's been a long time since I've tried it, so I don't know if it holds up, but I did enjoy it back at the time.

I have a hard time thinking of what "nobody's ever heard of" means, because while there are a number of obscure or underappreciated titles I enjoy, a lot of them at least have enough recognition for people to have heard of. And there's certainly a lot of games that people know about, even if they never talk about them. Adventure for Atari, for example.

Adventures of Lolo (1-3, though 3 is the best of them). Is probably my favorite.

I also remember really liking Snake, Rattle n' Roll, but I'm unsure whether or not people have heard of it.

[LibraryOgre]

Modem Wars. An old, modem-based, turn-based strategy game. Call up your friends and play a wargame with grunts, boomers, and a quarterback .

Alternate Reality, which was an ambitious First-Person, Open-World RPG that didn't quite live up to its ambitions. Only The City was completed, leaving The Wilderness and The Dungeon undone. It was EXTREMELY sandboxy, and you played, more or less, a hobo, since you couldn't really have a home, save inn rooms you rented by the night, most of your food also came from inns, and there were no plots or quests... just wandering around, trying to find things, occasionally fighting things (or charming them, or tricking them, or trading with them).

[DemonicAngel]

Metal Fatigue - giant robots, corporation warfare, aliens, all packed up in a cool RTS format with 3 distinct maps and scavenging of parts. it was amazing.

[factotum]

Well, too bad, you have to take Iji off the list because I've heard of it and wanted to mention it :smalltongue:

Ditto for Puzzle Quest, because I have that one as well! :smalltongue:

Favourite game that nobody's heard of (unless Triaxx pokes his nose into this thread): X3: Terran Conflict. Best single player Elite-style game in existence. The studio behind it (Egosoft) went off the rails a bit with X: Rebirth, but I have hopes they learned their lesson in the upcoming X4.

[Cespenar]

"Nobody" is a stretch, but here are some underrated gems from the 97-00 era that I might have had mentioned before in similar threads:

NetStorm: A pretty unique RTS in which you had to use tetris-like bridge pieces to get across airborn islands and outrange/outgun your opposition with the correct application of different turrets. That probably didn't mean much.

Sanity: Aiken's Artifact: A very underrated action/adventure game with a cool superpowers-themed story. I vaguely remember that the protagonist was voiced by Ice-T or something.

Gruntz: A puzzle game with good voice acting and humor. And lots of references.

Silver: Another action/adventure game with a pretty fun combat system for its time. I recall that the story itself was somewhat cliche, but the way it was told was not half bad.

[Beelzebub1111]

Super Baseball 2020 - SNES/Genisis/Arcade game about baseball set in the far future. Men Robots and Women all play together and they have jetpacks. the foul and home run zones were shrunk down so home-runs were only over the center field fence and fouls were only behind first and third base. The team you faced off against int he world series were named after historical Axis people.

Cyborg Justice - Final fight style Beat-em-up where you could rip off your opponents arms and replace them with your own.

Temple of Elemental Evil - a near perfect reproduction of the original temple of elemental evil with 3.5 rules. The only D&D game set in the Greyhawk universe. A super awesome and difficult tactical combat game. I still boot it up all the time (remember to use the Circle of Eight mod)

[Yora]

Bound by Flame: I've only ever seen it mentioned anywhere once, which was a live first look lets play. It really had zero marketing. It is very clearly a b-list title and it doesn't actually do anything particularly impressively. But I like the combination of looks and feel, and the simple story.

Another one is Redout, which is the best Wipeout game I've ever played. Even shortly after release it had zero people playing online.

Primal is one of the best 3D-Adventure games I ever played. I belief it got a PS3 or PS4 port on PSN. I think it has a fantastically designed world and exploring and solving the puzzles was really fun. Only the combat felt tacked on, but most of the time it's pretty easy.
I like it more than The Longest Journey.

[Cespenar]

I like it more than The Longest Journey.

Now, let's not get hasty over here. :smalltongue:

[Harrisonvinny]

Tiny Toons: Buster Busts Loose for the SNES (though I am finding it is not as unknown as I once thought...)

[Tvtyrant]

Tiny Toons: Buster Busts Loose for the SNES (though I am finding it is not as unknown as I once thought...)

OMG I lost to the cafeteria level so many times as a kid...

On that note the SNES Lion King platformer, with its completely awful opening level with the just can't wait to be king song.

Most obscure: SNES Pacman point and click adenture game.

[Rodin]

A quick look through my Steam list to see obscure ones...

Ok, I'm not sure how obscure this list is, but they're definitely pretty far down the "indie" hole so hopefully someone will discover a game they like:

Salt and Sanctuary - A game that largely manages to out-Dark Souls the Souls games themselves, despite being a 2D Metroidvania. All the more impressive for being made by one husband and wife team. I've always felt this game doesn't get the credit it deserves.

Defense Grid: The Awakening - Easily has the best plot of any Tower Defense game I've played, and a serious plot to boot. This is mainly down to the voice of your AI advisor, who really sells it. It helps that the game has simple but very finely tuned levels - you really need to know what you're doing, especially on harder difficulties and in challenge mode.

Desktop Dungeons - Deceptively difficult turn-based dungeon...crawler? Puzzle game? It kind of defies description, but the strategy goes deep.

Dungeons of Dredmor - Rogue-like dungeon crawler with the comedy taken up to max. Lots of goofy fun with many classes, and fantastic mod suport.

Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara - A remake/re-release of the arcade classics, they were well known in their time but perhaps not so much now. I consider them the best beat-em-up games of all time.

Gunpoint - Another game with a development team you can count on one hand, it's a stealth puzzler in the same vein as Mark of the Ninja - except it's cyberpunky with hilarious dialogue. Short but well worth the time of anyone who likes stealth games.

Hand of Fate - A roguelike where what you encounter comes from a deck you have built. The combat is unfortunately only passable, but the concept is compelling and the non-combat encounters are a lot of fun.

King's Bounty series - Possibly less obscure than the others, but worth putting on my list I think. Heroes of Might & Magic style combat where you roam an overworld rather than build a kingdom - a lot of fun finding the different synergies from the units.

Machinarium - Short little adventure game following a little broken down robot with a steampunk aesthetic.

Oxenfree - Adventure game about some kids stuck on an island when weird things start happening. Stellar story and playing the game a second time reveals more of the story.

Quantum Conundrum - Physics based first person puzzle-game, not dissimilar from Portal. Main highlight is the writing and the voice acting of John De Lancie as the Professor.

[Gnoman]

NetStorm: A pretty unique RTS in which you had to use tetris-like bridge pieces to get across airborn islands and outrange/outgun your opposition with the correct application of different turrets. That probably didn't mean much.

Netstorm can pretty easily be described as a multiplayer tower defense game. It was ludicrously ahead of its time - not only was it one of the first games designed for Internet multiplayer (hence Netstorm), but the advancement system (in which you start out with most of the units locked, and have to unlock them by sacrificing enemy priests) is a pretty clear predecessor to that used in modern games such as World Of Tanks.


Metal Fatigue - giant robots, corporation warfare, aliens, all packed up in a cool RTS format with 3 distinct maps and scavenging of parts. it was amazing.

This one fell into obscurity because it is extremely difficult to get it to run on any OS newer than Windows Me. Fortunately, it was recently released on GoG, and you can even get the multiplayer working.


Ditto for Puzzle Quest, because I have that one as well! :smalltongue:

Favourite game that nobody's heard of (unless Triaxx pokes his nose into this thread): X3: Terran Conflict. Best single player Elite-style game in existence. The studio behind it (Egosoft) went off the rails a bit with X: Rebirth, but I have hopes they learned their lesson in the upcoming X4.

I sort of feel like it went off the rails a bit with the X3 games. There were too many different ones (a real problem if you subscribe to the "Never buy an Egosoft game until it's been out for two years, they need that time to fix the bugs" philosophy, and I found the interface changes from X2 really hard to get used to.

That reminds me that I need to start playing these again.

[Temotei]

There was this game where you toured an airport and it had all sorts of funny sound effects when you clicked on stuff.

It had this minigame where luggage was on conveyor belts and you had to get the luggage to the proper sorting bins by switching directions of belts, hitting switches, etc. I loved that game. I don't remember what it was called, though.

[Eldan]

I can second Iji and Crawl. Crawl is on the Switch and worht every cent.

Miasmata is one that I don't think enough people have heard of. It's a two-person effort. A sort of... walking simulator stealth exploration botanist simulator game?

Anyway. You are dying of a mysterious disease. You are stranded on an island, where a group of scientists were working on the cure. A monster is stalking you through the jungle. You have to find the notes of the scientists and the right plants before you die.

Two things that made the game for me. First was the disease. You are not your usual action hero. You are weak and feverish. That means if you try to run down a hill, you can trip and fall. If you try to swim more than a few meters, you might drown. Climbing a hill means you are out of breath for several minutes. And it's all very elegantly done and feels organic.

The other is the mapmaking. The island is huge, with varied microclimates (you'd be surprised by how many varieties of "jungle" these people can come up with). You start with a blank piece of paper, a pencil and a compass. You can fill in the map by finding landmarks that you can draw a line of sight two and triangulating your position, which fills in the map around where you are right now and a direction to that landmark. When you get two different sight lines at different angles on the same landmark, that landmark is filled in too. It's surprisingly interesting and involved. It means that you'll frequently try to climb hills or walk out on a long headland at the coast, just to find out where you are after getting lost in the jungle. Again, feels very natural.

The monster is the weakpoint, really. It has some nice behaviour when stalking you, such as being distracted by thrown objects, but it's just so damn goofy looking.

[Cespenar]

Netstorm can pretty easily be described as a multiplayer tower defense game. It was ludicrously ahead of its time - not only was it one of the first games designed for Internet multiplayer (hence Netstorm), but the advancement system (in which you start out with most of the units locked, and have to unlock them by sacrificing enemy priests) is a pretty clear predecessor to that used in modern games such as World Of Tanks.


You're right, though its single player campaigns were perfectly playable as well. Actually, to be honest, I never played it multiplayer. But yeah, it was both pretty ahead of its time and also still fairly unique now as well, 21 years later.


A quick look through my Steam list to see obscure ones...

Ok, I'm not sure how obscure this list is, but they're definitely pretty far down the "indie" hole so hopefully someone will discover a game they like:

Not to sound too dismissive, but those are all very well received indie games. And rightly so, since most of them are pretty good.

[Eldan]

Oh, also, currently I'm playing and enjoying The Unavowed, an urban fantasy point and click adventure that came out recently. You were possessed by a demon for a year and have to find out, with the help of some supernatural investigators, what you did during that time. It's pretty well done.

[Hunter Noventa]

In the same vein as Super Robot Wars, already mentioned, I'll put up Front Mission 3, part of a semi-obscure and now dead series of turn-based mecha tactics games by Square. These were a bit different in that you could mix and match arms, legs and torsos to make terrifyingly effective frankenmechs. Or Wanzers, as they're called. The plots of the games are endlessly silly, but the gameplay is pretty enjoyable.

[Rodin]

Not to sound too dismissive, but those are all very well received indie games. And rightly so, since most of them are pretty good.

Fair, but given that I've heard of most of the games in this thread I wasn't sure how obscure we're talking. And you never know what somebody has heard of.

[Silfir]

Well, if we're supposed to go full hipster, I'll point out a series of 2D action-adventure games that was created from 1988-1992 and ruled my childhood: The Game of Robot. Basically a German programming nerd answer to The Legend of Zelda. There are many puzzles to solve and monsters to defeat/run away from and a dungeon ruled by an evil wizard, but the monsters are all robots, and many of the puzzles are technology-themed; for instance, to open up the entrance to the final boss area, you have to assemble wiring and logical Boole operators to make all the light bulbs turn on. (And then you defeat the final boss with your magic wand by writing down a spell with a pen in front of him while being disguised as a robot. Robot I was just weird.)

The peak of the series is Robot III. It doesn't feature a single robot, or electronic technology, since it takes place on a tropical island filled with strange ruins from a precursor civilization, indigenous inhabitants, dangerous wildlife that acts suspiciously similar to the robots from the first two games, and an active volcano. It's just an excellent reasonably non-linear mystery-solving adventure.

It's all German-only, which is a crying shame.

[Triaxx]

I felt I was being summoned?

I thing I'll take my thoughts on the X-series to it's own thread.

Sacred feels like one of those games that should be here, even though it's reasonably popular. It's the sort of thing that was released and that I think a lot of people would have gone oh, it's just a Diablo clone and passed it over. It does have some diablo-esque elements, I agree. But at the same time it's got it's own unique style to it.

I find Total Annihilation is in almost the exact same boat. It released ahead of StarCraft, but like Sacred was just a goomba beneath the Mario of Blizzard.

[Man_Over_Game]

One I recently remembered that's worth the mention is

Battleships Forever: Free RTS game. It once had a huge cult behind it, until the devs just decided to forget it existed and refused to pass on the torch to the several thousand acolytes at their disposal. It's an RTS that focuses around small tactical missions rather than large, resource oriented wars. You only have control of a few ships, but each one has their own specific purpose, with their own special abilities with a massive focus on positioning. Your battleships are fitted together using a series of pre-determined weapons, armor, and modules, which all can be individually targeted and destroyed. Your heavy beam battleship does really well against slow enemies, but it turns slowly and is easily taken down by a couple weak fighters that can just avoid your death beams, so it's in your best interest to defend its flanks. That boss you're taking down has some major shields on the front, but the modules for those shields are actually located in the back, with some visibly weak armor protecting them, so it may be in your best interested to surround it and shoot its ass. You can usually pick and choose what ships you get each mission, so you can design your own strategies. It also comes with a mission-creation system and a system to make your own ships. There are thousands of homebrews on the internet, but they may be harder to find now that the game has become extremely obscure. Cosmoteer is a more modern version of this game, with a lot of the core ideas originating from Battleships Forever.

[Man_Over_Game]

Oh, yeah. Fun fact about Puzzle Quest: It has an expansion that triples the size of the game while doubling the number of classes.

The catch? It's only officially on Xbox 360, due to the fact that the company disbanded shortly after it was made, and they never were able to finish the PC port. However, some smart guys were able to work some magic on the 360 version of the expansion and make a working PC version of it that you can put inside of your PC version of PQ. It's a bit hard to find. It's called Revenge of the Plague Lord, and it is brutal. I've beaten the main campaign of PQ 2-3 times, but I've never beaten any of the Plague Lords' main plots. It doesn't take anything away from the main game, and you won't really be able to tell where the main plot branches end and the expansion begins; it's all perfectly seamless.

Keep in mind, this is different than just Puzzle Quest 2, which is available on mobile and is significantly worse, especially early on.

[Giggling Ghast]

I'm a total bandwagon-jumper, so I can't think of many games I've played that no one's heard of. And the obscure games that I have played were generally obscure for good reason. :smalltongue:

The closest example I can give is The Last Court, a game put out by Sunless Sea (the developer of Fallen London) that's set in the Dragon Age universe. It was released just before DAI came out. Essentially, you play as the Marquis of this quaint burg known as Serrault and must constantly contend with courtly intrigue, bandits, rabble-rousers and the occasional monster, all in a purely text format.

I enjoyed it, though it has a reputation for being infuriating in the DA fandom, mostly because it can get very repetitive. You will be nearly assassinated roughly 5,000 times during an average TLC playthrough.


Oh, also, currently I'm playing and enjoying The Unavowed, an urban fantasy point and click adventure that came out recently. You were possessed by a demon for a year and have to find out, with the help of some supernatural investigators, what you did during that time. It's pretty well done.

Yahtzee did a review of it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWlggS8bbwE). I'm sorry, but you have to turn in your hipster badge.

(While a badge is a symbol of subservience to authority — in other words, "selling out" — the mainstream would think a "hipster badge" is too ridiculous for anyone to display proudly, so carrying a hipster badge ironically is an act of self-expression and a defiance of convention.)

[Cespenar]

Oh, also, currently I'm playing and enjoying The Unavowed, an urban fantasy point and click adventure that came out recently. You were possessed by a demon for a year and have to find out, with the help of some supernatural investigators, what you did during that time. It's pretty well done.

Yep, it's from the makers of the Blackwell Chronicles, as well as other similar oldschool adventure gems. I'd personally suggest Technobabylon or Primordia as their better games. But Unavowed is also pretty good.

[factotum]

The closest example I can give is The Last Court, a game put out by Sunless Sea (the developer of Fallen London)

You mean Failbetter Games--Sunless Sea is another of their games, not the name of the developer.

[CosmicHobbit]

Machiavillain. It got mixed reviews on Steam and a 65% on Metacritic, but I love it. It's...sort of hard for me to explain, so I'll just copy the steam description.

"Machiavillain is an evil mansion management and strategy game, inspired by Dungeon Keeper, Prison Architect and all the horror movie clichés! Build your own manor, raise your monsters, set up your traps, and exterminate your victims. But to gain reputation you'll have to slay by the horror movie rules!"

There's just something about being able to use the evil genius side all of us have(especially TTRPG Dungeon/Game Masters:smalltongue:). Combine that with the fact that it's the kind of game I love, lots of creative ability and strategy, and I've fallen in love with the game. Come to think of it, I haven't played it in quite a while...I'll have to do that ASAP!

[Man_Over_Game]

Machiavillain. It got mixed reviews on Steam and a 65% on Metacritic, but I love it. It's...sort of hard for me to explain, so I'll just copy the steam description.


There's just something about being able to use the evil genius side all of us have(especially TTRPG Dungeon/Game Masters:smalltongue:). Combine that with the fact that it's the kind of game I love, lots of creative ability and strategy, and I've fallen in love with the game. Come to think of it, I haven't played it in quite a while...I'll have to do that ASAP!

I completely forgot!

Dungeon Keeper: An...RTS? That's designed around you building a dungeon that heroes come to invade. Unlike other RTS games, this one relies on the idea of building defenses first and offenses second. You can build several types of rooms to entice specific monsters into your dungeon, all with specific uses. Wizards can study more spells for you to cast, goblins love to train and fight, and trolls will work constantly in your workshop to create new traps and walls. The game often rewards you for being a bad guy. Your units aren't working hard enough? Slap them around a bit, maybe that lost health will teach them to work harder. That hero is dying too quickly in your torture chamber? Cast a healing spell so that he survives long enough to know that THERE IS NO HOPE and YOU are their god now. Don't have enough food to support your growing demands? Make some skeletons by throwing your captives in jail; eventually they'll rot and serve you in undeath without requiring any upkeep of their own.

It was probably the first of its kind, but there were several games released over the last 10-15 years that tried to follow it's formula, but few have managed to perfect it.

[Silfir]

What parallel universe have I ended up in which nobody has heard of Dungeon Keeper, of all things? It might be one of the most well-known games of the 90s across all genres, let alone settlement management games.

[Man_Over_Game]

What parallel universe have I ended up in which nobody has heard of Dungeon Keeper, of all things? It might be one of the most well-known games of the 90s across all genres, let alone settlement management games.

I guess I'm a little younger than most who know about it. The first game is near impossible to get running on an XP computer, and probably requires a few hacks to get working on anything modern. The first I've ever heard about it was around 10 years ago, well over it's shelf life.

[Cespenar]

Back in the day, it was on the cover of most gaming magazines on the month it came out.

Also I remember a recent-ish spiritual successor-ish thing called Dungeons 3, where they tried to slap together Dungeon Keeper and Warcraft 3, but it was pretty meh, to me at least.

[enderlord99]

Hand of Fate 2.

It's a somewhat boardgamey roguelite with pseudo-Arkham-style combat (which is its weakest point, but still really good) and a card-based unlock system.

EDIT: As the title implies, it's a sequel to one Rodin listed. It's even better than that one, though, and by a large margin.

[Kato]

I guess I'm a little younger than most who know about it. The first game is near impossible to get running on an XP computer, and probably requires a few hacks to get working on anything modern. The first I've ever heard about it was around 10 years ago, well over it's shelf life.

Well, I guess I'll forgive you for being too young.. But as was pointed out, DK was extremely famous back in the day. I think its mascot is still kind of famous.
Also, I dare say its direct sequel is actually a huge improvement on the original. Somehow studios have failed to emulate the formula in the past decade, but War for the Overworld did a decent job of copying it.

[Sian]

I guess I'm a little younger than most who know about it. The first game is near impossible to get running on an XP computer, and probably requires a few hacks to get working on anything modern. The first I've ever heard about it was around 10 years ago, well over it's shelf life.

If it wasn't extremely well known, chances are you wouldn't have heard about it 10 years after it's release.

That's like saying that Beethoven is a no-body since no one remember him in his prime

[Kitten Champion]

I'm sure people have heard of them, but I've never heard anyone discussing them...

Galaxy 5000 for the NES. It's a racing game with hovering space ship-like vehicles and some combat mixed in. It had a clear visual aesthetic that worked well to create that pseudo-3D look for itself, the ships handled well, and the combat was fun without taking over the racing experience. Of the NES collection my father has, outside of the Mario games, Final Fantasys, and Micromachines it's probably the one I played the most.

Again, I don't know how popular it was at the time, but Assault Suits Valken for the SNEs. It's a side-scrolling mecha action game with elements of a shmup. In terms of embodying that mecha-style fantasy it was pretty well done, the visual style had this heavy industrial-armoured feeling to everything and was neatly anime but in a more utilitarian fashion than the hyperbolic style that genre can go into, it was pretty hard difficulty-wise without feeling needlessly punishing, and it mixed the Megaman-esque platforming levels with these free-floating space combat ones and the faster-moving shmup sections all while keeping the feeling of being in this heavy mecha. Apparently it was re-titled Cybernator in the international release, which is... fine, I guess.

[Cespenar]

Since many people are referencing more recent games, let me dig into my Steam portfolio and check out the less popular ones:

Black Closet: Made by Hanako Games (which probably means something to some people), it's a management game with you being the student council president and solving "cases" for the school. There are quite a few ways to attack a case, though, and that plus the time constraints make things pretty hectic as the game progresses. Also the writing isn't half bad.

Framed: A stylish little noir-themed puzzle game in which you sort out the panels of a storyboard to let the story flow correctly.

Hero-U: I'm surprised that this didn't explode much. It's made by the creators of Quest for Glory, and you play a student in the "Hero University" as a member of the "Disbarred Bards" class, which is named because if you call them Rogues, you've pretty much destroyed the point of Rogues. A pretty good time management/RPG/point-and-click adventure hybrid with no hand holding.

Last Word: A short little crime-solving adventure game with a nice gimmick: the "battle system" is actually the two parties discoursing and trying to stump the opposition.

[Magic_Hat]

Shantae series, currently four games, all but the first are on Steam btw.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I guess since there's been some other moderately well known games mentioned, I thought I'd mention my favorite mostly-overlooked RTS.

Sacrifice. You're a dimensional-hopping sorcerer looking to establish a life for yourself in a new world. There are 5 gods in this world who aim to give you missions to perform for them, and as the game progresses some gods get mad at you for things and won't want to work with you anymore. It's got a pretty good story going on and some choices through the story will offer more insight into events than others do.

[Eldan]

Sacrifice is awesome and really, really underappreciated.

[Man_Over_Game]

One I really liked for the PS1 was

Unholy War: A combination of battle arena and turn-based strategy. Each unit isn't just a unit, but a character you can play in battle. Each tile isn't just a tile, but an arena with various different traps and environmental effects, like traps, portals, lifts, conveyor belts, lasers, and other things you can use for your battle strategy. The game plays by default on the grid, and when two opposing units step on the same tile, a battle commences where both players duke it out until one is left standing. Each unit has its own playstyle and abilities, and they're designed to have individual counters with each unit. Units retain life lost from a battle, so even if you lose, you can soften up the enemy for the next fight. On the grid, you can earn resources that will let you spawn more units, and each unit also has special abilities they can use to manipulate the board. Very much like the original Archon, with actually playable controls. The game has two factions, the native monsters vs. the immigrant robots, with some units being able to replicate themselves, fly, shoot missiles or teleport, so there's a lot of strategy involved.

[GloatingSwine]

I guess I'm a little younger than most who know about it. The first game is near impossible to get running on an XP computer, and probably requires a few hacks to get working on anything modern. The first I've ever heard about it was around 10 years ago, well over it's shelf life.

You can just get Dungeon Keeper on GoG and they've done all the making it work for you. (with Dosbox I expect).

[Man_Over_Game]

One obscure one I liked was Bahamut Lagoon, an SNES game that never made it into an official English translation, but there's an unofficial translated version online. It's a turn-based tactics RPG, where each of your heroes also controls a dragon that's its own unit and its own abilities that it can choose to do in combat. Where you can control the heroes, the dragons have their own AIs that you can help teach how to act based on general commands (Attack, Protect Me, etc) or feeding them items that design them around that playstyle (weapons make them angry, and more likely to attack in melee combat, books make them smarter and want to cast spell more, etc). The game also does a good job of using environmental interactions, such as casting Ice on a group of units, which also turns the nearby water into a makeshift frozen bridge for the next few turns, similar to what some turn-based strategy games are only now implementing. On top of that, combat between units when they attacked took place in a pseudo Turn-based JRPG format, where each "tactical unit" was made up of a group of "JRPG" units, causing a further element to plan around when determining to use a single target vs. AoE attack. The game seems like it took a lot of elements from another, less obscure game, Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen.

[Triaxx]

I loved Bahamut Lagoon. Fan translation was awesome.

Blaster Master: Blasting Again, a PS1 entry into the Franchise that was... early 3D. A fun game but very much called back to it's Nintendo Hard routes with almost no guides around.

Legend of Dragoon. It's simultaneously well known and pretty obscure. Definitely a cult following I guess. Turn based combat, but attack patterns required button press inputs and some enemies could counter, with longer attacks late in the game becoming harder, but also allowing for multiple counter points. Plus it had an epic story.

[DodgerH2O]

One game I never hear about is Return Fire. It was a strange combination of puzzle game/capture the flag with single and two-player modes. You had certain numbers and types of vehicles to perform basically a reverse tower-defense scenario. Enemy bases had turrets that could shoot your vehicles down and destructible walls that you needed to breach in order to find a flag, which you then had to capture with a basic jeep/humvee type vehicle. I remember a helicopter and a tank, but I think there were more vehicle types.

I played tons of it on the original Playstation, though now that I have the page up on Wikipedia I see it was also on PC and 3DO. I would love a modernized version of it with a map editor and community uploads.

[mavengames]

Hey Guys! I found a new upcoming board game. Hope you guys will found interesting. Have a look
DOOMSDAY: ATLANTIS

[Alent]

Most of my favorite obscure games fall into "cult classic" territory, so "that nobody's heard of" might be a bit much... But here goes:

Carrier Command: A really fun early 3D simulation strategy game where you control one of two automated battle carriers converted into a science research platform, and have to use your carrier to take down the more advanced second carrier, which had been hacked by terrorists. At some point the game had its name stolen and used for some awful looking sci-fi novel product placement game that's on Steam.

Starglider 2: Starfox's big brother, made by the same team before they went to work for Nintendo and made the SuperFX chip. The Super FX story is fairly well known at this point, but Starglider 2 is an absolutely awesome sandbox game. You get to fly around an entire solar system freely, and basically run a fedex quest to help rebels build a weapon you can use against an enemy super-dreadnaught of some sort. Sadly I was too young to understand the game way back when and never beat it. I keep meaning to go back and finish it, but there's never enough time.

Live A Live: Calling this obscure is probably a stretch as it is a Squaresoft RPG, but it doesn't get anywhere near enough love. This game was an experiment in genre blurring gameplay mechanics and in my opinion turned out much better than most of Square's failed experiments. Lots of interesting mechanics like tactical movement in combat and it managed a very interesting Dragon Quest deconstructing meta-plot.

Royal Stone: Imagine Sega made an S/RPG that wasn't Shining Force. Now imagine they made it on the Gamegear, made it look like an end of life SNES squaresoft RPG, and let it die in obscurity as a Japanese only title for no apparent reason. This game is surprisingly good, and while it's no Thracia 776, does a lot of interesting things with the combat side of things. It has good art, and again, it looks like an end of life SNES game despite being on the Gamegear. The second game of the Arliel series, the first game came out in English as Crystal Warriors. Although it doesn't look nearly as good, it had most of the same mechanics.

Treasure of the Rudras: Octopath Traveler claims to be a spiritual successor to FF6, but it is actually a spiritual successor to Rudra no Hihou. Has a super fun magic system where you can just make up your own spells. Sadly it was too big and too late in the SNES' life to make it to the states.

I'll also give D&D Shadows over Mystara another shoutout, although it's not obscure. Played that game with some friends on steam until we were sick of it. This game needs a sequel so bad.

Crystalis: Cult classic, not that obscure, but it deserves a place on any list.

Metal Combat: Falcon's Revenge: The most fun light gun game Nintendo has ever made.

Metal Marines: While on the note of giant robot games, this was a really fun Japanese made Windows 3.1 RTS game that was dramatically different than all of its peers. The SNES port got some attention, but if you ever get a chance, play the original in a Windows 3.1 emulation setup. The experience is very unique and the game design is pretty good.

Castle of the Winds: If you had Windows 3.1 and played shareware game packs, this game was probably your first introduction to Roguelikes. Really solid roguelike, has a strong fan community.

Wild ARMs XF: Popular series, but this ends up being an obscure PSP exclusive spinoff game in the franchise. I loved this game back when I found it in 2010, it was amazing, I've recently started streaming it because the FFT 1.3.8 hack ticked me off and I wanted to show off what a well designed "FFT but harder" game looks like. Uses hexes instead of tiles to great effect.

Berwick Saga: Another Hex based S/RPG. I've talked about it in some other threads like this before. Really fun and hard, last I saw it was finally getting a fan translation, although I've no idea how close to completion the project is.

[Starwulf]

"Nobody" is a stretch, but here are some underrated gems from the 97-00 era that I might have had mentioned before in similar threads:

NetStorm: A pretty unique RTS in which you had to use tetris-like bridge pieces to get across airborn islands and outrange/outgun your opposition with the correct application of different turrets. That probably didn't mean much.

I loved NetStorm, but I never got to play the full version, only a slightly hacked demo that gave me a little more of the game than the standard demo(but I played the hell out of that demo, over and over again). Heck, I'd play it now if Steam or GOG released it, just to see how the memory holds up.

Edit: To add to this list, I present The Adventures of Willy Beamish(I'm not 100% on the title). It's a point and click puzzle game where you roam around your house and outside, though I don't quite remember what the story was. I specifically remember having to fight a vampire and not figuring out I had to use the vacuum cleaner to suck it up when it was a bat until I had died to it like 20x over(minimum).

[Yora]

I really enjoyed playing Rent-a-Hero, which i think came at the tail end of the point and click adventure glut. Not sure if it was a good adventure, but it had that cartoony, gold and pink lighting look (https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mQfIiEe2CTc/hqdefault.jpg) that was a thing at the time and that somehow really worked for me.

[Rodin]

For a couple games that people will really not know (unless you're British and over the age of 30): Games from the venerable BBC Micro!

Stryker's Run - an early Contra-style sidescroller with pilotable vehicles and aircraft. I spent far too much time playing this when I was 4 years old.

Palace of Magic - an early Metroidvania-style game where you gain access to different parts of the palace by gathering items from various areas in it. For example, you have to get a bowl from one area, bring it to a water source in another, in order to put out a lake of fire in a third. All while platforming about and dodging enemies. Very difficult, never beat it, but it helped form my love of videogames.

[factotum]

For a couple games that people will really not know (unless you're British and over the age of 30): Games from the venerable BBC Micro!

Heck, if we're going back that far then I'd have to throw a couple of Spectrum games into the mix:

Strangeloop - You're a chap in a space suit trying to shut down an automated robot factory, but oddly enough, the enemy isn't robots, it's flying pieces of razor-sharp swarf that cut your suit and cause leaks that deplete your limited oxygen supply. Never actually finished the game, but still remember it very fondly.

Skool Daze - you're a boy in a school who has to steal his report from the headmaster's safe and forge the results so you don't get in trouble with your parents. The thing about the game is that you had regular lessons that you had to attend, and instead of health you had lines--get too many lines and you'd be expelled from school and lose the game.

[Sian]

I think I'm going to top everyone...

The Apprentice - Probably the least bad game on the massive Failure of the Philips CD-i ... A difficult vertical platformer, with a quite distinct and cute visuals.

[factotum]

I think I'm going to top everyone...

The Apprentice - Probably the least bad game on the massive Failure of the Philips CD-i ... A difficult vertical platformer, with a quite distinct and cute visuals.

Hey, I worked on a couple of CD-i games, you dissing me? :smallsmile:

Seriously, I did actually work on games for that platform, and the experience just told me that it was not designed for gaming in any way, shape or form. The fact anybody managed to produce anything halfway playable from it is amazing.

[Man_Over_Game]

Hey, I worked on a couple of CD-i games, you dissing me? :smallsmile:

Seriously, I did actually work on games for that platform, and the experience just told me that it was not designed for gaming in any way, shape or form. The fact anybody managed to produce anything halfway playable from it is amazing.

I actually played the Zelda game that everyone disses on (I think it was bugged, as most walkthroughs hinted at progressing further when I couldn't), and a Mario Hotel game that was fun. Definitely not designed for gaming, but I applaud you for the amazing effort it must have took.

[T.G. Oskar]

I got a couple people haven't mentioned yet.


Lagoon (Sharp x6800/SNES): an action/adventure game, in the vein of Legend of Zelda and the Soul Blazer trilogy (which also has Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma), with tons of RPG elements. You play as Nasir, a young warrior tasked with traveling to the eponymous Lagoon castle to figure why the waters of the world have gone foul. As you go, you realize a few secrets, while you conquer the dungeons and castles, fighting monsters and whatnot. The difficulty is insane (your hitbox is laughably small, which isn't so bad for monsters but brutal when dealing with bosses; you get awesome spells, but can't use them in boss battles, and you can only get one copy of each healing item, which you can't get anymore after a certain point...oh, and it has top-view platforming), but it has awesome music, and the twist right near the end isn't half bad.
Zaxxon (multiplatform): a shmup, one of the first ones, known for being one of the first few with isometric view. You move your ship in semi-3D, passing stages to face the alien Zaxxon. Alongside the better known Donkey Kong, Pac-Man and Combat, this was one of the first games I truly loved, when I was a wee child. Played it on the Atari, years after the Video Game Crash.
Legend of Mana (PSX): one of the lesser-loved entries in the Mana series, but still recognizable enough. It changes a few aspects of the Mana series, such as the entire combat system, the magic system, and...well, it's almost an entirely different game. You play as one of two teenagers (a boy or a girl), who are tasked by the Fairy of the Mana Tree to reconstruct the world. As you do, you start unraveling the story within the world, doing various sidequests and dealing with three main quests (a fight between two Dragoons and their servants, the plea of a Shrine Maiden and a former friend of hers, and the last members of a dying race being hunted for their "cores", which resemble jewels - this last one is arguably the most depressing storyline ever), until you reach the Mana Tree. It's unique in that the positioning of each land influences the rest, and can make enemies stronger, items in towns much, much better, and so forth. Plus, the music is awesome (of course, it was composed by Yoko Shimomura, and if you don't know who she is, you...probably haven't played a Square game recently. Or old-school Capcom games, as she belonged to Alph Lyra, the company game BGM group).
The Dark Spire (DS): a throw-back to old-school dungeon crawlers like Wizardry and the first few Might & Magic games, as well as Basic D&D. The plot is bare-bones: a wizard called Tyrfing stole the Sword of Light and climbed the eponymous Dark Spire, and it's up to you and your team to climb the tower. If you like Wizardry and other dungeon crawlers, it's a great game with awesome music. Sadly, it didn't get a sequel, compared to games on a similar time frame (Etrian Odyssey, Class of Heroes).
Syndicate (PC/SNES): a cyberpunk/heist game with hints of conspiracy theory. As you know, most cyberpunk games focus on the rebels (Shadowrun has the shadowrunners, Cyberpunk focuses on the down-on-their-luck warriors and criminals) fighting against the corporations. Syndicate turns that around; you play as an executive, using your corporate agents to do missions on behalf of your corporate masters. You control four agents, each of which you can upgrade with cybernetics and weaponry you research (and pay for), and you can get new agents by "recruiting" (more like instant brainwashing by hacking into their mind chips). There was a sequel, Syndicate Wars, where the corporation has to face a cult trying to take over the world...after you took over, that is. A nice turnaround to the cyberpunk genre, since few games let you play as the corporates.

[Gnoman]

I got a couple people haven't mentioned yet.


Legend of Mana (PSX): one of the lesser-loved entries in the Mana series, but still recognizable enough. It changes a few aspects of the Mana series, such as the entire combat system, the magic system, and...well, it's almost an entirely different game. You play as one of two teenagers (a boy or a girl), who are tasked by the Fairy of the Mana Tree to reconstruct the world. As you do, you start unraveling the story within the world, doing various sidequests and dealing with three main quests (a fight between two Dragoons and their servants, the plea of a Shrine Maiden and a former friend of hers, and the last members of a dying race being hunted for their "cores", which resemble jewels - this last one is arguably the most depressing storyline ever), until you reach the Mana Tree. It's unique in that the positioning of each land influences the rest, and can make enemies stronger, items in towns much, much better, and so forth. Plus, the music is awesome (of course, it was composed by Yoko Shimomura, and if you don't know who she is, you...probably haven't played a Square game recently. Or old-school Capcom games, as she belonged to Alph Lyra, the company game BGM group).


Mana fans generally consider this to be at or near the high point in the series - it is extremely well received.

[Yora]

I actually never heard of most of the games here. That's quite impressive, in a way.

[danzibr]

A Blurred Line.

[theMycon]

Playground Marco Polo
This works best on a large piece of playground equipment, something that has multiple platforms and slides and perhaps some monkey-bars connecting different parts. Since so much involves the honor system (and the potential for hurting oneself is pretty high), it's best played with a mature group of friends that trust each other & aren't jerks. Also after hours when you're the only people who want to use the playground.

One person is "It", and moves around as quickly as they feel safe with their eyes closed, trying to tag any of the other players, who then becomes It. Usually, the most mobile/sober player stays nearby to tell them if they're about to hurt themselves (I prefer a one-syllable safe word, like "STOP" or "BAR" or "STAIR"). People generally can't climb very well with their eyes closed, so this isn't as big a disadvantage as you might think.

A "fish out of water" rule works best- if someone is out of the "pool" and It get the whole phrase out of their mouth before they're back in, they've been caught.

Popful Mail (Sega CD/Working Designs version)
A fantasy platformer with hilarious writing, surprisingly good voice acting, and devilish difficulty. Generally, there's entirely different dialogue for each of the characters, which is the real joy of the game, but the boss battles & exploration are pretty dang fun too.

You have 3 characters you can switch between freely, who use (in order of appearance) swords & boomerangs, staves, and claws & breath weapons. Your down-on-her-luck bounty hunter gets caught up in a quest to save the world, and meets this guy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLgK3ZHgNxQ). And you can get through the whole thing in about 8 hours if you don't die too often.

Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom (NES)
An adventure game retelling of the 1917 Russian Revolution using sapient fruits & vegetables & the occasional giant robot. It looks cute and cheery, but even at age 8 I could tell it was dark as (redacted). After most of the royal family is killed and Princess Tomato is taken hostage to act as a puppet leader, the last loyal retainer (Sir Cucumber) must rescue her from the evil minister and the farmies, who trying to use eachother as they fight to establish their power. See too-old fruits shipped of too gulags, undesirable vegetables disappeared by the secret police, and money become only usable at the black market, all while being followed by a cheery young persimmon who can't swim but will remember details for you in case you need that hint from 3 chapters back.

[Marillion]

I got a couple people haven't mentioned yet.

[LIST]
Lagoon (Sharp x6800/SNES): an action/adventure game, in the vein of Legend of Zelda and the Soul Blazer trilogy (which also has Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma), with tons of RPG elements. You play as Nasir, a young warrior tasked with traveling to the eponymous Lagoon castle to figure why the waters of the world have gone foul. As you go, you realize a few secrets, while you conquer the dungeons and castles, fighting monsters and whatnot. The difficulty is insane (your hitbox is laughably small, which isn't so bad for monsters but brutal when dealing with bosses; you get awesome spells, but can't use them in boss battles, and you can only get one copy of each healing item, which you can't get anymore after a certain point...oh, and it has top-view platforming), but it has awesome music, and the twist right near the end isn't half bad.
Legend of Mana (PSX): one of the lesser-loved entries in the Mana series, but still recognizable enough. It changes a few aspects of the Mana series, such as the entire combat system, the magic system, and...well, it's almost an entirely different game. You play as one of two teenagers (a boy or a girl), who are tasked by the Fairy of the Mana Tree to reconstruct the world. As you do, you start unraveling the story within the world, doing various sidequests and dealing with three main quests (a fight between two Dragoons and their servants, the plea of a Shrine Maiden and a former friend of hers, and the last members of a dying race being hunted for their "cores", which resemble jewels - this last one is arguably the most depressing storyline ever), until you reach the Mana Tree. It's unique in that the positioning of each land influences the rest, and can make enemies stronger, items in towns much, much better, and so forth. Plus, the music is awesome (of course, it was composed by Yoko Shimomura, and if you don't know who she is, you...probably haven't played a Square game recently. Or old-school Capcom games, as she belonged to Alph Lyra, the company game BGM group).

I wish I'd been older when I played these games, I might have gotten further and actually been able to appreciate them more!

Mine was Sky Odyssey for the PS2, a surprisingly involved yet intuitive flight simulator. You were searching for an ancient treasure on an archipelago that was incredibly hostile towards your single-person customizeable aircraft. I was personally fond of the bi-plane (which you could turn into a tri-plane if you found a certain hidden landing strip), but you could also start with a WW2 bomber or a sonic jet, and could unlock several other planes through play. Whether you were dodging avalanches and rock slides as you flew through snow covered mountains, attempting to land on an aircraft carrier during a thunderstorm, rendezvousing with a fuel-carrying blimp or train, or using the jetstream to make a long-distance jump between islands at 300+ miles an hour, the missions were varied and incredibly engaging for a game without any real characters, dialogue, or combat. And of course there was plenty of replay value in trying to beat your performance on these missions, especially since choosing different paths or using different aircraft could turn it into an almost new experience, unlock different parts for your aircrafts, or even unlock different levels, including 3 different final levels that were all hellishly difficult and truly satisfying to even complete successfully, nevermind do well in.

[Man_Over_Game]

I wish I'd been older when I played these games, I might have gotten further and actually been able to appreciate them more!

Mine was Sky Odyssey for the PS2, a surprisingly involved yet intuitive flight simulator. You were searching for an ancient treasure on an archipelago that was incredibly hostile towards your single-person customizeable aircraft. I was personally fond of the bi-plane (which you could turn into a tri-plane if you found a certain hidden landing strip), but you could also start with a WW2 bomber or a sonic jet, and could unlock several other planes through play. Whether you were dodging avalanches and rock slides as you flew through snow covered mountains, attempting to land on an aircraft carrier during a thunderstorm, rendezvousing with a fuel-carrying blimp or train, or using the jetstream to make a long-distance jump between islands at 300+ miles an hour, the missions were varied and incredibly engaging for a game without any real characters, dialogue, or combat. And of course there was plenty of replay value in trying to beat your performance on these missions, especially since choosing different paths or using different aircraft could turn it into an almost new experience, unlock different parts for your aircrafts, or even unlock different levels, including 3 different final levels that were all hellishly difficult and truly satisfying to even complete successfully, nevermind do well in.

Legend of Mana is incredibly hard to get in to at first. It's awkward and clunky. The graphics are nice but...not? You're not sure what's happening or where to go, so you just wander in a random direction, and you still only have a vague idea what's happening by the middle of the game, only because you've tried to pay attention to the random stuff that's been going on in the last 6 hours of gameplay.

A lot of modern games go overboard with tutorials, but Legend of Mana is definitely one game that needs them and doesn't. Even if you were older, you do need a bit of patience to fully enjoy it. Or a friend. The complexity with the fighting styles, combined with different companions your +1 can play, can add a lot of fun to the game.

[T.G. Oskar]

I wish I'd been older when I played these games, I might have gotten further and actually been able to appreciate them more!

Kinda surprised for your interest in Lagoon. It's really a weird game.

Speaking of which, another game I haven't heard yet, and this one is a shame because it never got through any further:

Royal Blood (aka Gemfire) (NES, SNES, I believe Genesis/Megadrive?): a kingdom simulator/strategy game. You know Koei, right? The company that created the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games? The one that's pretty much devoting its existence to milking the Musou games (Dynasty Warriors, Warriors Orochi, etc.)? Well...did you know they actually made a fantasy kingdom simulator/strategy game NOT BASED ON ANYTHING? Yep, they did, and the game was called Royal Blood, though it's known in the West as Gemfire as well (the SNES version is known as Super Royal Blood). In essence, it's the exact same game as Rot3K, where you choose one of many lords to conquer the kingdom, except this time it's on an island roughly the size and shape of Great Britain. The story is a bit cliche'd, but par for the time; the king ruled with an iron fist, the princess can't stand it and shatters the crown of her father, which contains six (or is it seven?) magical gems holding powerful wizards and a Red Dragon. The king finds her, but the deed is done; all but one of the gems warp away into various of the lords of the kingdom (all the gems that hold the wizards), and a war ensues to unify the now-divided land. The game's battles have an element where you have four fixed units, and a 5th unit that could change (usually it had the wizard/advisor trapped in the gem, but it could also be mercenaries, skeletons and the like). Sadly, after the SNES version (and no sequels at all), the game faded into obscurity. How badly? Well, how many Dynasty Warriors games have appeared, and how many variants such as Hyrule Warriors have appeared, and we STILL don't have any of the Gemfire lords around? This is a rare game that Koei would probably wish never existed, but it's weird, because with all the advancements, and experience, and the push for a fantasy heartbreaker, it could experience an odd revival.

[Algeh]

Legend of Mana is incredibly hard to get in to at first. It's awkward and clunky. The graphics are nice but...not? You're not sure what's happening or where to go, so you just wander in a random direction, and you still only have a vague idea what's happening by the middle of the game, only because you've tried to pay attention to the random stuff that's been going on in the last 6 hours of gameplay.

A lot of modern games go overboard with tutorials, but Legend of Mana is definitely one game that needs them and doesn't. Even if you were older, you do need a bit of patience to fully enjoy it. Or a friend. The complexity with the fighting styles, combined with different companions your +1 can play, can add a lot of fun to the game.

I spent a lot of time playing Legend of Mana back in the day, and I never did figure out large chunks of what was going on. It was the first game I remember playing where you'd basically accidentally "finish" the game before you really wrapped up some of the things you were working on and saw as "part of the plot". (I suppose it was techincally also possible to do this in some other games I played, like Chrono Trigger, but with Legend of Mana it came more out of the blue rather than as an "obviously wrong" option.)

I never did really figure out the crafting system in any meaningful way, or finish all of the things you could get to from the pirate ship. I probably painted myself into a corner for finishing at least one of the plot threads that interested me at the time by putting something down in the wrong place or in the wrong order in a way that was not at all obvious, and just sort of "beat" the game and eventually wandered off without ever feeling like I'd gotten a satisfying end to most of the stories. I suppose I could re-play it with a guide some day.

[Cespenar]

A Blurred Line.

Oh yeah, that's that RPGMaker gem that never got the ending, right? I member that.

There was also this another RPGMaker gem that was called The Way or something IIRC, which was also good. Perhaps not as good as A Blurred Line, but at least it got finished. :smalltongue:

[Gnoman]

I spent a lot of time playing Legend of Mana back in the day, and I never did figure out large chunks of what was going on. It was the first game I remember playing where you'd basically accidentally "finish" the game before you really wrapped up some of the things you were working on and saw as "part of the plot". (I suppose it was techincally also possible to do this in some other games I played, like Chrono Trigger, but with Legend of Mana it came more out of the blue rather than as an "obviously wrong" option.)

I never did really figure out the crafting system in any meaningful way, or finish all of the things you could get to from the pirate ship. I probably painted myself into a corner for finishing at least one of the plot threads that interested me at the time by putting something down in the wrong place or in the wrong order in a way that was not at all obvious, and just sort of "beat" the game and eventually wandered off without ever feeling like I'd gotten a satisfying end to most of the stories. I suppose I could re-play it with a guide some day.

You can't lock yourself out of plot just by placing the lands in the wrong places (although you can mess it up with other quests). Your problem was probably caused by the fact that there are three plots in the game, and it isn't always clear what is part of which plot - which means that you can't always figure out how to follow up a given story path. The game is relatively "plot-lite" in the lack of a single overarching story - narratively, the meat of the game is in relatively low-level character interactions.


The item crafting is extremely obtuse, and figuring it out isn't particularly easy - but it is also a fairly unimportant subsystem.


You might want to check out Mega64's LP of the game (https://lparchive.org/Legend-of-Mana-(by-Mega64)/), which is extremely completionist.

[Lacco]

I completely forgot!

Dungeon Keeper: An...RTS? That's designed around you building a dungeon that heroes come to invade. Unlike other RTS games, this one relies on the idea of building defenses first and offenses second. You can build several types of rooms to entice specific monsters into your dungeon, all with specific uses. Wizards can study more spells for you to cast, goblins love to train and fight, and trolls will work constantly in your workshop to create new traps and walls. The game often rewards you for being a bad guy. Your units aren't working hard enough? Slap them around a bit, maybe that lost health will teach them to work harder. That hero is dying too quickly in your torture chamber? Cast a healing spell so that he survives long enough to know that THERE IS NO HOPE and YOU are their god now. Don't have enough food to support your growing demands? Make some skeletons by throwing your captives in jail; eventually they'll rot and serve you in undeath without requiring any upkeep of their own.

It was probably the first of its kind, but there were several games released over the last 10-15 years that tried to follow it's formula, but few have managed to perfect it.

You should try the tabletop version... :smallsmile:

[danzibr]

Oh yeah, that's that RPGMaker gem that never got the ending, right? I member that.

There was also this another RPGMaker gem that was called The Way or something IIRC, which was also good. Perhaps not as good as A Blurred Line, but at least it got finished. :smalltongue:
Nailed it!
Yeah, he made parts 1 and 2 (and merged them) but we never saw the conclusion...

The Way, I started it, I enjoyed it, then I switched laptops. I need to pick that back up.

[Man_Over_Game]

You should try the tabletop version... :smallsmile:

Color me intrigued...

----------------------------

One that was STUPID amounts of fun was Exit Fate. It's a Game Maker game, inspired almost directly by Suikoden 2.

In case you're not familiar with the Suikoden series, it's unique in the sense that it's a JRPG that uses 6 people in your active party, and it has 100 unique people to use. Most of them are optional, but none are permanently losable (However, you can miss out on getting certain characters earlier in the game).

Exit Fate has a massive world, an amazing storyline, complex combat without it feeling too slow, and even implements a tactics portion of the game, where your characters lead armies of people into combat, with unique powers for each tactical unit.

It has a LOT going for it. You'd think a 6v6 JRPG would be slow, but it actually has you input all of the commands for your team at once, and THEN initiative/turn order is automatically calculated and everyone's actions happen all at once. As a result, it looks and feels very active and cool.

The game is very polished, and I'd probably say even better than the Suikoden game it was made around. Make sure to make multiple saves as you get further in. Best part is, experience greatly favors getting your unused characters to level, so you don't have to level your 100 equally, as they'll jump several dozen levels if they're behind.

Oh, yeah. And it's free. Just go here: Exitfate.webs.com

I got stuck when I saved at a plot-based camp site, with the only option to go forward, into a boss fight I was not leveled to deal with. I had to stop as I was bashing my head into a wall that'd never break, and I had no way of going back. This was my ONLY gripe in the game, so learn from my mistake. As far as I've witnessed, this is the only part of the game that this could potentially happen to someone, so don't let it stop you from enjoying this masterpiece.

[danzibr]

Exit Fate, another I started and switched laptops. Had a solid start.

The only thing I disliked was it ripping music from all over.

[Sian]

Reminds me ...

Final Fantasy: Endless Nova - is a very strong fan-made RPG-maker game, which stands up as comparable to Final Fantasy 6-8 in theme (outside of a slightly schizophrenic graphical scheme, which borrows a lot from FFVI), with the Main character being an odd jobs/drifter and his android side-kick, who stumbles upon an amnesic girl with cat ears (which is very much not normal, and usually hidden under a hat) and decides to help her finding her memory (and his own for that matter)

[Cristo Meyers]

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc - A visual novel/point and click mystery game. A group of high schoolers are locked in a school and the only way to escape is to kill one of the others without getting caught. In between cases its a pretty standard social sim, but once a murder's been committed it turns into an investigation game where you talk to witnesses, gather clues, and eventually comes the trial where gameplay changes again. You use the clues you've gathered to counter other people's arguments and reveal the killer.

There's three of them and an anime, so maybe not "nobody's heard of" but it's damn entertaining.

[Algeh]

You can't lock yourself out of plot just by placing the lands in the wrong places (although you can mess it up with other quests). Your problem was probably caused by the fact that there are three plots in the game, and it isn't always clear what is part of which plot - which means that you can't always figure out how to follow up a given story path. The game is relatively "plot-lite" in the lack of a single overarching story - narratively, the meat of the game is in relatively low-level character interactions.


The item crafting is extremely obtuse, and figuring it out isn't particularly easy - but it is also a fairly unimportant subsystem.


You might want to check out Mega64's LP of the game (https://lparchive.org/Legend-of-Mana-(by-Mega64)/), which is extremely completionist.

Yeah, it was basically a case of "I want to find out more about the whatever-plot-thread" (I think the Jumi? It's been a while - I also remember liking some of the ones about the school in Geo, and the weird junkyard dolls), but I could not find any more of that story no matter where I poked, and I wasn't getting any more new artifacts from anywhere I poked, and the only place I could find new quests was sometimes the pirate ship after a tedious navigation mini-game. I think I basically had one quest I could find from the ship that involved the dudbears in the cavern and was really obnoxious, and it was the only one that I knew how to trigger but hadn't beaten yet. I liked the game early on because it was pretty open ended and you could just wander around and find neat stuff to do (my favorite gameplay mode in general is "exploration with minimal consequences for being wrong, so go wander around the map and poke at stuff"), but it eventually kind of narrowed down to less new stuff to find without ramping up to a single obvious thing I needed to be doing in place of the ever-sparser small stuff.

[Sian]

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc - A visual novel/point and click mystery game. A group of high schoolers are locked in a school and the only way to escape is to kill one of the others without getting caught. In between cases its a pretty standard social sim, but once a murder's been committed it turns into an investigation game where you talk to witnesses, gather clues, and eventually comes the trial where gameplay changes again. You use the clues you've gathered to counter other people's arguments and reveal the killer.

There's three of them and an anime, so maybe not "nobody's heard of" but it's damn entertaining.

A small niche genre to be sure, but hardly unheard of, that would probably have to be the company’s other flagship, ‘zero escape’

[Lacco]

Color me intrigued...

Dungeon Lords (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/45315/dungeon-lords), game made by a Czech guy with good portfolio. Most of his games are rather good.



As for the discussion... most of people, even RPG fans, in my vicinity never heard about ADOM or LCS. And these are two games I still play when I get the mood...and have time... so not often.

[Cespenar]

As for the discussion... most of people, even RPG fans, in my vicinity never heard about ADOM or LCS. And these are two games I still play when I get the mood...and have time... so not often.

Most roguelikers know ADOM alright, but if by LCS you mean Liberal Crime Squad (which is a hilarious game by the Dorf Fortress creator, but its content might be a grey area in this forum), that I've seen very rarely talked.

[Driderman]

I get the feeling that not a lot of people know of The Curious Expedition but it's probably one of my favourite games ever.

For old stuff, Deuteros, Reunion and that weird game where you played a time-and-space travelling immortal who had to seed 4 races on their respective biome planets (aquatic, desert and two others I forget) and then handle any and all of their development and critical moments, going back in the time to fix things if you made the wrong choices... for reasons. I wish I could remember the name.

[Aeson]

Not sure that I'd necessarily call them 'favorite' games, but some games I remember enjoying, though I haven't played any of them for a long time and neither know nor particularly care if they're games that 'nobody' has heard of.
- Battleship: Surface Thunder
- Caveman Rocks
- GalBat
- Galaxian
- A game I can't remember the name of but which involved playing as a dragon flying around more-or-less 2D castles, which I think was packaged with Caveman Rocks
- LEGO Rock Raiders
- LEGO Loco
- Dungeon Siege and Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna

[Triaxx]

I keep forgetting about Dungeon Siege, even though it's a game I adore.

[Sian]

As for the discussion... most of people, even RPG fans, in my vicinity never heard about ADOM or LCS. And these are two games I still play when I get the mood...and have time... so not often.

ADOM is widely considered one of the 5 genre defining 'Canon' Roguelikes (together with Rogue, Angband, Nethack and Dungeon Crawl), and equally considered one of the big 4 (together with aforementioned Nethack (optionally with Slash'em on top of it), Tales of Maj'Eyal, which at it's core is an Angband fork, and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which is a direct successor to Dungeon Crawl)

[TaRix]

Two from the NES days:
Magician, a sorta action-RPG-sidescroller with a trainee mage questing across the land to take on a tyrant-mage in his tower, gaining power by solving puzzles and beating creatures. Not only did you have to sort through all kinds of helpful gizmos and devices, you also had to stay fed and quenched. Learning new spells was mostly done by assembling the right word bits, and casting an unknown spell was just one way of dozens to abruptly die. At least the persistent narration window told you how stupid you acted. Fun music and great detailing for its time.
Nightshade, not the Sega one with ninjas. This one's more of a point-n-click in the vein of Monkey Island or Maniac Mansion with you as a wannabe vigilante hero self-tasked with cleansing the city from thugs, valley-girl ninjas, two-dimensional jackals, stuffy gents, and Sutekh, the Egyptian-themed mastermind behind it all. You've got to do it because they've managed to forcibly retire Metro City's REAL hero.
The fun part of this one was more of tone than of substance--the townsfolk, foes, comments, and fight woosh kind of bring to mind the campy 60s Batman show. You get to save kittens in trees, help little old ladies cross the street, foil muggings, all in an attempt to become sufficiently popular and well-enough equipped to reach Sutekh's lair. Fail, and you find yourself in yet another moderately escapable deathtrap (the last one isn't, though, so keep your health up.)

One I've mentioned before in the early computer days:
Robot Odyssey, a plotless wonder that has you falling into a robotic city sewer (both the city and sewer are robotic), struggling to find your way back out. Made by the guy that did the Atari console Adventure!, the interface is simple enough--pick up stuff, move around, drop stuff-- but the puzzles are anything but. From the second screen onwards, you bring along three programmable robots, and you have to get them to navigate places forbidden to you for keys, tokens, and other necessities.
Oh, but coding a robot? Nope, no higher-level languages for you. You get to use logic gates. ORs, XORs, ANDs, NOTs, and some flip-flops are the only things in your toolbox, though you can find specific sensor types scattered about. Though I never won it as a youth, the basics got me through some college-level material with ease. Pity all the emulations and remakes I've seen haven't been playable. I'd like to try this one again.

[Hunter Noventa]

Oh here's a wacky one, Faxanadu. It's a 2D Action-RPG Platformer for the NES. Think the combat sections of Zelda 2, but that's the entire game. The basic plot is a meteor or something hit the World Tree and you've got to climb it and defeat the evil its spawned. it's a brutal, unforgiving game with a nightmarish password system (like 30 characters long with a poor choice of font) but somehow it's also a load of fun and has some decent music and a lot of variety between weaponry, magic and just plain platforming, but no one ever talks about it.

[TaRix]

Oh here's a wacky one, Faxanadu. It's a 2D Action-RPG Platformer for the NES. Think the combat sections of Zelda 2, but that's the entire game. The basic plot is a meteor or something hit the World Tree and you've got to climb it and defeat the evil its spawned. it's a brutal, unforgiving game with a nightmarish password system (like 30 characters long with a poor choice of font) but somehow it's also a load of fun and has some decent music and a lot of variety between weaponry, magic and just plain platforming, but no one ever talks about it.

Well, it was a bit buggy. Everyone was so... blinky, like the mouth-sprite and eye-sprite codes were reversed or something. I found out the hard way that one of the items in the manual (the black onyx) was supposed to make you stronger, but weakened you instead. The game did find its way onto that terrible Captain N cartoon, though. Gotta count for something, right?

[LibraryOgre]

Oh here's a wacky one, Faxanadu. It's a 2D Action-RPG Platformer for the NES. Think the combat sections of Zelda 2, but that's the entire game. The basic plot is a meteor or something hit the World Tree and you've got to climb it and defeat the evil its spawned. it's a brutal, unforgiving game with a nightmarish password system (like 30 characters long with a poor choice of font) but somehow it's also a load of fun and has some decent music and a lot of variety between weaponry, magic and just plain platforming, but no one ever talks about it.

It was a really fun game... a staple of our rentals, especially since the obnoxious password system let you resume games after you returned and retrieved it from the store. IIRC, we also, eventually, started experimenting with hacking the password system.

[Cespenar]

So I remembered a few more that I enjoyed back in the day, though the distinction between less known and just... old, is beginning to slip here.

C-Dogs: It was a top-down shoot em up with pretty enjoyable fight mechanics. Even had some campaigns with a nice array of mission objectives, but the real angle was the multiplayer, I think.
Blood & Magic: A RTS in D&D/Forgotten Realms? What must they have been thinking? No, actually, this game rocked back then. Had lots of terrain interactions and other strategic elements.
Triplane Turmoil: A triplane shoot em up in WW1-ish era? It had pretty good old airplane mechanics, and required a fair bit of skill/training to get any good at it. Again, designed for multiplayer, I think, but it had campaigns as well.
Dilbert's Desktop Games: Hmm.
Little Fighters 2: What if Super Smash Bros was made earlier and much better, but more in a beat-em-up kind of way? :smalltongue:

[theMycon]

In case you're not familiar with the Suikoden series, it's unique in the sense that it's a JRPG that uses 6 people in your active party, and it has 100 unique people to use. Most of them are optional, but none are permanently losable (However, you can miss out on getting certain characters earlier in the game).

(Exit Fate) is very polished, and I'd probably say even better than the Suikoden game it was made around. Make sure to make multiple saves as you get further in. Best part is, experience greatly favors getting your unused characters to level, so you don't have to level your 100 equally, as they'll jump several dozen levels if they're behind.

It has a LOT going for it. You'd think a 6v6 JRPG would be slow, but it actually has you input all of the commands for your team at once, and THEN initiative/turn order is automatically calculated and everyone's actions happen all at once. As a result, it looks and feels very active and cool.

Oh, yeah. And it's free. Just go here: Exitfate.webs.com


That link is dead, but you can still find the game at the producer's website, scf works (http://site.scfworks.com/?page_id=10). It's got consistently solid reviews, though they all include "for an RPGMaker game" or "Compared to SCF's last game". I'm giving it a shot.

Having played about 2 hours, I suspect you define "polish" differently from me. Sure, there's a lot of detail, but it's sloppy. It's jarring when the music dead-stops for a half-second then resets every 30 seconds, instead of making a smooth loop. The dialogue is consistently weird enough* that I have to remind myself that it's not actually a SNES-era low budget localization. There doesn't seem to be much to interact with (people, some chests). The "spend money to skip this battle" function is nice, but it's useless 90% of the time, when you can just open a chest or talk to someone or go through a door; or if you set any button other than esc to open the status window. And the portraits are often downright horrifying- I think I'll see Fitch's face every time I close my eyes for the rest of my days.

Unrelatedly, you can easily perma-kill most of your characters in the Suikoden games. For example, do damage to Luca Blight in the army battle against him. Everyone in a 5-square radius is gonna get hurt, and unless they're one of the few characters with plot armor, it's there's about a 50-50 chance of they'll be perma one-shot. People also die often when losing duels, or if you make an obviously bad choice.
And in Exit Fate you give people orders immediately before they act; one by one.



*For example- meeting Elder Lothis, this mayor of a small town introduces himself as supreme ruler of all elves, and then Daniel Vinyard explains to him the details of his army's secret plans & how the campaign has gone so far. This isn't special, it's indicative of how everyone talks.

[Starwulf]

Oh here's a wacky one, Faxanadu. It's a 2D Action-RPG Platformer for the NES. Think the combat sections of Zelda 2, but that's the entire game. The basic plot is a meteor or something hit the World Tree and you've got to climb it and defeat the evil its spawned. it's a brutal, unforgiving game with a nightmarish password system (like 30 characters long with a poor choice of font) but somehow it's also a load of fun and has some decent music and a lot of variety between weaponry, magic and just plain platforming, but no one ever talks about it.

If you were dedicated enough you could grind and grind and grind in the starting areas, and buy the strongest spell in the game(I believe it was the strongest, maybe 2nd, but pretty sure 1st) and then basically be immortal for most of the game as nothing could stand up to it until you were near the end of the game. BUT, if you weren't willing to grind, you didn't have another chance to buy it until about halfway through the game, when you had to come back to the starting area.

Another one for me was Karnov for the NES. You are a fire-breathing circus performer who is battling monsters. Why? I don't remember, it's been far to long since I played, but I've never come across anyone who knows what the hell I'm talking about when I bring the game up, so I'm assuming it was relatively unknown, but supremely fun. I've been tempted to buy a copy from Ebay and play it through(I would say "And see if it holds up to my memory", but I've played dozens of older games that I enjoyed when I was younger, and I still enjoyed them now, so I'm assuming I'm some kind of freak that just doesn't mind extremely dated gameplay/graphics).

[TheTeaMustFlow]

Probably a little less obscure than some things here, but I was a big fan of Rise of Legends (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_Nations:_Rise_of_Legends). Rise of Nations slightly odd fantasy spinoff, lovely little strategy game with some surprisingly good story and worldbuilding for what and when it was (and an excellent ost (https://youtu.be/qEoZgg_S4HQ)). Along with the Battle for Middle Earth games, it's top of my "wish I could find a download version to play on my discless laptop" list.

More recently, the cyberpunk platformer-rpg Dex (https://store.steampowered.com/app/269650/Dex/) was rather fun. And again, some pretty good music (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl8lOzKoZsA&list=PLrMTsWNqDh4SiOT7conAuI9--3Ts0L3rb).

[Eldan]

Rise of LEgends was pretty fun, though from what I remember, I played through the campaign once, then never touched it again. Basically solid, though, and a lot of quite nice ideas for an RTS.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Nobody is a pretty high bar (or more like a low bar, maybe this is a limbo dancing contest), but i'm currently replaying Vector Unit's Ritide GP: Renegade. The first time I played the Android version, now I bought the PC version on top of that.

It's a fun little game about racing jet engined jetski's in a mildly science-fictiony cyberpunky setting. It's a bit weird for a racing game in that it's less about getting the right speed in corners and such and more about turning on auto-throttle and doing lots of stunts. There is a decent variety of tracks and vehicles as well as a pretty good stunt system, there are fun cosmetic options, and while the difficulty can vary quite a bit from race to race overall the game the hard parts of the game put up a good fight without feeling like an unfair challenge that's there just to keep you playing longer. It's the third part in the series, and where part two lacked difficulty settings this game has both that and a pretty big postgame. It's quite cool, is what I'm saying. If I had to make a top 5 favorite games this would probably be an honorable "in the same genre" mention attached to Stunts claiming the number 1 spot.

The elimination race on "Firewater" in the second cop quest is hell though, especially on a phone where some combination of screen size and aspect ratio keeps me from reliably hitting either shortcut. Absolute hell.

Also: if anyone else has this title I'm game to try out the multiplayer function sometime.

[LibraryOgre]

If you were dedicated enough you could grind and grind and grind in the starting areas, and buy the strongest spell in the game(I believe it was the strongest, maybe 2nd, but pretty sure 1st) and then basically be immortal for most of the game as nothing could stand up to it until you were near the end of the game. BUT, if you weren't willing to grind, you didn't have another chance to buy it until about halfway through the game, when you had to come back to the starting area.

Another one for me was Karnov for the NES. You are a fire-breathing circus performer who is battling monsters. Why? I don't remember, it's been far to long since I played, but I've never come across anyone who knows what the hell I'm talking about when I bring the game up, so I'm assuming it was relatively unknown, but supremely fun. I've been tempted to buy a copy from Ebay and play it through(I would say "And see if it holds up to my memory", but I've played dozens of older games that I enjoyed when I was younger, and I still enjoyed them now, so I'm assuming I'm some kind of freak that just doesn't mind extremely dated gameplay/graphics).

It was an INSANE grind, but you'd also level, IIRC, and the game became a walk. I think there was another point to buy it in the future, not just at the main town, but it was also a lot more expensive (and I remember it being of limited use against fast, bouncy, enemies)

[NeoVid]

I still use an avatar from my all-time favorite MOBA, Super Monday Night Combat. It was basically a funnier version of Team Fortress 2 as a MOBA, but without a player base.

[tyckspoon]

Another one for me was Karnov for the NES. You are a fire-breathing circus performer who is battling monsters. Why? I don't remember, it's been far to long since I played, but I've never come across anyone who knows what the hell I'm talking about when I bring the game up, so I'm assuming it was relatively unknown, but supremely fun. I've been tempted to buy a copy from Ebay and play it through(I would say "And see if it holds up to my memory", but I've played dozens of older games that I enjoyed when I was younger, and I still enjoyed them now, so I'm assuming I'm some kind of freak that just doesn't mind extremely dated gameplay/graphics).

I've played that, although IIRC I never got much past the first stage.

[LibraryOgre]

Dusk of the Gods, where you play an Einherjar trying to make sure the Aesir win Ragnarok. Character creation is playing your character's entire life... then you die and the game starts.

[Man_Over_Game]

Dusk of the Gods, where you play an Einherjar trying to make sure the Aesir win Ragnarok. Character creation is playing your character's entire life... then you die and the game starts.

Reminds me of the Valkyrie Profile games.

Speaking of:

Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume: A turn-based tactics game for the DS, probably one of the hardest you've ever played in your life. This game is like dialed up to 12 on a 10 point scale. This game takes a turn that's different from the other Valkyrie Profile games, where you are actually a nobody who joins a covenant with the bad guy. You save some people throughout the game, who pledge their lives to you, which grants you LITERALLY POWER OVER THEIR LIVES. Your special ability is that you can unleash the life force in an ally, granting them incredible powers for the remainder of the battle, becoming near invulnerable. They automatically die at the end of the mission, permanently, and you gain the ability to unleash your dead ally's "potential" ability for the rest of the game. The more friends you consume this way, the more powerful you become. Additionally, you're rewarded for overkilling enemies and beating missions as quickly as possible, so there's lots of incentives for killing your friends. The end of the game has a battle between you and the Valkyrie who's been trying to stop you, and every ally who you killed this way has joined the enemy side. If you beat the game on hard mode, and get the perfect ending (meaning you've sacrificed a maximum of 1 friend throughout the entire game), you unlock a special game mode that uses your team to fight through a tower full of difficult enemies and new allies to join your party from the previous Valkyrie Profile games.

[Gray Mage]

Possibly my favorite RPG ever and on the top of the list of my favorite games, Skies of Arcadia: Legends. A fun JRPG about skypirates exploring the world and fighting the evil empire, it seems like a standard JRPG, but it hits every trope just so right, the dialogue and character interactions are so funny and right and the evil empire is not generalised as irredeemably evil that it works very well. Adding a fun elemental rock paper scissors system for magic/attacks and an airship battle system made it be one of the few RPG that I've beaten twice, the second time 100%, not to mention the times I've started a new file to replay the beginning.

[Wookieetank]

Onimusha Series: 3rd person samurai action games for the PS2, where you fight off demons using your Katana and some magic. Has a bit of a Resident evil feel on puzzles and area progression mechanics.

Onimusha Tactics: A decent tactical RPG for the GBA, set in the Onimusha world. Bit of a crossover game where characters and vilians from several of the main games make appearances.

Last World series: Open world RPGs with a large amount of character customization for the PC made with RPG maker. Had a lot of fun searching out all the side areas and optional content on these, there is a lot.

Ara Fell: Another RPG maker game, but gorgeously done. Every area is just swimming in details, and the outdoor areas are just teaming with life. A rather light hearted romp plot wise, but its a lot of fun and the game has a lot of heart.

[The Hellbug]

I still use an avatar from my all-time favorite MOBA, Super Monday Night Combat. It was basically a funnier version of Team Fortress 2 as a MOBA, but without a player base.

I actually really loved Monday Night Combat, but the more MOBA-y sequel just didn't do it for me.

[NeoVid]

I actually really loved Monday Night Combat, but the more MOBA-y sequel just didn't do it for me.

I never got around to playing the original, but even so I kept thinking they shouldn't have been separate games. Might have been better off if they were different modes for the same game instead of splitting dev time and player base. SMNC even added a Turbo mode that copied more of the first game's mechanics, and I had more fun with that mode than the default...

[Potato_Priest]

Card Hunter's campaign is a masterpiece of a game complete with wonderful satire of D&D culture, but sadly it's pretty short and most of the game's development is focused on pvp arena battles.

[LibraryOgre]

Phantasie and Phantasie III.

The evil sorcerer Nikademus is trying to take over the world. The first game has a lot of VERY OBVIOUS Tolkien rip-offs (like the 9 black riders who attack you when you get too close to Nikademus's mountain stronghold... I think you also fight someone named JRR Trollkin, at one point). The 3rd came out a few years later, had updated graphics (still CGA, 'cause we roll old school), and was very much the same sort of game.

Very much a D&D clone, though they put a lot more magic in.

[Sian]

Sengoku Rance - a surprisingly competent Strategy game with a very strong (even if it was deliberately hammy and overplayed) story, hiding under more M+ rated stuff than your average teenager's hidden collection.

If just it had been released in a censored version, then I'd think it could have been quite popular in it's strategy niche.

Also, it got one of the most hilarious soundtracks, with the main theme being a upbeat rock/metal remix of the East German anthem


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EYnpfWLQWE

[Grif]

I'll toss in a few candidates from the RTS genre.

Metal Fatigue - This used to be one of the cult favourites of the genre. However, it's almost impossible to get running on modern systems, and likely dropped off the radar as a result. The premise? You get to command the usual sci-fi assortment of infantry, tanks, and planes... with an added twist of also being able to field giant robots made out of modular parts. Yes, you heard it right, this game lets you live out your Gundam dreams if you had those, though the robots don't actually fly, if I recall correctly, and all battles happen over land. The game even tries to go further with three strategic layers (underground, ground and space), but I think those weren't implemented quite well enough.

Submarine Titans - If you ever wondered why no one took a jab at underwater combat, well, someone actually did. You have a Starcraft-esque system of three factions, with two different resources (not!Minerals and not!Vespene) to collect. As the name suggests, it all takes place underwater, and you command submarines instead of the usual assortment of infantry, tank, planes. It did a decent enough job, with submarines actually being able to move up and down the Z-plane, and there are tactical considerations for that. (You can't fire on anything too high above your current Z-plane, etc).

[Gnoman]

I mentioned this earlier, but Metal Fatigue is on GoG now, and easy to get running.

[T.G. Oskar]

Now that I remember, there's another game I'm sure few or no people have heard of, that it's actually pretty good.

Dungeons & Dragons Tactics (PSP): I bought a PSP because of Valkyrie Profile, which I never played, but I ended up with a good amount of games for it. This was one of them. D&D Tactics is a pretty interesting take on both the D&D system and tactical games. The game uses the 3.5 rules, with access to all Core classes + two Psionic classes (Psion and Psychic Warrior), plus feats from the PHB and the Expanded Psionics Handbook. The game exists on its own setting, not using Faerun or Eberron or any of the known settings. The story is...bland, at best; you start at low levels, doing some minor quests, but then you learn your main character has Dragon blood in him (or her), and you get assasination attempts. You end up traveling all over the map trying to figure out who's trying to kill you and how that relates to the story between a Green Dragon and a Silver Dragon fighting each other. The game is pretty faithful to the original source, with only some minor caveats. The "tactical" portion is handled in a very unique way; you explore each dungeon or location as if it were a Diablo map, except you have to move each character individually each round. (You can finish a round early, if you need to). In battle, the game plays very much like a D&D battle, with initiative and flanking and specific movement and whatnot. The game even has most of the skills from the game (other than those like Craft and Profession, you get pretty much all of them, including and not limited to Use Magic Device), though their applications may differ. Better yet, there's at least two endings, depending on the alignment your character ends up with, and there's pivotal moments where your main character can change alignment. Despite not being very popular, it's a pretty faithful take on D&D, and it's a shame that it didn't got a sequel or a remaster (I'd love a remaster for the Switch, as long as it's not set in the Forgottten Realms). Oh, and your main character isn't the only one you can craft from scratch; you can create a party of 4, and then complement with a few pre-made characters that you can tweak later on. I finished it three times a long time ago, and I wouldn't mind firing the PSP for another go.

[theMycon]

Having played about 2 hours, I suspect you define "polish" differently from me. Sure, there's a lot of detail, but it's sloppy. It's jarring when the music dead-stops for a half-second then resets every 30 seconds, instead of making a smooth loop. The dialogue is consistently weird enough that I have to remind myself that it's not actually a SNES-era low budget localization. There doesn't seem to be much to interact with (people, some chests). The "spend money to skip this battle" function is nice, but it's useless 90% of the time, when you can just open a chest or talk to someone or go through a door; or if you set any button other than esc to open the status window. And the portraits are often downright horrifying- I think I'll see Fitch's face every time I close my eyes for the rest of my days.


I'm in Chapter 4 now, and... well, what I said about polish still holds, but it gets better.
The faces have gone from "uncanny valley/body horror" to "usually look like ugly humans", the music kinda bobs with a small but noticeable break, and the dialogue is now just a little flat. I'm a little annoyed that my 94% in the first real army battle got a B (I tried 3 times, and it's more about manipulating your AI allies out of suicide than any real tactics), but if the game continues to improve at this rate, I can see why it's so well regarded in the indie games community.

If it stays at this level... well, it's still a decent game, but they REALLY should've given the start a once-over. And I don't spend money on anything but keeping my weapons 1-level-below current for my active party, but I'm still constantly broke. And even that takes grinding to the point where regular battles are free healing/bosses aren't a serious concern. No, I've never bought armor.

[Triaxx]

I'd like to stick MechWarrior Online here, even though it seems fairly popular it's also pretty niche it feels like.

[somedudeguy]

I got so excited to give a good first impression that I posted a similar topic to this without realizing it was already a thing, so I'll just copy over what I already said:

sentinels of the multiverse cooperative superhero card game. It's got a digital release as well. They do a great job of making 'not copyright infringing' versions of popular heroes while still having a unique twist to them. The synergies you can put together with the right team are a joy to behold.

Unloved modern conversion of a Doom 2 mod that got released a couple years ago. Very atmospheric and tense fps/survival horror/roguelike thing. Probably best described as a less polished version of Killing Floor crossed with the ai director mechanics from Left 4 Dead. It's not a great game, but I still have sunk tons of time into it.

WWE: Know Your Role an incredibly niche pro wrestling tabletop rpg based on 3.5 dnd (which was probably not a good design choice). I mention it because it has the most unique combat system I have ever seen, also because it is probably one of the very few explicitly pvp tabletop rpgs out there. Each round all the players decide what move they want to do. They do this by selecting how much damage they want to do, then applying modifiers (knocks target prone, can be used as a pin attempt, is an illegal move that could disqualify you if the ref sees it, etc). Each of these decisions has a 'maneuver modifier' associated with it. After everyone is decided they all roll a d20 and add the maneuver modifier as well as bonuses from stats and levels. Whoever rolls highest has their move go off, so they get the right to narrate what happened that round.

This is turning into a wall of text so just one more quick one. X-Crawl another 3.5 setting. Competitive dungeon crawling is the hottest spectator sport. Your party is a sponsored team of professional crawlers who compete against other teams to clear dungeons fastest while all being broadcast on national tv.

[Beleriphon]

Ditto for Puzzle Quest, because I have that one as well! :smalltongue:

Favourite game that nobody's heard of (unless Triaxx pokes his nose into this thread): X3: Terran Conflict. Best single player Elite-style game in existence. The studio behind it (Egosoft) went off the rails a bit with X: Rebirth, but I have hopes they learned their lesson in the upcoming X4.

Puzzle Quest: I have the squeal, and the not quite as good sci-fi one.

And I have all of the X games. Yay Humble Bundles!

[Seto]

Okay, let me throw that in there... Have you guys heard of that new thing called Legend of Zelda? Never? Oh my, you're in for a treat!

How about Pokemon? It's quite niche, but I think it has the potential to make it big.

No, seriously, good job, I'd never heard of any of the games in this thread (well, maybe Dungeon Maker). Admittedly, I'm a casual gamer, and these days when I want to play I look up "classics" I haven't played (recently completed Earthbound) or games that recently made a buzz (Undertale, Cupcake). The most obscure games I've played are probably adaptations of French or Belgian comics, back when I was a kid with a Gameboy Color.
As for those I stumbled upon randomly, I'm bad at determining how well-known they are. For example, I thought Battle for Wesnoth was rather obscure, but then I saw several people mention it on these forums. Or Tower of Heaven - would you say it's well-known? It's certainly sort of a meme.

[tyckspoon]

For example, I thought Battle for Wesnoth was rather obscure, but then I saw several people mention it on these forums..

It's a well-known game among a fairly niche population - turn-based hex strategy isn't exactly a huge market :smalltongue: This just happens to be the right kind of place and subforum to run into all the people who already know about it.

[Triaxx]

It's also free, and that's a big draw.

[Aeson]

There's also that it's made well enough that it could be taken for a commercial product.

[Bowman7210]

I'm a bit too lazy to read through this entire thread to see if anyone's heard of this game, but it's an old one for the PS2 called Grafitti Kingdom. The point of the game would be to draw these creaures and use them to fight. It's almost a precurser to Spore. I always loved renting it from the local blockbuster when that was still a thing.

[Wookieetank]

I'm a bit too lazy to read through this entire thread to see if anyone's heard of this game, but it's an old one for the PS2 called Grafitti Kingdom. The point of the game would be to draw these creaures and use them to fight. It's almost a precurser to Spore. I always loved renting it from the local blockbuster when that was still a thing.

Forgot about this one. Its a sort of sequal to Magic Pengel, which was a game with some great ideas, but a terrible rock/paper/scissors battle system. Was very glad that Grafitti Kingdom got rid of that and turned it into an actiony game for the combat.

[sihnfahl]

Who remembers the Legend of Kyrandia series?

[heronbpv]

@sihnfahl
Oh my, I used to play Malcolm's Revenge back in the day, the third game in the series. Couldn't escape the initial island, but man, was it fun to walk around and try things! All the funny interactions! :D

[Psyren]

Mine would be the Otogi series:

These underrated gems come to us from the makers of Dark Souls, and show off their commitment to making Nintendo Hard games long before they became a household name for doing so. Featuring beautiful environments, extensive destructo-physics (100%-ing each level requires you to absolutely trash it), varied mission/enemy types and, in the second title anyway, a rich multi-character storyline with distinct playstyles for each person you used - I can't recommend these games highly enough. Some of the boss fights are Bayonetta levels of ridiculous too.

[GloatingSwine]

Man, I could never get the Moonlight Blade in Otogi. You needed to do a level basically in one giant air combo for it, and I could never quite manage it. Got everything else though.

Didn't play 2 as much.

Be nice if they got those on the Xbox One backwards compatibility, they looked great at the time.

[Majiy]

Magic the Gathering - Battlegrounds

Think the Magic TCG, but in realtime, with some beat-em-up mechanics worked in.

OK in singleplayer, but very fun in multiplayer 1 vs 1 matches.

[Forbiddenwar]

Micropose Sid Meier's Magic the Gathering
I know people know of it, but since it's been unplayable since 2000, few people have played it. Build a deck by earning spells and land by missions saving towns and defeating wandering wizards.

Of course I always mention Quest for Glory series. But everyone has heard of that.

I love Conquests of the Longbow so much I bought it the second it came out on Gog

And Gobliiins (early point and click adventure) as well

[deuterio12]

Last World series: Open world RPGs with a large amount of character customization for the PC made with RPG maker. Had a lot of fun searching out all the side areas and optional content on these, there is a lot.


Anybody could provide me a link for this one please? I tried googling and I get only other fantasy rpgs mentioning "last world" somewhere in their fluff text (plus a "last word" rpg maker title).

[Cespenar]

Micropose Sid Meier's Magic the Gathering
I know people know of it, but since it's been unplayable since 2000, few people have played it. Build a deck by earning spells and land by missions saving towns and defeating wandering wizards.

I can somehow run that on my Win 10 and it's still very playable. Doubly so with the unofficial Shandalar 2015 patch, which adds a boatload of new cards to the mix. Rarely the AI can muck up and lose games they could have won, but it's a rare issue and it actually holds up pretty nice considering that it deals with card mechanics way beyond anyone's expectation when the game was being designed.

[heronbpv]

Anybody could provide me a link for this one please? I tried googling and I get only other fantasy rpgs mentioning "last world" somewhere in their fluff text (plus a "last word" rpg maker title).

Is it possible he wanted to say Last Dream (https://store.steampowered.com/app/266230/Last_Dream/) instead? The description seems to fit. And it also got a continuation, in Last Dream: World Unknown (https://store.steampowered.com/app/448170/Last_Dream_World_Unknown/).

[deuterio12]

Is it possible he wanted to say Last Dream (https://store.steampowered.com/app/266230/Last_Dream/) instead? The description seems to fit. And it also got a continuation, in Last Dream: World Unknown (https://store.steampowered.com/app/448170/Last_Dream_World_Unknown/).

Seems like those are the ones, thanks!

[Wookieetank]

Is it possible he wanted to say Last Dream (https://store.steampowered.com/app/266230/Last_Dream/) instead? The description seems to fit. And it also got a continuation, in Last Dream: World Unknown (https://store.steampowered.com/app/448170/Last_Dream_World_Unknown/).


Seems like those are the ones, thanks!

Yeah that was it. Sorry bout the mixup :smallredface:

[Mr_Fixler]

I know it came up a few pages ago, but Sacrifice was one of my favorite PC games from a decade or so ago.

A sort of rts game where you play a sorcerer who kinds goofed and doomed his home plane. Goes to a new realm and immedielty gets in too deep in the politics of the gods.

Each god had different units and spells so while the basic game was similar, your strengths and tactics could vary greatly.

Also one of my random favorite games was Digimon Digital Card Battle for PS1. I'm not even remotely a Digimon fan, but I found the disc in the park and lost myself playing the game for probably over 100 hours.

[factotum]

I remember Sacrifice myself, mainly because the gods were very silly indeed--as I recall, the God of Air was basically a balloon with a face painted on it, and the God of Earth was Earthworm Jim from the eponymous game series! I never got very far into the game myself, but that's mainly because RTS is not one of my favourite genres.

[LibraryOgre]

Summoner: A Goddess Reborn for Gamecube. I guess it was the sequel to another game, but I never played nor really saw anything about the game. In gameplay, it was similar to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (a bit more arcade-y), with a diverse team of 3 chosen from a relatively broad class with different skills. Two stealth-solo missions for your stealth character, while your Main was just a powerhouse.

Playing the game, it just DUMPED you into the world. There's backstory that you get on the edge, there's world lore that your character doesn't ask about because she already knows... you can look it up, but I felt immediately immersed in the world.

[Driderman]

Micropose Sid Meier's Magic the Gathering
I know people know of it, but since it's been unplayable since 2000, few people have played it. Build a deck by earning spells and land by missions saving towns and defeating wandering wizards.

Of course I always mention Quest for Glory series. But everyone has heard of that.

I love Conquests of the Longbow so much I bought it the second it came out on Gog

And Gobliiins (early point and click adventure) as well

I actually know all of those, does that make me weird?

[Forbiddenwar]

I actually know all of those, does that make me weird?

No. How many times did you buy them though?

[Khay]

Ooh, a chance to shill for The Spirit Engine (http://www.thespiritengine.com/tse2-screens.html)!

TSE 2 is a great little RPG that's celebrating its 10th birthday this year. I wouldn't call it a "forgotten classic" exactly, because something has to be known before it can be forgotten, but it definitely deserved to be a classic. The combat mechanics are fun and challenging (and fairly unique to this day), the music is incredible, and the graphics are... well, it looks better than most things from 2008. The game didn't sell at all when it was released, so it's been freeware for most of its existence. I strongly recommend playing through the first chapter or two when you have the chance.

[Velaryon]

Dragon Spirit: The New Legend is an overhead view shoot-em-up in the vein of 1942 or Tiger Heli, except you play as a dragon (or rather, a dude who transforms into a dragon). You can find powerups that change your breath weapon, or have you grow extra heads, or get baby dragons to fly alongside you. It was seriously awesome for an NES game. There was an intro level in which you play a blue dragon. If you beat it, you continue into the game as normal. If you fail, you get a different opening cutscene and you play the son of the blue dragon guy, who transforms into a gold dragon that has twice as much health, and you skip a couple of the levels so it's a shorter game.



Super Baseball 2020 - SNES/Genisis/Arcade game about baseball set in the far future. Men Robots and Women all play together and they have jetpacks. the foul and home run zones were shrunk down so home-runs were only over the center field fence and fouls were only behind first and third base. The team you faced off against int he world series were named after historical Axis people.

I loved this game! I remember blowing curveballs past the batters at 200+ mph, making those spectacular jetpack-assisted jumping and diving catches, and blasting enemy batters with pitches just to watch the helicopter ambulance carry them away.



WWE: Know Your Role an incredibly niche pro wrestling tabletop rpg based on 3.5 dnd (which was probably not a good design choice). I mention it because it has the most unique combat system I have ever seen, also because it is probably one of the very few explicitly pvp tabletop rpgs out there. Each round all the players decide what move they want to do. They do this by selecting how much damage they want to do, then applying modifiers (knocks target prone, can be used as a pin attempt, is an illegal move that could disqualify you if the ref sees it, etc). Each of these decisions has a 'maneuver modifier' associated with it. After everyone is decided they all roll a d20 and add the maneuver modifier as well as bonuses from stats and levels. Whoever rolls highest has their move go off, so they get the right to narrate what happened that round.

I have this on my RPG shelf and have come agonizingly close to playing it a couple times. I even got as far as having practice sessions with my gaming groups a couple times, so that I could help my friends make their character and teach them the mechanics. But there was always one stick-in-the-mud who categorically refused to play, so we had to drop the game and do something else. I've never gotten to actually play it myself.

[Driderman]

No. How many times did you buy them though?

Well 3 of the 4 my dad bought off a floppy disc salesman back in the good old Amiga days and the last one was at a friends, so none.

[Cespenar]

Ooh, a chance to shill for The Spirit Engine (http://www.thespiritengine.com/tse2-screens.html)!

TSE 2 is a great little RPG that's celebrating its 10th birthday this year. I wouldn't call it a "forgotten classic" exactly, because something has to be known before it can be forgotten, but it definitely deserved to be a classic. The combat mechanics are fun and challenging (and fairly unique to this day), the music is incredible, and the graphics are... well, it looks better than most things from 2008. The game didn't sell at all when it was released, so it's been freeware for most of its existence. I strongly recommend playing through the first chapter or two when you have the chance.

Yeah, those were quite enjoyable. The second one more so. Lots of different character interactions depending on your team members and so forth.

[Cazero]

Calculords, a game where you do math to deploy units to crush your enemy.
Currently using a soldier steamroller deck that wouldn't work without the Traxx DLC, but I'm reliably beating the Shadow Nerd with it.

[Morvram]

OneShot is a great puzzle-RPG, and nobody I've mentioned it to knew about it beforehand, so I suppose it fits here. The basic premise is that you're guiding a child wearing a cat-hat and carrying a very important lightbulb through a strange and sentient world in the final stages of its decay. I highly recommend it to anybody who would be interested in that sort of thing. It is one of those games where some things are locked behind a second play-through, so probably avoid if you don't like that.

[deuterio12]

OneShot is a great puzzle-RPG, and nobody I've mentioned it to knew about it beforehand, so I suppose it fits here. The basic premise is that you're guiding a child wearing a cat-hat and carrying a very important lightbulb through a strange and sentient world in the final stages of its decay. I highly recommend it to anybody who would be interested in that sort of thing. It is one of those games where some things are locked behind a second play-through, so probably avoid if you don't like that.

Oh, I tried that one out, quite interesting setting.

A fair warning, there's very few opportunities to save the game, so it's something that you'll need a free afternoon to play through (something I didn't manage to do yet hahaha...)

[Man_Over_Game]

Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns

That's right, a Triple-A Final Fantasy game hits the thread.



This is probably one of my all-time favorite games, and while the world is roughly based off of the previous 2 Final Fantasy XIII games, you don't actually have to play them to understand what's going on. Rather, playing the previous two games will do nothing to help you understand what's going on.

Plot: Due to some timey-wimey bullsh** from FFXIII-2, time has died. People do not age, children do not grow up and neither are new ones born, yet people can continue their lives and die. People actively track the remaining number of people left in the world, which decreases each day. The world is visibly decaying with a literal "end of the world", a black void bordering everything in the known universe, and this void consumes more with each passing day. A powerful being, effectively God, has enlisted you as his Valkyrie to fulfill the people's last wishes so that he can gather their willing souls to pass on to a new world without decay. The world has stood still for several centuries now.

Good news is, the more people you save, the more energy God can pump into his magic machine to give you more time.
Bad news is, he needs about 7 days to create the machine he needs to transfer the souls over, and there's only about 4 days left before the world ends. So get crackin'~!

Gameplay: The game has a clock for each day, with every 10 real-life seconds translating to an in-game minute. As a result, 4 hours of gameplay translates to a day lost. There's no way to rewind time (but you can stop the clock temporarily, more on that). You spend your time completing quests, which earn you stats and gear. You do not level up in the conventional sense of battling monsters, instead your gear and your quest rewards dictate your level of power. The more quests you do, the more time you get back (until eventually you hopefully get the 7 days you need to finish the game, otherwise you lose).

Quests can sometimes be lighthearted, but usually they can be pretty dark, from people going insane, to a kid who's lonely because his parents have "disappeared" but he doesn't really get what's going on (because he's been a 9 year-old for the last 300 years).

Combat is interesting as a action/strategy game relying on real-time resource management combined with timing. Random chance is non-existent in this game, and grinding on enemies isn't a thing, so you definitely feel like every failure had the chance of being a victory (if you didn't suck so badly).

You are a sole unit in combat, with 3 different classes to choose from instantly in combat. Your classes are dictated by the gear you're using. Each class expends energy to use 1 of 4 actions specific to that equipped loadout, and each class regenerates energy separately (regenerating more energy if it is not the class you are currently using).

Each enemy has a stagger bar that increases when taking stagger damage and decreases over time. Many of your actions have varying degrees of real and stagger damage (spells deal high stagger but low real damage). If an enemy takes enough stagger damage, they become staggered and lose all of their resistances and take additional damage for a short time. Some enemies are nearly invulnerable except when staggered, so sometimes combat is a clock to stagger an enemy as quickly as possible before they can get off a slow and powerful attack.

Alternatively, some enemies have attacks that hit the entire ground, requiring you to find methods to stay in the air via actions. Other enemies have attacks that deal massive damage but can be blocked with a Guard action (and then be counterattacked for massive real and stagger damage).

There's a lot of various strategies to play this game, which is incredible considering there's no in-combat movement (your character moves around, but you don't actually move her).

When you kill enemies, you get this sort of "Valkyrie Point" resource that you can use in-and-out of combat, which lets you use special powers, with things like being able to heal, teleport to a location in the world, or even stop the doomsday clock for a little while. You could technically stop the doomsday clock, grind on more enemies, gather enough points to make a profit and almost pause the doomsday clock indefinitely, but some quests require specific things to happen on specific days, so eventually you HAVE to let the day end.



The balance of the game is great, the combat is very fluid. I played it on Hard and only ever thought it was impossible in 1-2 spots in the game. Now, one of those was the final boss of the hidden dungeon, Erishkigal, considered one of the hardest bosses in all of Final Fantasy, and it took me about 6 hours of repeating that FREAKING BOSS FIGHT to finally kill, but otherwise the game is very fun to play.

I'm usually a pretty chill guy. My wife and friends usually say I'm the nicest, calmest person they've ever met. But I swear to God I almost threw that controller like a 9 year old temper tantrum trying to kill that freaking demon squid.

Side Note: The final boss of the main story has an ultimate attack, called Dancing Mad, which is a nod to Kefka of Final Fantasy VI, as that was the name of his theme music.

[danzibr]

Lightning Returns!

Surprisingly, one of my favorite in the series. Like the whole series. XIII was pretty much garbage, XIII-2 was pretty much garbage, then Lightning Returns is an absolute gem. Not quite up there with VII, but def one of my favorite PS3 games.

[Man_Over_Game]

Not sure if this is super obscure or not, but I certainly loved it and I don't know of too many people who were into it:

Zeus: Master of Olympus
Real-time city building game akin to the Anno series, with a huge emphasis on economy over warfare. Unlike other city building games, your services to the people follow a sort of road system, one that you can easily build incorrectly. Make a road improperly leading off into nowhere, and now your food vendors, maintenance workers, and everyone else just walks away from all of the people they're supposed to be helping. In a way, it's a lot like a puzzle mixed with economy.

Several major events, like Cerberus attacking, can occur that require you to build temples to Gods to summon them to bless your city and defeat certain monsters, adding more challenges. The game does utilize some warfare, but it's rare, expensive, but can lead to some majorly interesting benefits (such as opening up new areas to build your empire).

[plungerhorse]

Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou. its a very trippy, very strange game that starts when the person you play dies.

[LibraryOgre]

Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou. its a very trippy, very strange game that starts when the person you play dies.

Dusk of the Gods had a character creation system that was "Play your character until they die, then play the game."

[plungerhorse]

Dusk of the Gods had a character creation system that was "Play your character until they die, then play the game."

huh sounds interesting

[DeadMech]

Outpost 2 anybody? Released in 1997 by Sierra. Relatively hard sci-fi RTS/colony management game. Came with a novella that unlocked chapter by chapter as you completed one of the 12 missions a piece for the 2 campaigns. It was pretty good if I remember. My dad was worried about how much reading I was doing in the game so he found the txt files and printed them off for me on his new printer... a decision that was far more costly and time consuming than I think he initially planned. Think it was a couple hundred pages and an entire day's worth of printing on a printer and back then you pretty much had to sit there and supervise them.

The last of humanity took to the stars aboard a colony ship just prior life on earth being obliterated by an asteroid. But running out of resources they are forced to settle on a mars like planet. Dry, cold, little atmosphere, certainly not breathable... oh and pelted by meteorites constantly. Two political factions arise. One, Eden, wants to terraform the planet. The other, Plymouth, wants to adapt to the harsh conditions. Plymouth steals some stuff and sets off to make their own colony, with blackjack and hookers and eventually shut down the communication satellite relied on to talk when Eden plans to go through with it. Unfortunately and unknowingly this was permanent. Eden's leadership starts getting nervous and in desperation to appease it's people and to prevent Plymouth from stopping them develop a microbe to break down molecules to their base elements planning to free oxygen and other gasses that is locked in the planet's crust. Turns out people are made of molecules this microbe breaks down. Also turns out that the lab containing this explodes suddenly and mysteriously unleashing this blight across the surface and into the crust of the planet before they bothered making a way to contain it. Chased by a flesh melting bacteria and beset by ever increasingly dangerous natural disasters as the once seismically dead world comes to life the two colonies are forced to resettle time and again in a desperate race to not only stay ahead of flesh melting bacteria but also to use what little resources can be gathered on the way to construct a new colony ship and escape from this doomed world to the stars. There not being time and material to make two ships forced the sides into conflict as they race to collect and analyze fragments of the crashed ship that brought them to the planet, mine the richest deposits of ore along the way, and eventually secure possession of the genebank containing the genetic legacy of our race. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, lightning storms, tornadoes, flesh melting, and eachother.. extinction is not an option.

Combat wasn't anything to write home about. There were 11 weapon system about half a which were shared between factions that you could mount on a guard post or 3 different classes of remote operated vehicle chassis ranging from quick but lightly armored, a mid range and the double barreled heavy but painfully slow tank. Though mostly the more interesting weapons weren't that useful there were sticky foam launchers than immobilized units or area denial mine launchers. But one side getting the longest ranged and highest dps lightning gun kinda made everything else obsolete and unbalanced. The other side got weak legged spiders that could capture emp'ed enemy units. Although I did once take out a player in multiplayer with one of the useless suicide bomb units since he built his advanced lab too close to his command center and I was able to drive one up to it.

Where the game really excelled was in the colony building and management. Managing your population was vital. From ensuring children were being born, an appropriate number of workers were educated to become scientists, feeding everyone, and ensuring their morale and thus their productivity and lifespan was up. You had to provide adequate recreation facilities, healthcare, non-overcrowded residential buildings, emergency services, and manage unemployment and underemployment levels. Your people would even get angry with you if you started targeting enemy civilian infrastructure.

Game's a bit dated by today's standards. Without features like rallying points and a 32 unit selection limit. You need to download a specific video codex to play the in game cinematics. And of course the Sierra online servers have long long since been shut down. But as abandon ware it should be pretty easy to get a hold of.

[danzibr]

Whoa. Outpost 2 sounds epic.

[factotum]

I think I played the first Outpost, never did the second. Mind you, looking at the screenshots on Mobygames.com, the second game looks bizarrely more primitive than the first one, with a top-down view instead of an isometric one?

[Man_Over_Game]

I think I played the first Outpost, never did the second. Mind you, looking at the screenshots on Mobygames.com, the second game looks bizarrely more primitive than the first one, with a top-down view instead of an isometric one?

I felt the same way about the Shadowrun game for the SNES vs. the Genesis. Genesis came afterwards and felt a lot more responsive, but it was much uglier and less fancy than the original. Kinda funny how that happens sometimes.

[Mightymosy]

Has 68k been mentioned? Alternate title is "Cho Ren Sha" (or real title, I really don't know, not much language in the game, not that you would need it)

The game is 968kb, but I have rarely seen packed so much so little.


If you happen to sit down with a friend AT THE SAME COMPUTER (yes I know, rare these days) give Liquid War a shot. Obscure, unusual gameplay, but worth a couple of matches.

By the way, since we're talking oldies, anyone know Wacky Wheels? That was funny :-) :-)

.@ MtG Shandalar: For someone into MtG this used to be the classic way to the soldify your rules knowledge, especially the turn structure (because the game automatically enforced the rules, unlike when you played paper Magic with your friends in real.
I used play a campaign for nostalgia every now and then, but unfortunately at some point it didn't work anymore on the newest PC. I might try using the tricks above, thanks for the hint!

[DeadMech]

Whoa. Outpost 2 sounds epic. I'd offer a download link but I'm not 100% if that would conform with forum rules. I'm led to believe it's abandonware but you can never be certain with the ownership of licenses and such.

I forgot one other feature of the game that was cool. It had a day night cycle you could watch roll across the landscape. In addition your buildings and vehicles had flood lights that lit up their surroundings. And in the case of at least the vehicles you could turn them off. The reason I was able to sneak a remote car with a bomb on it into one guys base to take out a singularly weak building and chain reaction that into killing his base was because of this. It's been a long time but I think units only showed up on the minimap if they were in daylight or if they had their lights on, thus being visible to satellite.


I think I played the first Outpost, never did the second. Mind you, looking at the screenshots on Mobygames.com, the second game looks bizarrely more primitive than the first one, with a top-down view instead of an isometric one?

Why you can't judge things from a single screen shot. Video of the games in action are better to distinguish. 1 is turn based and has a pretty limited sized area in which you can see the base you are making. They apparently consulted with some folks from nasa in order to learn what a colony on another planet would most likely look like end up looking like. Which is super cool.

[zlefin]

back in the day I played a fun game called Empire over telnet.
It was a multiplayer strategy game where each player ran a nation that would acquire and build up provinces, setup your economy. you'd build a variety of units, give them orders to cover various areas for combat. this was way back when so there was far less automation of things. managing the logistics of your empire was a major factor, as lack of local resources could severely hamper your war effort in any theater, and the combat system was fairly detailed.
it was one of those games you could really pour hours a day into (at least during warfare and it was one of those games that lasted months).


Trying to think of some other old games that I quite liked, but that aren't so obvious that most people (who lived through the era and played games) would probably have heard of.
Maybe Onslaught? an old side-scroller I played on the Amiga with a variety of findable weapons that you'd use to try to conquer territories.

[Algeh]

I just miss Sierra games in general. I grew up playing most of their games with my dad (including an...awkward day with one of the Leisure Suit Larrys when I don't think he quite realized what he'd be getting into trying to play with a little kid "helping" - I was SO MAD when I later discovered that he decided to "keep playing the game without me" and I didn't get to know what happened next...), starting with the first King's Quest on the Compaq portable and continuing through pretty much the life of the company and several of the game series. We got their advertising magazine, so I pretty much just thought of Sierra games when I thought of PC games for most of my childhood. (For the adventure games, we'd have one person controlling the character on screen and the other taking notes/making a bubble map and such, and collaborate on trying to figure out the puzzles.)

I'm sure there are indies out there making that kind of game now, but I don't think the internet era has been kind to those sorts of puzzles. It's more fun to take a while trying to figure it out yourself, discuss it with your friends who are also playing the game, and generally have the whole local whatever-playing community be stuck for a while (or have that one guy who gives annoying vague-yet-smug hints), and that's just not how it works now.

[Kato]

I'm sure there are indies out there making that kind of game now, but I don't think the internet era has been kind to those sorts of puzzles. It's more fun to take a while trying to figure it out yourself, discuss it with your friends who are also playing the game, and generally have the whole local whatever-playing community be stuck for a while (or have that one guy who gives annoying vague-yet-smug hints), and that's just not how it works now.

Yeah, the adventure market has shrunk but while you don't get AAA games from the genre, there's more than enough if you look for it. (for example the Deponia series imo is a decent successor to the Monkey Island games' weirdness)
Of course nowadays there's the internet so nobody gets stuck longer than they want to...
Also I think there are even quite a few free flash adventure games around.

[Eldan]

I just miss Sierra games in general. I grew up playing most of their games with my dad (including an...awkward day with one of the Leisure Suit Larrys when I don't think he quite realized what he'd be getting into trying to play with a little kid "helping" - I was SO MAD when I later discovered that he decided to "keep playing the game without me" and I didn't get to know what happened next...), starting with the first King's Quest on the Compaq portable and continuing through pretty much the life of the company and several of the game series. We got their advertising magazine, so I pretty much just thought of Sierra games when I thought of PC games for most of my childhood. (For the adventure games, we'd have one person controlling the character on screen and the other taking notes/making a bubble map and such, and collaborate on trying to figure out the puzzles.)

I'm sure there are indies out there making that kind of game now, but I don't think the internet era has been kind to those sorts of puzzles. It's more fun to take a while trying to figure it out yourself, discuss it with your friends who are also playing the game, and generally have the whole local whatever-playing community be stuck for a while (or have that one guy who gives annoying vague-yet-smug hints), and that's just not how it works now.

I know one German company that still does some of htem, and there's a few indies. You might try The Unavowed, where you play a team of urban fantasy investigators/monster hunters solving a series of connected cases. It's quite good, but unlike the Sierra games I remember, the solutions to the cases seem mostly logical, there's basically no pixel-hunting and my brother and I never got stuck anywhere and we never had to resort to "use everything with everything".

If you want some interesting puzzle solving, I can't recommend Return of the Obra Dinn enough. It's entirely unique. You solve the mystery of a shipwreck and what happened to all the individual crew members by walking through still images of death scenes. It's entirely unlike a point and click adventure gameplay wise, but for me, it scratched the same itch.

[LibraryOgre]

I just miss Sierra games in general. I grew up playing most of their games with my dad (including an...awkward day with one of the Leisure Suit Larrys when I don't think he quite realized what he'd be getting into trying to play with a little kid "helping" - I was SO MAD when I later discovered that he decided to "keep playing the game without me" and I didn't get to know what happened next...), starting with the first King's Quest on the Compaq portable and continuing through pretty much the life of the company and several of the game series. We got their advertising magazine, so I pretty much just thought of Sierra games when I thought of PC games for most of my childhood. (For the adventure games, we'd have one person controlling the character on screen and the other taking notes/making a bubble map and such, and collaborate on trying to figure out the puzzles.)

I'm sure there are indies out there making that kind of game now, but I don't think the internet era has been kind to those sorts of puzzles. It's more fun to take a while trying to figure it out yourself, discuss it with your friends who are also playing the game, and generally have the whole local whatever-playing community be stuck for a while (or have that one guy who gives annoying vague-yet-smug hints), and that's just not how it works now.

There's also agdinteractive (http://www.agdinteractive.com), which remade a few of the older Sierra games into VGA versions.

[danzibr]

Oh yeah!

There was an old online game called Penumbra. First person dungeon crawler. Could party up with other people. Play as a Thri-Kreen or Tabaxi. Final boss was the Lag Monster or something. Super op person was Erzivia Ktal or something. No idea what happened to it.

[TaRix]

back in the day I played a fun game called Empire over telnet.
It was a multiplayer strategy game where each player ran a nation that would acquire and build up provinces, setup your economy. you'd build a variety of units, give them orders to cover various areas for combat. this was way back when so there was far less automation of things. managing the logistics of your empire was a major factor, as lack of local resources could severely hamper your war effort in any theater, and the combat system was fairly detailed.
it was one of those games you could really pour hours a day into (at least during warfare and it was one of those games that lasted months).


Huh. I saw a remake of that on Steam, probably not by the original folk, though. Here's the store link. (https://store.steampowered.com/app/666640)

[Man_Over_Game]

A bit odd, haven't checked to see if it still exists, but about 10 years ago, I was a part of an online gaming site called World of Dungeons.

It was a text-based combat game where you filled a unique slot in a team, you programmed what you'd do when the group ran their next dungeon, and at a particular time of the day/week/month, your group would run that dungeon based on the scripts for each character and monster in it. It was a way for people with real jobs to participate in group efforts and raids and such without actually having to be there. The battle would be resolved instantly, so you can review how you did, what killed you, and try to assess with your group what needs to be prioritized on.

It has a lot more Pay-to-play elements now than it ever did, but I think it's still up and running. Used to run a pretty major guild on it in my highschool days.

[IthilanorStPete]

For the adventure/puzzle game lovers: I highly recommend checking out Hadean Lands. It's an old-style parser-based puzzle game, but with a lot of modern conveniences and some really interesting puzzles.

[Beleriphon]

I loved Captain Comic as a kid. Side scroller EGA game. It really was an open world side scroller, to this day I have no idea what it was actually about.

[DeadMech]

I just miss Sierra games in general. I grew up playing most of their games with my dad (including an...awkward day with one of the Leisure Suit Larrys when I don't think he quite realized what he'd be getting into trying to play with a little kid "helping" - I was SO MAD when I later discovered that he decided to "keep playing the game without me" and I didn't get to know what happened next...)

My dad had me beat the river jetski(?) section of one of those games for him since he couldn't. LOL

[Buji]

Bit of a bump, because I was going to post a thread like this originally but saw that this was here.

2 games that I really enjoyed, the first one being my favorite, are:

Legend of Legaia
There are a lot of other great games out there that I love, but Legend of Legaia for the PlayStation 1 would have to be my favorite, since it was one of the first turn based JRPGs that got me into the genre, aside from watching my sister play Final Fantasy games (which I also love).
Legend of Legaia (I'm gonna shorten it to LoL) I feel not too many people have heard of, or played. There was Legend of Legaia 2 for the PS2, but it was not as good, more characters, yes, but didn't have the same feeling.

LoL has 3 characters. The main character, Vahn, who is a martial artist from a small village. Noa, a mountain girl who was raised by a talking wolf, and Gala, monk from a monastery.
The story is simple; people lived peacefully until the "mist" or "miasma" appeared and started to anger Seru, creatures/objects with powers, and monsters, turning people into monsters as well. The 3 main characters have "Ra-Seru" which grant them protection from the Mist and allows them to capture certain monsters (summons) and enhance their physical abilities. It it your duty to destroy "Mist Generators" and revive the Genesis Trees around the world which repel the Mist.

What makes LoL so appealing to me was it's combat, it's also simple, but was unique for me. You are able to input commands (up, down, left, right) on a command line (which increases with level) to fight. Entering certain commands (such as UDU) will give you a special move (in this case, summersault) and you can chain them into each other. Example is UDU is high atk, low atk, summersault, DUUL is low atk, high atk, high atk, PK Combo, so you can chain UDUUL for high atk, low atk, SS, high atk, PKC, rather than doing them all separately like UDU, DUUL, since that uses too much space on your command bar.

LoL 2 uses the same combat system, but you're unable to "capture" summons, rather, each person has their own set of summons/skills, but overall I prefer LoL 1.

Eternal Eyes
Yet another PlayStation 1 game, this time it's a tactics game. It's another that there's a lot of better tactics games, but this was one of my first tactics games, aside from Final Fantasy Tactics (PS1).
A lot of people will say it's a dull game that rips off Battle Ogre (or is it Tactics Ogre?) or FF Tactics, but whatever.

It's a game that involves managing "pappets" which are creatures or dolls that can have special abilities, while playing like a normal Tactics game. If your pappet dies in battle, you can revive them, though they will have their abilities erased so you'd have to start from scratch. I believe you can also fuse pappets to make better ones. There isn't really much to say about this game other that I enjoyed it.

Edit:
Witch and the Hundred Knight
PS 3 game, with a remastered version for PS4, this is also one of my favorite games, since I love witches, especially crazy ones, such as Beatrice from Umineko no Naku Koroni.

Gameplay and I guess story on this one aren't really anything spectacular. It's a top down ish view (similar to Diablo or Path of Exile) where you play as the "Hundred Knight," a magical creature brought to life by the Swamp Witch Metallica (or Metallia for the English name), who is my favorite part of the game. The goal of the game is to release Mana from these pillars, which the mana is similar to a toxic swamp to people, so that Metallica can become the most powerful witch, since she cannot go outside of the swamp's presence.

It's by NIS America and Nippon Ichi, so art is similar to Disgaea.

More so than the gameplay or story (granted I like the story too), the most enjoyable part of the game is the characters. Metallica is a crude, cynical witch, who will do whatever it takes to get things done her way, this involves turning her mother into a rat and having horny male rats chase after her in the wild, nearly destroying an entire castle just so she can be invited to it the following year, and breaking the world altogether.

Edit 2:
Currently in the process of playing The Witch and the Hundred Knight 2, starring Chelka (my avatar) instead of Metallica, but doesn't have the same feel to it. Gameplay is basically the same, but story and characters aren't pulling me in.

[Deadline]

So, there's a new turn based game similar to X-COM that I picked up recently that may be worth a mention - Troublshooter. It's still in early release, but so far isn't terrible. The gist is that you are heading up your own licensed vigilante company (the licensed vigilantes are called "Troubleshooters") who works with the police to handle dangerous criminals in the fictional city of Valhalla. The characters that are part of your company progress through various job trees (and despite taking place in a near future setting, you've got folks wielding swords, fists, guns and magic), you have a base of operations (although you don't really do any of the base development of X-COM), and you get progressively better gear from either crafting, drops from enemies, or treasure boxes you can retrieve on the various battle maps. There appears to be a city district mechanic that is in development (jurisdiction), but isn't formally in place yet. There is an overarching story, but it's pretty meh.

Still, if you like the X-COM type combat, this one may be worth a look.

Along those same lines, has anyone checked out Phantom Doctrine? Because the premise of turn-based 80's Berlin spy action sounds awesome.

[zlefin]

Huh. I saw a remake of that on Steam, probably not by the original folk, though. Here's the store link. (https://store.steampowered.com/app/666640)
that's a different game entirely that goes by the name Empire. that game was actually pretty well known back in the day; unlike the internet-based game called Empire that I was referring to. The one I was referring to was also way more complex (much like the fancier tabletop wargames of old) and not related.

[Man_Over_Game]

Flying Heroes was a big one during my childhood. It's a First Person Shooter that is like Unreal Tournament in the sky. You have some means of flying transportation, and you try to shoot down your opposition. Since your method of transportation cares about momentum, you can surround your target in toxic gas or chase them down with a rocket launcher. Your form of transportation matters, with a Dragon having more mobility and less weaponry than, say, a zeppelin.

Use your excess mobility as a dragon rider to flip around your assailant and now the hunter becomes the hunted. Or use your shotgun barrage as the Zeppelin to mulch that dragon if he's dumb enough to get close to you as you chase him down.

It's incredibly fun and hard.

[Velaryon]

Edit:
Witch and the Hundred Knight
PS 3 game, with a remastered version for PS4, this is also one of my favorite games, since I love witches, especially crazy ones, such as Beatrice from Umineko no Naku Koroni.

Gameplay and I guess story on this one aren't really anything spectacular. It's a top down ish view (similar to Diablo or Path of Exile) where you play as the "Hundred Knight," a magical creature brought to life by the Swamp Witch Metallica (or Metallia for the English name), who is my favorite part of the game. The goal of the game is to release Mana from these pillars, which the mana is similar to a toxic swamp to people, so that Metallica can become the most powerful witch, since she cannot go outside of the swamp's presence.

I checked out the PS4 version from my library once. Then things got busy and I didn't have time to make it much past the intro, but it looked interesting. I had completely forgotten about it until I saw your post.

[Malphegor]

Psychic Force, for PS1

In the distant future, the far off year of 2010, brightly coloured fighters use their psychic power whilst flying high above the ruins of futuristic metropolises. Did a child Malphegor understand any of what was going on? No. Did he even fully understand the controls? No.


So basically it was a PS1 side view fighter with 3d controls where you had a combo meter and a limited space to fight in. From memory you could throw enemies into the walls of the space you fight in, and they'd get hurt, but you could move yourself or they could move themselves to the walls and not get hurt. I remember it being really hard when I was about 6 or 7 years old, it's probably just a button masher really but it's worth a look.

Has some decent J-Pop and the localisation on the english version is pretty much just the text, making the game even more confusing.

The main characters I remember are:

Burn Griffiths- a man who is such a pyrokinetic he took the most boring name ever!

Wendy Ryan- yes, they made the aussie girl who can control wind be named 'wendy'

Sonia- is actually Wendy's brother transformed into a female bioroid which is apparently a biological robot but ok isn't that just a human shut up dont poke holes in this, this might be the first blatantly genderflipped character in gaming maybe. Shame it's unwilling.

Rokudo Genma- Japanese warrior monk who thinks he's using magic and thinks all these psychiceers (because ESPer wasn't unique enough a name) are heretics.

It's a bizarre little game and the fact that it's all in flight and with weird 3d controls makes it a strange one to try out.

[Toric]

"Nobody has heard or" is a bit of an overstatement, but if you haven't heard of one of these I recommend at least looking into it.

Balloon Fight is one of those NES games that keep getting referenced in Smash Bros, Wario Ware. If you've seen an 8-bit dude wearing a helmet with helium balloons attached, that's the guy. Your only controls are flapping your arms to raise your altitude and slowly changing your left/right velocity. You fight birds with balloons attached to their heads, and beat them by contacting their balloons with your body, popping them. It supports two players, so yoi can pop your partner's balloons, because even in the 80's developers understood the need for PVP. Imagine Joust but your floaty physics change as you take damage, because you've got fewer balloons. A little extra nerd praise: this game introduced me to the concept of ball lightning.

Snow Bros is another NES game, in which you and a partner play two brothers who have been turned into snowmen. On each square stage you defeat enemies by flinging globs of snow at them until they're big round snowballs, then push them so they roll to the bottom of the stage, taking along anything in their path like a katamari. "Anything in their path" includes your partner so you can snag the sweet loot at the top of the screen uncontested, because even in the 80's developers understood the need for PVP. It was arcade quarter-gobblet hard so naturally my actual brother and I cheated with infinite lives to beat it.

Sanitarium is a point-and-click PC adventure game you can pick up on GOG. It's a horror game, one that relies on disorienting and unnerving you rather than jump scares. You aren't afraid of what's in the dark, you're afraid of what's responsible for what's happening around you in plain daylight. I don't recall the puzzles being very obtuse. There's some weird moon logic, but it makes sense in context and it's part of the player disorientation strategy. There's a complete screenshot playthrough at the LP Archive for those interested in checking it out.

[Hunter Noventa]

Snow Bros is another NES game, in which you and a partner play two brothers who have been turned into snowmen. On each square stage you defeat enemies by flinging globs of snow at them until they're big round snowballs, then push them so they roll to the bottom of the stage, taking along anything in their path like a katamari. "Anything in their path" includes your partner so you can snag the sweet loot at the top of the screen uncontested, because even in the 80's developers understood the need for PVP. It was arcade quarter-gobblet hard so naturally my actual brother and I cheated with infinite lives to beat it.

I remember when I was younger I'd go to a day care/activity center place some nights, and they had a Snow Bros arcade cabinet. that was a blast.

[Toric]

I remember when I was younger I'd go to a day care/activity center place some nights, and they had a Snow Bros arcade cabinet. that was a blast.

I've never seen a Snow Bros cabinet in person, that's so awesome!

[Knaight]

First order of business: DROD.

DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) is an excellent series of puzzle games. You play Beethro Budkin, professional dungeon exterminator in a tile based game where you occupy one tile, your sword occupies an adjacent tile and every turn you either stay still, move 1 tile in any direction, or rotate your sword 45 degrees. The rest of the puzzle elements fit around this, for a truly staggering variety. The series:

DROD: King Dugan's Dungeon
This is the first game, a bit rough around the edges, lacking the finesse that shows up in later puzzles. I wouldn't recommend starting here, unless JtRH proves a little too difficult for you.

DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold
This is where it really starts. 25 levels, done basically one after the other (there's some optional content around secret rooms where you traipse through segments again in weird orders), each of which has about a dozen rooms, each of which is a puzzle. These vary hugely, from a maze made entirely out of 1 use trapdoor tiles where you move around the 3 wide outer edge in an elaborate pattern to draw out the enemies hiding in narrow passageways where you can kill them to several lynchpin puzzles where you have to make a core realization, to horde management in rooms full of roach queens spawning giant dungeon roaches en mass every 30 turns, to moving you and several potion-copies of yourself through room segments simultaneously, each in a different bomb-maze. It's fantastic.

It also has one of the best recurring enemies in all video games. 39th Slayer, in a series of rooms where killing him is nonviable (there's no way to do so without specific threats), chasing you down as you do a bunch of puzzles. He crops up about every 4 floors or so on average, enough to be interesting without overwhelming the rest of the game.

DROD: The City Beneath
TCB amps up the plot, and amps up the difficulty.The numbered levels are gone, replaced by areas you move between with names, purposes, etc. The weirdness of the setting also starts coming into full bloom. More than anything though are the continued solid core of good puzzles, enabled by the new elements (a few enemies, a few tile types).

DROD: The Second Sky
TSS continues the plot from TCB, and spikes the difficulty to truly ludicrous proportions. If you really take to the series and really get a hang for how it works I'd recommend it. I'm still struggling to get through it at all though, and I'm pretty good at it. Not to the point where instead of solving puzzles I'm doing competitive turn minimization on them (and some do), but still.



There's also the spinoffs, one of which is basically a totally different game that's barely in the same genre.

DROD: Gunthro and the Epic Blunder
GEB follows a different character, and is essentially a prequel of sorts. It's self contained, and it's about as easy as KDD while being significantly better designed (it helps that it's the fourth in the series).

DROD: Smitemaster's Selections
These are a collection of smaller games, originally much cheaper but now comparable given that DROD has gotten cheap. They vary highly in difficulty and are generally pretty tightly themed. There's one that's basically all complex lock puzzles. I particularly like Complex Complex, a truly complicated facility with some brutal levels. It was the high point for series difficulty until TSS came out, and when you're looking for a real challenge I'd still recommend it.

DROD RPG: Tendry's Tale
This is the weird one. It's essentially one huge level, where all the rooms are part of the same puzzle. Enemies don't move, you have stats, and it's fundamentally about efficient pathing and resource use, improving yourself with stat gems and health potions to spend the least health winning fights with static monsters that are basically resource doors, while using keys effectively. It's almost a different subgenre of puzzle games, but it's also enjoyable.

Plus it has Tendry. Tendry is hilarious.

Flash DROD
A spinoff of KDD, rendered as a flash game. The rooms are a bit smaller but the core concept behind them is maintained, and it's a good way to try out the series without commiting to a download.

User Made Content
One of the cool things about the DROD series is that while the games are commercial all of them have demos, all the demos have complete engines, and these complete engines can, for free, play all user made content. It's a pretty ridiculously good deal.


Second order of business. Galapagos: Mendel's Escape is pretty neat. I haven't played it for ages, so who knows how it holds up. The concept is that there's a little autonomous spider robot that you're trying to help escape a testing facility by manipulating the environment around it.

[Khay]

First order of business: DROD.

Oh man, I remember that one. I once fell for one of those "200 games in one!" shareware CDs when I was a kid. The DROD demos were the high point (along with the demo for Blades of Avernum).

Also, I was recently reminded of Battlezone II: Combat Commander (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_II:_Combat_Commander), which... yeah, that's an awful title, but the game itself was pretty cool. It's an FPS/RTS hybrid, which plays better than you'd think but worse than they probably hoped for. Notably, the plot starts with fighting the alien "Scion" on the "Dark Planet", but then the good ending is somehow about terraforming and transhumanism and the military-industrial complex.

[Morgaln]

Brigandine: A turn-based strategy game for the PS1 where you had to conquer a continent using hero-led groups of monsters. I played that one to death, playing through it at least twice with every available faction.

Ascendancy: A Sci-Fi 4X game for the PC, released in 1995. You chose one of 21 unique alien races and set out to conquer the galaxy. Unfortunately, the AI was crap, so it was pretty much impossible to lose the game, but it was still loads of fun to play.

Warzone 2100: An old RTS, similar in style to the old Command & Conquer titles. You were playing a group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world that was rebuilding civilization and had to fend off other groups that had decided differently on what the new civilization should look like. What made it unique was that you would uncover pre-apocalyptic artifacts that would unlock new options for your units (locomotion types, bodies and weapon systems), and you had complete freedom in how to combine those to form your very own units. That's not all that special today, but it was in 1999.

There are probably more that I just can't think of right now. I'll have to check my game collection when I get home.

I also second Legend of Mana, Legend of Dragoon and Legend of Legaia (huh, quite a legendary list :P); all of these are awesome games that I loved to play.

[Man_Over_Game]

A lot of people don't know this, but there are actually 3 Secret of Mana games. The Secret of Mana everyone recognizes is actually the second game in the series.

The first one was released out of Japan as Final Fantasy Adventure. It was remade into a Gameboy Advance game called Sword of Mana, which I actually had a copy of. It's not very good, though.



The third Secret of Mana game was never released outside of Japan, called Seiken Densetsu 3. It's basically Secret of Mana, but better. You pick one main protagonist and two sidekicks out of 6 when you start the game, each with their own goals, plots and combat specialities. So if you play a character you don't like, you can just make a new save with a new party and a new plot!

There's an unofficial English translation patch you can get for it, so that you can enjoy the game in English.

There was also a really good PS1 game of the series, called Legend of Mana, which has a TON of sidekicks, playstyles, magic, and miniature worlds and plots to explore. I will warn you, though, nothing will make sense as you play it, as the game is weirdly designed so that you build the world/plot as you play, changing with how you play/build it. As a result, nothing really makes that much sense, and you might need a guide to figure out what the hell you're doing.

[factotum]

Warzone 2100: An old RTS, similar in style to the old Command & Conquer titles.

Worth noting here that Warzone 2100 went open source (both program and assets) a while ago, so you can download and run it for free if you want.

[Toric]

The third Secret of Mana game was never released outside of Japan, called Seiken Densetsu 3. It's basically Secret of Mana, but better. You pick one main protagonist and two sidekicks out of 6 when you start the game, each with their own goals, plots and combat specialities. So if you play a character you don't like, you can just make a new save with a new party and a new plot!

There's an unofficial English translation patch you can get for it, so that you can enjoy the game in English.

Man that is such a good game. What I really like about it is there's three subplots with their own final bosses, each tied to one pair of the six possible party members. So you can pick one sidekick who shares your main's final boss for a tighter endgame, or pick one character from each subplot for more of a "ragtag group united by a greater threat" feel.

[Rodin]

Worth noting here that Warzone 2100 went open source (both program and assets) a while ago, so you can download and run it for free if you want.

I think I actually did go back to that game at one point. It...hasn't aged well. Then again, I don't think most RTS games have done. After all the Red Alert talk in the other thread I went and picked up the original Red Alert again. The controls are super clunky by modern standards and things like soldiers charging forward until they're hit by the splash damage of their fellows was just infuriating. I think I lost more units to friendly fire than I did to the enemies.

Still, I have fond memories of Warzone 2100 as the game that made me buy my own PC for the first time. It was the first game I wanted that required a 3D accelerator on the graphics card, rather than having that as an optional graphics boost.

[Marywn]

Crosscode.

[0wca88]

Revenant (1999) - great game.

[Sian]

While I doubt that noone heard of it, I somehow doubt that many remember Runescape ... It’s still alive and kicking and it have stolen most of my gaming time since early January

[factotum]

Revenant (1999) - great game.

I remember that one--it's an RPG where you're playing a resurrected corpse, right? (And no, nothing like Dark Souls!).

[Kato]

Ascendancy: A Sci-Fi 4X game for the PC, released in 1995. You chose one of 21 unique alien races and set out to conquer the galaxy. Unfortunately, the AI was crap, so it was pretty much impossible to lose the game, but it was still loads of fun to play.
[QUOTE]
Man, I loved that game despite it's flaws. I think there was a new version at some point but from what I heard it's not nearly as good.

[QUOTE=Man_Over_Game;23841432]A lot of people don't know this, but there are actually 3 Secret of Mana games. The Secret of Mana everyone recognizes is actually the second game in the series.

The first one was released out of Japan as Final Fantasy Adventure. It was remade into a Gameboy Advance game called Sword of Mana, which I actually had a copy of. It's not very good, though.



The third Secret of Mana game was never released outside of Japan, called Seiken Densetsu 3. It's basically Secret of Mana, but better. You pick one main protagonist and two sidekicks out of 6 when you start the game, each with their own goals, plots and combat specialities. So if you play a character you don't like, you can just make a new save with a new party and a new plot!

There's an unofficial English translation patch you can get for it, so that you can enjoy the game in English.


I think SD 3 is actually pretty well known, at least among people who are interested in the series :smallconfused: To the point where I'm surprised Nintendo / SE still hasn't bothered to release it in the west.

[T.G. Oskar]

The third Secret of Mana game was never released outside of Japan, called Seiken Densetsu 3. It's basically Secret of Mana, but better. You pick one main protagonist and two sidekicks out of 6 when you start the game, each with their own goals, plots and combat specialities. So if you play a character you don't like, you can just make a new save with a new party and a new plot!

There's an unofficial English translation patch you can get for it, so that you can enjoy the game in English.


Man that is such a good game. What I really like about it is there's three subplots with their own final bosses, each tied to one pair of the six possible party members. So you can pick one sidekick who shares your main's final boss for a tighter endgame, or pick one character from each subplot for more of a "ragtag group united by a greater threat" feel.

It's also one of the few games I consider to have perfect balance in terms of gameplay. While you had a degree of level limitation (you needed at least level 16 to make the first upgrade, and then somewhere between 32 and 36 to make the second), you could beat the game regardless of your team choice. It's very difficult to make a "worst possible" team; you really have to make the effort of analyzing what's the worst possible team, and even then, you can finish the game in the expected power level. That's what I consider perfect balance; while there's an obvious "best choice" and obvious "worst choice", the difference between the two in terms of difficulty is so minimal that the game keeps being challenging with the "best" and possible to win with the "worst".


There was also a really good PS1 game of the series, called Legend of Mana, which has a TON of sidekicks, playstyles, magic, and miniature worlds and plots to explore. I will warn you, though, nothing will make sense as you play it, as the game is weirdly designed so that you build the world/plot as you play, changing with how you play/build it. As a result, nothing really makes that much sense, and you might need a guide to figure out what the hell you're doing.

Don't forget it also has an awesome soundtrack. Plus the techniques had pretty awesome animations and made some sense if you think about it. Magic, on the other hand...

[danzibr]

Man. Now I want to pick back up SD3. Started it yeeeeears ago but never finished.

[Aspheric]

I'm not terribly in touch with games people have and haven't heard of, but I thought of some titles that I haven't really heard people discuss much.

Va-11 Hall-A is a really cool visual novel with a drink mixing minigame about working a bar in a cyberpunk dystopia. It has a really good soundtrack, a colourful cast of characters, and it's a queer story that isn't a coming-out narrative, and there's not too many of those around. I've been meaning to play through it again, but haven't found the time yet!

ANATOMY is a super creepy horror game centered around a house. I don't want to say anymore because it's really good! Frankly, all of Kitty Horrorshow's games could qualify, and most of them are free, too. They're definitely not "friendly," by any means, but they're really cool experiences, as chilling and skin-crawling as they might be.

continue?9876543210 made a small splash when it came out, but since it's been relatively forgotten since, I'm including it here. Basically, you play as an RPG character slated to be deleted by a Java-script algorithm, and have to do what you can to survive garbage collection for as long as possible. It's a little clunky, but it's one of the most conceptually interesting games I've ever seen.

This thread is reminding me of the series Superbunnyhop made on games he had only ever seen in his inbox. There were a ton of real gems in those videos, too...

[LibraryOgre]

One that I keep going back to in my mind (which I may have mentioned on this thread before) was Dusk of the Gods. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dusk_of_the_Gods) Pretty basic by today's standards, it was an open-world exploration game where you played as an Einherjar, out to not only start Ragnarok but, if you paid attention and played well, prevent the deaths of the Gods at Ragnarok. You could tackle things in pretty much any order, could haul the head of Mimir around to ask it questions, and could avert several of the prophesied deaths at Ragnarok (Blind Hodur could be given an amulet that would let him avoid being killed by Vidar for his role in the slaying of Baldur; Freyr's man Skirnir could be given a Rod of Beguiling, which would let Freyr keep his sword for Ragnarok, and thus survive)

HUGE world, and a bit achronological (since Beowulf-king can give you the task of killing the Dragon, and Hrothgir can give you the task of killing Grendel AND his mother). Asking around makes some things a lot easier and faster (you can borrow Skidbladnir from Frey, which means you don't have to SWIM to Iceland). Character creation is a minigame where you play out your character's life until your death, going on raids and getting into battles and visiting temples and towers of learning.

[Man_Over_Game]

One that I keep going back to in my mind (which I may have mentioned on this thread before) was Dusk of the Gods. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dusk_of_the_Gods) Pretty basic by today's standards, it was an open-world exploration game where you played as an Einherjar, out to not only start Ragnarok but, if you paid attention and played well, prevent the deaths of the Gods at Ragnarok. You could tackle things in pretty much any order, could haul the head of Mimir around to ask it questions, and could avert several of the prophesied deaths at Ragnarok (Blind Hodur could be given an amulet that would let him avoid being killed by Vidar for his role in the slaying of Baldur; Freyr's man Skirnir could be given a Rod of Beguiling, which would let Freyr keep his sword for Ragnarok, and thus survive)

HUGE world, and a bit achronological (since Beowulf-king can give you the task of killing the Dragon, and Hrothgir can give you the task of killing Grendel AND his mother). Asking around makes some things a lot easier and faster (you can borrow Skidbladnir from Frey, which means you don't have to SWIM to Iceland). Character creation is a minigame where you play out your character's life until your death, going on raids and getting into battles and visiting temples and towers of learning.

Reminds me of the Valkyrie Profile games. You play as a Valkyrie, gathering souls that die in the mortal world to fight with you as ghosts. After leveling them up, you send them up to Valhalla for them to serve as Einherjar, where their training and talents will earn you praise and many benefits. Of course, now you're mostly consisted of a high level party with one less unit, and you have to take in a noobie to fill in the spot you just sold.

It becomes this weirdly rotating door of "Get a Hero, level up your party, sell the highest level hero for profit, unlock a better tier of heroes". The thing that stood out to me, hard, was how uncaring the Valkyrie was. You genuinely do not care, at all, about mortals, and sometimes you just watch and wait for them to die horrifically (to bandits, monsters, whatever) just so you can claim your new (temporary) addition to the army.

[Hunter Noventa]

Reminds me of the Valkyrie Profile games. You play as a Valkyrie, gathering souls that die in the mortal world to fight with you as ghosts. After leveling them up, you send them up to Valhalla for them to serve as Einherjar, where their training and talents will earn you praise and many benefits. Of course, now you're mostly consisted of a high level party with one less unit, and you have to take in a noobie to fill in the spot you just sold.

It becomes this weirdly rotating door of "Get a Hero, level up your party, sell the highest level hero for profit, unlock a better tier of heroes". The thing that stood out to me, hard, was how uncaring the Valkyrie was. You genuinely do not care, at all, about mortals, and sometimes you just watch and wait for them to die horrifically (to bandits, monsters, whatever) just so you can claim your new (temporary) addition to the army.

That kind of made Valkyrie Profile a really great game, honestly. That's exactly how a Valkyrie would likely act. And man that was a good game.

[Man_Over_Game]

That kind of made Valkyrie Profile a really great game, honestly. That's exactly how a Valkyrie would likely act. And man that was a good game.

If you want to play the evil, mortal version of a Valkyrie in the same universe, check out Covenant of the Plume. I mentioned it earlier in the thread. It's a brutally difficult tactics game that becomes drastically easier when you sell the souls of your friends, and takes place in the Valkyrie Profile universe.

[Hunter Noventa]

If you want to play the evil, mortal version of a Valkyrie in the same universe, check out Covenant of the Plume. I mentioned it earlier in the thread. It's a brutally difficult tactics game that becomes drastically easier when you sell the souls of your friends, and takes place in the Valkyrie Profile universe.

Yeah I tried that one out, couldn't get into it. Or Valkyrie Profile 2, for that matter.

[deuterio12]

If you want to play the evil, mortal version of a Valkyrie in the same universe, check out Covenant of the Plume. I mentioned it earlier in the thread. It's a brutally difficult tactics game that becomes drastically easier when you sell the souls of your friends, and takes place in the Valkyrie Profile universe.

A funny detail is that in the original Valkyrie profile, if you fail to deliver enough heroes in time (since there is a clock counting down most of the time, Ragnarock's not gonna wait forever), then a godess with cheater stats will descend to smite you down for not doing your job.

While in Covenant of the Plume if you go full evil and start sacrificing friends left, right and center for ultimate power, then that's what'll trigger a goddess with cheater stats to come down and smite your ass for doing your job too well.

And of course in Covenant of the Plume

In the final battle you need to fight everybody who you sacrificed.

[The Glyphstone]

Ascendancy: A Sci-Fi 4X game for the PC, released in 1995. You chose one of 21 unique alien races and set out to conquer the galaxy. Unfortunately, the AI was crap, so it was pretty much impossible to lose the game, but it was still loads of fun to play.

Man, I loved that game despite it's flaws. I think there was a new version at some point but from what I heard it's not nearly as good.



I still play Ascendancy once in a while for the nostalgia hit. They re-released it for the iPhone as a mobile game with the code otherwise untouched (AI included), and it's basically crap because the game was never intended to be played by touchscreen.

[danzibr]

Oh man. I remembered a couple.

Ib and Schuld. Both RPG Maker horror games. Both fantastic (not RPGs btw).

[Man_Over_Game]

Oh man. I remembered a couple.

Ib and Schuld. Both RPG Maker horror games. Both fantastic (not RPGs btw).

That's the most disappointing part about RPG-maker. I like RPGs, but it's really hard to find decent ones made with RPG-maker. They usually have shoddy plots, poor balance, bad graphic/world design, etc. The best things to come out of RPG-Maker were, ironically, not RPGs. Which is a shame if you actually like the genre.

[danzibr]

That's the most disappointing part about RPG-maker. I like RPGs, but it's really hard to find decent ones made with RPG-maker. They usually have shoddy plots, poor balance, bad graphic/world design, etc. The best things to come out of RPG-Maker were, ironically, not RPGs. Which is a shame if you actually like the genre.
I agree with this like 95%. Most traditional RPGs (like with random battles) that I played from RPG Maker were trash, EXCEPT for A Blurred Line (and The Way was great... but I disabled random battles).

Anyway. Right, it’s interesting almost all the good games aren’t even RPGs.

[Man_Over_Game]

I agree with this like 95%. Most traditional RPGs (like with random battles) that I played from RPG Maker were trash, EXCEPT for A Blurred Line (and The Way was great... but I disabled random battles).

Anyway. Right, it’s interesting almost all the good games aren’t even RPGs.

I think it was made with Game Maker, but one of my favorite RPGs is Exit Fate. I posted about it earlier on the thread. Check it out. It is a LOT like Suikoden.

[Sian]

I agree with this like 95%. Most traditional RPGs (like with random battles) that I played from RPG Maker were trash, EXCEPT for A Blurred Line (and The Way was great... but I disabled random battles).

Anyway. Right, it’s interesting almost all the good games aren’t even RPGs.

Try Final Fantasy: Endless Nova... it’s just about as strong and complex as the old classical FF games that it obviously tries to emulate, and made in rpg maker 2000

[LibraryOgre]

An old favorite: Broderbund's Ancient Art of War. Flood of nostalgia for it just now.

[danzibr]

I think it was made with Game Maker, but one of my favorite RPGs is Exit Fate. I posted about it earlier on the thread. Check it out. It is a LOT like Suikoden.
Oh yeah! With the white haired doctor dude sporting the hyper masculine jaw line sharing my name. Yeah I started it, then got a new computer. Gotta try it again. It was RPGMaker btw.

Try Final Fantasy: Endless Nova... it’s just about as strong and complex as the old classical FF games that it obviously tries to emulate, and made in rpg maker 2000
Sounds nice! I’ll keep that in mind.

[NovenFromTheSun]

I don’t hear a lot of mentions of Grapple Force Rena around most sites, does anyone else here know of it? It’s a platformer where you can grab onto distant objects like enemies or walls.

[MinimanMidget]

Someone already said Triplane Turmoil, but how about Liero? Essentially a real-time version of Worms. Also, Skyroads! Fast-paced scrolling platformer.

Edit: Wow, I almost forgot Tyrian, my favourite vertical scrolling shooter of all time.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Here's one I played that I'd love to be able to find again, except I can't remember the name. Mid 90s, I think. Same era as Loom and maybe the Gold Box D&D games (at least the early ones).

It was an isometric, tile-based (like a rogue-like, everyone moves when you do) RPG. Things I remember:

No classes--at the start you pick some things you're good (weapons, magic, etc) at but can learn others. Picking any weapon but swords was a mistake due to plot reasons later, but...

Start out an orphan in a temple/monastery that is raided by the forces of evil. The only survivor, you take a tunnel through underground dungeons to go kill the big bad. Along the way you find an intelligent sword that gains power by killing things. There's an obvious in retrospect plot twist at the end if you got the good ending.

I remember the box was black and promised "over 100 hours of gameplay".

Anyone know a name for this?

[Otomodachi]

Here's one I played that I'd love to be able to find again, except I can't remember the name. Mid 90s, I think. Same era as Loom and maybe the Gold Box D&D games (at least the early ones).

It was an isometric, tile-based (like a rogue-like, everyone moves when you do) RPG. Things I remember:

No classes--at the start you pick some things you're good (weapons, magic, etc) at but can learn others. Picking any weapon but swords was a mistake due to plot reasons later, but...

Start out an orphan in a temple/monastery that is raided by the forces of evil. The only survivor, you take a tunnel through underground dungeons to go kill the big bad. Along the way you find an intelligent sword that gains power by killing things. There's an obvious in retrospect plot twist at the end if you got the good ending.

I remember the box was black and promised "over 100 hours of gameplay".

Anyone know a name for this?

Sounds vaguely like Avernum... did you have one character, or a party? Was it Diablo-esque? Do you see it anywhere on this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_games_with_isometric_graphics) list?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Sounds vaguely like Avernum... did you have one character, or a party? Was it Diablo-esque? Do you see it anywhere on this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_games_with_isometric_graphics) list?

Thanks! I found it. It was The Summoning (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Summoning_(video_game)).

[mrcarter11]

I'm not sure it was a "good" game per say, but I lost countless hours of my childhood to Unholy War. To my knowledge it was only released on the PS1. Pretty basic story line, tech advanced society needs special resource from magical type planet, and the campaign can be played out from either side. The maps are hexagonal, units have special abilities you can activate for a certain amount of the previously mentioned special resource that you harvest on map. When units fight it changes from a board game set up to something more akin to mortal combat. Each unit has special abilities and basic attacks. The fighting portion was pretty great, you can move in any direction, and several units had vertical moment abilities, there were map hazards to avoid.
It was just a lot of silly fun to me.

[Man_Over_Game]

I'm not sure it was a "good" game per say, but I lost countless hours of my childhood to Unholy War. To my knowledge it was only released on the PS1. Pretty basic story line, tech advanced society needs special resource from magical type planet, and the campaign can be played out from either side. The maps are hexagonal, units have special abilities you can activate for a certain amount of the previously mentioned special resource that you harvest on map. When units fight it changes from a board game set up to something more akin to mortal combat. Each unit has special abilities and basic attacks. The fighting portion was pretty great, you can move in any direction, and several units had vertical moment abilities, there were map hazards to avoid.
It was just a lot of silly fun to me.

+1 for Unholy War. I posted it earlier in the thread, still one of my favorites. Like a better Archon. I wish there were more games of this genre, but the only other one I was able to find that was a little more updated was Wrath Unleashed, which wasn't quite as good. It wasn't quite as "good unbalanced" (where some units were designed to kill other units, creating a rock-paper-scissors balance system) as Unholy War, the battle arenas were really stale, and you could sometimes win just by learning a really strong combo with a particular unit with little strategy.

[BeerMug Paladin]

+1 for Unholy War. I posted it earlier in the thread, still one of my favorites. Like a better Archon. I wish there were more games of this genre, but the only other one I was able to find that was a little more updated was Wrath Unleashed, which wasn't quite as good. It wasn't quite as "good unbalanced" (where some units were designed to kill other units, creating a rock-paper-scissors balance system) as Unholy War, the battle arenas were really stale, and you could sometimes win just by learning a really strong combo with a particular unit with little strategy.

Star Control (original only) was also a game of this type.

Also, I believe Archon, Star Control and Unholy War were all made by the same people, so maybe they'll eventually make a new one.

[KineticDiplomat]

Has Age of Decadence got a mention?

Extraordinary game. The type of game you finally stagger through a play through and go “wow, that was challenging and new and a pretty good story and goddam if it ever stopped to holding your hand”. Then you play again.

And realize the story isn’t just good. It’s an intricate multi layer, multi perspective, multi world state story that is thorough and well thought through, and that holy $&@! did you even realize that this entire other story was running in parallel, and that there were entire areas with vastly different lore you never saw? And that almost every situation has multiple solutions, and not just “kill, sneak, talk” but actually entire different paths?

And then you play a third time. And would you know it, there was actually a way to talk to demons of the abyss? How the hell did you miss that?

Round four. Wait. I can summon a god?

Round five. Oh. That makes so much more sense.

Round six. You can actually do that? You can sell that guy up the river to the other guy? And the only way to know is consider being a treacherous SOB to begin with, because it makes sense that there isn’t a quest prompt saying “and if, just because, you want to sell out your current boss, well of course you can?”

Round Seven. There’s a way to BE a god? It’s not just a different ending, but a different end path that you have to discover on your own?

And on. And on.

[deuterio12]

Has Age of Decadence got a mention?

I had noticed that game on steam but never got around to trying it out since I thought they were overpromising. However from your experience seems like it does deliver so I'll see if I can make some time to play it, thanks!

[jdizzlean]

Total Annihilation - pc from the late 90s i think, early RTS war game, great fun

Tribes 1: pioneering FPS game from late 90's

Leisure Suit Larry - 80s/90s game maybe, but adults only for mostly crude antics



...damn i'm getting old.

[Triaxx]

Total Annihilation got lost in the storm that was StarCraft, despite being the better game in my opinion.

[LibraryOgre]

Leisure Suit Larry - 80s/90s game maybe, but adults only for mostly crude antics



Remember having to answer history questions to prove your age in the first game?

[Driderman]

Remember having to answer history questions to prove your age in the first game?

We had that game on 3.5'' discs when I was a kid and for the longest time I though the copy-protection WAS the game :smallbiggrin:

[LibraryOgre]

We had that game on 3.5'' discs when I was a kid and for the longest time I though the copy-protection WAS the game :smallbiggrin:

3.5"? Luxury! We played on 5.25" disks and a CGA monitor and we liked it! :smallbiggrin:

[Velaryon]

Does anyone here remember an old shareware tank combat game called Scorched Earth from back in the early 90s? It was like Worms before Worms existed.

https://dosgames.com/screens/tankwars.gif

[Silfir]

Absolutely, though the one I remember didn't look like that. I know that one under the name of Tank Wars. (The picture itself is called tankwars.gif, so I'm dead certain I'm right.) Maybe a misattributed screen shot?

I remember Scorched Earth being legitimately impressive in terms of depth. There were tons of weapons in it, and you could have like 16 tanks in the game at once. If you look for tank-based artillery games made in much more recent years made by indies, they tend to allow for four players, sometimes only two.

Worms could be said to be what the artillery genre moved into - after Worms nobody was really talking about the "tank-based" games anymore, even if they were still being made. Worms Armageddon is essentially the peak of the genre. Unless you want to count Angry Birds, like Wikipedia does. And even then Worms Armageddon probably beats any incarnation of that. (If only because it's multiplayer.)

[LibraryOgre]

Does anyone here remember an old shareware tank combat game called Scorched Earth from back in the early 90s? It was like Worms before Worms existed.

https://dosgames.com/screens/tankwars.gif

Oh, yeah. It was great fun. Rounds that made ground, variable gravity, wind, all sorts of things.

[Man_Over_Game]

I particularly liked a game called Alundra for the PS1. It was a lot like Link to the Past, but it was more serious, the protagonist was a girl, and it had jumping as a major part of the gameplay. I'm not sure how well it holds up now, though, since I haven't played it in 15+ years. If I remember correctly, you had the power to go into people's dreams, where demons occasionally lurked.

[TaRix]

Does anyone here remember an old shareware tank combat game called Scorched Earth from back in the early 90s? It was like Worms before Worms existed.

Well, if you're looking to scratch that itch, ShellShock Live is probably as close to a spiritual successor as you'd find, though I haven't really done any particular searching of my own.

I remember it, though; it made the rounds in electronics class in high school. The version I played was a Mac variant: Dome Wars.

Another thing I haven't tried or researched is SSL2, apparently on some game sites.

edit: fixed quote block

[Velaryon]

Absolutely, though the one I remember didn't look like that. I know that one under the name of Tank Wars. (The picture itself is called tankwars.gif, so I'm dead certain I'm right.) Maybe a misattributed screen shot?

I remember Scorched Earth being legitimately impressive in terms of depth. There were tons of weapons in it, and you could have like 16 tanks in the game at once. If you look for tank-based artillery games made in much more recent years made by indies, they tend to allow for four players, sometimes only two.

This definitely looks like the game I knew as Scorched Earth, though I only remember being able to up to tanks. I loved opening rounds with the MIRV or Death's Head missiles for maximum chaos and carnage. Since it was a shareware game, I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple variations of it making the rounds back then.

Preteen me also had a great amount of immature fun opening up the dialogue file in DOS and editing all the death lines into various forms of crude sexual or toilet humor.


Worms could be said to be what the artillery genre moved into - after Worms nobody was really talking about the "tank-based" games anymore, even if they were still being made. Worms Armageddon is essentially the peak of the genre. Unless you want to count Angry Birds, like Wikipedia does. And even then Worms Armageddon probably beats any incarnation of that. (If only because it's multiplayer.)

I preferred Worms 2 over Armageddon, because it had a much higher degree of possible customization... plus I knew all the cheats to start with the secret weapons like the Concrete Donkey.

[Gnoman]

Scorched Earth 1.2 (along with 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5) looks like this:


https://www.dropbox.com/s/pgr4ntpaftikldv/scorch.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pgr4ntpaftikldv/scorch.png?dl=0

[Rodin]

Gunbound was another notable of the genre, with 4v4 combat between different classes of tank. It was a lot of fun casually but got silly at higher levels, with players printing out angle and wind charts to make it so they could land otherwise impossible shots.

Unfortunately I think the original version got shut down, and while it still exists the format has been changed a lot and it's been more heavily monetized. Shame.

[Toric]

I just remembered Sudeki for the original XBox.

It's a traditional action RPG. You've got your Swordguy Herodude and you get into random battles. The arena is limited to a ring (which is procedurally generated based on where you contacted the enemy so you can accidentally give yourself a tiny battleground) and you run Swordguy around on the screen whacking things into the sword. Then you get your standard Princess Magegirl. And while Swordguy is hitting things she's holding her staff like a rifle and shooting things. And then you can switch to control Magegirl and THIS IS AN FPS! You have a first-person view while controlling this girl, your staff functions like a pistol, you can get critical hits via headshots I believe, and while Swordguy's new swords just get elemental damage Magegirl's staffs include things like a flamethrower (fire, obviously), a lightning shotgun, and an ice LMG. And then one of your other two party members is a steampunk inventor with sci-fi guns who functions identically. That was such a great gameplay surprise: an FPS nestled inside an action RPG.

[Man_Over_Game]

I just remembered Sudeki for the original XBox.

It's a traditional action RPG. You've got your Swordguy Herodude and you get into random battles. The arena is limited to a ring (which is procedurally generated based on where you contacted the enemy so you can accidentally give yourself a tiny battleground) and you run Swordguy around on the screen whacking things into the sword. Then you get your standard Princess Magegirl. And while Swordguy is hitting things she's holding her staff like a rifle and shooting things. And then you can switch to control Magegirl and THIS IS AN FPS! You have a first-person view while controlling this girl, your staff functions like a pistol, you can get critical hits via headshots I believe, and while Swordguy's new swords just get elemental damage Magegirl's staffs include things like a flamethrower (fire, obviously), a lightning shotgun, and an ice LMG. And then one of your other two party members is a steampunk inventor with sci-fi guns who functions identically. That was such a great gameplay surprise: an FPS nestled inside an action RPG.

Sounds like a lot of fun. I felt a similar feeling from Dragon's Dogma. The game allows you to play a reaction-based Warrior, a third-person shooter Ranger, or a battlefield-controlling mage. It even allows you to mix-and-match the classes into hybrid classes (with a Ranger+Mage becoming a Magick Archer that shoots homing arrows that are less precise but have special effects and allow you to run as you shoot easily).

I might try to find a playable copy, but I doubt I'll have much luck, with how obscure AND old it is.

[sihnfahl]

I just remembered Sudeki for the original XBox.
And the fourth a catgirl ninja-type. Complete with claws that let you traverse special walls.

[IthilanorStPete]

Gunbound was another notable of the genre, with 4v4 combat between different classes of tank. It was a lot of fun casually but got silly at higher levels, with players printing out angle and wind charts to make it so they could land otherwise impossible shots.

Unfortunately I think the original version got shut down, and while it still exists the format has been changed a lot and it's been more heavily monetized. Shame.

I remember playing Gunbound! That was a pretty fun game.

[Man_Over_Game]

Not sure how "unknown" it was, but Gunstar Heroes is an amazing shooter platformer that had cooperative gameplay and it had a unique mechanic where you would load two different gun elements that modified what kind of shots you did. Fire + Homing meant you controlled a flaming sphere with your movement that'd float around the screen separate from your character, but Fire + Fire meant you had a difficult to use flamethrower that dealt stupid amounts of damage. You'd mix and match different gun elements to deal with specific bosses, and the game was amazingly done. The bosses themselves were interesting, and the final level was ludicrously fun as a villain's boardgame/funhouse that changed based on the things you did (or just how the dice rolled).

[deuterio12]

Not sure how "unknown" it was, but Gunstar Heroes is an amazing shooter platformer that had cooperative gameplay and it had a unique mechanic where you would load two different gun elements that modified what kind of shots you did. Fire + Homing meant you controlled a flaming sphere with your movement that'd float around the screen separate from your character, but Fire + Fire meant you had a difficult to use flamethrower that dealt stupid amounts of damage. You'd mix and match different gun elements to deal with specific bosses, and the game was amazingly done. The bosses themselves were interesting, and the final level was ludicrously fun as a villain's boardgame/funhouse that changed based on the things you did (or just how the dice rolled).

I loved that back in the day, but I think you're misrembering things a bit since the boardgame/funhouse level was actually just the fourth selectable stage out of 4 so you could actually play it first and after completing all 4 initial stages then there was still other levels to play.

Not only the bosses, the rest of the stages were plenty of fun with mooks and things exploding everywhere all the time.

Got a sequel for the GBA which is probably less known and has an interesting gimmick that if you play it on easy mode, the plot will be super simplified to Saturdary Cartoon levels, but the harder the difficulty you pick, suddenly the story starts to get deeper and more serious.

[Toric]

Got a sequel for the GBA which is probably less known and has an interesting gimmick that if you play it on easy mode, the plot will be super simplified to Saturdary Cartoon levels, but the harder the difficulty you pick, suddenly the story starts to get deeper and more serious.

That's a wonderful gimmick I've never heard before! Gives a great reason to replay the game.

[tonberrian]

I always really liked the King's Bounty series, at least the later series. You get to choose your class - warrior, paladin, or mage - and then you go collect dudes to fight in battles a la Heroes of Might and Magic. As you leveled, you gained runes of three flavors, one for each class to focus in, and you spent them to buy passive abilities for your hero. However, every attribute in the game could also be increased by picking up corresponding items on the world map, and each time you played the game it would randomize pretty much everything, from the troops available to the pickups on the map. The plot was so-so, the translation poor, but it's addictively fun.

[danzibr]

Dang, Sudeki sounds awesome.

I’ve been thinking of Landstalker a lot lately. Quite a simple game, but I have a soft spot for it.

[Corlindale]

Back in primary school, we played a Danish game called Foodman. It was released by the Danish Cancer Society to promote healthy eating among kids, and the premise was that you controlled a guy that had to navigate through a supermarket, eating the healthy foods while avoiding the unhealthy, while occasionally answering trivia questions about nutrition. This may sound silly and simple, but it was surprisingly elaborate - especially for its time (the first version dates back to 1987, and it was re-released in 1994). There were many different kinds of food, and if you stayed too long on a level things would start to get moldy and inedible, so there was a built-in time limit as well. Later levels would also have temptations - candy and cake that moved around and could 'attack' you and force you to eat it.

It was a surprisingly brutal game as well. You could die from hunger, obesity, too much sugar, too much moldy food or too much alcohol (if you drank 4 units of alcohol during the game, you would immediately die - also a little bonus lesson for the kids, I guess). Later levels would force you to go through a bunch of sugary stuff to proceed, so you'd have to get a lot of healthy food and exercise to compensate. I still remember how cool it felt to finally complete it on our classroom PC.

Here's a gameplay video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgE_cbzjG1k). It's in Danish, but I think it gives a decent impression anyway.