Mine has to be Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime, a DS spin off of the Dragon Quest series that sees you playing as a slime operating a tank and rescuing the people from your town. You run around the overworld, collecting items to use as ammunition and saving money to upgrade your tank. The art and music are just as great as you’d expect from the Dragon Quest series. It made fantastic use of the DS’s dual screens. It’s also written for a younger audience, so a lot of it is just really silly and fun! Try it out for sure, I’m so sad there’s no sequel :(
In certain circles it is well known, but Baba Is You is one of the most ingenious games for a long while and should be known even wider.
Among all the love Bioware gets for KotOR and Mass Effect I’m genuinely surprised more people aren’t talking about Jade Empire.
It’s a full fledged classic Bioware RPG set in an interesting world based on Chinese mythology, has some great characters and a fun (if simple) combat system. Voice acting is mostly good too, especially for a 2005 game and it even has John Cleese doing a part!
I loved it when it came out and am stumped as to why it never became a BioWare mainstay. Maybe releasing as an exclusive for the original Xbox just killed it, but if you enjoy this style of RPG I highly recommend checking it out!
Return of the Obra Dinn is an amazing game that I wish I could play again for the first time. The art style is super unique and the attention to detail in every aspect of the game is incredible.
Highly recommend.
I agree, I really wish I could erase it from my memory and play it again. It’s not an obscure game but I think it’s hard for it to stay relevant on social media and in the zeitgeist since it’s both short and not a game you really replay.
I’ve tried to recapture the feeling of playing it by watching others play but most people approach it poorly and impatiently and just end up guessing too much.
If anyone else is in the same boat the best one I’ve found by far is MangledPork.
American McGee’s Alice and the much later sequel which is my favourite game of all time - Alice: Madness Returns.
The aesthetic, the puzzles, the sound design, the voice acting, the political statements underlying the narrative, Alice’s outfits, the collectibles hidden in obscure places, the different art styles for each world level. I just love it! I mean sure, the combat mechanics are not as complex as some games but they fit nicely into Alice in Wonderland lore and if you up the difficulty settings it can be more challenging.
I’m also really enjoying Inscryption at the moment. A puzzle/card game interweaved with an escape the room horror story.
Any love for the Monkey Island series here?
Rise of Nations. It’s like Civilization but as a real-time strategy game and I really enjoy it. Microsoft actually released an updated edition in 2014 which was good of them but I basically never hear anyone actually talk about it which sucks because it’s such a cool game. The single-player Conquer the World campaigns are also cool, and have some elements reminiscent of the classic Risk board game.
There’s also Star Trek: Bridge Commander, which is often mentioned in discussions of “what Star Trek games were good?” but not much outside of that context. It strikes a perfect balance between having starship combat that really feels like you’re commanding a ship with a lot of mass behind it and actually being fun and easy for an average person to pick up and play (which is where stuff like the X Universe games fall down). There are tons of “space fighter” games out there but I’ve never really seen anything that captures space capital ship combat as well as Bridge Commander.
My Summer Car. It’s probably still #1 for play time on Steam for me. I bought a whole-ass racing wheel setup just for that game.
Looks like Mon Bazou - though probably with less maple syrup power ups 😂 https://store.steampowered.com/app/1520370/Mon_Bazou/
It’s exactly where the inspiration for Mon Bazou came from. People been asking for My Winter Car for years
I used to watch a streamer play My Summer Car whenever I could. I love the games that are just their own thing.
I’ve been to Finland back in 2000s and must say that game is 100% realistic!
I concur, hell I am so tempted to buy a Datsun 100A irl just because of that game…
If I had a legitimate opportunity to buy one I would seriously consider it
Planetside 2 - someone else already mentioned it here, but it’s the only game in it’s genre and nothing else really comes close to what it offers (persistent 1v1v1 +300 player battles across infantry, land, air, and sea). It’s been kicking for over a decade now and I’m not sure what could replace it if or when it finally kicks it. It’s truly singular, and responsible for some of my fondest memories in gaming. It’s also free!
Black and White, it was a god simulator on PC in 2001. You interact with your villagers and the world as a floating hand, casting spells to raise faith in villages or throwing rocks to smite as necessary. You also got a giant pet that you could train to do your bidding.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%26_White_(video_game)
One Must Fall 2097, an awesome robot fighting game for DOS, which is quite different from every other fighting game, because in this one you have to select both pilots and the robots, and each pilot and robot have their own specialities and back stories, so it makes for a lot more interesting gameplay compared to other games in this genre.
Whoooooooa, now you’re really taking me back. I only had the Shareware version, so the full version with all the fighters was something I lusted after for ages, but never actually got. Megarace is another one from this era that stands out, though I don’t think it was a particularly great game.
You know that killer soundtrack right?
One day Kenny Chou was browsing the internet and randomly thought “I wonder if anyone remembers that game I did the music for?” and was surprised to find his OMF2097 music has a huge following.
To celebrate he re-constructed the main theme in modern tools here: https://youtu.be/UvlVaQl7kEk
That’s awesome! Cheers for the link! I loved the theme song so much that I made up random lyrics for it as a kid and used to sing it all the time. People used to ask me what was that song that I was singing and I’d tell them all about the game and rope them into it lol.
I can still remember every special move and destruction. And how to select Nova outside tournament. Completed the tournament on Heavy Metal, but it’s hard only in the beginning.
There are custom tournaments and a open source remake project https://www.openomf.org/
Man, I haven’t played it in decades, and I can still remember the soundtrack. Great game! I can count on one hand the number of fighting games that I’ve bothered to learn all the moves for, and OMF might have been the first. Just had the shareware version for years, then happened upon a licensed copy in an old box of 3.5" disks. Good times.
Crimson Skies for OG Xbox. It’s pirates in planes dogfighting, we need a remake badly.
Mine is definitely Freelancer. The game by Chris Roberts that actually got finished by firing him.
I love that game, the story is engaging and the characters are likeable.
I’m probably just seeing it with nostalgia but I like to play it until this day. I installed it on my Steam Deck and gave it a go. It was awesome.
Hard to settle on just one. In no order:
- ChuChu Rocket (Dreamcast): insanely fun and manic couch multiplayer game
- A10 Tank Killer II: Silent Thunder (PC): the soundtrack alone justifies the time to play this aging flight sim
- Virtual On (Arcade): this was ported to Saturn and the port is good, but the giant arcade machine is where it’s really at with dual twin stick cockpits
- Mario Paint (SNES): Really fun non-game from a time when non-games were uncommon on home consoles. I have hundreds of hours into this
- Dungeon Keeper (PC): darkly comedic evil dungeon lord management sim. I will never forgive EA for what they did to Bullfrog and subsequently the DK franchise. There have been many attempted homages and clones but none have captured the magic.
- Super Tennis (SNES): an actually fun tennis game
- Super Play Action Football (SNES): football game with a unique isometric view
- Hank Parker’s Super Black Bass 2 (SNES): super fun fishing sim. I wish there were games like this today that took fishing more seriously and less arcadey.
- Brain Age (DS): a genuine sensation in its heyday and largely forgotten now. Really showed off the potential of the DS
- Cel Damage (GameCube): twisted metal with zany little cel shaded cartoon characters. Never got the respect it deserved and probably never will since they butchered the game’s balance with the HD re-release
Mine would be tunic , It feels like top down old school Zelda but puzzles that will blow your mind when you get the context. If you haven’t played tunic before don’t watch any review just buy the game and play it.
This is a 10/10 game where I wish to forget about it to play this again.
CrossCode. It’s an SNES-style action RPG with very fun combat, 2D-Zelda-like puzzles, and a genuinely charming well-written story that was made in HTML5 and JavaScript for some reason. It is genuinely my favorite game of all time. I habitually proselyte this game to friends, but check it out for the love of God
