And what specifically makes it special, appealing, or interesting to you?
I enjoyed Spore when I was a kid. It was legit fun evolving and designing your creature.
I enjoyed Spore when I was a kid. It was legit fun evolving and designing your creature.
oh, what i would give for someone to try and make an AAA-backed Spore-like game. it scratches such a specific itch that nothing else really does
Spore was really cool… Until space stage which was just too boring!
I was extremely invested in spore pre release and with how much was cut, it could never live up to my expectations…
I played SO much spore back in the day. I even created a sort of OC in the game with a whole backstory and cast of characters and everything. Totally just had a blast from the past looking at my creations on the “sporepedia” (it still exists!)
Although the entire game has kinda become a meme in recent years, I love The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Its a really charming game, and although people like to rag on it for being “generic lotr fantasy” I dont think thats a bad thing. Sometimes you just wanna play a run of the mill fantasy game and explore some dungeons. Plus it still had enough weird and bizarre things to keep it interesting, like the Shivering Isle dlc. I have fond memories of playing the game all the time back in school. One time I beat the entire Knights of the Nine dlc in a single sitting. It can be really clunky, weird, and downright broken but I still love it. Morrowind is still better tho
Nothing before or after Morrowind had this level of familiar-but-alien vibe. Telvanni towers of huge mushrooms, giant crab shell being a redoran town, dwarven ruin, where some npcs standing around in the dark are being held as cattle by vampires… wonderful.
I think its the fact that the game starts out weird, alien, and hostile to you (including the people of Morrowind) and the more you play the more you understand. By the time you finish the main quest, you completely understand this world and its secrets. You’ve mastered the setting.
I think oldschool games that were pre-minimap wonderful that way. The maps were often better designed to be distinct and navigable without a map, and by the end of the game you really learn the map in a way you don’t in a lot of modern RPG’s.
Gothic 2 and Risen are some I really remember fondly for this.
Overall I also enjoyed Morrowind more, but the Dark Brotherhood questline in Oblivion was so good.l
I’d go back to Oblivion if it weren’t for the scaling enemies. That really takes a lot of the fun away for me, ever since I realized the game does this.
Maybe there’s a mod? I know we’re not alone in this opinion.
Tacoma. Incredible game, barely has any gameplay, though, and is very short if you don’t actively look for side-content, which is the main focus of the game. It’s mostly storytelling through holographic logs of an abandoned station. Your goal is to salvage previous data in there and an abandoned AI, that your company needs to reclaim.
When I played Obra Din, I got vibes of Tacoma and I wish someone would take another shot at that style of game in space with the depth/mystery element of Obra Din.
Have you played Outer Wilds?
I played a bit of Outer Wilds but I got lost and then stopped paying for XGP. I should pick it up next time its on sale somewhere.
i remember this game was really interesting to play as i went around trying to figure out what happened to the crew
I enjoyed Tacoma very much. Fullbright always has such great writing, characters, and settings.
For all its flaws, I loved Mass Effect Andromeda. It was a fun one to play.
Master Of Orion. Both the original, it’s sequel and the modern remake. It’s nice to play something with different pacing from other games. And the random outcomes from AI throughout the game’s progression keeps things spicy from playthrough to playthrough.
I loved Stuntman on the PS2. In it, you play a stunt driver across a series of movie sets. You drive the car while a director barks orders into your ear. If you complete all the set pieces in a scene, you move on to the next (more difficult) one and then onto other movies.
I love the process of refining the run over and over until you get it just right. The worst thing about the game is the load times. I don’t remember how long they were, but I remember they were very long. This is tough in a game that’s asking you to do something over and over until you get it right. Super Meat Boy handled this aspect much better years later, but I enjoy the premise of Stuntman more.
Stuntman with instant restarts would have been amazing. Things like trials HD are similar but not quite there
That’s true! I hadn’t made the Trials connection.
I appreciate overwatch, because the sequel cured my videogame addiction (it’s so much worse)
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I wouldn’t call this unpopular because it’s disliked, just unknown to a lot of people because I don’t think it was marketed much in the US. One of my all time favorite games is Dragon Quest Builders 2. It’s got just the right difficulty for me where it’s mostly easy with a few challenging boss fights that might take a few tries to master. It’s got a nice balance between questing, building, and farming. It’s a bit silly, but it gets to be cute and endearing. I love the graphics. You’re building in 3D with blocks like Minecraft but it’s actually pretty, Minecraft was always too ugly for me to get into it.
I only know about this game because Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest games were my boyfriend’s favorite growing up and it’s still his favorite series.
I lost myself for awhile in that game, I completely rebuild my main island.
My only gripe was the unskippable dialog. When the big bad would do his overspeech it was so, so painful. They needed to at least put in a text speed option.
The dialog is painfully slow. I agree on that.
This is one of the few games in recent memory that I’ve played start-to-finish! Beautiful game, great story progression (for what it is), and it just kept always presenting something new and interesting so I never got bored of it. Even now, I find myself tempted to go back and pick it up for PC (I played it original on Switch) and play through it again but with a better framerate. :P
I started to play this on game pass recently, and it did feel like it had a lot of potential, but at least at first I was frustrated that it kept telling me to build to very specific plans. Less “Create whatever shit you want” and more “here is an outline, put these blocks exactly where I tell you or you can’t progress.”
Does the building system open up later on / did I just give up in a really long tutorial?
In the story there are major structures that have to be built to specifications (and plenty of minor ones early on), though for the major ones you just have to supply materials and villagers will complete them for you if you don’t feel like trying to match a huge blueprint block by block. There are other parts of the game where you have lots of leeway and get general requests for things like a certain type of kitchen or bedroom that tell you what furniture and decorations are needed to create that room, but it’s up to you to build it as large or small as you want and embellish it and you can use any type of blocks you want for the walls and flooring if you’ve got a preferred aesthetic in mind. There are also whole islands where it’s just free form build whatever you like. At the end game you can buy materials instead of gathering them yourself if you want and just build to your heart’s content. You also get some better building tools as the story progresses.
Also has one of the most endearing nicknames ever: “Slimecraft”!
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
It was a kinda janky 3D Action Adventure from around 2000. Back then it had really beautiful and colorful graphics. I remember playing it on my first “real” PC and being amazed by how it looked.
It also stands out to me for being actually funny and comitting to being a comedy game.
I loved this game! The humour was my favourite part - very dry and very British. A fun shooter with a lot of variety. Amazing soundtrack by Jeremy Soule. I found the game very difficult, though - I doubt I ever got close to finishing it. How about you?
When I first played it I didn’t get very far into it. But I came back to it a few years later and finished it. The Multiplayer was also suprisingly fun on LAN-parties.
You two + the screenshots on the steam page I just looked up have sold me on this. It looks, at the very least, interesting and different, which is sometimes all I want really. I’ll give it a shot.
There’s also a spiritual successor made by the same people (more or less), Armed & Dangerous.
Good luck. Let us know if it still holds up today.
Nobody can hate that game. Damn that was gold. I believe it’s well beloved, tho not widely remembered
Dear Esther is a beautiful piece of art that communicates its story and themes through visual, environmental and interactive symbolism, both random and scripted prose, and movingly composed music. At worst, I think anyone can at least appreciate the beauty in this world they created, the use of symbolism in the environment, and/or the music.
I think of it as the video game equivalent of a Terrance Malick film where you are basically driving the camera and triggering the narration. I totally get if you don’t have preferences for that type of thing, but I think it’s extremely healthy for the medium to have works like it. Few games scratch the kind of itch this one does.
Additionally, the act of moving and investigating a 3D, digitally-realized island constitutes interactivity and, thus, marks it as something inherently different from a movie or book. Modern “games” do not have to have deep or challenging mechanics to utilize interactivity artistically.
I’ve played and beaten plenty of difficult, mechanical or systems focused video games, including most the modern From Software games, Hollow Knight, and old NES games so my appreciation for it isn’t some kind of aversion to challenge or mechanical depth.
I remember playing Dear Esther many years ago and I did enjoy it. Gone Home would likely be up your alley if you haven’t already played it.
In a similar vein, I still really want to try Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, but that game NEVER goes on sale even though it’s ancient at this point, and I just refuse to cooperate with that.
I haven’t heard of that. I’ll have to check it out. Eastshade is really great for a calm, artistic environment.
I really enjoy enter the matrix, it’s a little janky but it’s got some pretty cool for the time set pieces and I think the entire idea of the hacking mode is interesting, if very weird. For a licenced early 2000s video game I thought it was a step above most of the stuff in that field.
The driving sections are… Not very fun though.
Yeah I loved that game when it was new. It had a lot of jank but it felt more matrix than the sequels to me.
Planetside 2. Loved huge coordinated battles with hundreds of players even though it often was a buggy, laggy mess.
My friends and I played it many years ago and felt like it was an endless grind, but that wasn’t really a bad thing. We still had a great time.
Not necessarily unpopular in general, but unpopular within its own series are the DS Zelda games, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. These games have some great dungeon design and I really liked most aspects of the touch screen controls (except blowing into the DS). These games used the DS to its fullest and will sadly be locked there as a result. I might have been one of the only people disappointed with Link Between Worlds for adandoning the touch screen for traditional controls.
Spirit Tracks is the bomb. I loved that game very much.
I am bumping both of these games up my personal list to try on 3DS now. This sounds cool. And I’ve been playing totk so zelda is on the brain lately. :)
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I think we might as well declare Alpha Protocol the best game of all time. Ok joking, but that dialog system, damn how good was that
I completely forgot about Brink. Game felt like one of the first “parkour” shooters. So much fun, sad it died quickly.
I liked Balan Wonderworld. i didn’t love it, but i certainly don’t understand the hate- I haven’t ran into any bugs, some of the powers were neat, the music was phenomenal, and the simple controls were a selling point for me. it was like playing a new Dreamcast game in 2023 for better or for worse, another Billy Hatcher or something.
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3D platformers are seeing a bit of a resurgence on the indie level at least which is pretty exciting. In particular I’d recommend the Spark the Electric Jester series (although the 1st is 2D) and Lunistice in particular
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