Patient Gamers

I haven’t played in years, maybe over a decade at this point, but I used to play a shit ton of the absolutely terrible Anarchy Online. I never got very far, I never really understood much, but I liked playing it for some reason.

Hunted: The Demon's Forge, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, and Fear Effect: Sedna

I played the first two way after release on PS Now and the picked up the third on sale for $2. Sure, they have reputations that range from so-so to war crime but I think Hunted is a diamond in the rough and find ORC and Sedna to be the perfect games to play after another one is a huge disappointment.

its playerbase fell off so hard, but i still really liked nickelodeon all star brawl. hopefully a sequel comes out sometime

Section 8 and Section 8 Prejudice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_(video_game)

A fantastic pair of games which died too quickly because everyone saw the power armor and thought it was going to be a standard run and gun Halo style game. When in fact it had a mechanic that required dropping shields with certain types of weapons before you could then use other types to penetrate the armor. It also had a power management mechanic allowing you to move faster or use other abilities if you had the power remaining to do so.

As a result all the Halo/COD bro's bounced off the game because the few of us who took the time to understand and master those mechanics would just absolute wreck their faces. This unfortunately also included many critics/reviewers. Which results in a whole lot of "this game sucks". In this case the bliss of ignorance killed both games.

I enjoyed them immensely if briefly. They died too soon.

Aranock-Online; Still available, but nothing like its earlier days, predictably.

Azure Dreams. A PS1 Konami game that mixes elements of RPGs, roguelikes, dating sims, and creature collectors.

I've never known anyone else IRL who's heard of it, but it's always been at the top of my favorite games list.

I was genuinely unaware for a long time that P.N. 03 on the Gamecube was pretty strongly disliked, and now seemingly forgotten.

I love everything about this damn game - the ridiculous "inside a macbook" looking aesthetic, the Drum n Bass-esque soundtrack, the fact that it's a game based on getting a high score (which is probably the one game mechanic I miss the most in a lot of more modern games), what more could you want?!

Shepherd's Crossing 2, for the DS. I've put a truly ridiculous number of hours into it over the years, and keep coming back.

It's not popular in the farm sims because a key part is butchering your meat animals so you can feed your dogs.

I’ll take it “unpopular” as in, literally dead and not “not liked”… but mine would be Obsidian Conflict. I have a 24/7 server that runs on my server just for the sake that once every few months a random player can join it.

I love all the community mods and spent sometime years ago scraping every map I found online for it.

Gallop Racer (psx)

It's about racing and breeding horses.

"Newer" titles of the series (ps2) also had the element of raising/training the horses.

The collab with G1 Jockey on the PS3 also had those obstacle course racing included.

My dad loved betting on horses (he got it from his father), and loved the game.

It was simple game of racing horses with some fine details mixed in (when to gallop, correct positioning and timing, and etc.)

The best thing about the series is that the list of horses are already laid out, so you know which ones are the strong ones in a particular course except for the secret horses that you only get through winning particular races in a particular order throughout the horse's career.

The endgame though is through breeding the horses, which is another element of euphoria when winning the genetic lottery.

Sometimes when I miss it, I just play it on my phone (through an emulator) and it's always been a fun experience.

I used to log in to armorgames.com to play shitty browser flash games occasionally. There was one "mmo" game called Rise of Mythos. It was a deck building collectible card game. I would play it for a few days then forget about it for 6 months. Over time I had a cool deck from years of occasionally logging in, never spent money on it though. Then one day I logged in and it was gone. I would have paid some money to keep it around.

Shadow Man. It was definitely shit, but I played it for so many hours. The mood and the scale of it was incredible, but the controls and gameplay were sorely lacking. Even so, I found it incredibly immersive.

I would say Rebel Galaxy and especially Rebel Galaxy: Outlaw, which reminds me of Wing Commander: Privateer for the "Good game with little recognition".

For the "Objectively bad but I still love it" type, Lichdom: Battlemage and Technomancer are deeply flawed but wonderfully fun gems that require you to ignore some pretty big problems to find your enjoyment in them. Same with DarkStar One and the Starpoint Gemini series.

If you like the toy soldiers idea you may want to check out HYPERCHARGE: Unboxed.

Tomba! on the first playstation. The first game is better than the second, but both are very fun platformers, maybe metroidvania in a way? Since there's some backtracking as you gain new stuff and abilities.

A possibly not very known title from the PSP that's totally worth the time: Kenka Bancho. There's only 1 in the series that was localized in english, which is the one I played and enjoyed it a lot. You're a high school japanese student on a quest to be the ultimate high school badass.

Neither is mediocre, they're possibly just "hidden gems", really.

Penny Racers was the jam, way back in the day. It was our family game, but unfortunately I played too much, and no-one could keep up.

Circuit Breakers is a really good Micro Machines clone. I still take it with me when the old ps-systems get carried around.

Biofreaks and WU-TANG:enter the pain are so much fun. Stupid gory party fighters with more jank than a dump site, but I don't care.