Games

A few that are favs for me that no one ever talks about:

Forgotten worlds on Genesis Wild arms on playstation Tokyo extreme racer zero on playstation 2

Omori is an Earthbound inspired jrpg that I can never talk about as to not spoil an ounce of this game. I thought about the ending to this game for a week straight after finishing it.

Beetle Adventure Racing for the n64.

Specifically the battle modes. The chaos of a bunch of Volkswagen beetles launching rockets at each other is a core memory for sure.

Dwarf Fortress, Less now since the steam release

Snowboard Kids 2 for the N64. One of my top 3 favorite Mario Karts.

Armagetron Advanced, which is a 3d multiplayer Tron clone, though you can also face off against bots. Fun as hell with friends and the customization options keeps things interesting.

Recettear

People bring up Journey a lot but another game by that same company called Flower. It's a short, simple game that I will never forget, a beautiful masterpiece.

Hogs of War for PS1.

It's probably the first 'Worms 3D' style game.

I know I posted here already, but I had to add one more, and I feel it deserves its own post: Eastward!

Eastward is Zelda-like adventure game set in a post apocalyptic world, and the setting itself is heavily inspired by China, Japan, Korea, and other areas in East Asia, and takes a lot of cues from Mother 3: Earthbound's lost sequel. It's a game with a lot of heart. It has a great sense of humor, but also is incredibly dark in some places, it had me in tears by the end. Sure it's not the easiest story in the world to follow, but I became so invested in the characters, and I kept playing because I just wanted to see if they got through everything alright. And even after playing through it once, I spent most of the year thinking back to moments in the game. Very few games have ever hit me like that. Eastward was definitely something special for me, and I wish it had the same hype behind it as many indie darlings like Undertale have.

And the game is probably one of the most beautiful 2D games I have ever played. There is a lot of detail put into the set pieces, and it makes the worlds feel like they were lived in at one point, which fits the post apocalyptic setting quite well. The dungeons, the towns, even the buildings off to the side tickle the urban explorer inside me.

Invisible, Inc. Klei has created other great games so probably Invisible is not that unknown, but it seems that this game is forgotten both by gamers and developers. The subreddit was dead (when reddit was relevant), nobody streams it, and Klei continued to add content or sequels to other games like Don’t Starve but nothing to Invisible.

Solar Jetman for the NES. A really unique game that was well ahead of it's time, featuring exploration, problem solving, cut-scenes, great music, and multiple planets to explore with different gravities. Your mission is to repair your spacecraft by finding missing parts, and you can use a small craft or leave the vehicle and boost around with a jetpack with your spacesuit.

Kid Icarus.

Terranigma - Came out at the end of the SNES era, and was never released in the US. Gameplay wise it's kind of similar to 2D Zelda but with RPG level mechanics, spells, and jump/attacks. Where it really shines is the story though. In that area I think it holds its own against the giants of JRPGs from that era like FFVI and Chrono Trigger.

Star Wars Republic Commando! Every now and then people talk about it, but it is a shame it isn't mentioned more. I actually just replayed it, I'd almost say it holds up today with the remaster mod and the rc patch. There is also a very cool mod called "slightly remastered" which adds stuff like 3rd person scripted animations and scripted kill cams, it makes you feel like a badass! Aside from that, I'm also surprised nobody in the boomer shooter enjoyer crowd talks about Cube 2: Sauerbraten, which is a very fast paced arena shooter. The only server that is consistently active uses one shot rifles that have enough recoil to do trick jumps, very fun to hop on for a few hours

I really liked Rumble Roses back on PS2

Women's Wrestling with good graphics and interesting features.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone else talk about Rocket Slime. I've never even played any mainline Dragon Quest game, and Rocket Slime is absolutely one of my favorite DS games of all time. I love everything about that game, from the team building to the way you steal items and enemies on the carts, to the hilarious slimes you gotta save. And boy, fighting other people in your tank was so much fun, although the cannon play was always kinda lackluster. Still, having an NPC man the cannons while you hop in your (incredibly overpowered) golem suit and walk over to the enemy tank, break in, destroy everything. Your NPC is wailing away on the cannons while you're distracting their gunmen, whittling away the tank's health, only for you to break into the heart and smash it to pieces.

I could go on, what a s(ub)lime game. Thanks for uncovering an old memory I had long forgotten, OP.

Starsector. It's been in development for so many years, and they are not on Steam. But man, I love that game.

Has anyone heard of "A Flame in the Flood?" It's not the deepest game, but I think it deserves a bit more recognition

Future Cop L.A.P.D.

I've seen like, maybe a singular youtube video essay on it (And I think it was by by a very small channel).

EDIT: Also WASTED: A Post Apocalyptic Pub Crawler.

Haha, SimTower for classic MacOS. I've always wanted to put together a clone of it.

Mmh.. I'd say King of Dragon Pass but the truth is that every half a year I see someone talking about. In niche circles but still. Let me check my Playnite list (only the ones I rated 5/5)...

Ok. At first I thought these ones would qualify: The Lion's Song, one night hot springs, Tacoma, missed messages. But I'm pretty sure I just haven't read in the right places, they are pretty big game in narrative indie circles I think.

Oh, I got it. These are my highly rated games that I don't think I have ever heard (much less read) someone talk about:

• No-One Has To Die: A short scifi puzzle/visual novel.
• The Last Door: An Edgar Allan Poe inspired point-and-click adventure.
• Don't Escape - 4 Days to Survive: A survival & mystery point-and-click adventure.
• Rebuild 2: A management survival game set in a zombie apocalypse. The creator who is called Sarah Northway I think went on to make I Was a Teenage Exocolonist which I haven't played yet.

Now that I think of it, small RPG Maker games would also qualify. I really liked Dhux's Scar back in the day.

By the way, if you want to discover lots of small games that no one knows daily there's YT channels like Wanderbots and Splattercatgaming that dedicate themselves to try certain genres of indies. It really makes cognizant of how many games come out every week.

I really loved a game called Guns of Icarus (the original one). Fun little airship defense game, where you had to manage fighting air pirates, repairing your ship, and saving your cargo. Extremely simple, basically a tech demo, but the aesthetic, music, and general feel were perfect. Very melancholy world that I still revisit sometimes.

Gunz: the duel

Its a fast paced 3rd person shooter.

There were a lot of unique glitches you could manipulate for advanced movement. This inadvertently made the skill floor and ceiling very high.

The game was super fast paced and played like nothing I will ever play again.

Blur, it was so much fun playing couch coop with my friends

Sayonara Wild hearts. It's such an underrated original and stylish game. It oozes charm, and surprised me again and again. The music alone is something I listen to still.

My favourite games are NoX, Morrowind and Populous the beginning. Only Morrowind is still really talked about, sadly.

Easy Red 2.

WWII fps/tps made by a small team. Did you like BF1942 maps and bots back in the day?

This is the first ‘bot game’ which is actually very good and wwii focused. Others like ravenfield were too spread out, scope wise, or too twee like Brass Brigade.

It’s just had Normandy come out and first person animations tweaked and it’s in a really good place.

Custom maps and soon to have custom assets on the workshop so workshop maps are about to blow up big style!

Would love to see more wwii game fans try it out, even off sale it’s FILTHY cheap. Can highly advise the recent Normandy DLC too, the quality of the maps are leaps and bounds over the base campaigns, Stalingrad is also very good too if you're an eastern front kinda boi.

The Legacy of Kain series. Very much slept on. And to make things worse, instead of making a finale game to wrap the story up, they worked on two different projects in the same IP that did not drive the story forward and ended up being scrapped anyway.

I like the series so much that once upon a time I decided I would start playing through it again if I ever became terminally ill.

I've never played DQ: Slime. I think I'll make an effort to. For me it's possibly Fallout, the original. To me it seems for a lot of people Fallout starts with 3 and ends with 4 or 76. The original Fallout was a wonderful turn-based tactical RPG.

Rocket Knight Adventures, back on the Genesis. Not the easiest game, and the "jumping from platform to platform by your tail" was ass to get the hang of in a boss fight, but I miss when games weren't so serious about themselves and you could just play something for a while. Sometimes I really want a grand statement that will leave me in a crying heap. Sometimes it's nice to just be a possum in jet-propelled plate mail.

Iji, a free indie platformer shooter, almost like a 2D immersive sim about a girl who trying to fight off an alien invasion using alien tech that got implanted on her. It's very cool! And it's free free, not freemium microtransaction nonsense.

This is kind of obscure but I used to love this MMO rhythm game called Audition Online, published by Nexon in 2007. It's completely deserted now, hasn't been updated in years, and only runs on Windows OS, but sometimes I'll revisit it and play for hours despite only like 10 people being online lol

Alter Ego, a 1986 DOS game that's still one of the best life-sim type games ever made. You start out as a baby and work your way through life by making choices. They can lead to a wide variety of outcomes, including dying tragically as a child, etc... You can play it free online or they've made updated versions.

OG Xbox games like Alter Echo and Advent Rising. Those games blew my god damn mind as a kid. Doesn't helpt they were pretty early for the generation and never escaped the console.

I'm going to name a few potentially obscure ones from my 30 years of gaming

• Micro Machines 2 (SNES and Mega Drive) - as far as I am aware, only MM1 had wide release, the rest were PAL only but have modern 60hz and NTSC patches now. Great fun, and you can play as Violet Berlin (for those like me who used to watch Bad Influence!)

• Looney Toons Collector: Martian Alert!! (Game Boy Color) - this one is hard to categorise! Its a top down adventure RPG like Zelda, you start as Bugs and recruit further characters each with their own skills to traverse the world and solve puzzles. For example, Elmer Fudd has a gun, Tweety can fly over gaps, etc. It is actually really fucking good, and holds up better than many GBC games. You can also trade with other people who have the game, and there's a sequel I haven't even played yet!

• Wario Land Virtual Boy - this is without a doubt one of the best platformers ever made, and it's a damn shame it's been forgotten by most. HOWEVER! Emulators exist, and the game runs like a dream in retroarch/mednafen.

A few tips: the virtual boy is a 50hz console, so set your display to that or use gsync otherwise you'll have stuttering. The console is also natively a wide-screen display, which is sweet. Steam Deck is perfect for it, and looks great in black and white. If you have a VR headset, that's a good idea too to get the proper 3D experience, but it's not essential in any way whatsoever.

• Neutopia II (PC Engine/TG16) - a shameless Zelda clone that is actually worth playing as a spiritual successor to Zelda 1. A neat little what if, if Nintendo had expanded on the original rather than Link to the Past. It has an awesome soundtrack, save battery backup (wahooo) and is just great fun. The first is good too, but feels significantly more dated than the sequel

And lastly, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Switch) - I don't care if it's the opposite of unknown,, I'm recommending this one. Culmination of the best trilogy I've ever known in gaming, and by far the best game I've ever played. With the 4k, 60fps and rebalance mods when playing on PC it's simply incredible. Based Monolithsoft.

The soundtrack is mind-blowing, has the best battle themes in the series and you can tell just how much work went into it (main two characters have flutes they use in the story to send dead soldiers to the afterlife - Yasunori Mitsuda then made those flutes for real to be used in the soundtrack). Just, every single thing about the game exudes more love and care than most games I've played and it shows. After so many years of being unable to finish a story due to corporate wankery (xenosaga....), Takahashi finally got to make his masterpiece. And for those who were put off by the anime-ness of Xenoblade 2, 3 is very much reined in, adult and pretty fucking dark. No big anime titties here - it's war, and it's not pleasant. It's more like XB1 - 2 is the outlier, and its happy-go-lucky feeling makes far more sense after seeing what happens in 3.

Warzone 2100. A seminal classic for me, from the year 2000.