And what specifically makes it special, appealing, or interesting to you?
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.
I enjoyed Tacoma very much. Fullbright always has such great writing, characters, and settings.
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Have you played Outer Wilds?
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i remember this game was really interesting to play as i went around trying to figure out what happened to the crew
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?
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.
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.
Nobody can hate that game. Damn that was gold. I believe it’s well beloved, tho not widely remembered
I enjoyed Spore when I was a kid. It was legit fun evolving and designing your creature.
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!)
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…
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.
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. :)
any arena shooter in the style of Quake, Halo, or Unreal Tournament. It’s a shame they aren’t more popular
Huh, I was under the impression there was a bit of a “boomer shooter” renaissance going on the last few years. I know I’ve seen a bunch of games that were trying to emulate the feel and sometimes even the look of that style of FPS.
The definitions of arena shooters and boomer shooters are both pretty fuzzy and have a lot of overlap.
For example, I consider Duke Nukem 3D’s multiplayer to be a great arena shooter, however when many people talk about arena shooters what they mean are early 2000s style shooters that are fully 3D rather than sprite based. Halo CE was “the” arena shooter when it came out.
It is a genre that really hasn’t made a comeback. Some people say things like Overwatch are arena shooters, but for the kinds of people wanting old fashioned shooters a big element is that all players start with the same weapons and abilities by default. It’s the imperfection of language trying to articulate a feeling.
Really? I must be out of the loop then 😂
Some notable games in the “boomer shooter” genre:
- Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal
- Warhammer 40.000 Boltgun
- Games by New Blood Interactive:
- Amid Evil
- DUSK
- Ultrakill
- Gloomwood
- Cultic
- Ion Fury
- Prodeus
- Dread Templar
- Hrot
Oh, OK! I should have been more specific that I was talking about multiplayer games like what I mentioned, my bad! I knew about some of those games. The Doom Reboot and that Warhammer Boltgun are both sick, I’ve enjoyed both of them. I’ll be looking into the others thanks!
for multiplayer I liked Splitgate a lot, but the devs seem to have mostly abandoned it right when it came out of beta.
How does the Halo Infinite arena multiplayer differ from the original Halo? I never got to play the multiplayer modes in these older shooters.
Is it that the older shooters had faster movement or simpler controls (easy to pick up, hard to master)? More like a Painkiller style of shooting? Or is that impression I have of older shooters totally off base?
Painkiller was definitely designed after the first Quake. As in, people who were playing Q1 for close to a decade because nothing else came close, loved Painkiller. If you were someone who just wanted to try out multi… Lol good luck, you lvl1 villager against lvl998 bosses.
Unreal was from what I remember is similar to painkiller. Imagine halo but jumping in slightly low gravity and you are always spirting.
I didn’t play much of the original three Halo games, I picked the series up when Reach came out, but yea movement and controls were simpler, there was no sprint or the special abilities they added in reach and afterwards like the jet pack and place down shield barriers. It was just you and your weapon against the other dude and their weapon.
If memory serves the original halos actually felt slower in terms of movement and time to kill than the modern ones.
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
Also has one of the most endearing nicknames ever: “Slimecraft”!
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.
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I completely forgot about Brink. Game felt like one of the first “parkour” shooters. So much fun, sad it died quickly.
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
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 played both Fable 3 and Assassin’s Creed 3 and enjoyed them immensely. I don’t always finish games, but I finished both of them. Then I went online and found out at the time both of them were considered the worst of their franchises. Shrug I still had fun, dangit.
I was really frustrated with Fable 3 when I
spoiler
had taken all of the “friendly, but more expensive” choices, as ruler, leaving me with no money for my army. I had the money needed to have a full army before the invasion in my personal stash, and was intending on moving it all to fund the army before the invasion.
However, I accidentally moved time forward (with no obvious warning) to the day before the invasion, and it was too late for me to do anything to fix it. I was so upset that I didn’t finish the game for a long time after that.
I appreciate overwatch, because the sequel cured my videogame addiction (it’s so much worse)
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Sword Art Online: Lost Song.
Total weeb game with a whisper of a story and super grindy, but it has some of the best flight and 3d mobility controls I’ve ever seen.
The flight was my favorite thing about it. Just flying around felt really good. Nothing else of note about it though, lol.
Sooo, story-wise, are we talking season 1 “lots of angst and weird time skips” or season 2 “incestuous love triangle plot” or season 3 “we have lightsabers now and I remember literally nothing else?”
I guess it doesn’t matter except that I was able to enjoy (somehow) season 1 and 3, despite their very many issues, but I just couldn’t with 2.
Hm, It’s set in Alfheim Online (season 2), but the story is original. It was actually decently not cringe, but it was also pretty unremarkable. There’s no character development, no “romance”, so every character is reduced to a stereotype of themselves. IIRC each major character got a short story arc. I think there may have been a few side quests that paralleled some events of the story from Season 2.
People love to rag on it but there’s nothing that quite compares to just fuckin around in the Mirror’s Edge Catalyst open world
If we’re talking unpopular as in not very well known outside of its immediate community I gotta say Ultrakill. It’s a retro shooter distilled to its most essential parts with a style meter tied into it. It’s like ballet… with shotguns and exploding demons- so not a lot like ballet. But it’s good! Buy it!
Oh my god I love ultrakill, its such a good timesink.
BLOOD IS FUEL… FOR MY COCK
For all its flaws, I loved Mass Effect Andromeda. It was a fun one to play.
