I had this game and was really excited about it, but it worked so badly it was unplayable. If I recall right, the problem was that my computer was like a generation higher than it was designed for, and the 3D rendering was jerky. I have it now from GOG, but I haven’t tried to see if I can get it working now.
I played Turrican II on my Amiga 500. I’ve never found a platform shooter I liked better. I don’t even try anymore. I just break out my emulator now and then and fire up The Guess Who on my emulated tape player. Well, MP3 player.
Its been a long time, but I remember thinking that **Syphon Filter **was possibly the greatest game of all time. I think the last console I had was PS2, but I still occasionally find myself daydreaming about finding a way to fire up and play Syphon Filter again.
My friend had that on a demo desk and we played that game about 500 times more than every other game on that disk combined. By the time I played the real game I had that first level memorized
Granted, but then that meshed with the general Western theme - lone drifter, aimless, goes from town to town righting wrongs with his [del]six shooter[/del]laser minigun, searching for the rat bastard who done him wrong… Because, I mean, “somebody tried to kill me, and I don’t even know why” looks vaguely stake-shaped to me :). What’s to stop him from trying again, if I just sit by and do nothing ? What 'bout my rep as a guy you can’t fuck with and/or shoot .45 bullets in the head at ?
I dunno, it worked well enough for me, even though I agree it was not the best opener.
I like NV a whole lot more than 3, if only because NV is a cohesive whole. Every place is connected, everything has a reason to be (even if you might not figure it out at first), there’s precious little that’s thrown in just because it’d be cool.
Compare to 3, which is a disjointed patchwork of WHACKY!!! and nonsensical. 200 years after the bombs fell, still eating frozen TV dinners in a bomb crater, worshipping Atom ? C’mon, son.
If you play the DLC, you see that your role is bigger than initially apparent, and that you are not just some random. I actually like that part the least, Ulysses was a weird character.
Well, the Fallout serie had traditionally bordered the nonsensical.
For my part, I liked New Vegas better (even though never finished any of the FNV games I started, but never finishing is the norm for me), but frankly didn’t see a major difference in quality between both. I just had a preference for the athmosphere of NV.
To answer the OP, I would mention “King of Dragon Pass”, one of the most original games I played. It really doesn’t fit in any recognized category. It’s not that it was disliked, it just went totally unoticed.
Disagree. Fallout 1 (and Wasteland) were pretty grim games, with heavy references to other post-apo fiction and a handful of token “wacky” stuff thrown in, mostly in random encounters. Only the aesthetics were on the funny, 50s retrofuture side. Fallout 2 increased the whacky content, true enough. But 3 is seemingly nothing but whacky. NV is closer to the roots.
That’s not really my main beef with it though. It’s more that it’s entirely self-contained whacky. Like, “this is a place where there’s a Lovecraftian cult !” - where does it come from ? Who are/were the cultists ? Where does the quest go from there ? Nowhere, that’s where. It’s just a random dungeon in the middle of nowhere. “This is the place where they worship an atom bomb !” ; “this is the place where two guys think they’re superheroes” ; “this is the vault where everybody’s a clone” etc…
NV has some whacky too - like the crazy invisible nightkin who murders cattle with a minigun at night in Novac. But you know exactly where he comes from, why he’s nuts, he even goes someplace else when all the cattle’s dead. He’s not just “suddenly, crazy mutant !”, ye ken ? Similarly, the people of NV don’t survive on frozen diners out of 200 year old bombed out buildings - they’ve built stuff, they grow crops, there’s a complex web of politics and trade between all the groups… they make sense.
Oh yes. That is a seriously fantastic game, and world - it draws from an RPG setting that was written by a bona fide ethnologist specializing in Celtic & Scandinavian cultures, and it bloody shows. They recently re-released it on tablets too, with some updates (some needless/obscure mechanics were rejiggered, additional art & events). I heartily recommend it.
I would second (or third or fourth or whatever) Alpha Protocol. It’s a great game with a unique concept, but which works really well. It’s too bad we didn’t get a follow-up (sequel or not) which expanded on the idea and polished it. I suspect it appeals to the kind of gamer that hangs out here, however. It was reviewed as an “ok” game and didn’t sell that well, owing to some bugs.
New Vegas sold quite well, despite not being heavily marketed. As usual, Obsidian gets screwed by being poorly-supported by whichever big company they work with. Truly, few companies have been mistreated by so many publishers. Also, best soundtrack ever. I felt honored to play this game, like it was something I just didn’t deserve. I mean, how lucky can one guy be…
Recettear is a somewhat obscure game from an obscure company, but it’s a lot of fun with a very weird twist on the usual fantasy trope. I’m not entirely sure how to describe it. It’s a socialization game crossed with a merchant sim crossed with a roguelike dungeon crawler. it has an offbeat style and never takes itself too seriously. This is a world of mighty heroes and terrible monsters, but I wouldn’t say three’s a villain and the plot, as such, mostly exists in NewGame+ mode if you get around to it.
Grand Ages: Rome was an unusual game and a pretty good one. It was conceived (quite blatantly) as an updated version of the Caeser line of city builders, and is pretty well-done. Uses radius effects rather than city walkers and you tend to build ridiculously cramped cities, with supposedly “central” features like a forum stuck far away from anything useful Despite a few quirks like that it was pretty entertaining and let you build up a skill tree based on your family. You could buy and sell estates that gave you permanent resources & so forth, while taking missions from important historical figures, and even decide which factions to support in the civil war. Unfortunately, the combat was somewhat iffy and later mission tended to be all about throwing everything in trying to build troops asap, then micromanaging them to beat the mission in a painfully short time.
Yes, the fact that 3 was so underdeveloped was weird. That the people of DC are so incompetent at rebuilding society is rather unreali… actually it makes a lot of sense! I always did think it was weird that a recent corpse was a blacked skeleton, while someone who died in a vault a time back was a plump, unrotten corpse.
I will add to the love for Dragon Age 2. I liked it too.
Also I will second Atari’s ET. Dammit, I liked it as a kid.
One game I was thinking of recently that I absolutely loved but it was not even a blip on anyone else’s radar was called Ghost Master. It was a strange game where you controlled ghosts and tried to scare people out of various houses. I loved it and still remember it fondly.
Another game I really loved that was not exactly hated but just kind of forgotten was Majesty. It was a Kingdom Simulator.
I had no problem with Dragon Age 2. I feel like the problems people had with it was mainly the expectation that it should have lived up to a higher standard than had been held for, well, pretty much every other RPG, ever.
Sure, you had to fight your way through the same, needlessly labyrinthine dungeon over and over again (seriously, caves do not form this way, anywhere, EVER!). Just like like pretty much every other RPG, ever. You had to endure long, unskippable sections of exposition, complete with boring, badly written dialogue, presented in a flat, wooden manner. Just like like pretty much every other RPG, ever. It involved having to deal with boring, wooden NPCs, some, or all, of whom you had little to no choice in working with. Just like like pretty much every other RPG, ever. You were forced to endure essentially pointless, insultingly difficult (or easy) “boss” battles in order to advance. Just like like pretty much every other RPG, ever. It promised “open world” sandbox gameplay, but if you wanted to progress the story, it ended up being pretty much a straight-line, linear experience, otherwise you were basically just wandering around, accomplishing nothing. Just like like pretty much every other RPG, ever. Notice a pattern developing here? Turns out it was… an RPG.
[QUOTE=Quimby]
One game I was thinking of recently that I absolutely loved but it was not even a blip on anyone else’s radar was called Ghost Master. It was a strange game where you controlled ghosts and tried to scare people out of various houses. I loved it and still remember it fondly.
[/QUOTE]
Not so hot on that one. I digged the concept a lot, but in practice it got frustrating trying to chase the last guys out of the larger maps/maps with few anchors. It’s on Steam now BTW. 5 bucks. The experience & novelty is probably worth more than a pack of smokes :).
Another game I loved the concept and aesthetics of but the whole didn’t really click in practice : Evil Genius. It’s basically Dungeon Keeper meets No One Lives Forever. You’re a Bond Villain, so go ahead and build your evil volcano lair, fill them pits with piranhas, steal the Eiffel tower and build giant death “lasers” ; with the added kicker that you have no direct control over your hapless mooks, you can just tell them “this guy needs to be killed”, “send that guy to my evil jail” etc… So, great concept, excellent graphics too. The janky AI (both yours and the Good Guys’, as well as the practicality of traps) sort of broke this promise however. I don’t think I’ve ever finished it.
I don’t regret playing it at all, though. Aaaand I just checked, it’s on Steam too. 10bux. Why, Valve ? What do you need so much of my cigarette money for ?!
I understand the trouble people had with the repeated maps from DA2, but it really just didn’t bother me. And I loved the characters, and the dialogue.
Sure, it’s not perfect. But I never completed DA1 because I thought it was too long and dull, so a tighter, shorter game with excellent characters and writing was just what I was looking for.
I haven’t bought DA3 yet, due to having too many other games to play, but I will.
It’s not so much that it was a cash grab, but it retconned the first one in stupid ways. Like, Andrew Ryan had a death grip on people who had a right to immigrate to Rapture, but not only does he let a SuperCommunist in, she’s “the real power behind the power” ? Has her own army of Not_Big_Daddies ? And none of that was even hinted in the first game ?
Yeah, no.
Had they set the game anywhere else, that would have been fine. But that story just doesn’t work in Rapture and damages the great, self-contained original. Even if the gameplay itself was better IMO.
Heck, No One Lives Forever, mentioned above (and its sequel), would be a great addition to this thread. One of the best FPS games ever and most people have never heard of it. It was funny, had imaginative level design (shooting enemies while falling out of a plane was genius) and had amazing dialog. How it hasn’t been optioned as a movie, I don’t know.
The Wii U version of Sonic Boom is actually my entry for the thread. I played part of it with a friend and had a great time. I think if Sega hadn’t rushed the game, it could have been pretty close to perfect.
And that was precisely the problem a lot of people had that I never understood; so many people came into BioShock 2 with negative predispositions because they were opposed to any game that revisited Rapture. So really, anything that 2K could’ve possibly done in the second game to build upon BS1 was already criticized by default just for being set in Rapture in the first place.
I just never thought that that was a compelling idea because - to me, anyway - Rapture is such a fascinating location that you only saw a sliver of in the first game, so naturally it lends itself to a bunch of other unseen locales for additional games. I mean, all these years later, I still say that the “Ryan Amusements” level of BS2 is the singularly best “level” that I’ve ever experienced in any game. It was perfectly designed & executed and encapsulated everything there was to love about BioShock as a franchise.
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Also want to add: Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
Like BioShock 2, I may be the only person who loved the Hell out of this game. I couldn’t even tell you how many times I’ve beaten it since 2004; every few years, I make a point of going back to it and playing through it again. IMO it still holds up.
Unlike the other game, however, I DO understand why this game gets a lot of derision. For many, its tonal & story shifts from Sands of Time were just a bridge too far, though I never minded them & thought they were perfectly justified within the context of the title’s story.
I still think that it’s the best game of the PS2/GCN/Xbox era Prince of Persia trilogy. For those who missed it, Ubisoft came out with a one-off PoP title for the PS3/XB360 called PoP: The Forgotten Sands. It was set in the same universe as the Sands of Time trilogy, during the span of time between SoT & WW. That was a good game as well, but I don’t think anybody else ever played it.
I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s more about what they DID with the setting. A lot of people had the same comments about DA2: that if it wasn’t a Dragon Age game it would have been okay but the changes to game play plus the retcons and changes to the game lore meant that it was screwing with the original game as well.
