What are your favorite games that you never see mentioned anywhere?
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During lockdown I played ECHO, which had been in my backlog for a few years after a stray recommendation I saw on MetaFilter. It was a surprisingly tight integration of beautiful and intriguing environmental/UI/sound design, gorgeous music, compelling yet minimalist storytelling (and voice acting), and a really strong gameplay loop of stealth, puzzle-solving, and the occasional panicky run-and-gun. Imagine my surprise when I read up on it after and learned it only sold a few thousand copies!
I strongly recommend playing it blind, but this trailer gives a good overview of the style and mechanics.
I played a much different Echo with my partner during COVID hahaha
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I used to play the shit out of The Specialist, a HL1 mp mod.
Also while most were hooked on Twisted Metal my brother and I loved Vigilante 8.
I have a group of friends who still play The Specialists! It’s the only reason I can’t go full Linux—it does not work on Linux.
Been playing for almost 20 years.
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Blast Corps
Oh fuck yeah
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Sauerbraten FOSS FPS, available in your repo.
Single player racemaps are fun. Get to the podium in the quickest time.Try these servers:
-Racing#1 2021 [rev]-
or
Racing Reloaded
--//--
0AD FLOSS RTS, also available in your repo.
Excellent theming and challenges.
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Escape Velocity and its open-source spiritual successor, Endless Sky.
EV Nova is what got me hooked on Star Citizen
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Epistory and Nanotales
Both fantastic games with beautiful graphics and good for typing practice.
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Some more recent ones:
- Hammerfight (2009)
- Brigador (2016)
- CrossCode (2018)
Hammerfight
Oh, yeah, I liked that one. Pretty unusual game. Kind of a faux Middle East setting, mouse-controlled aircraft using in significant part melee weapons. Not incredibly deep, but the core gameplay loop did a good job of sucking me in.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/41100/Hammerfight/
Brigador
https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/Brigador_UpArmored_Edition/
CrossCode
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It's definitely not a great moment for the game.
Okay I was being a bit hyperbolic, I like the game as a whole but that was the first time I was forced to commit the cardinal sin of looking up a guide to make it through a Lucasarts adventure game :<
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Geometry Wars Retro Evolved
https://store.steampowered.com/app/8400/Geometry_Wars_Retro_Evolved/
While I wouldn't personally set it that high, I did have a lot of fun with it myself.
Add in some Infected Mushroom and perhaps some actual mushrooms and you'll have the best time. I promise!
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I have brave fencer on ps1! Still play it sometimes. Sadly missing the ff bonus disc
I wanted to hate it because I had just read Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa and was fascinated by Miyamoto Musashi and the game is only loosely connected to him but it sucked me in.
I ended up playing it for a few weeks straight until I beat it and I've never forgotten it.
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Bugsnax. It's like Pokemon Snap/Legends Arceus, but the Pokemon are food items, like a sub-sandwich centipede or a lollipop dragonfly. You can feed them to people, and when you do, their body parts turn into the food they just ate. It's great!
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I always wanted to get this game when it came out but I only had a PS4 and no money...
It's such a fun game, I recommend giving it a go, it's one of those games you can play for a long time or just a quick little run through. it's on PS4 now I'm pretty sure.
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Wiz n'Liz
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Im surprised I missed this, I love this era of racing games. Gonna try to find a copy!
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Kinetica - a racing game where the 'vehicles' are people in mechanical suits that make them look like sexy mecha, racing to old techno
Bloody Roar - a series of fighting games where you fight as people who can suddenly shift into other forms, some recognizable animals and some abstract, and with the ability in some arenas to kick people through walls or over ledges into new arenas
Forsaken - 3D hover vehicle battles
Tiny Tank - a game where you play as a sweary AI tank
Megaman Legends 1 and 2 - Megaman as a 3d adventure game with a storyline and characters
Gitaroo Man - a rhythm game I enjoyed, later imitated by some others
Shadow of the Colossus - more known but not cared for these days. A game in which there are only boss battles. A subtly told story. Part of the ICO universe.
Titan Souls - One boy, one bow, one arrow that can be magically recalled to the bow, and giant stone destroyers that he must conquer with nothing more. Kind of a 2D Shadow of the Colossus
BPM: Bullets Per Minute - everyone has the idea for a rhythm FPS. This is the only one that does a good job of it.
Receiver - a game in which you don't just hit R to reload, but have to go through the full manual of arms, dropping the clip, holstering the weapon, loading each round into the clip, drawing the weapon, seating the clip, racking the round, checking the chamber to make sure it fed correctly, aiming, firing, clearing the jam, all while worrying about killer robots.
Valley - a movement game that has such an amazing feeling of freedom in its movement
Tunnet - lovecraftian network technician game
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Dark messiah of might and magic
ton of mentions until this day
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Outlaws. An early Spaghetti Western themed FPS from LucasArts. After Dark Forces (Retconned by Rogue One) and before DF2:Jedi Knight (the one with the amazibad FMV cut scenes and the best expansion pack ever), it leveraged the 2.5d engine for all it was worth and did a hand-animated slightly Don-Bluth-esque aesthetic that worked perfectly.
Level design was good. Multiplayer was fun, even though if you tried to LAN with an unswitched hub (it was 1998!) player 3 would lag like motherfucker and be relegated to throwing dynamite and praying. Story was straight out of a Tropes-R-Us, but well executed and with good voice acting (including John de Lancie IIRC). The coup de grace was the soundtrack, Clint Bajakian seemed to inhabit Ennio Morricone’s soul, but with leitmotifs to make John Williams proud. It absolutely elevated the game.
dark forces got a community sourceport, and even a commercial one. outlaws on the other hand which is better in literally every way gets no love.
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Shadow Tactics
Desperados III
The Thaumaturge -
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Endless Sky
According to wikipedia it is a space trading and combat simulation game. Its free and open source, has a lot of content (even more with plugins). You do missions to get the storyline forward and to get money, you can also mine asteroid, trade with other planets, attack other ships and plunder them. You discover new species and Outfits to make your space ship better, etc. -
DEFCON
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1520/DEFCON/
I am a sucker for the retro vector atheistics.
The developer (Introversion Software) also had another game that used vector-ish graphics.
kagis
I liked that, though I don't know if I'd put it on a "best of" list. I've had a number of games, most recently Carrier Command 2, that I really enjoy that use untextured polygons. Think maybe it's that if a developer can't get distracted with fancy graphics, they're focused on gameplay, dunno.
Hmm. Looks like Introversion then made a game, Scanner Sombre, that uses points for graphics, not even lines.
Introversion made another game I almost posted here: Uplink. Hacking-themed game that I used to love.
