And what specifically makes it special, appealing, or interesting to you?

    • 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

    • 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!)

  • 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.

  • Although the entire game has kinda become a meme in recent years, I love The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Its a really charming game, and although people like to rag on it for being “generic lotr fantasy” I dont think thats a bad thing. Sometimes you just wanna play a run of the mill fantasy game and explore some dungeons. Plus it still had enough weird and bizarre things to keep it interesting, like the Shivering Isle dlc. I have fond memories of playing the game all the time back in school. One time I beat the entire Knights of the Nine dlc in a single sitting. It can be really clunky, weird, and downright broken but I still love it. Morrowind is still better tho

    • Nothing before or after Morrowind had this level of familiar-but-alien vibe. Telvanni towers of huge mushrooms, giant crab shell being a redoran town, dwarven ruin, where some npcs standing around in the dark are being held as cattle by vampires… wonderful.

      • I think its the fact that the game starts out weird, alien, and hostile to you (including the people of Morrowind) and the more you play the more you understand. By the time you finish the main quest, you completely understand this world and its secrets. You’ve mastered the setting.

        • I think oldschool games that were pre-minimap wonderful that way. The maps were often better designed to be distinct and navigable without a map, and by the end of the game you really learn the map in a way you don’t in a lot of modern RPG’s.

          Gothic 2 and Risen are some I really remember fondly for this.

    • I’d go back to Oblivion if it weren’t for the scaling enemies. That really takes a lot of the fun away for me, ever since I realized the game does this.

  • 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 loved Stuntman on the PS2. In it, you play a stunt driver across a series of movie sets. You drive the car while a director barks orders into your ear. If you complete all the set pieces in a scene, you move on to the next (more difficult) one and then onto other movies.

    I love the process of refining the run over and over until you get it just right. The worst thing about the game is the load times. I don’t remember how long they were, but I remember they were very long. This is tough in a game that’s asking you to do something over and over until you get it right. Super Meat Boy handled this aspect much better years later, but I enjoy the premise of Stuntman more.

  • I really enjoy enter the matrix, it’s a little janky but it’s got some pretty cool for the time set pieces and I think the entire idea of the hacking mode is interesting, if very weird. For a licenced early 2000s video game I thought it was a step above most of the stuff in that field.

    The driving sections are… Not very fun though.

  • 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.

    • 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

    • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

          • 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!

            •  Pigeon   ( @Lowbird@beehaw.org ) OP
              link
              fedilink
              English
              31 year ago

              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.

              • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 liked Balan Wonderworld. i didn’t love it, but i certainly don’t understand the hate- I haven’t ran into any bugs, some of the powers were neat, the music was phenomenal, and the simple controls were a selling point for me. it was like playing a new Dreamcast game in 2023 for better or for worse, another Billy Hatcher or something.