Vern5 said:
This is game is bloody amazing and should set an industry standard for a new wave of Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale type games. Sadly, nobody besides me seems to know that it exists and the people who have bought it complain because they thought it would be like Diablo III. Morons.
I should play that again. I really enjoyed the mechanics and the way they implemented the different character classes; the only real problems I had were how... limited? things felt. I didn't get too far in, admittedly, but it didn't feel like the areas had a lot of exploration in them and the items/skills weren't as fleshed out as it seemed like they could have been (though the effects of the abilities and how they split down along the talent trees was pretty cool).
OT: I dunno, I don't really have that "obscure" of a gaming history... I mean, at least not with games that really made a lasting impact on me. There are games that people don't really talk about anymore which are part of series' that they
do still occasionally talk about, or games that haven't received a lot of attention but I've still seen one or two other people bring them up, or games that I had been following when they
were obscure but then they got featured on a Youtube channel so people found out about them (though whether they decided to play the games or not is another subject entirely, I suppose), and... yeah. I guess I could bring up some of those?
Series' People Still Talk About:
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II - One of the first shooter games I ever really played while growing up. Loved it, because hey, you got to be a Jedi (or Sith) and swing a lightsaber around! And there were all kinds of secrets, and it was 3D, and it was
Star Wars! It is notoriously difficult to get running on modern PCs these days, unfortunately, but still some damn fun once you get past how hilariously 1st-Gen 3D the polygons are.
Worms 2 - Whenever I just wanted to mess around and have a laugh, this was my go-to game. I'm convinced that absolutely nobody has ever learned how to effectively use the bazooka, in any of the games, but one thing I particularly loved about
Worms 2 was the sheer amount of customization you could do with all of the weapons. You could change their fire rates, damage, blast radius, wind resistance, number of clusters, fuse length, number of bullets, all sorts of things that could end up creating hilarious situations like having miniguns which could destroy the environment of the entire map with a single volley.
Games People Occasionally Talk About:
Gunpoint - Just a bloody brilliant game in every way, if you ask me. It's a 2D stealth-puzzle-hacking-platforming-punching-people-in-the-face kind of game, and I'd conservatively say that it's basically what
Watch Dogs would've been like if
Watch Dogs hadn't been so much like
Grand Theft Auto or
Assassin's Creed. Also, I find the dialogue to be fantastically funny, as it has an absurdist sense of humor that gels with me just right.
The Adventures of Batman & Robin for Sega Genesis - I actually haven't seen this one ever really brought up around here, but that could just be because topics involving Sega don't really appear very often to begin with. It's not exactly hard to find it on Youtube so I can't really say the thing is obscure, but I do have to specify which platform it's on because it's actually an entirely different game than the SNES version by the same name. They're both brawlers, of sorts, but the Genesis version is much more arcade-y and focuses more heavily on projectiles and constant movement. It's also bloody damn hard, and to this day I've still never beaten the Mad Hatter's level.
Endless Space - A 4X space game with possibly on of the slickest strategy game UIs I've ever seen. It really brings me back to the days of... oh, actually, that game might be one I could use too... "the good old days", then. The combat mechanics are pretty simple rock-paper-scissors in a way (it is slightly deeper than that, but not by too much) but the style of it is what really drags me in. It grabs me and pulls me into that "one more turn" mentality perfectly, because it's just so polished.
Games Which Have Been Featured On Youtube Channels:
Cloudbuilt - This is another relatively new game, but TotalBiscuit and Jim Sterling both did videos on it at least, so I'm not sure how "unknown" it is. It's probably the only game I can really pull the hipster card of "I was following it before they did their videos" for, though, as it caught my eye when it first came to Steam Greenlight. It's a third-person 3D speed-running game which combines a lot of
Mirror's Edge and
Megaman with some genuinely amazingly cruel level designs and fantastic music. Another insanely hard game, though.
Buh, it's too late for me to think up another one that fits this category. But I've got two I haven't seen anyone else except for me really talk about in the last few years!
Freedom Force - I actually recently repurchased this on Steam, though I haven't installed it as of yet. It was a game I had probably about a decade ago now, and I never really got far in it but I liked trying to mess around with some of the sillier things like seeing how easily one of the superheros could level city buildings in some empty maps.
Star Trek: Birth of the Federation - Probably the first strategy game I ever played with any sort of understanding for its mechanics, it's also one I still occasionally play to this day. It's a lot like
Masters of Orion 2 (and in fact was called by some a spiritual successor after
Masters of Orion 3 was released and everyone hated it) except it's
Star Trek. Unfortunately it does suffer from a few bugs and balancing issues; it's got one hell of a memory leak on games that run past a few hundred turns, even on modern PCs, and the Federation indisputably have two of the most powerful starships in the entire game by the end-game. And cloaking is insane if you're not the one using it. Random Events can completely destroy a game, as well, if the Borg decide to show up before the first 100 turns or so have transpired. There's actually a separate line of code within one of the game's configuration files that you can change to specifically turn the Borg off while leaving Random Events on, because the Borg Cubes in
BotF are
so insanely powerful. They rip through fleets like tissue paper, and destroy half of the population in a star system per turn while they're occupying that star system's spot on the galaxy map. Still love it.