Games you love, but no one else seems to know about or remember.

[BathorysGraveland2]

I concur with Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine as well as Croc: Legend of the Gobos. Childhood games right there.

To add to those, Shadowman. I recently replayed it on the PC, and it has actually aged very, very well. The atmosphere in the game, and its setting are amazing and it has one of the greatest protagonists I've seen. I don't think it ever really achieved any kind of popularity though. A shitty console-only sequel was made, and then the franchise was never heard from again. A pity, for sure. However, seeing how the sequel turned out, it was probably for the best.

 

[WalrusPowers]

Oh fuck yeah, the Shining Force games were amazing. Brilliant soundtracks too.

I'll go with Joint Operations. Multiplayer co-op FPS a bit like Arma where you do missions in massive maps taking down AI. Pretty much nobody has heard of it.

 

[Frybird]

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.

Second best game in the series, good story, excellent use of the Wii Motion Controls, the final time we get a great Yamaoka/McGlynn Soundtrack, interesting "psychological" gimmick, fantastic presentation.

True, the enemy encounters kinda sucked, but when having to decide between the chases of Shattered Memories and the "combat" of SH2, i take the former every day.


I also think that, whenever it comes to "great funny old adventure games", everyone seems to remember Lucas Arts Games while no one seems to think about Discworld 1+2

 

[Mr Dizazta]

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. One of my all time favorite games for the GBA, but I have only met a handful of people who have ever played the game.

 

[Amaror]

Beyond Good and Evil.
A fantastic action-adventure/puzzle-platformer/racing game with one of the best stories in gaming, and easily the best female protagonist. It has a really nice world, too, with a lot to find. I suppose it could be considered one of the first sandboxes. It has one of the coolest scavenger hunts that are mandatory to sandboxes: taking pictures of around 100 different animals. It makes the world feel alive, despite the fact that the area you can explore is about half the size of a university campus.
I think it's on GOG for a pittance, so I highly recommend y'all go and play it.

What?! Everbody remembers that game! At least here on the Escapist.

For me:
Spellforce. An Awesome hybrid of Rpg and Strategy game, combining the best aspects of the two together. The Strategic and tactical gameplay of Strategy with the progression, sidequests and awesome story of rpgs --> Epic game.

 

[Tropicaz]

Bishi-Bashi: Special for PS1! It is the ultimate (yet very simple) 2 player game, chock full of humor and oddities.

Yes. One of the best party games ever. Only game my sister ever played, too. The song from the rhythm game where being correct caused your afro to grow still gets stuck in my head from time to time.

 

[Kiardras]

Tachyon: The Fringe, a PC game from 2000. A rather good space sim with a branching storyline and a main character voiced by Bruce Campbell. I've only ever met one other person in real life who has even heard of it.

T:TF was one of the best games I've ever played. Bora for life! Death to galspan!

And dem fog daemons, urgh.

 

[Mobax]

Pirates of the Caribbean, 2003 by Bethesda Softworks. Buggy as hell, but still I loved that game, still have it with my original xbox.

 

[Daniel Janhagen]

Lagoon, from Kemco, on the SNES. Yes, the sword is really tiny and you can only walk in 4 directions, but this Zelda-esque game has awesome music, a cool story (told in part via old-school anime style* cut-scenes), a fairly decent magic system and cool bosses. At the time, only I and one of my friends liked it, while my other friends never ran out of ways of telling me how incredibly inferior it was to A Link to the Past. Now I doubt many of them even remember the game.
Note that I am not talking about Bahamut Lagoon by Squaresoft, which I don't think was even released in Europe.

*For those that don't remember or know old anime it was mostly stills filmed with a moving camera and/or animation with a really really low framecount that still managed to do some really cool stuff while being even cheaper to make than the old Hanna Barbera cartoons. This game is basically that, plus the limitations of the SNES and the low resolution (which isn't actually a limitation of the system, as evidenced by some later "high res" titles in the SNES library).

 

[josemlopes]

Since someone mentioned Indiana Jones I really liked The Emperor's Tomb. It was basicly a buggy Uncharted game with the main character actually being Indiana Jones.

The thing that suprised me the most was how it actually felt like an adventure.


Another game I really like is Kung Fu Strike: The Warriors Rise, its kind of like the fighting system of the Batman games but a lot less forgiving and more rewarding. Just put some Matrix soundtrack with it and you'll feel like a kung fu master after beating a level.

 

[Tomeran]

Operation Flashpoint + expansions. (The Bohemia Interactive version. Not that new crap)

Only people that ever seem to know about it are a select few arma-veterans and some of my friends.

One of the best games I've ever played. The map editor and the mods made the game the modern-day minecraft of creativity.

 

[Tarcolt]

Giants: Citizen Kabuto, A Goddamn scream of a game.... with. Fucking. JETPACKS.

 

[Jandau]

Vampire - The Masquerade: Redemption - Sure, everyone knows and loves Bloodlines, but almost nobody played this one. Sure, it's more like a party-based Diablo broken up by story sequences than a story-driven RPG like Bloodlines, and sure, the difficulty is downright sadistic at times (Tremere Chantry still gives me nightmares), but the gameplay was solid, the skills and leveling were delightfully unbalanced, the plot was decent, but propped up by some great characters. It's not the best game ever and it surely hasn't aged very well, but it doesn't deserve to be overlooked to this extent.

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident - This I don't get; everyone adores Homeworld and Nexus is basically a smaller scale Homeworld. It's a spaceship sim with a focus on capital ships. Good visuals, challenging combat, varied missions, seeing your ship gradually improve with better weapons, trying out various different builds for it. I've literally never met another person who played this and I can't for the life of me figure out why...

 

[Playful Pony]

Only my favorite game of all time, Lucas Arts: Outlaws!

This game is the most fun I've ever had playing an FPS. It's fast-paced action with a nice little storyline, fun characters and a lot of great dialogue between each cutscene you shoot your way trough a well-designed level filled with cowboys, chickens and a bossfight. The weapons are quite varied and usually have a really good feel to them, which is surprising considering how old the game is and how it looks. It is one of the very few games I still have in a box, sitting like a sacred relic on my shelf. Every time I take it down to play it I have a blast, I'm always surprised at just how much fun the game still is 16 years later! I also read it's the first game to feature sniper zoom, so thats cool X3.

This is the game that got me into FPS gaming way back then, when I played it at my cousins computer as a young, blue-eyed girl. Now I am a young, blue-eyed woman with a muffin top, and it's just as much fun as it was back then... Nostalgia speaking? Most likely!

 

[Delerien]

Freespace 1+2
I never played Wing Commander so these were my Introduction to space combat and it's probably the main reason I'm so excited to see the Genre "revived" with Star Citizen. It had somewhat clunky controls but was otherwise perfect in every way. It looked impressive (at least to me back in the day ) and had an engaging Story. Most importantly though it had the best Dogfights space ever had to offer.

Last i heard someone bought the rights to the series for 7500$.

 

[Mullac]

Myst III: Exile: Most people know of the first two Myst games at least, but no one ever seems to remember the third one. Excellent Puzzle design, beautiful art design, great story, and the music, oh sweet Jesus the music. Once again hard to find, best place to look is PC emulators.

Ah yeah Myst III. I can barely remember that game but when I was 10 we played it in school. My teacher played it with us as a class as part of our English lessons. We had to describe the scenery/plot/characters. I don't think we got very far though .

Probably the game which I like and I don't hear of often is Dragon's Lair. I've never played the original arcade version, as I wasn't born, but my Dad got the CD version donkeys years ago and was one of my first video game experiences.

 

[Aethren]

Space Colony, and, similarly, Evil Genius.

Such great games, yet nobody's ever played them...

 

[feauxx]

Duke Nukem Forever: Is it misogynist? Yeah, sure. Is it over the top. Absolutely. Its Duke Nukem and its damn fun.

Duke Nukem Forever was a huge controversy on multiple levels (development time, content, marketing/pr rednergroup), it got lots of attention. Hardly something that fits in a list of good/loved games few people know about.