Great games you found by accident

[AgentLampshade]

Grandia II. I never owned it, only ever rented it. First time I did was because my friends were making fun of the cover (it was purple coloured, that's all I remember about it) and it turned out to be the best RPG I had played and the first I'd finished all the way through.

Seriously. Picture it, a 10/11 year old kid who loves good stories plays an obscure RPG with an awesome story about gods and conquering false religions for the very first time. It's probably the game that got me into gaming as a whole. I needed more stories!

Also Folklore for PS3. Remember that one? Travelling to the netherworld and battling souls of dead people. Also Ireland.

 

[Erttheking]

Dark Souls, I heard about it online a little bit but I never watched any gameplay. One day I saw it a reduced price at Best Buy, so I decided to buy it. Haven't looked back since.

 

[The Doughboy]

There are a few.

I had just bought the brand spankin' new spiderman game for my PC and we needed a graphics card with something called "transforming and lighting" capabilities. I got a graphics card for my b-day and it had 3 of the best pc games ever.

Sacrifice, No One Lives Forever, and Aquanox.

Yeah, it was like that.

I also bought Sid Meier's Pirates on a whim and loved it to bits.

Pirates>Ninjas

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

The game based off Peter Jackson's King Kong. Was expecting a crappy fighting game where you fought dinosaurs as King Kong. Got a very fun survival horror FPS with unique enemies, minor puzzles, good fire psychics, and fun gameplay.

 

[Gorilla Gunk]

Years ago I went into one of those no-name mall game shops and found a copy of a little game called The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind: GOTY Edition. Never heard of it and it was cheap and they didn't have the game I wanted so I got it.

Life. Changed.

 

[deathninja]

Space Empires III (and later IV and V), and Morrowind.

 

[Troublesome Lagomorph]

None. Can't afford to buy anything without knowing about it first.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

As a kid, I found a demo of Heroes Of Might & Magic 2, and fell in love. The series may have gone downhill a bit, but it's still a wonderful game to play. Grid-based strategy combat with spells, towns to be laid siege to, a variety of units and so on. Never played anything else quite like it.

HOMM3 was great too, but it's never really been the same since the first three games. I've been really pleasantly surprised by the newer King's Bounty games though, which are somewhat similar. I wasn't expecting much of them at all, because they were made by some Russian developer I'd never heard of and kind of bizarrely pulled the King's Bounty name out of nowhere almost 20 years later (where the original King's Bounty is what the first HOMM was actually based on/inspired by). Turns out they're not at all your typical crappy cash-in reboot and are way more fun than the recent HOMM games have been. I feel like I ripped them off getting the first one for a dollar in a sale a couple years ago completely on a whim, but I guess it did get me to buy the sequel and its expansion after that...

How difficult are they to run? I mean, I've got a PC these days which could probably run HOMM2, but anything more modern than that may cause it to explode...

They're not very demanding, but they might not run on something quite that ancient, depending on how much you're exaggerating. The first one will probably run pretty happily on most stuff from the past five or six years as long as it has a "real" video card instead of just on-board video, and the newer ones use the same engine. The minimum requirements listed are something like a mid-range Pentium 4 from 2003 and a video card old enough that I saw a better one on sale for literally $12 yesterday. They go on sale all the time on Steam and Amazon and other places, and it looks like at least the second one of them has a demo you could try too.

 

[OpticalJunction]

Binding of Isaac. I would never have even known about it if not for the steam sales and everyone's praises. At first it looked crap, shit graphics, lame style. But after a while... wow. The gameplay is actually *fun*. It's challenging and doesn't hold your hand. Rare to find an indie game so well designed, apart from the graphics.

 

[Irridium]

I thought Sid Meier's Pirates was some sort of Civilization expansion. It wasn't, but it was so fun I didn't care.

Best buying mistake I've made.

 

[Stealthygamer]

Gotcha force
an awesome gamecube about toy robots who fight other toy robots for the safety of earth and mankind

Persona 3&4
Found them at a booth at Fan Expo, bought them both for a total of 70$, dont regret it at all

 

[SlaveNumber23]

Ocarina of Time actually, when I was about 7 or 8 my parents took me to the shop to buy me any N64 game I wanted. I knew absolutely nothing about Ocarina of Time, had never even heard of it before, but when I saw the cover something draw me to it and I picked it, the other games didn't even stand a chance.

 

[DanielBrown]

Singularity. Found it in a sale bin when I was in a Gamespot somewhere. Decided to grab it since it was only ~100SEK(£9) and had tons of fun with the game. Way more than I expected at least.

 

[juggalosqueaks]

Aside from virtually every game I owned on the NES and SNES I'd say Legend of Legaia, Jade Cocoon, Valkyrie Profile, Civilization IV and the Legacy of Kain series just to name a few. Legend of Legaia I rented based on the story description way back when and the rest I stumbled upon in various friends' collections and got hooked.

 

[Ljs1121]

Just Cause and Assassin's Creed. Both of them belonged to my nephew and when I got an Xbox 360 for Christmas he let me borrow them. This eventually paved the way for me discovering what would become two of my favorite games of all time, namely Just Cause 2 and Assassin's Creed 2.

 

[nathan-dts]

DJ Hero, I knew of it, but hadn't exactly been subject to any advertisements or recommendations to buy it. Saw it in Tesco for £20. It came with the first and second games as well as the turntables. I don't like music, let alone rhythm games. Only bought it cause I thought it'd be funny to carry a large box around college for the day. Game was suprisingly good.

 

[Bagged Milk]

Jak and Daxter, it came for free with my ps2 and it was the first game to REALLY get me into gaming.

 

[The Headcrab Farmer]

Medal of Honor Warchest, hot fucking dang. This was when i was a youngster without any game sites or magazines to browse through and no bootcamped mac to be able to have any sort of big libraries to choose from (or to buy stuff for a good price). Had saved up 500 kr (~?50) and was torn between Warchest and CoD 2 till my dad suggested warchest since it had 3 games instead of 1. Took it home, installed it, and god damn i have never played something like it. The variety, first you're on a covert rescue mission in North Africa, then i am infiltrating a submarine harbor dressed as an officer and then participates in the landing on omaha beach in just the first 3 chapters! And the expansions, They compressed the best of 3 chapters each and turned the awesome up to 11!

Doshin the giant, cute little thing, old GC game i picked up just because of its 3 for 2 offer and it's so.... cute. Going around on the little island as the Bananas in pajamas cousin was so nice.

I want to say Kane and Lynch: Dead Men too, since the only things that caught my eye were a bad review and "at least it aint Kane and Lynch!" jokes before actually buying it on a sale and.. i loved it. Stiff yes, but the story was awesome, i genuinely cared for Kane and Lynch while they were running across the globe in search for Kane's daughter and it all felt so real since shit went from bad to worse without a happy ending pulled out the arse ruining it. Can't wait for KaL 3.

 

[Swifteye]

Sakura wars so long my love for Playstation 2. I was looking for a RPG to play. I mean I don't play games like Skyrim or disgea they just don't gel my interest despite being very well made. So I have a hard time looking for the next good roleplaying game to pick up and play.

While I was at gamestop. I see this game sitting on the shelf. It wasn't just sitting in a case though. It had it's own box. That drew interest immediately. The thing about RPGs though. Especially the eastern developed ones. The story will often be medicore dressing for the combat system which isn't as inventive as it wants to be.

I read the flavor text on the back and it says that it removes the grinding in games by having you gain stats through conversing with your teammates. The stronger the relationship. The stronger the player and the allies get. So I'm hearing "Multi choice game, Dialogue heavy scenes, and game play that's direct and focused on events rather than dungeon crawling."

SOUNDS GOOD. Too me at least. I just got done playing some game called Adventures To Go. It was awful. The writing was weak, the dungeon system convoluted, and the game mechanics were breathtakingly tepid.

Sorry Persona people. Disgea blokes. I don't want to grind for hours. I got a cap. If I can't catch up and stay caught up by grinding for five levels. I don't want to play this game. You'd have to have a hell of a story to keep me around.

So yeah. Sakura wars wasn't this. So when I actually started playing it I was like "Good lord there is so much talking. I can hear yathzee's hate all the way from brisbane." First pitch though it hit me up with something interesting. You get timed multi choice questions. And Not answering any of them. Is also a choice. There is also a emphasis choice in which you can gauge how much emphasis your character gives on the certain phrase or action.
That's good, that's nice. I like that. It's all right with me. But what really sold the game. Wasn't that it eventually led into fun action sequences. But that the characters were AMAZING. It seems like every other day someone is talking about how terribly women are represented in video games. This game has the best cast of females I have ever seen.
They were like real people. Not female characters. People. By the time I was done I loved all those women.

The thing that blows me away is that it took this long to find this game. I hate that it's become a real thing to where if games have too much story content and not enough game play. It becomes a battle for validation in the eyes of the community.
Sakura wars gave me a great time and that's all I ever wanted.

 

[anthony87]

Ronin Blade(aka Soul of the Samurai)

A survival horror/hack and slash action game set in a Japanese fiefdom where you play as a Ronin returning to his hometown and Ninja searching for her lost brother through parallel and eventually converging stories. You start off fighting basic swordsman mooks and as the game progresses you start fighting off monsters and mutants and shit.

Picked it up randomly one day when I was like 11 simply because it was the only game in the pre-owned section I could afford that day. Ended up becoming one of my favourite Playstation 1 games.

The soundtrack was absolutely bitchin' too: