Poll: Have you ever bought a game you knew nothing about before seeing in the store?

[josemlopes]

I have indeed. That is how I discovered Planescape: Torment. A successful venture I say! It was much more common in the old days before the internet was the way it was now.

So this cover managed to pull you in?

Didnt expect that.

OT: I did buy Dark Sector and Enemy Territory Quake Wars because they were really cheap. I did already knew something about them but what I knew of Dark Sector was that trailer that ended up being very different then the actual game (it was what Warframe is now) and Quake Wars... well, I knew that it was related to Quake and it seemed like Quake Battlefield Edition so I guess I also knew something about it.

Ended up enjoying both, Dark Sector is a good Resident Evil 4 and even if I didnt play much of Quake Wars there was some fun to be had.

 

[Spaceman Spiff]

I have, but very rarely. I bought Borderlands back I first got my 360. I just saw it one the shelf, noticed the art, and decided to try it. I played that game for years afterward. More recently, I bought Terreria on Steam. It looked somewhat interesting and was cheap, but I haven't touched it yet.

 

[Islandbuffilo]

Not often, even when I was younger, unless commercials and source material don't count. The only games I can remember buying blind were: Fire emblem: Sacred stones (Loved it), The Bard's Tale (Loved it), and Mass Effect 2 (Loved it). Oh and I almost forgot Disciples 3.

 

[Lightknight]

I'd say it happens on Steam now. But never before. I'll see that it's a popular game on steam and then take a closer look.

But that kind of defeats the purpose. In seeing it on Steam I am simultaneously learning about it.

 

[KarmaTheAlligator]

Done that a few times with Steam sales and physical games, regretted some as they turned out completely different than what the box announced (or what I thought the box meant), or they just didn't do it for me. Now I can't really afford to do that anymore, so there's that.

 

[Nazulu]

Back when the SNES was the shit and my net was as slow as a snail turtle hybrid I did. I will never forget buying Super Metroid from someones Garage Sale for 5$, because I thought a game with that picture couldn't be bad. I couldn't have made a better decision. I did that with one other SNES game, couple of Playstation games, some computer games back in the 90s, and one N64 game, and that's because the industry was more reliable then.

 

[Michael Tabbut]

Rather frequently I must say, and for the most part I almost never get burned by my choices. The only time I ever really regretted buying a game was Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia, I played the everliving shit out of it until I realized it was shit.

 

[rgrekejin]

I used to do this somewhat often back when Gamestop had fairly regular buy-2-get-1-free sales on used games. I'd have a list of a few games I wanted that weren't an even multiple of three, so I'd get a game or two that I knew little or nothing about just to maximize the value of my money. Sure, I ended up with a few games I considered stinkers (the PS2 Ghost in the Shell game, the first Xenosaga game, Zone of Enders) but I also ended up with a few really excellent games I wouldn't have otherwise considered (Skies of Arcadia: Legends, Pikmin, Paper Mario, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Eternal Darkness, etc).

 

[IamLEAM1983]

Oh, yeah.

I was on vaca at my aunt's place, with a fat wad of stashed Leisure Money burning a hole in my pocket, some fifteen years ago. I ambled into Montreal's Sainte-Catherine Street Future Shop, expecting not to find anything too interesting.

Then, pretty much out of nowhere, a fairly cool bit of box art catches my eye. "Deus Ex? Man, look at that poser on the cover, game's probably just a graphics benchmark with silly narrative aspirations... Eh, it's sixty bucks, but I don't care. Looks kinda pretentious."

Little did I know I'd be wrong. Dead wrong. Deus Ex needs no introduction because Deus Ex is the absolute shit. It's the first high-concept game I played, it was the first game to get me researching Philosophy 101 authors and subjects, and it cemented my love for stealth-action games. I played through it over and over for about a year and developed my interest in Transhumanism as a result.

If I'd walked past that one box on a snowy January afternoon, I wouldn't be half the gamer I am today.

 

[G00N3R7883]

I'm sure its probably happened once or twice. In fact one game that comes to mind is Sol Survivor, a less famous tower defence game. I didn't know anything about it until one day I saw it on the Steam daily deals. I'd played Defence Grid already so I knew I liked the genre, the forum comments suggested Sol Survivor was a good game, so I bought it and I enjoyed it.

Mostly though, I thoroughly research all my game purchases because I don't want to get burned by buggy releases and over hyped crap.

 

[BleedingPride]

It was devil may cry 4 for me, loved it to bits.

 

[NerAnima]

I've done it a number of times, and so far I've enjoyed pretty much every single game I've gotten, so I guess I'm one of the lucky ones.

Metroid Fusion for the GBA when I was really little, still love that game to bits, I got "Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom" when I was a little older which, while not the usual card game fare, was still really interesting to me, and I loved being able to craft my own 3-monster teams.

And then, a year or so ago, I was in EB-Games, a bit of cash and looking for a new game, considering buying the Silent Hill HD collection, since I had heard good things about the franchise, but didn't want to scavenge for the PS2 version, when I noticed an odd game sitting on the shelf; Disgaea 4. I had never heard of it before, didn't even know what it was about, but it intrigued me. After learning a bit more on it, and debating over whether I should get it or not, I figured I should take a chance and buy it.

Turned out to be a wise decision, as I love that game, even if I feel it's a bit rough around the edges, but it looks a whole lot better than the Silent Hill HD remake.

 

[thoughtwrangler]

Actually I now remember another game where this qualified. It was a PS1 game about a Japanese family surviving an alien invasion and robbery/terrorism through bizarre minigames. I looked at the back of the case and couldn't NOT buy it.

That game was Incredible Crisis, and it was brilliantly flawed. Not a perfect game, but it was a lot of fun, and I don't regret it in the least. It worked out much better than Fester's Quest did.

 

[Cryselle]

I used to do this fairly often, getting games like Valkyrie Profile, Suikoden 2, Digital Devil Saga, Zone of the Enders, and God Hand all as impulse purchases that I knew little if anything about when I purchased them. More recently however I got burned by a string of bad purchases all in a row that has me a lot more wary about going for it. I'll still pick up a game on impulse if it's from a studio with a good track record, or if I'm just itching for something new, but most of my purchases now are researched.

 

[Savryc]

Plenty of times. Some good like the Act of War series, World in Conflict, Gothic series (I didn't know it had a cult following when I bought it). Some bad, like Dawn of Magic or Space Siege. I took hideous advantage of GAME's 3 for £10 on old/old-ish PC games when I was unemployed, dunno if they still do it.

Those examples were just off the top of my head. I'd say it's done me good overall.

 

[DocJ]

I tend to just pick up games at random. Especially if they're on sale. If I like the cover art and it's cheap I'll just pick it up. Why not? It's like a kind of candy. You might not have any idea what it tastes like, but the packaging looks nice and it looks tasty, so you pick it up. At least that's my way of viewing this stuff.

 

[ForumSafari]

Pre-PS2 it's about all I did. I have very fond memories of buying second hand NES/SNES cartridges cheap and particularly buying those shareware disk blister packs, just dozens of single-serve games.

And the full products came in such wondrous boxes, these days you feel lucky to get a manual and a crappy plastic fucking batarang makes something a 'collectors edition'. They have no damn clue, my boxed copies of Command & Conquer and Quake are the size of board games.

I miss my childhood.

 

[Meximagician]

Twice that I can recall: Rascal for PS1 (which made me never buy a game without researching ever again) and Yakuza 4 for PS3 (which probably shouldn't count, I got it as a BOGO deal with a game I did want).

Rascal is infamous for being one of the worst games for PS1. Certainly one of the most uninspired, at least Bubsy 3D's sparse landscapes made room for it's terrible camera and otherwise just felt unfinished, Rascal feels finished and is still terrible.

Yakuza 4 sat on my shelf for months until I finally got around to it. I launched a three meter great white shark out of the water. While angling off a dock. No mount or harness.

 

[Xathos]

Three notable games of mention for me.

The first is The World Ends With You. I was browsing some Kingdom Hearts fansites at the time, and occasionally they would report on the game because Tetsuya Nomura, who works on the Kingdom Hearts franchise, also worked in this game as well. But I didn't think much of it, and aside from compliments of the music, everything about the game was in the background and I knew nothing. Fastforward a few months later, and I end up going to Gamestop and seeing TWEWY there, and its the last copy. I wanted to buy something, and nothing was really grabbing my attention, so I said "What the hell, its the last copy".

Ended up being one of my favorite games of all time. The music was indeed great, the battle system was fun and required some time to master, and the characters felt great. But most of all, the game was hilarious, and even it's side chapter was just a nonstop rollercoaster of laughs. Even better though, is that I actually WANTED to try and get as close to 100% completion in an RPG, which really doesn't happen to me often (just side dungeons, bosses, the basic stuff). Got around 93% complete, and I had fun the whole way.

The second is Nier. I remember browsing through Kotaku and occasionally the game would come up during pre-release. Mostly it stemmed from one character in the game that looked like a girl, actually being a boy (or some gender/genital revealing fact). I remember there being a few more articles about the game, where they were trying to clarify exactly WHAT the character was (which is slightly more complicated in the actual game). That was pretty much all I knew about it except for some type of sickness that was apparently a focal point of the game. So the game comes out, and around Christmas time as I'm putting my list together, I trying really hard to get some RPG's I want. Remembering Nier, I decided to just put it on there as one of my last items and if I didn't get it, it was fine.

Holy crap did I love this game. The music was AMAZING (almost all of it felt like it had some lyrics to it), the voice acting was really good, the story was depressing (even moreso on New Game+ where they add additional story cutscenes to make you feel horrible), and I found the lighting effects to really strike a cord with me for some reason. Nier was another game that made me really want to try and get 100% completion (or at the very least most of the trophies). Just settled for getting all of the endings.

This tends to happen with me and RPGs. Most of them are random buys and I barely know about them. These two though are my go to ones, but there are a lot more (Xenosaga series, Star Ocean 3, Fire Emblem series, Tales of Xillia, Golden Sun, just to name a few).

 

[CommanderZx2]

Yes, but I haven't done so in a very long amount of time. I think the last time I bought a game from looking at the box and nothing else was back in 2001, which was Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s I didn't have much in the way Internet outside of occasional 33-56K and rarely saw a gaming magazine. So browsing game stores or word of mouth was the primary way of finding out about new upcoming games.