That underrated, forgotten gem of a game.

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Sep 13, 2009
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TaintedSaint said:
Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. If you have never played it you are going yourself a grave injustice.

This game was actually amazing. Shame it never got that much attention.

Crash Team Racing. Why Mario Kart was so much more popular than it eludes me. It is 10x the game Mario Kart is
 

Traveling Hero

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Jun 3, 2012
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Trap Gunner on PS1.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQO8TUq41jU

Such a good game. Sort of like a multi-player Deception (which I assume could also count for this list). Haven't played anything else quite like it.
 

Tilted_Logic

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Apr 2, 2010
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Prey.

Aside from the potential new interest Prey 2 stirred up at E3 a while back, I don't know anyone who'd played it, which is quite the tragedy.. As it was amazing.

Combine Ratchet & Clank and Portal, so you have a vast array of crazy guns, you can walk on walls, go through portals that put you on the roof, shrink you... That all on top of the Native American spirit walking ability...

This game was absolutely a gem in the rough, and I myself only came across it on a fluke.

One of the better Sci Fi games I've played by far, and I do hope that Prey 2 gets a release. My most anticipated game right now.
 

CrimsonBlaze

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Aug 29, 2011
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I'm going to go WAY off the radar and recommend the game Phase for the iPod (the one that has a wheel and not a giant screen).

Phase was a musical rhythm game and came out when Guitar Hero and Rock Band were at war with each other for your attention. It has a very simple control scheme: you have three buttons you use during the game, the left, right, and center inputs on the wheel, you can also slide the wheel left and right during a stream of notes, and you need to do it all to the beat of the music. There are three difficulties, Easy, Medium, and Hard, and each determines how many notes you must push correctly to the music and how closely you will follow the rhythm of the song (with Hard being the most accurate).

I know that there were other games similar to this on the iTouch, but what makes Phase the king is that your music selection is your OWN track list. That's right, any song that you own or have on your iPod can become playable on Phase. Yes there are some songs that are just too slow or fast paced to function properly, but if you have a large collection of songs like I do, you can find a lot of your favorites to play on Phase.

Phase was great for those moments where you wanted to hear a song, but wanted to do something else to keep you entertained, or when you wanted to play a quick game on your iPod without having to dedicated a large clump of time to it. I wish Phase would return in the form of an App and it might give me an excuse to actually buy the damn iTouch, as cheap and as skimpy with the memory as it is.
 

antidonkey

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Dec 10, 2009
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My addition to this list will have to be Clive Barker's Undying. I loved that game. It has a fantastic creepy vibe to it. I loved how your left hand was for guns while the right handled magic. All the characters were interesting and wound up as epic fights. The critics loved it but no one bought it. Such a shame as they had sequels and ports lined up. The one bad thing I remember about it was the final boss.......it was massively lame. Still, it didn't diminish the experience as a whole too much.
 

Kyr Knightbane

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ShinyCharizard said:
I can't believe that no one has yet mentioned War of the Monsters (PS2)

That was the game of my late childhood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Monsters
Damn, you beat me to it. This was the game that i sunk 30 hours into and played for about 10 hours straight when i bought it.

 

Jorjgasm

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Aug 22, 2011
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I second the people who said Dark Corners of the Earth, Giants, Majesty, Arcanum, Advent Rising, Undying and VTM Bloodlines. For me, Gothic was the opposite of obscure, it was a formative gaming experience for me and all my friends. I'll add the following:

- Clive Barker's Jericho, which had amazing ideas and characters and ended up a "bowl o' brown"
- Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising, which was this brilliant strategy game that had you using a very limited number of units to achieve difficult goals, what Carrier Command Gaea Mission is trying to riff on now, only without the exciting unit types and strategic depth. It deserved a sequel and more success for its amazing ideas. Also, if there was ever a single player game that screamed for multi, even just tacked on, this is it.
- Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends, which made the franchise fun for me and had this nice story and great factions with amazing art. The implementation of said story was kind of crappy, filler missions having just 2 lines of text assigned to them but still.
- Arx Fatalis, an RPG with incresible freedom a nice, fleshed out world, rats on a stick and an interesting magic system, from the people who gave us Dishonored. If you're going to say it is a legend and not obscure at all, then why hasn't Arkane reaped the rewards it deserved? It's been stuck doing grunt work for other games and Dark Messiah for the better part of ten years.
- Septerra Core - Western JRPG with everything it entails and a nice world.
- Freelancer - still the standard to beat in arcadey space sims with lots of freedom, that dont make you want to blow a gasket because of the controls (like the X series)
- the Legacy of Kain series, a vampire, time travel, still a better love story than twilight platformer and adventure, because of the story and the characters
 

NicotineStainedSoul

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Jan 24, 2009
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Startopia is for me one of the biggest shames, It scored well in reviews (those that did) and even today many years on, its aesthetic art design still looks good which is rare for games that old.
It was a really cool if rather simplistic sim space station game that wasn't without its faults but was charming none the less. I think the saddest part after the credits is the message "see you in startopia 2".

There was an article on here about it years ago http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_146/4839-Footprints

such a shame, a lot could have been polished in a sequel and the parts that didn't work stripped out or improved on. As is, every few years I fire up my copy and have fun rehabilitating alien convicts, converting them to religion (for profit$$), becoming an unstoppable economic juggernaut terraforming for high value crops and trading em.
 

hawkeye52

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Jul 17, 2009
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Anything which paradox plaza makes or publishes bar one or two games. Because the games aren't underated since people know that they are awesome
 

Skoldpadda

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47_Ronin said:
Archimedean Dynasty - still waiting for proper sequels.
Holy crap yes!
I'm sorry but I'm gonna have to hump your leg.

I would opine that Clive Barker's Undying belongs here. It wasn't that obscure in its day (although by no means a blockbuster), but it seems to have been buried under the sands of time, since I never hear it mentioned anymore. Which is a travesty because it actually, to this day, is still one of the best and most atmospheric story-driven shooters ever made.
 

beyondbrainmatter

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Dec 7, 2010
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SNES:

Tetris Battle Gaiden
Rock N'Roll Racing
Uncharted Waters 2: New Horizons
Romancing Saga 3
Bahamut Lagoon

PC:

Warlords 3: Darklords Rising
Jagged Alliance 2
Star Control 2
Romance of the Three Kingdoms 11

Neo Geo:

Last Blade 2
Blazing Star
Twinkle Star Sprites
Magical Drop 3

Neo Geo Pocket:
SNK vs Capcom: Cardfighters Clash

Arcade:
DoDonPachi
ESPGaluda
Dangun Feveron
Ketsui
Guwange
Giga Wing
1944: Loopmasters
Strikers 1945 III
 

THEMILKMAN

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I have to say it every time these topics come around: Rule of Rose.
The gameplay is a steaming pile of ass but my god does everything else about it make it all worth it. If you have a creative bone in your body then I recommend playing this game ASAP.
 

Kevlar Eater

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Sep 27, 2009
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The Void - Has a bit of an intriguing story, "combat" mechanics are weird but understandable, teaches one how to gather, plant and use the game's semi-renewable resource (color) wisely. Also contains a lot of sexy naked women that stretch, dance or move around seductively (with the exception of three) when fed their preferred color.
 

Schadrach

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Jorjgasm said:
- the Legacy of Kain series, a vampire, time travel, still a better love story than twilight platformer and adventure, because of the story and the characters
It is sad that they'll never make an eighth one and finish the series, especially since the major pieces of the plot arc for it are all right in front of them.
 

Mycroft Holmes

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Sep 26, 2011
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Not necessarily forgotten: But Arcanum is one of the greatest RPGs ever. Superb dialogue and voice acting. A very big story line that can play out many different ways. And a very modular character creation system that allows you to play as very diverse and interesting characters. A human who talks his way out of most situations and is good at convincing other people to fight for him. A ugly as shit halfling who is extremely quick with a blade. The retarded half-ogre who people trick into doing quests for them. The genius half-ogre scientist who is as strong as he is brilliant.

Tanis said:
Giants: Citizen Kabuto:
You play as a drunk alien British mercenary, a naked water chick, and a huge fucking dinosaur like thing. What's not to love?
A game that never seems to take itself to seriously (SEE: Most lines of dialogue in the game), some great game play that differs from each storyline (or creature class), plus some really fun run and kill game play, and you've got an over looked gem.
Agreed(although the girl is only topless in European versions, in the US she wears a bra.) The dialogue is hilarious and the gameplay fun and diverse.
 

Schadrach

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THEMILKMAN said:
I have to say it every time these topics come around: Rule of Rose.
The gameplay is a steaming pile of ass but my god does everything else about it make it all worth it. If you have a creative bone in your body then I recommend playing this game ASAP.
What's really sad is I've either played, or have in some obscure part of my backlog, every game mentioned in this thread. Rule of Rose is on the backlog right in front of "second half of the .hack games". Steambot Chronicles is right in front of it.

I apparently have a taste for obscure games. I even played Princess Tomato in Salad Kingdom on NES, since my old rental rule in junior high was "since it's 4 games for a weekend for $3.49, I'll get two I know will be good, one that probably will be, and one that I've never heard of." That rental place had basically every game that those collector's lists put in the top 100 rarest NES, SNES, and Genesis games. It's sad that it burned down (though it didn't take much -- they were also the main supplier of alcohol to a small college town).
 

MorganL4

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May 1, 2008
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I absolutely adored Cell Damage.... It's entire point was to explore this new thing called cell shading ( yeah I said "new") You got in cars that had horrible steering and drove around as cartoon creatures in a looneytoon-esce environment and killed each other the way looney tunes do ( hammers rockets buzz saws) and the crap driving was made okay because as a cartoon you expected to have crap driving control. get 3 friends and play that, you won't stop laughing...


 

SirDoom

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Chromehounds for the 360, before the servers got shut down.

There was no multiplayer game I loved more than chromehounds at the time. It not only encouraged teamwork, it forced it. You couldn't just go in treating the game as a deathmatch either. If you go run off on your own without communicating with your team, it didn't end well for you. I guess that's why it never really picked up traction. It was something special, but something that was incompatible with the typical xbox live gamer.

The only real downside I see is that the single player was nothing more than a tutorial for the online part of the game, and the online part of the game is no more. So now all that's left is a handful of short missions with only a tiny fraction of the mech parts available to you. The disc isn't really worth putting in the console anymore. Such a sad way to go.
 

Vladimir Eremeyev

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Sep 23, 2012
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ALFA ANTITERROR
Best tactical turn-based game EVER you never heard about.
And it's even has hot seat mode!

It's the the Operation Flashpoint of the turn-based genre.
Really hardcore, to the max, with literally everything to account for.