Phantasmagoria 1 and 2
I loved bulletstorm.
Age of empires 3 was good. The units were cooler, graphics were amazing and the gameplay was better placed than previous games. The only thing that sucked was grinding cards but bypassing that was as simple as changing a value in a text file.
Age of empires 3 DE moggs Age of Empires 4 to death.
Everyone is just saying actually popular games, but ones they don’t think are popular enough. If people don’t have to look up the game, it’s probably not answering this question (with a few infamous exceptions maybe).
Mine would be Stationeers. There’s no real action or anything. It’s a game about designing, building, managing, and automating a station on another world. Each world has its own issues, be that Luna with a vacuum, Mars (the easiest) with storms, no breathable atmosphere, and cold, Venus with all the Venus issues, or some made up planets with crazy problems. It simulated gasses and liquids, replicating the refrigeration cycle so you can make your own heat pumps for cooling. It’s really cool, but complex and potentially boring for most people.
It’s made by the studio making Kitten Space Agency. It’s a studio created by the DayZ mod creator, and they seem really cool. They’re very much not profit motivated, and I think they’ve said developing Stationeers is costing them money, at least at one point, and KSA is planned to be free and donation supported.
Vindictus, pre-2015
Holy ball knowledge. I used to play a little of that in the early 10s, what an insane combat system for an MMO.
I regret being distracted with other stuff because when I checked it again much later it seemed to be going… As most other mmos where going.
Bubsy
I loved Bubsy.
Resident Evil…3
The one that as far as I can tell everyone hates I played the absolute shit out of as a kid. I remember speed running it before I knew that was a thing to unlock everything. Used to just do 2-3 playthroughs a week just vibin.
Did people hate that one? I know people don’t like the remake because it took out a bunch of content. But I remember feeling like Nemesis becoming the face of the franchise for a time.
Whether deserved or not Star Wars Jedi Knight Jedi Academy is always forgotten compared to its predecessor. But I don’t care, it’s the best one for me.
In the same vein The Force Unleashed II is the one I remember more fondly. It’s worse than the previous one certainly, but the story does have some nice moments and playing it on the hardest difficulty makes you actually have to block correctly and plan your movement right to survive the onslaught of fire by the stormtroopers.
That first time you land on a rainy biome and the rain drops sizzle on your saber…
It’s far from my favorite game, but I really really enjoyed the new saint’s row. My only real issue with it was it was so buggy that when my SO and I played together, every session had at least two points where it either crashed outright, or broke in such a way we had to both relaunch the game.
And this is coming from someone who loves saints row 2.
My problem with the latest saints row was it was too short. Story was cute, but brief. I bought it on sale after they fixed some stuff apparently and just played it to have fun with a friend. It was fun.
This wasn’t one I expected to see.
I was genuinely surprised playing it to find it was actually good. And that most of the loudest complaints just weren’t true.
The dot hack series on ps2
People hated .hack? One of my favorites!
Surely there were better semi-action RPGs…but the vibes and the depth of some systems on those games were great
Timeshift: it has 71 on metacritic, so not that universally disliked, but I actually thought it was really great. An fps where you can stop or slow down time, with pretty simple time related puzzles and a lot of slow-motion gore.
It also had an interesting multiplayer mode where you could throw grenades that slow down time in a sphere around them, but unfortunately I never managed to find a match online
Watch Dogs, the first one specifically. I know Ubisoft has had a pretty bad track record, especially in recent years, but I’ve played through that game a bunch of times and always had a good time with it. Even in its worse parts its still dumb fun.
The story honestly aged really well too for better or worse with how tech companies and governments are mingling now.
I will never forgive them for the incredibly misleading E3 footage where the game looked so much better than what it ended up being.
I didn’t like that game for the most part, but for reasons I find difficult to explain, I really enjoyed that minigame with the robot spider.
that’s from WD2, the first game was way more grounded.
It was definitely the first. I don’t own and have never played the sequel. They called them “digital trips” or something like that. It was supposed to be like an in-universe computer game, I think? There wasn’t a lot to it–you piloted this tank thing and had to clear a level, by jumping around and sometimes killing some enemies until you reached a checkpoint, in a certain brief time limit. But I found it kinda weirdly compelling.
I would have like Watch Dogs more if there was some sort of magical element to the story. Because what that character could do was basically magic.
I played the first one for a while and enjoyed it, don’t really remember if there was a specific reason I put it down. I didn’t realize a lot of people had beef with it. I remember that the driving mechanics were clunky as hell after playing things like GTA or Mafia, but other than that it seemed like a pretty cool game.
Can it be played on Steam Deck without much tinkering? I’ve always wanted to give it a try.
Dont forget you can check ProtonDB and see how users have found it on the Steam Deck! The site is a great resource for checking in advance:
https://www.protondb.com/app/243470
There’s 30 separate reports there for you to check over!
It says it’s playable with it on the Steam page so probably. I’m not sure if Ubisoft made it extra janky with something like Ubisoft Connect though.
Anthem and Babylon’s fall… sadly.
The Guild 2 is a janky, buggy mess that I love.
I don’t think anyone hated
eitherany of these games, but they don’t seem to have gained as much traction as they deserve.Secret of Mana for the SNES is my all time favorite game.
Red Faction: Guerrilla is also a great game that few people remember.
Star Wars: Rebellion was possibly the first 4X game I played, before they were called 4X. Totally unbalanced in favor of the empire, and building a death star was just stupid, but it was still a fun game.
I loved the original RF but couldn’t get into any of the sequels. I tried, I really wanted to like them, but they always ended up not quite scratching the itch and I’d just uninstall and replay the first.
Secret of Mana for the SNES
I definitely played through that a few times, but in retrospect standing around and holding the attack button for like 10-15 seconds to charge your weapon was perhaps not the most fun mechanic.
I let the third character be the boy(Randi). I played the sprite(Popoi) and my brother player the girl(Marle). The computer charged the attacks and we handled the spells.
Marle is from chrono trigger. The SoM girl is either Purim or Primm.
I played both, Primm is the one that I remember. How I got her confused with Marle I’ve no clue.
They do look very similar. Wouldn’t have questioned it if I hadn’t just played chrono trigger.
Actually that’s not strange, Marle was kinda sorta based on Primm. When development for Chrono Trigger began, Akira Toriyama was asked to make characters, and he was told he could use the SoM characters as inspiration or something along those lines, and he made Chrono and Marle basically as a DTIYS of Randy and Primm.
That’s basically how most two player games of SoM end up. “Randi” is just a boring attacker and not particularly fun to play. It is also the only one the AI can really handle playing properly.
+1 for Secret of Mana. Awesome game.
