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No One Lives Forever
To this day I have no idea why I bought it. And I bought it close to its release date. I would only do that if I had been absolutely obsessed for months with previews and stuff. But I remember none of that.
And still it ended up becoming one of my all time favourites.
This is a hard one because I generally try to play good games these days, and good games either get popularized through word of mouth or Youtubers make video essays about how they were misunderstood at the time. For me, this question is really asking "Hey what weird trash did you find back when you were 10 years old digging through the bargain bin for whatever you could trade two games you finished for."
I think my big picks from the weird trash are The Urbz, which comes from back when they made Sims spinoff games instead of endless DLC, and Ty the Tasmanian Devil, which was a 3D platformer metroidvania that revolved around collecting increasingly elaborate boom-a-rangs. I definitely sunk the most hours into the Urbz, because nothing was more fun to a 10 year old than going around a virtual town flipping people off.
Idk, I remember hide-and-go-seek being pretty sick as a kid. I don't often see it mentioned.
Commander Keen might be one of the few old enough not to have been mentioned to me since the internet became well-known.
Also, Squarez.
Two very niche board games from the 70s: "Snit's Revenge" "Lie, Cheat, and Steal"
And an old Avalon Hill wargame: "Wooden Ships and Iron Men"
Shallow Thought Of The Day: Any game mentioned in this thread twice is automatically someone who didn't read all the comments before posting.
Or they did read all the comments, but someone posted their game during the time they were reading, so they never actually saw it. Then they posted their game and looked a stinky non-reader even though they weren't.
Sid Meiers' Pirates of the Carribean
Lode Runner
Loved Lode Runner! Broderbund Software, right? I think they also made Choplifter.
Yup broderbund, one of the first games available for our Mac classic
There was this officially licensed Star Trek tabletop starship battle game that I got to play a couple times in the eighties and no one seems to remember it but me. Wish I could find a copy. I remember it being a blast.
I could rattle off a whole list of TRS-80 Model I/III or Apple ][ games that no one has ever heard of, but I'll spare you.
Descent
Descent 2 earthshaker multiplayer was my jam. Went through so many joystick hats!
All time biggest time sinks are probably Civilization 2 and Factorio.
Biggest time sink you’ve never heard of is Ancient Dungeons of Mystery, a one-man Roguelike dungeon delving passion project.
Civ II was peak of the series imho... Immersive gameplay trumps graphics
Since most games are often mentioned on the internet, I'm going to reach waaaaaaaay back to my childhood and mention Cartooners:
This was a game for kids to make their own cartoons. I spend so much time making all kinds of funny and weird stories. It was very basic, but it had me giggling every time.
Super dodgeball for the NES.
Deceptively simple, but much deeper than it seems on first glance. Each character has 2 different special abilities that change the way you throw. Especially if you can get a few buddies to huddle around the tv with you, will keep you all entertained for hours.
Haven't seen it mentioned here, but my favorite game of all time is one that is Rarely mentioned - if ever,
The World Ends With You, originally for the DS, now on Switch.
MC Neku has 7 days to figure out wtf is going on in The Reaper's Game, but he can't remember anything.
Fun combat mechanics, the DS version had you fighting 2 combat encounters at the same time, one on the top screen, and the main one on the bottom screen. The sound track was amazing! I still have multiple soundbytes from that game as ringtones.
Each Anno Domini game consists of 336 cards, with a description of a historical event on one side of the card and the year (and sometimes specific date) in which it happened on the other. All Anno Domini games can be played as a standalone item or mixed with some or even all other editions.
In Anno Domini, each player receives nine cards (or fewer, if you want the game to be shorter) and may look only at the descriptions. In turn, players place a card on the table, trying to place their card in chronological order to those already present. Instead of adding a card, a player may claim that the order in which the cards have been placed is incorrect. In this case all cards are turned over and the correct years revealed.
If the order is correct, then the doubting player receives two cards and skips a turn. If the order is incorrect, then the previous player – who accepted the order as correct or made it incorrect through her own placement – receives three cards. The first player with no cards remaining in hand wins.
The Anno Domini game series exist only in German.
If its out of non-mentions it has to be Space Station 13. I hope 14 on Steam catches up soon, been thinking of lending a hand.
Snake. There are many good versions of it, but I'd say my favourite is the one from coolmathgames.com .
Loco roco 1,2,3 on psp. Played the shit out of them when I was a kid
Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow (PC)
A game that’s never mentioned on the internet? Probably would have to be something that came on those shareware discs in the 90s then.
I’ll go with the Adventures of MicroMan
I never see Cultist Simulator recommended but it's one of my favorites. It really captures the idea of studying the esoteric arts, and has a surprising amount of world building given how simple the presentation is.
I really like backgammon but no one ever wants to play with me
Probably havent player it in ten years but Kirby super star ultra. There is just SO MUCH content. I swear there are like a dozen minigamss and multiple "main games". All on the DS, it's crazy.
Other than that, megaman zero. Great music, tight controls and great story. Its fucking hard of course but super fun.
Actual recommendations, but bring your friends AND beer:
Super SMASH Tv
Zombies Ate My Neighbors
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Only if you’re a masochist because you REALLY REALLY like flying through rings then Superman64 is probably the best game there is
Jade cocoon 2 for the PS2.
A brilliant mix of tactics and Pokemon. You have a box composed of 8 slots surrounding you, 4 edges of different coolers, and 4 corners that combine 2 colors, you get to pick of 6 monsters to fill those 8 slots, each edge is a different style of move, red is attack, blue is defend, green is heal, yellow is cast, some monsters only have 1 color affiliated with them, some have 3, you select which side/color of box you want to attack your opponent with, if you don't have a monster in the middle of that color they can attach your hit point pool directly.
I rarely see it mentioned, and I think that's a shame, it was very creative for being in a very popular genre
Escape Velocity Nova
That game is the shit. It's even easy to play on Windows now, which was very much not the case back in the day.
Board game: Sheriff of Nottingham, i just love social deception games.
Video game: BETON BRUTAL, 3D platformer with similar parkour like Minecraft, but more polished. Overall pretty chill to sink some time into.
Urban Rivals. No one is talking about that game anymore. It used to be an amazing browser game. By now it's even on steam, but apparently they cut a lot of the animations so the crowd isn't happy about it. The card artworks are cool and the gameplay (was) fun. I don't know if it's still the same, as live games tend to change game mechanics.
Every other game I play('d) is mentioned at least sometimes (once a week).
Even stuff like Gothic, Golden Sun, Ragnarok Online.
Castle of the winds.
I had this as a kid. From a shareware compilation CD.
For the Gen-Z kids in the audience, that's like a little snapshot of the internet that you bought at a computer show or flea market for $2, and was worse than the internet because it didn't have any boobies on it, except it was better than the internet because your parents wouldn't gripe at you constantly for always tying up the house's telephone line and you barely had to wait to play anything on it.
Where was I again?
Oh yeah. I got my ass kicked by that game. It was also cool that you could set any Windows .ico file as your player character, though. You could run around as Captain Notepad or Sir Calculator the Algebraic if you wanted to.
ICO never gets mentioned and is legitimately my #1 all time with Another World a close 2nd that also never gets mentioned
The boardgame Heat is one of my all time favorites. Thunder Road Vendetta is right up there too, and I am waiting to put them together for an all road race/rage saturday with my boardgame peeps.
Well that rules out pretty much every video game. So here's my favorite card game instead.
It's called Illimat. It's very strategic but easy to finish a game in under an hour. It's essentially a game of pattern recognition and "harvesting" sets of cards. The goal is to harvest the most points each round.
Fitting into the overall theme of farming, there are four fields to harvest from, and each field is in a different season. Players can change the seasons by playing special cards, and the seasons affect the types of actions that may be performed in each field.
Everyone I've played with has enjoyed this game.
Tzolk’in is my favorite game, I think. It is a board game that incorporates time in an interesting way for a worker-placement style game.