And what specifically makes it special, appealing, or interesting to you?
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
It was a kinda janky 3D Action Adventure from around 2000. Back then it had really beautiful and colorful graphics. I remember playing it on my first “real” PC and being amazed by how it looked.
It also stands out to me for being actually funny and comitting to being a comedy game.
I loved this game! The humour was my favourite part - very dry and very British. A fun shooter with a lot of variety. Amazing soundtrack by Jeremy Soule. I found the game very difficult, though - I doubt I ever got close to finishing it. How about you?
You two + the screenshots on the steam page I just looked up have sold me on this. It looks, at the very least, interesting and different, which is sometimes all I want really. I’ll give it a shot.
There’s also a spiritual successor made by the same people (more or less), Armed & Dangerous.
Good luck. Let us know if it still holds up today.
When I first played it I didn’t get very far into it. But I came back to it a few years later and finished it. The Multiplayer was also suprisingly fun on LAN-parties.
Nobody can hate that game. Damn that was gold. I believe it’s well beloved, tho not widely remembered
Not necessarily unpopular in general, but unpopular within its own series are the DS Zelda games, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. These games have some great dungeon design and I really liked most aspects of the touch screen controls (except blowing into the DS). These games used the DS to its fullest and will sadly be locked there as a result. I might have been one of the only people disappointed with Link Between Worlds for adandoning the touch screen for traditional controls.
Spirit Tracks is the bomb. I loved that game very much.
I am bumping both of these games up my personal list to try on 3DS now. This sounds cool. And I’ve been playing totk so zelda is on the brain lately. :)
any arena shooter in the style of Quake, Halo, or Unreal Tournament. It’s a shame they aren’t more popular
Huh, I was under the impression there was a bit of a “boomer shooter” renaissance going on the last few years. I know I’ve seen a bunch of games that were trying to emulate the feel and sometimes even the look of that style of FPS.
The definitions of arena shooters and boomer shooters are both pretty fuzzy and have a lot of overlap.
For example, I consider Duke Nukem 3D’s multiplayer to be a great arena shooter, however when many people talk about arena shooters what they mean are early 2000s style shooters that are fully 3D rather than sprite based. Halo CE was “the” arena shooter when it came out.
It is a genre that really hasn’t made a comeback. Some people say things like Overwatch are arena shooters, but for the kinds of people wanting old fashioned shooters a big element is that all players start with the same weapons and abilities by default. It’s the imperfection of language trying to articulate a feeling.
Really? I must be out of the loop then 😂
Some notable games in the “boomer shooter” genre:
- Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal
- Warhammer 40.000 Boltgun
- Games by New Blood Interactive:
- Amid Evil
- DUSK
- Ultrakill
- Gloomwood
- Cultic
- Ion Fury
- Prodeus
- Dread Templar
- Hrot
Oh, OK! I should have been more specific that I was talking about multiplayer games like what I mentioned, my bad! I knew about some of those games. The Doom Reboot and that Warhammer Boltgun are both sick, I’ve enjoyed both of them. I’ll be looking into the others thanks!
for multiplayer I liked Splitgate a lot, but the devs seem to have mostly abandoned it right when it came out of beta.
How does the Halo Infinite arena multiplayer differ from the original Halo? I never got to play the multiplayer modes in these older shooters.
Is it that the older shooters had faster movement or simpler controls (easy to pick up, hard to master)? More like a Painkiller style of shooting? Or is that impression I have of older shooters totally off base?
I didn’t play much of the original three Halo games, I picked the series up when Reach came out, but yea movement and controls were simpler, there was no sprint or the special abilities they added in reach and afterwards like the jet pack and place down shield barriers. It was just you and your weapon against the other dude and their weapon.
If memory serves the original halos actually felt slower in terms of movement and time to kill than the modern ones.
Painkiller was definitely designed after the first Quake. As in, people who were playing Q1 for close to a decade because nothing else came close, loved Painkiller. If you were someone who just wanted to try out multi… Lol good luck, you lvl1 villager against lvl998 bosses.
Unreal was from what I remember is similar to painkiller. Imagine halo but jumping in slightly low gravity and you are always spirting.
Pretty much any of the Zachtronics games. Shenzen I/O, ExaPunks, Opus Magnum, and Last Call BBS are all fun “puzzle” games for programmers and people with programmer brains.
Wait a minute are Zachtronics games not considered cool? Pfff
They’re supreme cool among puzzle game fans, and among some not-usually-puzzle-fans who like their relatively open-ended nature more than the “one correct solution” type of puzzle games.
I know a lot of people find them intimidating though, to be fair.
Dear Esther is a beautiful piece of art that communicates its story and themes through visual, environmental and interactive symbolism, both random and scripted prose, and movingly composed music. At worst, I think anyone can at least appreciate the beauty in this world they created, the use of symbolism in the environment, and/or the music.
I think of it as the video game equivalent of a Terrance Malick film where you are basically driving the camera and triggering the narration. I totally get if you don’t have preferences for that type of thing, but I think it’s extremely healthy for the medium to have works like it. Few games scratch the kind of itch this one does.
Additionally, the act of moving and investigating a 3D, digitally-realized island constitutes interactivity and, thus, marks it as something inherently different from a movie or book. Modern “games” do not have to have deep or challenging mechanics to utilize interactivity artistically.
I’ve played and beaten plenty of difficult, mechanical or systems focused video games, including most the modern From Software games, Hollow Knight, and old NES games so my appreciation for it isn’t some kind of aversion to challenge or mechanical depth.
I remember playing Dear Esther many years ago and I did enjoy it. Gone Home would likely be up your alley if you haven’t already played it.
In a similar vein, I still really want to try Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, but that game NEVER goes on sale even though it’s ancient at this point, and I just refuse to cooperate with that.
I haven’t heard of that. I’ll have to check it out. Eastshade is really great for a calm, artistic environment.
If we’re talking unpopular as in not very well known outside of its immediate community I gotta say Ultrakill. It’s a retro shooter distilled to its most essential parts with a style meter tied into it. It’s like ballet… with shotguns and exploding demons- so not a lot like ballet. But it’s good! Buy it!
Oh my god I love ultrakill, its such a good timesink.
BLOOD IS FUEL… FOR MY COCK
I enjoyed Spore when I was a kid. It was legit fun evolving and designing your creature.
I played SO much spore back in the day. I even created a sort of OC in the game with a whole backstory and cast of characters and everything. Totally just had a blast from the past looking at my creations on the “sporepedia” (it still exists!)
I enjoyed Spore when I was a kid. It was legit fun evolving and designing your creature.
oh, what i would give for someone to try and make an AAA-backed Spore-like game. it scratches such a specific itch that nothing else really does
Spore was really cool… Until space stage which was just too boring!
I was extremely invested in spore pre release and with how much was cut, it could never live up to my expectations…
Imperator: Rome actually. I think I’ve been seeing a bit more appreciation for it recently (or maybe I’m just imagining it), but the launch was really rough and none of the updates, which changed quite a lot, really got the player counts up until Paradox just decided to abandon it. It’s definitely flawed, but I have kind of a soft spot for it and still enjoy the occasional game. For me the army automation was really nice, since microing stacks has always been one of the most annoying things for me to do in these games, the pop migration and stuff helped it feel like my cities were really growing more organically, and where the basegame falls short there are still some pretty decent mods to improve things (one major mod is actually still being regularly updated years after the game was axed by the devs).
Master Of Orion. Both the original, it’s sequel and the modern remake. It’s nice to play something with different pacing from other games. And the random outcomes from AI throughout the game’s progression keeps things spicy from playthrough to playthrough.
Watch_Dogs was my first platinum on PS3. Everyone was shitting all over the game due to the PC port controversy, but I really enjoyed it. Huge city, different environment, actually good on-foot movement unlike in GTA games, and toooooooons of side stuff to do.
And oh dear, all the hacking stuff was such fun. Yes it was all just one button, but everything was well implemented. The amount of personal details you could pull from phones was amazing. I kept doing it all the time and it wasn’t until near the end of the game that they started repeating.
And the trademark unique Ubisoft multiplayer. Shame it didn’t have full-blown online mode, I can see myself getting lost in it.
Yea great game. Didn’t deserve all the hate unrelated to its actual accomplishments.
The DLC… Bad Blood I think? Was even better.
I can’t emphasize enough how cool some of those VR side-missions were. Some would qualify as fun standalone indie games on their own.
Ah yes, I absolutely loved Watch_Dogs! Glad I wasn’t the only one! :)
I really liked Watch_Dogs. And it is the only game in which the invading player thingy clicked for me. No other game ever pulled that off again. (the new Sniper elite came close though, but it messed up the frequency of it)
Sadly the second game never clicked for me, so I didn’t tried Legions.
Watch dogs was really good (although I really didn’t click with the player character, he was so morose). I wanted to like the second one but I got stuck on a level and abandoned it.
Nobody ever says this but Halo Infinite isn’t that bad if you ignore the battlepass
It’s unfortunate that the game is designed with like 50 layers of battle pass reminder nags. And that it aggressively hated you picking only the modes you really wantes to played; becauae man, yeah, I had a lot of fun with it.
Not quite unpopular but titanfall 2. The movement is exquisite, the chaos that unfolds when titans start dropping is incredible. There is nothing quite like getting cornered by a titan as a pilot and desperately darting through buildings with your AT weapon trying to survive.
“Not quite unpopular” is an understatement, the problem with titanfall 2 is just that it didn’t sell that well, but whenever I see it mentioned it is always universally praised.
The Guild 2 and 3. They are so janky and absurd. Half the mechanics barely work, the dialogue is ridiculous, but the game just has charm. It’s got just enough economy mechanics to keep my math brain engaged while mostly playing it like The Sims.
Charm sure can go a long way, I find. Arguably, a lot of my favorite games just have a lot of character, more than anything, to differentiate them from similar games.
Tacoma. Incredible game, barely has any gameplay, though, and is very short if you don’t actively look for side-content, which is the main focus of the game. It’s mostly storytelling through holographic logs of an abandoned station. Your goal is to salvage previous data in there and an abandoned AI, that your company needs to reclaim.
I enjoyed Tacoma very much. Fullbright always has such great writing, characters, and settings.
When I played Obra Din, I got vibes of Tacoma and I wish someone would take another shot at that style of game in space with the depth/mystery element of Obra Din.
Have you played Outer Wilds?
I played a bit of Outer Wilds but I got lost and then stopped paying for XGP. I should pick it up next time its on sale somewhere.
People love to rag on it but there’s nothing that quite compares to just fuckin around in the Mirror’s Edge Catalyst open world
