Games

Might and Magic 6. It was such a weird product of its tech limitations, but they managed to squeeze such a good rpg power curve into it, it's still super fun.

Original War. A very unique RTS about American and Russians fighting over a precious resource billions years in the past. It has an interesting story with memorable characters and branching choices. The game still looks decent, especially the between missions cutscenes didn't age badly because of the style of presentation. One thing that's rather hit or miss is voice acting, at least in English. There are two campaigns so you get to see both sides, skirmish mode, map editor and quite a number of mods. Some interesting mechanics like vehicle and building customisation. You can build not only combat vehicles with various weapon systems but also utility vehicles like trucks to haul resources and cranes to help with construction. You can pick propulsion method, tracks/wheels, size and if it's manned or unmanned, and each choice has some upsides and downsides.

The thing that stands out the most is that it's the only rts I can think of where you actually care for the life of your soliders. Due to the setting, there's no way to recruit new people, so losing anyone hurts, and you will be grateful for unmanned vehicles, trained primates and others methods that reduce the risk to your soldiers.

Soul Bubbles is a puzzle-action game released for the NDS. You encase the souls of the departed in magic bubbles and blow them around levels to help them to the afterlife, dodging spiky terrain, marauding creatures, and wind currents.

It might have gotten more attention if its production run wasn't so small and it wasn't sold exclusively at Toys 'R Us.

Ogre Battle, either March of the Black Queen or Person of Lordly Caliber. It's such a weird cul-de-sac of tactical RPGs. The same company made Tactics Ogre, which then became Final Fantasy Tactics, which in turn inspired a zillion other post-2000 tactics games; and Tactics Ogre got a remake version recently. But the Ogre Battle side of the family just disappeared.

Rocket Slime was one of my favorite games as a kid! I didn't even find out what Dragon Quest was until like a decade later when 11 came out

Backyard baseball, loved that game as a kid.

Comix Zone. It was a beat-em-up on the Sega Genesis with a gorgeous, comic book art style. It wasn't the greatest game, but it had character and it stood out against some of the other fighting games at the time. I'd really love a remake or sequel at some point. Doing it in the style of the Spider-verse movies would be rad.

I'm going to name a few potentially obscure ones from my 30 years of gaming

• Micro Machines 2 (SNES and Mega Drive) - as far as I am aware, only MM1 had wide release, the rest were PAL only but have modern 60hz and NTSC patches now. Great fun, and you can play as Violet Berlin (for those like me who used to watch Bad Influence!)

• Looney Toons Collector: Martian Alert!! (Game Boy Color) - this one is hard to categorise! Its a top down adventure RPG like Zelda, you start as Bugs and recruit further characters each with their own skills to traverse the world and solve puzzles. For example, Elmer Fudd has a gun, Tweety can fly over gaps, etc. It is actually really fucking good, and holds up better than many GBC games. You can also trade with other people who have the game, and there's a sequel I haven't even played yet!

• Wario Land Virtual Boy - this is without a doubt one of the best platformers ever made, and it's a damn shame it's been forgotten by most. HOWEVER! Emulators exist, and the game runs like a dream in retroarch/mednafen.

A few tips: the virtual boy is a 50hz console, so set your display to that or use gsync otherwise you'll have stuttering. The console is also natively a wide-screen display, which is sweet. Steam Deck is perfect for it, and looks great in black and white. If you have a VR headset, that's a good idea too to get the proper 3D experience, but it's not essential in any way whatsoever.

• Neutopia II (PC Engine/TG16) - a shameless Zelda clone that is actually worth playing as a spiritual successor to Zelda 1. A neat little what if, if Nintendo had expanded on the original rather than Link to the Past. It has an awesome soundtrack, save battery backup (wahooo) and is just great fun. The first is good too, but feels significantly more dated than the sequel

And lastly, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Switch) - I don't care if it's the opposite of unknown,, I'm recommending this one. Culmination of the best trilogy I've ever known in gaming, and by far the best game I've ever played. With the 4k, 60fps and rebalance mods when playing on PC it's simply incredible. Based Monolithsoft.

The soundtrack is mind-blowing, has the best battle themes in the series and you can tell just how much work went into it (main two characters have flutes they use in the story to send dead soldiers to the afterlife - Yasunori Mitsuda then made those flutes for real to be used in the soundtrack). Just, every single thing about the game exudes more love and care than most games I've played and it shows. After so many years of being unable to finish a story due to corporate wankery (xenosaga....), Takahashi finally got to make his masterpiece. And for those who were put off by the anime-ness of Xenoblade 2, 3 is very much reined in, adult and pretty fucking dark. No big anime titties here - it's war, and it's not pleasant. It's more like XB1 - 2 is the outlier, and its happy-go-lucky feeling makes far more sense after seeing what happens in 3.

Rune factory 3. It’s not popular anymore, nor do I see it talked about but I still play it from time to time. Sometimes I leave it open just to listen to the music/background and sometimes I fire up youtube and my speaker just to listen to its OST.

I used to play a lot of games on miniclip wayyyy back when flash was a thing, but nitrome games were my favorite:

• Final Ninja series (2 games I think?), 2D platformers where you could swing around and also shoot enemies with ninja stars. had a lot of levels to complete
• Dirk Valentine, 2D platformer, similar to final ninja but with a different theme
• Avalanche, a 2D game where you are a penguin trying to escape the avalanche by sliding and avoiding obstacles. I think this had a lot of levels too

Looks like nitrome has these flash games to download on their website, but they also converted / are converting them to html5 as well. I'm so glad these aren't lost!

It is not that unknown and it's getting some traction but I'm still surprised how many people are sleeping on Riftbreaker, its such a well made polished (and Polish) game with tons of updates and communication from the devs who are also working on adding co-op to it which is a huge task! Look at the absolute unit of a blog post they wrote about it. It is very much a labor of love and I think more people should know about it.

The FATE series. No, not the anime, the Diablo ripoff computer game with stolen music sold by WildTangent. I was a kid that got by playing only demos, and this game was one I reinstalled over and over again to get those free plays.

It's a pretty simple dungeon crawling game with procedurally generated floors where you have to get to floor 5x and defeat the named boss there so you can reincarnate and start it over again.

I reinstall it every couple of years to play it. It's got hardly any story, quests are generated for the floors you're about to reach, stats are randomly generated. It's just pure gameplay, though a bit repetitive as it can be. I love that it has a similar fish mechanic to Torchlight for your pets.

I remember seeing a nostalgia post on the game on Reddit and the developer of the game series had commented on the post. It was like meeting one of your heroes. Definitely very memorable for me.

The third game supposedly has all the content from the first two, so here's the steam link if anyone's curious.

Einhander on PS1 was a great side scrolling shooter by squaresoft with a sick techno soundtrack and a pretty fun weapon-stealing gimic.

Allegiance

Wildly asymmetric sci-fi RTS sorta - one player per team was actually playing an RTS but everyone else on the team flew one of the actual ships, so the commander was more like making suggestions. Super fun space dogfights and sometimes you could just chill and be the turret on a bomber. One hilarious advanced strategy was to have some of your extra supply ships line up nose-to-tail with the bombers and accelerate them towards the enemy base.

That was one of my favorite games as a kid! I think it was super ahead of it's time too, the mech battling feels really MOBA-esque especially in hindsight.

Mine would be Anarchy Online. Still around, though FC has ran it to the ground and not too obscure, considering it used to be quite big before 2005ish, but almost nobody talks about it in EU and the few times they do is to comment on the dreadful launch.

But I doubt there's a game I've sunk more hours into, playing constantly from release up to 2011 and then on and off until last year. Eventually I figured out it's just nostalgia and it's not worth it anymore, the time, let alone the sub.

Not my favorite but in my top 10 is from the depths. Never seen anyone ever mention it without going out of my way

Digimon World (PSX)

Sally Can't Sleep. It's a strange indie first person platformer with a lot of focus on versatile and exploitable movement mechanics. The dev sacrificed visual polish for quantity and style, so the game has a lot of interconnected levels with a wide variety of different mechanics, types of level design, and visual styles - it's a really good example of how much a solo developer can accomplish. It's pretty funny, too. I don't think I've ever seen a game pull a credits gag like it did.

Meteos for the DS. Never got the Disney sequel but the original was great and probably my most played DS game.

Waddington’s House of Games smash hit “Ulcers”

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2517/ulcers