I happen to love FFXII, but everyone I talk to hates it. I understand it more with the Zodiac Age version since they made a few unnecessary changes, but the original was fun.
Zelda Twilight Princess may not have been exactly hated, but nobody really seems to love it. They all go gaga over Ocarina of Time instead, which just feels like a worse Twilight Princess in just about every way. Nostalgia I guess!
Also, you know, Twilight Princess has you be a wolf (in sections for part of the game, and then later you get unrestricted wolf mode (but it keeps kicking you out of it grrr!)). Huge therian feels. That’s a big part of why I love it.
– Frost
I liked and finished Unlimited SaGa twice. The soundtrack is phenominal and the graphics are all hand-painted watercolors. The combat system is a bit opaque but with tinkering, can be figured out.
And yet, it’s regarded as one of the worst titles on the PkayStation 2.
I still use the track “DG mixture” when I need a consistent sound to set my soundboard for my shows.
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.
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.
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.
Oni.
In my most unpopular opinion, the only good thing Bungie ever made. Way more satisfying than console-friendly auto-aim shooting aliens without gore.
Oni has some great sci-fi details, even when missing a deep overarching story. And breaking people’s necks with a cool 360 swing with proper sound effects of the neck bones being chipped is sooo satisfying. And that was an unfinished project by the way: you can notice there was no environment work done.
Oni was awesome but I will not take this Marathon slander sitting down!
Not being an Apple user, I can only talk having experienced it by proxy, but it seems to me that the game technically didn’t have at all the finesse that could be found in titles from the same years that pioneered FPS.
A lot of talk about the lore, but having tried more than once to stay awake through one of the many videos going through it, it seems the same boring space opera stuff seen in Halo.
I love the Graphic Realism style of the new one though, but as expected it’s just another bombing live service.
To me it was something about the setting, I was like 13 at the time and compared to Quake that was an excellent multiplayer game, the vibe and story really attracted me at the time.
The main difference to halo is that the master chief feels like an unstoppable war machine but marathon made me feel scared, running around in vents and panicking at the sight of a bug.
Ok but Marathon is earlier than Quake. One should compared it to Doom.
And compared to Doom, Marathon had more to offer from what I recall. Att least I remember it more fondly but I might mix it up with the sequels.
I loved bulletstorm.
Bubsy
Forspoken has one of the best battle and movement gameplay systems in gaming, or at the very least in the “power fantasy sandbox” genre. Its story and dialogue are also a very cute, earnest take on Isekai that didn’t deserve the backlash they got. It has its flaws but it’s absolutely nowhere close to being the utter cringe-fest and terrible game that people like Asmongold successfully convinced the rest of the internet it was (because it has a female POC protagonist, basically). Personally, as someone who wanted to live the ultimate elemental wizard power-fantasy in a game since I was a child, Forspoken gave me everything I wanted and more (like cats! Lots of adorable cats).
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.
+1 for Secret of Mana. Awesome game.
As an introvert, I enjoyed Evermore more than Mana.
Still have my copies of both, though I bet the batteries are dead by now.
No one ever knows that one for some reason but Evermore was my favorite too. Loved seeing the dog transform to different breeds as you progress through the story
I adored Red Faction: Guerrilla! I just loved the world, the destruction, and even the multiplayer was great fun. It’s an excellent sandbox.
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 rarely used charged attacks. The only weapons that really made sense for that were the ranged ones. I was also very annoyed that attacking at 95% would deal the same damage as at 5%, so you always had to wait for the click.
Besides, once you get the first magic with Undine, it’s ridiculously easy to stunlock enemies, even bosses, just time the magic right and boom, just don’t overdo because a “single attack” damage tops at 999
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.
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.
Ironically, if you directly control the others, you have a small window of downtime after casting magic, which makes controlling Randi better for magic combos
Ah, but the real trick is that some of the sprite’s better spells don’t have a downtime (one example is the main dark offensive spell). You can just rapid fire the spell as quick as the menu lets you. Randi feels silly in comparison.
Vindictus, pre-2015
Mass Effect Andromeda. It’s a lot better than people give it credit for. Sure it has its issues, but no more than the original trilogy which is so revered. And the game is gorgeous, definitely the best looking ME to date - even with the trilogy legendary edition. The story was good too, it could’ve been the start of a great new trilogy. It doesn’t have Shepard, but female Ryker was a lot of fun.
I really enjoyed Cities Skylines 2 even at launch.
That is an opinion.
Having hardware good enough to run it at more than 20 fps helped. Thankfully the performance (and everything else) is much improved now.
OP’s specs, for context: El Capitan; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Livermore, CA, USA.
So, I had an snes, which I loved, but my taste in games wasn’t great and my parents objected to violence, which means my collection is a bit weird.
One game I loved which wasn’t universally acknowledged to be great, was Clayfighter. It was essentially a Street Fighter clone, but the assets were all modelled in clay and animated using stop motion technique.
I think it got a lot of flak for being not well balanced and a little slow, so it kind of just didn’t stand out beyond the obvious classics of that genre, but man, I loved it. I couldn’t get Street Fighter because of my parents, but they were fine with clayfighter’s look and more humorous approach. At the same time, it still was a good beat em up, so I spent hours with it. Also, it kind of gave me an edge as SF2 was just the game everybody had, so at least I had a fun game to spend an hour with that people hadn’t played to death already.
The samples will remain burned into my memories forever. “The Blob Wins!!” Good times.
Bad Mr Frosty!
Played it at a friend’s sleepover. Some years later, I bought the N64 version from a Blockbuster for like $5 used and we played that a bunch too. I remember riding my frioend’s pegs on the way home. We got our other friend (at whose house we usually played Twisted Metal on PS1) and went to my house to take turns trying out all the characters. Great game, lots of funny lines and fun arenas.
