Mount & Blade. It’s not unpopular per se, but somehow I never saw anyone mentioning it around here in Lemmy.
I was playing it on console so I didn’t get to do any mods to really increase the fun but I still had a lot of fun anyway. I do think the devs need to try a bit harder. I feel like they just provide a framework for mods without making a really nice game themselves.
That being said I played hundreds of hours of both and really like them. I just wish they were a bit better
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
I have been playing this game my entire life on/off, and have the most hours in, but I have never beaten it. I came close 1 fucking time, and I will forever remember the one dumb mistake I made that lost it for me just on the cusp of victory.
One day…
God tier game. I’ve never even been close to beating it.
luanti https://www.luanti.org/
It’s Luanti* - You got the name wrong
ok I edited it
My family (wife and multiple kids) oddly enough have access to both this and Minecraft and actually prefer Luanti most of the time.
Whoah, when did they change the name?
Just recently
October
The Thief series. I LOVED the first one especially, Thief the Dark Project. Medieval (low magic fantasy?) stealth shooter. The more valuable you pick up directly translates to what you can buy as a load out for the next level so you’re encouraged to explore, though even the low level enemies can kick you ass so you have to be sneaky. Actually great stealth mechanics even for an old game. The world building is amazing, with it’s own lore, culture and slang. The plot of the games are also great.
The Kingdom of Loathing is a game I’ve played almost non-stop since about 2003. Web based and free, it’s based off of old text based games. But it’s fun. Really fun. And hilarious. The currency is meat. The classes are goofy. Saucerer? Disco bandit? Seal Clubber? A lot of games deal with things like power creep or inflation, or how the heck to get people to actually help pay for it. This game solves problems like these elegantly. The user base is fun and friendly and corporative, there’s always new stuff coming out to try, they do a holiday special every year, and all the pictures are crudely drawn stick figures.
Half-Life, Thief, and the original Sims games (City, Ant, etc) were my original gaming go-tos!
Sim ant rules, you can be a spider sometimes
There’s a cheat code for that.
Disco bandit checking in! You got any meat paste?
I stack my meat like I stack the bodies of knob goblins in my wake
The Moxie on this one!
The Kingdom of Loathing
I can’t believe that game is still around lol. It was probably 2009 or so when I logged in last. I had ascended 3 times and figured I had pretty much seen all there is to see. So cool to see they are still around and doing well. I guess I’m going to have to playthrough it at least one more time :)
Oh man they have added and changed so much since you dropped off
The Fatal Frame series (maybe the second one here and there) and Kunitsu-Gami. The second one surprised me since it’s relatively new, but I thought it was a great surprise. I loved the hell out of that game.
One of my favorite games is a hidden gem that I never see people mention. It’s called Out of Space and it’s a couch co-op game similar to Overcooked with two major differences, it’s less frenetic so you can play it to chill out, and it’s procedurally generated so you have lots of replayability. For me and my wife it’s the perfect game of “let’s play a round of something”, yet I never see it mentioned anywhere.
This looks great for my wife and I, also our niblings. Thanks.
Definitely Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, an RTS in the Star Wars universe that uses the Age of Empires 2 engine and has very similar gameplay.
i played the shit out of that. still have the deluxe “saga” edition complete in box.
Thing Thing series
Pocket Tanks
Black Ice
Tactics Ogre. I see people drop Final Fantasy Tactics as the greatest tactics game of all time. Then you always see Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and Disgaea after. People sleep on Tactics Ogre. It’s a mechanically superior game to all of the mentioned. It’s story is equally as good as FFT. I think the graphics are better. It’s a challenging game from the start. FFT was created with the Tactics Ogre director and lead artist to be a more accessible version of TO. People see 90s golden era Final Fantasy and automatically put FFT on a pedestal. TO is like Undertaker stalking AJ Styles ready to obliterate whatever is in its way.
I’ve played Tactics Ogre after I’ve read some accounts of it being described as FFT’s spiritual successor, but I must admit I never finished it–not because of the gameplay which is suprisingly deep for its time, but because of my own perfectionism. I didn’t let myself just play the game without any guides or overthinking, instead went full “I want the perfect gamesave”.|
But yes! what you said is true. FFT is a more accessible successor to Tactics Ogre.
I think this was the game I rented once as a kid and never saw again but pops up as a memory every so often and I could never remember the name… Gonna check it out again.
Try it. It’s a fantastic game. I think the newest version that came out on Steam is the way to go but a lot of people still recommend the PSP Version if you wanna emulate it. Or you can go all the way back to the SNES version. I don’t think there’s a bad version of the game but there are definitely better versions of the game.
Fight it out!
Flashback.
I played it on SNES, but it was on a few consoles. I heard they are making a sequel so that’s cool. It’s science fiction with flavours of total recall, they live, and running man. I just really enjoyed the prince of Persia style gameplay but cyberpunk.Parasite Eve
More specifically number 2, because the first one never officially came to pal regions. It’s like resident evil but SciFi/body horror. The third game was shit because they lost the rights to the novel it was originally based on. If there’s any game sequel that I wish for it would be a proper PE3.flashback is one of my favorite games, after prince of persia and ahead of blackthorne.
i just hate the fact that 3d games fucking flooded the market just as cinematic platformers were getting really good.
instead of even more refined games with better graphics and animations, we got shit like fade to black and pop3d.
Didn’t expect to see Blackthorne mentioned here. One of my wife’s favorites on SNES. It’s pretty fun, but too easy I think. I need to see if I can get Flashback, I’ve never even heard of it.
The original Master of Magic for DOS. It’s STILL being actively modded 32 years post release and has never quite been duplicated.
The Age of Wonders series does a fairly good job with the feel, but it’s just not the same.
Legend of Legaia. It’s a JRPG from the PS1 golden era, but it had a relatively small launch and basically zero marketing. It was completely overshadowed by other games like FFVII and Legend of Dragoon. It has a sort of cult classic following now. The story starts off as a fairly basic “world is awful, kid gets a magic weapon to beat the big evil thing” type of plot, but has a surprising amount of twists and turns.
The combat system is interesting, and hasn’t really been replicated since. You string together a series of small attacks, to make larger super combos.
Fair warning, the US release is significantly harder than the JP and EU versions. For some reason, the devs multiplied all the enemy stats by 1.25, and slashed their exp/gold drop rates by 50% for the US release. So you need to grind twice as long to be properly geared/leveled, and the grinding is 25% more difficult.
When videogame rentals were a thing, developers often intentionally made games unreasonably hard to spur repeat rentals or purchases. My money is on that.
Even the EU version is dozens of hours long for a casual play through. The game is surprisingly long for only being one disc; They didn’t use a bunch of pre-rendered cutscenes like many of the bigger games did. Those pre-rendered cutscenes take up a lot of disc space, and are why games like Legend of Dragoon and FFVII have multiple discs.
I got to meet Legaia’s creator Hidenori Shibao. He also created Lennus (“Paladin’s Quest” that I enjoyed on SNES in my youth) and its sequel.
Right at this moment it’s Civilization 7. I’ve never seen it mentioned here, just on CivFanatics forums and mostly negatively on Reddit. It had a botched/way too early release. My personal theory is that 2K knew that GTA was getting delayed so they said no delay for Civ.
New giant patch inbound any day! I swear it’s fun. Best combat in Civ so far, and I have played every mainline game for the past roughly 30 years.
Kinda cheating, since this game (hell, entire series; linking my fave entry) has kind of a cult following in Central/Eastern Europe.
Oof, my favorite! It was too good for it’s time.
Gothic 1 is one of the most difficult RPG I’ve ever played, in terms of quest. The sequel, I’d still play it if only it ran on my devices.
The video looked cool but for the picture they had to go with the Pixar face??
Armadillo Run
Robot Alchemic Drive (R.A.D.)
The Saboteur
Saboteur was unexpectedly good
You are the only person I have ever seen mention Armadillo Run. I used to be obsessed with that game.
And you’re the only person I’ve ever seen recognize it in turn.
Part of me wants to ask where you went to college since that’s the only community I knew who played it, but I also wouldn’t post that here.