What are your favorite games that nobody's heard of?

[Forbiddenwar]

Micropose Sid Meier's Magic the Gathering
I know people know of it, but since it's been unplayable since 2000, few people have played it. Build a deck by earning spells and land by missions saving towns and defeating wandering wizards.

Of course I always mention Quest for Glory series. But everyone has heard of that.

I love Conquests of the Longbow so much I bought it the second it came out on Gog

And Gobliiins (early point and click adventure) as well

[deuterio12]

Last World series: Open world RPGs with a large amount of character customization for the PC made with RPG maker. Had a lot of fun searching out all the side areas and optional content on these, there is a lot.

Anybody could provide me a link for this one please? I tried googling and I get only other fantasy rpgs mentioning "last world" somewhere in their fluff text (plus a "last word" rpg maker title).

[Cespenar]

Micropose Sid Meier's Magic the Gathering
I know people know of it, but since it's been unplayable since 2000, few people have played it. Build a deck by earning spells and land by missions saving towns and defeating wandering wizards.

I can somehow run that on my Win 10 and it's still very playable. Doubly so with the unofficial Shandalar 2015 patch, which adds a boatload of new cards to the mix. Rarely the AI can muck up and lose games they could have won, but it's a rare issue and it actually holds up pretty nice considering that it deals with card mechanics way beyond anyone's expectation when the game was being designed.

[heronbpv]

Anybody could provide me a link for this one please? I tried googling and I get only other fantasy rpgs mentioning "last world" somewhere in their fluff text (plus a "last word" rpg maker title).

Is it possible he wanted to say Last Dream instead? The description seems to fit. And it also got a continuation, in Last Dream: World Unknown.

[deuterio12]

Is it possible he wanted to say Last Dream instead? The description seems to fit. And it also got a continuation, in Last Dream: World Unknown.

Seems like those are the ones, thanks!

[Wookieetank]

Is it possible he wanted to say Last Dream instead? The description seems to fit. And it also got a continuation, in Last Dream: World Unknown.

Seems like those are the ones, thanks!

Yeah that was it. Sorry bout the mixup

[Mr_Fixler]

I know it came up a few pages ago, but Sacrifice was one of my favorite PC games from a decade or so ago.

A sort of rts game where you play a sorcerer who kinds goofed and doomed his home plane. Goes to a new realm and immedielty gets in too deep in the politics of the gods.

Each god had different units and spells so while the basic game was similar, your strengths and tactics could vary greatly.

Also one of my random favorite games was Digimon Digital Card Battle for PS1. I'm not even remotely a Digimon fan, but I found the disc in the park and lost myself playing the game for probably over 100 hours.

[factotum]

I remember Sacrifice myself, mainly because the gods were very silly indeed--as I recall, the God of Air was basically a balloon with a face painted on it, and the God of Earth was Earthworm Jim from the eponymous game series! I never got very far into the game myself, but that's mainly because RTS is not one of my favourite genres.

[LibraryOgre]

Summoner: A Goddess Reborn for Gamecube. I guess it was the sequel to another game, but I never played nor really saw anything about the game. In gameplay, it was similar to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (a bit more arcade-y), with a diverse team of 3 chosen from a relatively broad class with different skills. Two stealth-solo missions for your stealth character, while your Main was just a powerhouse.

Playing the game, it just DUMPED you into the world. There's backstory that you get on the edge, there's world lore that your character doesn't ask about because she already knows... you can look it up, but I felt immediately immersed in the world.

[Driderman]

Micropose Sid Meier's Magic the Gathering
I know people know of it, but since it's been unplayable since 2000, few people have played it. Build a deck by earning spells and land by missions saving towns and defeating wandering wizards.

Of course I always mention Quest for Glory series. But everyone has heard of that.

I love Conquests of the Longbow so much I bought it the second it came out on Gog

And Gobliiins (early point and click adventure) as well

I actually know all of those, does that make me weird?

[Forbiddenwar]

I actually know all of those, does that make me weird?

No. How many times did you buy them though?

[Khay]

Ooh, a chance to shill for The Spirit Engine!

TSE 2 is a great little RPG that's celebrating its 10th birthday this year. I wouldn't call it a "forgotten classic" exactly, because something has to be known before it can be forgotten, but it definitely deserved to be a classic. The combat mechanics are fun and challenging (and fairly unique to this day), the music is incredible, and the graphics are... well, it looks better than most things from 2008. The game didn't sell at all when it was released, so it's been freeware for most of its existence. I strongly recommend playing through the first chapter or two when you have the chance.

[Velaryon]

Dragon Spirit: The New Legend is an overhead view shoot-em-up in the vein of 1942 or Tiger Heli, except you play as a dragon (or rather, a dude who transforms into a dragon). You can find powerups that change your breath weapon, or have you grow extra heads, or get baby dragons to fly alongside you. It was seriously awesome for an NES game. There was an intro level in which you play a blue dragon. If you beat it, you continue into the game as normal. If you fail, you get a different opening cutscene and you play the son of the blue dragon guy, who transforms into a gold dragon that has twice as much health, and you skip a couple of the levels so it's a shorter game.

Super Baseball 2020 - SNES/Genisis/Arcade game about baseball set in the far future. Men Robots and Women all play together and they have jetpacks. the foul and home run zones were shrunk down so home-runs were only over the center field fence and fouls were only behind first and third base. The team you faced off against int he world series were named after historical Axis people.

I loved this game! I remember blowing curveballs past the batters at 200+ mph, making those spectacular jetpack-assisted jumping and diving catches, and blasting enemy batters with pitches just to watch the helicopter ambulance carry them away.

WWE: Know Your Role an incredibly niche pro wrestling tabletop rpg based on 3.5 dnd (which was probably not a good design choice). I mention it because it has the most unique combat system I have ever seen, also because it is probably one of the very few explicitly pvp tabletop rpgs out there. Each round all the players decide what move they want to do. They do this by selecting how much damage they want to do, then applying modifiers (knocks target prone, can be used as a pin attempt, is an illegal move that could disqualify you if the ref sees it, etc). Each of these decisions has a 'maneuver modifier' associated with it. After everyone is decided they all roll a d20 and add the maneuver modifier as well as bonuses from stats and levels. Whoever rolls highest has their move go off, so they get the right to narrate what happened that round.

I have this on my RPG shelf and have come agonizingly close to playing it a couple times. I even got as far as having practice sessions with my gaming groups a couple times, so that I could help my friends make their character and teach them the mechanics. But there was always one stick-in-the-mud who categorically refused to play, so we had to drop the game and do something else. I've never gotten to actually play it myself.

[Driderman]

No. How many times did you buy them though?

Well 3 of the 4 my dad bought off a floppy disc salesman back in the good old Amiga days and the last one was at a friends, so none.

[Cespenar]

Ooh, a chance to shill for The Spirit Engine!

TSE 2 is a great little RPG that's celebrating its 10th birthday this year. I wouldn't call it a "forgotten classic" exactly, because something has to be known before it can be forgotten, but it definitely deserved to be a classic. The combat mechanics are fun and challenging (and fairly unique to this day), the music is incredible, and the graphics are... well, it looks better than most things from 2008. The game didn't sell at all when it was released, so it's been freeware for most of its existence. I strongly recommend playing through the first chapter or two when you have the chance.

Yeah, those were quite enjoyable. The second one more so. Lots of different character interactions depending on your team members and so forth.

[Cazero]

Calculords, a game where you do math to deploy units to crush your enemy.
Currently using a soldier steamroller deck that wouldn't work without the Traxx DLC, but I'm reliably beating the Shadow Nerd with it.

[Morvram]

OneShot is a great puzzle-RPG, and nobody I've mentioned it to knew about it beforehand, so I suppose it fits here. The basic premise is that you're guiding a child wearing a cat-hat and carrying a very important lightbulb through a strange and sentient world in the final stages of its decay. I highly recommend it to anybody who would be interested in that sort of thing. It is one of those games where some things are locked behind a second play-through, so probably avoid if you don't like that.

[deuterio12]

OneShot is a great puzzle-RPG, and nobody I've mentioned it to knew about it beforehand, so I suppose it fits here. The basic premise is that you're guiding a child wearing a cat-hat and carrying a very important lightbulb through a strange and sentient world in the final stages of its decay. I highly recommend it to anybody who would be interested in that sort of thing. It is one of those games where some things are locked behind a second play-through, so probably avoid if you don't like that.

Oh, I tried that one out, quite interesting setting.

A fair warning, there's very few opportunities to save the game, so it's something that you'll need a free afternoon to play through (something I didn't manage to do yet hahaha...)

[Man_Over_Game]

Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns

That's right, a Triple-A Final Fantasy game hits the thread.



This is probably one of my all-time favorite games, and while the world is roughly based off of the previous 2 Final Fantasy XIII games, you don't actually have to play them to understand what's going on. Rather, playing the previous two games will do nothing to help you understand what's going on.

Plot: Due to some timey-wimey bullsh** from FFXIII-2, time has died. People do not age, children do not grow up and neither are new ones born, yet people can continue their lives and die. People actively track the remaining number of people left in the world, which decreases each day. The world is visibly decaying with a literal "end of the world", a black void bordering everything in the known universe, and this void consumes more with each passing day. A powerful being, effectively God, has enlisted you as his Valkyrie to fulfill the people's last wishes so that he can gather their willing souls to pass on to a new world without decay. The world has stood still for several centuries now.

Good news is, the more people you save, the more energy God can pump into his magic machine to give you more time.
Bad news is, he needs about 7 days to create the machine he needs to transfer the souls over, and there's only about 4 days left before the world ends. So get crackin'~!

Gameplay: The game has a clock for each day, with every 10 real-life seconds translating to an in-game minute. As a result, 4 hours of gameplay translates to a day lost. There's no way to rewind time (but you can stop the clock temporarily, more on that). You spend your time completing quests, which earn you stats and gear. You do not level up in the conventional sense of battling monsters, instead your gear and your quest rewards dictate your level of power. The more quests you do, the more time you get back (until eventually you hopefully get the 7 days you need to finish the game, otherwise you lose).

Quests can sometimes be lighthearted, but usually they can be pretty dark, from people going insane, to a kid who's lonely because his parents have "disappeared" but he doesn't really get what's going on (because he's been a 9 year-old for the last 300 years).

Combat is interesting as a action/strategy game relying on real-time resource management combined with timing. Random chance is non-existent in this game, and grinding on enemies isn't a thing, so you definitely feel like every failure had the chance of being a victory (if you didn't suck so badly).

You are a sole unit in combat, with 3 different classes to choose from instantly in combat. Your classes are dictated by the gear you're using. Each class expends energy to use 1 of 4 actions specific to that equipped loadout, and each class regenerates energy separately (regenerating more energy if it is not the class you are currently using).

Each enemy has a stagger bar that increases when taking stagger damage and decreases over time. Many of your actions have varying degrees of real and stagger damage (spells deal high stagger but low real damage). If an enemy takes enough stagger damage, they become staggered and lose all of their resistances and take additional damage for a short time. Some enemies are nearly invulnerable except when staggered, so sometimes combat is a clock to stagger an enemy as quickly as possible before they can get off a slow and powerful attack.

Alternatively, some enemies have attacks that hit the entire ground, requiring you to find methods to stay in the air via actions. Other enemies have attacks that deal massive damage but can be blocked with a Guard action (and then be counterattacked for massive real and stagger damage).

There's a lot of various strategies to play this game, which is incredible considering there's no in-combat movement (your character moves around, but you don't actually move her).

When you kill enemies, you get this sort of "Valkyrie Point" resource that you can use in-and-out of combat, which lets you use special powers, with things like being able to heal, teleport to a location in the world, or even stop the doomsday clock for a little while. You could technically stop the doomsday clock, grind on more enemies, gather enough points to make a profit and almost pause the doomsday clock indefinitely, but some quests require specific things to happen on specific days, so eventually you HAVE to let the day end.



The balance of the game is great, the combat is very fluid. I played it on Hard and only ever thought it was impossible in 1-2 spots in the game. Now, one of those was the final boss of the hidden dungeon, Erishkigal, considered one of the hardest bosses in all of Final Fantasy, and it took me about 6 hours of repeating that FREAKING BOSS FIGHT to finally kill, but otherwise the game is very fun to play.

I'm usually a pretty chill guy. My wife and friends usually say I'm the nicest, calmest person they've ever met. But I swear to God I almost threw that controller like a 9 year old temper tantrum trying to kill that freaking demon squid.

Side Note: The final boss of the main story has an ultimate attack, called Dancing Mad, which is a nod to Kefka of Final Fantasy VI, as that was the name of his theme music.

[danzibr]

Lightning Returns!

Surprisingly, one of my favorite in the series. Like the whole series. XIII was pretty much garbage, XIII-2 was pretty much garbage, then Lightning Returns is an absolute gem. Not quite up there with VII, but def one of my favorite PS3 games.

[Man_Over_Game]

Not sure if this is super obscure or not, but I certainly loved it and I don't know of too many people who were into it:

Zeus: Master of Olympus
Real-time city building game akin to the Anno series, with a huge emphasis on economy over warfare. Unlike other city building games, your services to the people follow a sort of road system, one that you can easily build incorrectly. Make a road improperly leading off into nowhere, and now your food vendors, maintenance workers, and everyone else just walks away from all of the people they're supposed to be helping. In a way, it's a lot like a puzzle mixed with economy.

Several major events, like Cerberus attacking, can occur that require you to build temples to Gods to summon them to bless your city and defeat certain monsters, adding more challenges. The game does utilize some warfare, but it's rare, expensive, but can lead to some majorly interesting benefits (such as opening up new areas to build your empire).

[plungerhorse]

Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou. its a very trippy, very strange game that starts when the person you play dies.

[LibraryOgre]

Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou. its a very trippy, very strange game that starts when the person you play dies.

Dusk of the Gods had a character creation system that was "Play your character until they die, then play the game."

[plungerhorse]

Dusk of the Gods had a character creation system that was "Play your character until they die, then play the game."

huh sounds interesting

[DeadMech]

Outpost 2 anybody? Released in 1997 by Sierra. Relatively hard sci-fi RTS/colony management game. Came with a novella that unlocked chapter by chapter as you completed one of the 12 missions a piece for the 2 campaigns. It was pretty good if I remember. My dad was worried about how much reading I was doing in the game so he found the txt files and printed them off for me on his new printer... a decision that was far more costly and time consuming than I think he initially planned. Think it was a couple hundred pages and an entire day's worth of printing on a printer and back then you pretty much had to sit there and supervise them.

The last of humanity took to the stars aboard a colony ship just prior life on earth being obliterated by an asteroid. But running out of resources they are forced to settle on a mars like planet. Dry, cold, little atmosphere, certainly not breathable... oh and pelted by meteorites constantly. Two political factions arise. One, Eden, wants to terraform the planet. The other, Plymouth, wants to adapt to the harsh conditions. Plymouth steals some stuff and sets off to make their own colony, with blackjack and hookers and eventually shut down the communication satellite relied on to talk when Eden plans to go through with it. Unfortunately and unknowingly this was permanent. Eden's leadership starts getting nervous and in desperation to appease it's people and to prevent Plymouth from stopping them develop a microbe to break down molecules to their base elements planning to free oxygen and other gasses that is locked in the planet's crust. Turns out people are made of molecules this microbe breaks down. Also turns out that the lab containing this explodes suddenly and mysteriously unleashing this blight across the surface and into the crust of the planet before they bothered making a way to contain it. Chased by a flesh melting bacteria and beset by ever increasingly dangerous natural disasters as the once seismically dead world comes to life the two colonies are forced to resettle time and again in a desperate race to not only stay ahead of flesh melting bacteria but also to use what little resources can be gathered on the way to construct a new colony ship and escape from this doomed world to the stars. There not being time and material to make two ships forced the sides into conflict as they race to collect and analyze fragments of the crashed ship that brought them to the planet, mine the richest deposits of ore along the way, and eventually secure possession of the genebank containing the genetic legacy of our race. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, lightning storms, tornadoes, flesh melting, and eachother.. extinction is not an option.

Combat wasn't anything to write home about. There were 11 weapon system about half a which were shared between factions that you could mount on a guard post or 3 different classes of remote operated vehicle chassis ranging from quick but lightly armored, a mid range and the double barreled heavy but painfully slow tank. Though mostly the more interesting weapons weren't that useful there were sticky foam launchers than immobilized units or area denial mine launchers. But one side getting the longest ranged and highest dps lightning gun kinda made everything else obsolete and unbalanced. The other side got weak legged spiders that could capture emp'ed enemy units. Although I did once take out a player in multiplayer with one of the useless suicide bomb units since he built his advanced lab too close to his command center and I was able to drive one up to it.

Where the game really excelled was in the colony building and management. Managing your population was vital. From ensuring children were being born, an appropriate number of workers were educated to become scientists, feeding everyone, and ensuring their morale and thus their productivity and lifespan was up. You had to provide adequate recreation facilities, healthcare, non-overcrowded residential buildings, emergency services, and manage unemployment and underemployment levels. Your people would even get angry with you if you started targeting enemy civilian infrastructure.

Game's a bit dated by today's standards. Without features like rallying points and a 32 unit selection limit. You need to download a specific video codex to play the in game cinematics. And of course the Sierra online servers have long long since been shut down. But as abandon ware it should be pretty easy to get a hold of.

[danzibr]

Whoa. Outpost 2 sounds epic.

[factotum]

I think I played the first Outpost, never did the second. Mind you, looking at the screenshots on Mobygames.com, the second game looks bizarrely more primitive than the first one, with a top-down view instead of an isometric one?

[Man_Over_Game]

I think I played the first Outpost, never did the second. Mind you, looking at the screenshots on Mobygames.com, the second game looks bizarrely more primitive than the first one, with a top-down view instead of an isometric one?

I felt the same way about the Shadowrun game for the SNES vs. the Genesis. Genesis came afterwards and felt a lot more responsive, but it was much uglier and less fancy than the original. Kinda funny how that happens sometimes.

[Mightymosy]

Has 68k been mentioned? Alternate title is "Cho Ren Sha" (or real title, I really don't know, not much language in the game, not that you would need it)

The game is 968kb, but I have rarely seen packed so much so little.


If you happen to sit down with a friend AT THE SAME COMPUTER (yes I know, rare these days) give Liquid War a shot. Obscure, unusual gameplay, but worth a couple of matches.

By the way, since we're talking oldies, anyone know Wacky Wheels? That was funny :-) :-)

.@ MtG Shandalar: For someone into MtG this used to be the classic way to the soldify your rules knowledge, especially the turn structure (because the game automatically enforced the rules, unlike when you played paper Magic with your friends in real.
I used play a campaign for nostalgia every now and then, but unfortunately at some point it didn't work anymore on the newest PC. I might try using the tricks above, thanks for the hint!

[DeadMech]

Whoa. Outpost 2 sounds epic.

I'd offer a download link but I'm not 100% if that would conform with forum rules. I'm led to believe it's abandonware but you can never be certain with the ownership of licenses and such.

I forgot one other feature of the game that was cool. It had a day night cycle you could watch roll across the landscape. In addition your buildings and vehicles had flood lights that lit up their surroundings. And in the case of at least the vehicles you could turn them off. The reason I was able to sneak a remote car with a bomb on it into one guys base to take out a singularly weak building and chain reaction that into killing his base was because of this. It's been a long time but I think units only showed up on the minimap if they were in daylight or if they had their lights on, thus being visible to satellite.

I think I played the first Outpost, never did the second. Mind you, looking at the screenshots on Mobygames.com, the second game looks bizarrely more primitive than the first one, with a top-down view instead of an isometric one?

Why you can't judge things from a single screen shot. Video of the games in action are better to distinguish. 1 is turn based and has a pretty limited sized area in which you can see the base you are making. They apparently consulted with some folks from nasa in order to learn what a colony on another planet would most likely look like end up looking like. Which is super cool.