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

[Marillion]

I got a couple people haven't mentioned yet.

[LIST][*]Lagoon (Sharp x6800/SNES): an action/adventure game, in the vein of Legend of Zelda and the Soul Blazer trilogy (which also has Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma), with tons of RPG elements. You play as Nasir, a young warrior tasked with traveling to the eponymous Lagoon castle to figure why the waters of the world have gone foul. As you go, you realize a few secrets, while you conquer the dungeons and castles, fighting monsters and whatnot. The difficulty is insane (your hitbox is laughably small, which isn't so bad for monsters but brutal when dealing with bosses; you get awesome spells, but can't use them in boss battles, and you can only get one copy of each healing item, which you can't get anymore after a certain point...oh, and it has top-view platforming), but it has awesome music, and the twist right near the end isn't half bad.[*]Legend of Mana (PSX): one of the lesser-loved entries in the Mana series, but still recognizable enough. It changes a few aspects of the Mana series, such as the entire combat system, the magic system, and...well, it's almost an entirely different game. You play as one of two teenagers (a boy or a girl), who are tasked by the Fairy of the Mana Tree to reconstruct the world. As you do, you start unraveling the story within the world, doing various sidequests and dealing with three main quests (a fight between two Dragoons and their servants, the plea of a Shrine Maiden and a former friend of hers, and the last members of a dying race being hunted for their "cores", which resemble jewels - this last one is arguably the most depressing storyline ever), until you reach the Mana Tree. It's unique in that the positioning of each land influences the rest, and can make enemies stronger, items in towns much, much better, and so forth. Plus, the music is awesome (of course, it was composed by Yoko Shimomura, and if you don't know who she is, you...probably haven't played a Square game recently. Or old-school Capcom games, as she belonged to Alph Lyra, the company game BGM group).

I wish I'd been older when I played these games, I might have gotten further and actually been able to appreciate them more!

Mine was Sky Odyssey for the PS2, a surprisingly involved yet intuitive flight simulator. You were searching for an ancient treasure on an archipelago that was incredibly hostile towards your single-person customizeable aircraft. I was personally fond of the bi-plane (which you could turn into a tri-plane if you found a certain hidden landing strip), but you could also start with a WW2 bomber or a sonic jet, and could unlock several other planes through play. Whether you were dodging avalanches and rock slides as you flew through snow covered mountains, attempting to land on an aircraft carrier during a thunderstorm, rendezvousing with a fuel-carrying blimp or train, or using the jetstream to make a long-distance jump between islands at 300+ miles an hour, the missions were varied and incredibly engaging for a game without any real characters, dialogue, or combat. And of course there was plenty of replay value in trying to beat your performance on these missions, especially since choosing different paths or using different aircraft could turn it into an almost new experience, unlock different parts for your aircrafts, or even unlock different levels, including 3 different final levels that were all hellishly difficult and truly satisfying to even complete successfully, nevermind do well in.

[Man_Over_Game]

I wish I'd been older when I played these games, I might have gotten further and actually been able to appreciate them more!

Mine was Sky Odyssey for the PS2, a surprisingly involved yet intuitive flight simulator. You were searching for an ancient treasure on an archipelago that was incredibly hostile towards your single-person customizeable aircraft. I was personally fond of the bi-plane (which you could turn into a tri-plane if you found a certain hidden landing strip), but you could also start with a WW2 bomber or a sonic jet, and could unlock several other planes through play. Whether you were dodging avalanches and rock slides as you flew through snow covered mountains, attempting to land on an aircraft carrier during a thunderstorm, rendezvousing with a fuel-carrying blimp or train, or using the jetstream to make a long-distance jump between islands at 300+ miles an hour, the missions were varied and incredibly engaging for a game without any real characters, dialogue, or combat. And of course there was plenty of replay value in trying to beat your performance on these missions, especially since choosing different paths or using different aircraft could turn it into an almost new experience, unlock different parts for your aircrafts, or even unlock different levels, including 3 different final levels that were all hellishly difficult and truly satisfying to even complete successfully, nevermind do well in.

Legend of Mana is incredibly hard to get in to at first. It's awkward and clunky. The graphics are nice but...not? You're not sure what's happening or where to go, so you just wander in a random direction, and you still only have a vague idea what's happening by the middle of the game, only because you've tried to pay attention to the random stuff that's been going on in the last 6 hours of gameplay.

A lot of modern games go overboard with tutorials, but Legend of Mana is definitely one game that needs them and doesn't. Even if you were older, you do need a bit of patience to fully enjoy it. Or a friend. The complexity with the fighting styles, combined with different companions your +1 can play, can add a lot of fun to the game.

[T.G. Oskar]

I wish I'd been older when I played these games, I might have gotten further and actually been able to appreciate them more!

Kinda surprised for your interest in Lagoon. It's really a weird game.

Speaking of which, another game I haven't heard yet, and this one is a shame because it never got through any further:

• Royal Blood (aka Gemfire) (NES, SNES, I believe Genesis/Megadrive?): a kingdom simulator/strategy game. You know Koei, right? The company that created the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games? The one that's pretty much devoting its existence to milking the Musou games (Dynasty Warriors, Warriors Orochi, etc.)? Well...did you know they actually made a fantasy kingdom simulator/strategy game NOT BASED ON ANYTHING? Yep, they did, and the game was called Royal Blood, though it's known in the West as Gemfire as well (the SNES version is known as Super Royal Blood). In essence, it's the exact same game as Rot3K, where you choose one of many lords to conquer the kingdom, except this time it's on an island roughly the size and shape of Great Britain. The story is a bit cliche'd, but par for the time; the king ruled with an iron fist, the princess can't stand it and shatters the crown of her father, which contains six (or is it seven?) magical gems holding powerful wizards and a Red Dragon. The king finds her, but the deed is done; all but one of the gems warp away into various of the lords of the kingdom (all the gems that hold the wizards), and a war ensues to unify the now-divided land. The game's battles have an element where you have four fixed units, and a 5th unit that could change (usually it had the wizard/advisor trapped in the gem, but it could also be mercenaries, skeletons and the like). Sadly, after the SNES version (and no sequels at all), the game faded into obscurity. How badly? Well, how many Dynasty Warriors games have appeared, and how many variants such as Hyrule Warriors have appeared, and we STILL don't have any of the Gemfire lords around? This is a rare game that Koei would probably wish never existed, but it's weird, because with all the advancements, and experience, and the push for a fantasy heartbreaker, it could experience an odd revival.

[Algeh]

Legend of Mana is incredibly hard to get in to at first. It's awkward and clunky. The graphics are nice but...not? You're not sure what's happening or where to go, so you just wander in a random direction, and you still only have a vague idea what's happening by the middle of the game, only because you've tried to pay attention to the random stuff that's been going on in the last 6 hours of gameplay.

A lot of modern games go overboard with tutorials, but Legend of Mana is definitely one game that needs them and doesn't. Even if you were older, you do need a bit of patience to fully enjoy it. Or a friend. The complexity with the fighting styles, combined with different companions your +1 can play, can add a lot of fun to the game.

I spent a lot of time playing Legend of Mana back in the day, and I never did figure out large chunks of what was going on. It was the first game I remember playing where you'd basically accidentally "finish" the game before you really wrapped up some of the things you were working on and saw as "part of the plot". (I suppose it was techincally also possible to do this in some other games I played, like Chrono Trigger, but with Legend of Mana it came more out of the blue rather than as an "obviously wrong" option.)

I never did really figure out the crafting system in any meaningful way, or finish all of the things you could get to from the pirate ship. I probably painted myself into a corner for finishing at least one of the plot threads that interested me at the time by putting something down in the wrong place or in the wrong order in a way that was not at all obvious, and just sort of "beat" the game and eventually wandered off without ever feeling like I'd gotten a satisfying end to most of the stories. I suppose I could re-play it with a guide some day.

[Cespenar]

A Blurred Line.

Oh yeah, that's that RPGMaker gem that never got the ending, right? I member that.

There was also this another RPGMaker gem that was called The Way or something IIRC, which was also good. Perhaps not as good as A Blurred Line, but at least it got finished.

[Gnoman]

I spent a lot of time playing Legend of Mana back in the day, and I never did figure out large chunks of what was going on. It was the first game I remember playing where you'd basically accidentally "finish" the game before you really wrapped up some of the things you were working on and saw as "part of the plot". (I suppose it was techincally also possible to do this in some other games I played, like Chrono Trigger, but with Legend of Mana it came more out of the blue rather than as an "obviously wrong" option.)

I never did really figure out the crafting system in any meaningful way, or finish all of the things you could get to from the pirate ship. I probably painted myself into a corner for finishing at least one of the plot threads that interested me at the time by putting something down in the wrong place or in the wrong order in a way that was not at all obvious, and just sort of "beat" the game and eventually wandered off without ever feeling like I'd gotten a satisfying end to most of the stories. I suppose I could re-play it with a guide some day.

You can't lock yourself out of plot just by placing the lands in the wrong places (although you can mess it up with other quests). Your problem was probably caused by the fact that there are three plots in the game, and it isn't always clear what is part of which plot - which means that you can't always figure out how to follow up a given story path. The game is relatively "plot-lite" in the lack of a single overarching story - narratively, the meat of the game is in relatively low-level character interactions.


The item crafting is extremely obtuse, and figuring it out isn't particularly easy - but it is also a fairly unimportant subsystem.


You might want to check out Mega64's LP of the game, which is extremely completionist.

[Lacco]

I completely forgot!

Dungeon Keeper: An...RTS? That's designed around you building a dungeon that heroes come to invade. Unlike other RTS games, this one relies on the idea of building defenses first and offenses second. You can build several types of rooms to entice specific monsters into your dungeon, all with specific uses. Wizards can study more spells for you to cast, goblins love to train and fight, and trolls will work constantly in your workshop to create new traps and walls. The game often rewards you for being a bad guy. Your units aren't working hard enough? Slap them around a bit, maybe that lost health will teach them to work harder. That hero is dying too quickly in your torture chamber? Cast a healing spell so that he survives long enough to know that THERE IS NO HOPE and YOU are their god now. Don't have enough food to support your growing demands? Make some skeletons by throwing your captives in jail; eventually they'll rot and serve you in undeath without requiring any upkeep of their own.

It was probably the first of its kind, but there were several games released over the last 10-15 years that tried to follow it's formula, but few have managed to perfect it.

You should try the tabletop version...

[danzibr]

Oh yeah, that's that RPGMaker gem that never got the ending, right? I member that.

There was also this another RPGMaker gem that was called The Way or something IIRC, which was also good. Perhaps not as good as A Blurred Line, but at least it got finished.

Nailed it!
Yeah, he made parts 1 and 2 (and merged them) but we never saw the conclusion...

The Way, I started it, I enjoyed it, then I switched laptops. I need to pick that back up.

[Man_Over_Game]

You should try the tabletop version...

Color me intrigued...

----------------------------

One that was STUPID amounts of fun was Exit Fate. It's a Game Maker game, inspired almost directly by Suikoden 2.

In case you're not familiar with the Suikoden series, it's unique in the sense that it's a JRPG that uses 6 people in your active party, and it has 100 unique people to use. Most of them are optional, but none are permanently losable (However, you can miss out on getting certain characters earlier in the game).

Exit Fate has a massive world, an amazing storyline, complex combat without it feeling too slow, and even implements a tactics portion of the game, where your characters lead armies of people into combat, with unique powers for each tactical unit.

It has a LOT going for it. You'd think a 6v6 JRPG would be slow, but it actually has you input all of the commands for your team at once, and THEN initiative/turn order is automatically calculated and everyone's actions happen all at once. As a result, it looks and feels very active and cool.

The game is very polished, and I'd probably say even better than the Suikoden game it was made around. Make sure to make multiple saves as you get further in. Best part is, experience greatly favors getting your unused characters to level, so you don't have to level your 100 equally, as they'll jump several dozen levels if they're behind.

Oh, yeah. And it's free. Just go here: Exitfate.webs.com

I got stuck when I saved at a plot-based camp site, with the only option to go forward, into a boss fight I was not leveled to deal with. I had to stop as I was bashing my head into a wall that'd never break, and I had no way of going back. This was my ONLY gripe in the game, so learn from my mistake. As far as I've witnessed, this is the only part of the game that this could potentially happen to someone, so don't let it stop you from enjoying this masterpiece.

[danzibr]

Exit Fate, another I started and switched laptops. Had a solid start.

The only thing I disliked was it ripping music from all over.

[Sian]

Reminds me ...

Final Fantasy: Endless Nova - is a very strong fan-made RPG-maker game, which stands up as comparable to Final Fantasy 6-8 in theme (outside of a slightly schizophrenic graphical scheme, which borrows a lot from FFVI), with the Main character being an odd jobs/drifter and his android side-kick, who stumbles upon an amnesic girl with cat ears (which is very much not normal, and usually hidden under a hat) and decides to help her finding her memory (and his own for that matter)

[Cristo Meyers]

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc - A visual novel/point and click mystery game. A group of high schoolers are locked in a school and the only way to escape is to kill one of the others without getting caught. In between cases its a pretty standard social sim, but once a murder's been committed it turns into an investigation game where you talk to witnesses, gather clues, and eventually comes the trial where gameplay changes again. You use the clues you've gathered to counter other people's arguments and reveal the killer.

There's three of them and an anime, so maybe not "nobody's heard of" but it's damn entertaining.

[Algeh]

You can't lock yourself out of plot just by placing the lands in the wrong places (although you can mess it up with other quests). Your problem was probably caused by the fact that there are three plots in the game, and it isn't always clear what is part of which plot - which means that you can't always figure out how to follow up a given story path. The game is relatively "plot-lite" in the lack of a single overarching story - narratively, the meat of the game is in relatively low-level character interactions.


The item crafting is extremely obtuse, and figuring it out isn't particularly easy - but it is also a fairly unimportant subsystem.


You might want to check out Mega64's LP of the game, which is extremely completionist.

Yeah, it was basically a case of "I want to find out more about the whatever-plot-thread" (I think the Jumi? It's been a while - I also remember liking some of the ones about the school in Geo, and the weird junkyard dolls), but I could not find any more of that story no matter where I poked, and I wasn't getting any more new artifacts from anywhere I poked, and the only place I could find new quests was sometimes the pirate ship after a tedious navigation mini-game. I think I basically had one quest I could find from the ship that involved the dudbears in the cavern and was really obnoxious, and it was the only one that I knew how to trigger but hadn't beaten yet. I liked the game early on because it was pretty open ended and you could just wander around and find neat stuff to do (my favorite gameplay mode in general is "exploration with minimal consequences for being wrong, so go wander around the map and poke at stuff"), but it eventually kind of narrowed down to less new stuff to find without ramping up to a single obvious thing I needed to be doing in place of the ever-sparser small stuff.

[Sian]

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc - A visual novel/point and click mystery game. A group of high schoolers are locked in a school and the only way to escape is to kill one of the others without getting caught. In between cases its a pretty standard social sim, but once a murder's been committed it turns into an investigation game where you talk to witnesses, gather clues, and eventually comes the trial where gameplay changes again. You use the clues you've gathered to counter other people's arguments and reveal the killer.

There's three of them and an anime, so maybe not "nobody's heard of" but it's damn entertaining.

A small niche genre to be sure, but hardly unheard of, that would probably have to be the company’s other flagship, ‘zero escape’

[Lacco]

Color me intrigued...

Dungeon Lords, game made by a Czech guy with good portfolio. Most of his games are rather good.

---

As for the discussion... most of people, even RPG fans, in my vicinity never heard about ADOM or LCS. And these are two games I still play when I get the mood...and have time... so not often.

[Cespenar]

As for the discussion... most of people, even RPG fans, in my vicinity never heard about ADOM or LCS. And these are two games I still play when I get the mood...and have time... so not often.

Most roguelikers know ADOM alright, but if by LCS you mean Liberal Crime Squad (which is a hilarious game by the Dorf Fortress creator, but its content might be a grey area in this forum), that I've seen very rarely talked.

[Driderman]

I get the feeling that not a lot of people know of The Curious Expedition but it's probably one of my favourite games ever.

For old stuff, Deuteros, Reunion and that weird game where you played a time-and-space travelling immortal who had to seed 4 races on their respective biome planets (aquatic, desert and two others I forget) and then handle any and all of their development and critical moments, going back in the time to fix things if you made the wrong choices... for reasons. I wish I could remember the name.

[Aeson]

Not sure that I'd necessarily call them 'favorite' games, but some games I remember enjoying, though I haven't played any of them for a long time and neither know nor particularly care if they're games that 'nobody' has heard of.
- Battleship: Surface Thunder
- Caveman Rocks
- GalBat
- Galaxian
- A game I can't remember the name of but which involved playing as a dragon flying around more-or-less 2D castles, which I think was packaged with Caveman Rocks
- LEGO Rock Raiders
- LEGO Loco
- Dungeon Siege and Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna

[Triaxx]

I keep forgetting about Dungeon Siege, even though it's a game I adore.

[Sian]

As for the discussion... most of people, even RPG fans, in my vicinity never heard about ADOM or LCS. And these are two games I still play when I get the mood...and have time... so not often.

ADOM is widely considered one of the 5 genre defining 'Canon' Roguelikes (together with Rogue, Angband, Nethack and Dungeon Crawl), and equally considered one of the big 4 (together with aforementioned Nethack (optionally with Slash'em on top of it), Tales of Maj'Eyal, which at it's core is an Angband fork, and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which is a direct successor to Dungeon Crawl)

[TaRix]

Two from the NES days:
Magician, a sorta action-RPG-sidescroller with a trainee mage questing across the land to take on a tyrant-mage in his tower, gaining power by solving puzzles and beating creatures. Not only did you have to sort through all kinds of helpful gizmos and devices, you also had to stay fed and quenched. Learning new spells was mostly done by assembling the right word bits, and casting an unknown spell was just one way of dozens to abruptly die. At least the persistent narration window told you how stupid you acted. Fun music and great detailing for its time.
Nightshade, not the Sega one with ninjas. This one's more of a point-n-click in the vein of Monkey Island or Maniac Mansion with you as a wannabe vigilante hero self-tasked with cleansing the city from thugs, valley-girl ninjas, two-dimensional jackals, stuffy gents, and Sutekh, the Egyptian-themed mastermind behind it all. You've got to do it because they've managed to forcibly retire Metro City's REAL hero.
The fun part of this one was more of tone than of substance--the townsfolk, foes, comments, and fight woosh kind of bring to mind the campy 60s Batman show. You get to save kittens in trees, help little old ladies cross the street, foil muggings, all in an attempt to become sufficiently popular and well-enough equipped to reach Sutekh's lair. Fail, and you find yourself in yet another moderately escapable deathtrap (the last one isn't, though, so keep your health up.)

One I've mentioned before in the early computer days:
Robot Odyssey, a plotless wonder that has you falling into a robotic city sewer (both the city and sewer are robotic), struggling to find your way back out. Made by the guy that did the Atari console Adventure!, the interface is simple enough--pick up stuff, move around, drop stuff-- but the puzzles are anything but. From the second screen onwards, you bring along three programmable robots, and you have to get them to navigate places forbidden to you for keys, tokens, and other necessities.
Oh, but coding a robot? Nope, no higher-level languages for you. You get to use logic gates. ORs, XORs, ANDs, NOTs, and some flip-flops are the only things in your toolbox, though you can find specific sensor types scattered about. Though I never won it as a youth, the basics got me through some college-level material with ease. Pity all the emulations and remakes I've seen haven't been playable. I'd like to try this one again.

[Hunter Noventa]

Oh here's a wacky one, Faxanadu. It's a 2D Action-RPG Platformer for the NES. Think the combat sections of Zelda 2, but that's the entire game. The basic plot is a meteor or something hit the World Tree and you've got to climb it and defeat the evil its spawned. it's a brutal, unforgiving game with a nightmarish password system (like 30 characters long with a poor choice of font) but somehow it's also a load of fun and has some decent music and a lot of variety between weaponry, magic and just plain platforming, but no one ever talks about it.

[TaRix]

Oh here's a wacky one, Faxanadu. It's a 2D Action-RPG Platformer for the NES. Think the combat sections of Zelda 2, but that's the entire game. The basic plot is a meteor or something hit the World Tree and you've got to climb it and defeat the evil its spawned. it's a brutal, unforgiving game with a nightmarish password system (like 30 characters long with a poor choice of font) but somehow it's also a load of fun and has some decent music and a lot of variety between weaponry, magic and just plain platforming, but no one ever talks about it.

Well, it was a bit buggy. Everyone was so... blinky, like the mouth-sprite and eye-sprite codes were reversed or something. I found out the hard way that one of the items in the manual (the black onyx) was supposed to make you stronger, but weakened you instead. The game did find its way onto that terrible Captain N cartoon, though. Gotta count for something, right?

[LibraryOgre]

Oh here's a wacky one, Faxanadu. It's a 2D Action-RPG Platformer for the NES. Think the combat sections of Zelda 2, but that's the entire game. The basic plot is a meteor or something hit the World Tree and you've got to climb it and defeat the evil its spawned. it's a brutal, unforgiving game with a nightmarish password system (like 30 characters long with a poor choice of font) but somehow it's also a load of fun and has some decent music and a lot of variety between weaponry, magic and just plain platforming, but no one ever talks about it.

It was a really fun game... a staple of our rentals, especially since the obnoxious password system let you resume games after you returned and retrieved it from the store. IIRC, we also, eventually, started experimenting with hacking the password system.

[Cespenar]

So I remembered a few more that I enjoyed back in the day, though the distinction between less known and just... old, is beginning to slip here.

C-Dogs: It was a top-down shoot em up with pretty enjoyable fight mechanics. Even had some campaigns with a nice array of mission objectives, but the real angle was the multiplayer, I think.
Blood & Magic: A RTS in D&D/Forgotten Realms? What must they have been thinking? No, actually, this game rocked back then. Had lots of terrain interactions and other strategic elements.
Triplane Turmoil: A triplane shoot em up in WW1-ish era? It had pretty good old airplane mechanics, and required a fair bit of skill/training to get any good at it. Again, designed for multiplayer, I think, but it had campaigns as well.
Dilbert's Desktop Games: Hmm.
Little Fighters 2: What if Super Smash Bros was made earlier and much better, but more in a beat-em-up kind of way?

[theMycon]

In case you're not familiar with the Suikoden series, it's unique in the sense that it's a JRPG that uses 6 people in your active party, and it has 100 unique people to use. Most of them are optional, but none are permanently losable (However, you can miss out on getting certain characters earlier in the game).

(Exit Fate) is very polished, and I'd probably say even better than the Suikoden game it was made around. Make sure to make multiple saves as you get further in. Best part is, experience greatly favors getting your unused characters to level, so you don't have to level your 100 equally, as they'll jump several dozen levels if they're behind.

It has a LOT going for it. You'd think a 6v6 JRPG would be slow, but it actually has you input all of the commands for your team at once, and THEN initiative/turn order is automatically calculated and everyone's actions happen all at once. As a result, it looks and feels very active and cool.

Oh, yeah. And it's free. Just go here: Exitfate.webs.com

That link is dead, but you can still find the game at the producer's website, scf works. It's got consistently solid reviews, though they all include "for an RPGMaker game" or "Compared to SCF's last game". I'm giving it a shot.

Having played about 2 hours, I suspect you define "polish" differently from me. Sure, there's a lot of detail, but it's sloppy. It's jarring when the music dead-stops for a half-second then resets every 30 seconds, instead of making a smooth loop. The dialogue is consistently weird enough* that I have to remind myself that it's not actually a SNES-era low budget localization. There doesn't seem to be much to interact with (people, some chests). The "spend money to skip this battle" function is nice, but it's useless 90% of the time, when you can just open a chest or talk to someone or go through a door; or if you set any button other than esc to open the status window. And the portraits are often downright horrifying- I think I'll see Fitch's face every time I close my eyes for the rest of my days.

Unrelatedly, you can easily perma-kill most of your characters in the Suikoden games. For example, do damage to Luca Blight in the army battle against him. Everyone in a 5-square radius is gonna get hurt, and unless they're one of the few characters with plot armor, it's there's about a 50-50 chance of they'll be perma one-shot. People also die often when losing duels, or if you make an obviously bad choice.
And in Exit Fate you give people orders immediately before they act; one by one.



*For example- meeting Elder Lothis, this mayor of a small town introduces himself as supreme ruler of all elves, and then Daniel Vinyard explains to him the details of his army's secret plans & how the campaign has gone so far. This isn't special, it's indicative of how everyone talks.

[Starwulf]

Oh here's a wacky one, Faxanadu. It's a 2D Action-RPG Platformer for the NES. Think the combat sections of Zelda 2, but that's the entire game. The basic plot is a meteor or something hit the World Tree and you've got to climb it and defeat the evil its spawned. it's a brutal, unforgiving game with a nightmarish password system (like 30 characters long with a poor choice of font) but somehow it's also a load of fun and has some decent music and a lot of variety between weaponry, magic and just plain platforming, but no one ever talks about it.

If you were dedicated enough you could grind and grind and grind in the starting areas, and buy the strongest spell in the game(I believe it was the strongest, maybe 2nd, but pretty sure 1st) and then basically be immortal for most of the game as nothing could stand up to it until you were near the end of the game. BUT, if you weren't willing to grind, you didn't have another chance to buy it until about halfway through the game, when you had to come back to the starting area.

Another one for me was Karnov for the NES. You are a fire-breathing circus performer who is battling monsters. Why? I don't remember, it's been far to long since I played, but I've never come across anyone who knows what the hell I'm talking about when I bring the game up, so I'm assuming it was relatively unknown, but supremely fun. I've been tempted to buy a copy from Ebay and play it through(I would say "And see if it holds up to my memory", but I've played dozens of older games that I enjoyed when I was younger, and I still enjoyed them now, so I'm assuming I'm some kind of freak that just doesn't mind extremely dated gameplay/graphics).

[TheTeaMustFlow]

Probably a little less obscure than some things here, but I was a big fan of Rise of Legends. Rise of Nations slightly odd fantasy spinoff, lovely little strategy game with some surprisingly good story and worldbuilding for what and when it was (and an excellent ost). Along with the Battle for Middle Earth games, it's top of my "wish I could find a download version to play on my discless laptop" list.

More recently, the cyberpunk platformer-rpg Dex was rather fun. And again, some pretty good music.

[Eldan]

Rise of LEgends was pretty fun, though from what I remember, I played through the campaign once, then never touched it again. Basically solid, though, and a lot of quite nice ideas for an RTS.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Nobody is a pretty high bar (or more like a low bar, maybe this is a limbo dancing contest), but i'm currently replaying Vector Unit's Ritide GP: Renegade. The first time I played the Android version, now I bought the PC version on top of that.

It's a fun little game about racing jet engined jetski's in a mildly science-fictiony cyberpunky setting. It's a bit weird for a racing game in that it's less about getting the right speed in corners and such and more about turning on auto-throttle and doing lots of stunts. There is a decent variety of tracks and vehicles as well as a pretty good stunt system, there are fun cosmetic options, and while the difficulty can vary quite a bit from race to race overall the game the hard parts of the game put up a good fight without feeling like an unfair challenge that's there just to keep you playing longer. It's the third part in the series, and where part two lacked difficulty settings this game has both that and a pretty big postgame. It's quite cool, is what I'm saying. If I had to make a top 5 favorite games this would probably be an honorable "in the same genre" mention attached to Stunts claiming the number 1 spot.

The elimination race on "Firewater" in the second cop quest is hell though, especially on a phone where some combination of screen size and aspect ratio keeps me from reliably hitting either shortcut. Absolute hell.

Also: if anyone else has this title I'm game to try out the multiplayer function sometime.