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There's a few threads about complaining about games or talking about genres but I haven't found one where you can talk about just random games you like and why you like them, so I made this one. The idea is that you tell people about games you like but which few people talk about or play much, it doesn't have to be an obscure game but these probably work best for this. Say why you like the game, add screenshots or whatever you want, just basically make a case for why a game owns and why more people should play it. I will update this OP with links to different games if, against all odds, this thread ends up not dropping off the page and gets longer. The biggest one for me is Reunion for DOS and Amiga. Reunion is a weird hybrid 4x game made by a Hungarian studio called Merit Software. The story is that Earth got into a massive civil war for some mysterious reason some time in the future, and colonists escaped to another world called New Earth to settle there. You have to guide the new colony and expand into space to get back to Earth and "reunite" with it, but there's a bunch of crazy aliens and other bullshit in your way, besides the fact that you will have to somehow solve whatever caused the civil war. I said that it's a weird game because while it looks like a 4x sandboxy type of game, it follows a linear storyline and plays like a linear game. There are events that occur at specific dates that you should try to be prepared for, like alien invasions that you need adequate defenses for or aliens that request your help for certain things. You have some freedom in how you exactly choose to prepare for these events, but there is a road of least resistance that you should try to aim for. Maybe this doesn't sound very cool, but it is, the game plays almost like a roguelike where a mistake will result in failure, fortunately you can save the game at any time and correct for mistakes. The fun is really in just learning how the game works and trying different strategies to find out which one works the best. It's like playing Masters of Orion, but with more of a sense of purpose and urgency to it. It's hard as balls and all about efficiency and balancing different aspects of your space colonies. The other thing it has going for it is the pixel art, these are some great DOS graphics:       So to summarize, the good parts of this game is that it's really challenging and there's no other game exactly like this that I've ever seen, there are multiple genres combined in one game: space 4x, city building, adventure elements and linear gameplay, and it looks and sounds cool. It's an experiment that's really satisfying to play and beat. The bad part is that unfortunately it's kinda buggy sometimes, you'll have to use dosbox to play it and it occasionally crashes at the intro, or if you don't save for a long time. Save often and use a guide if you really aren't making progress. It's abandonware but easy to find. Tell us about dumb weird cool games nobody plays and why they should be played. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 13:18
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 18:06 |
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So, a few years back, I was a slacker backer of a kickstarter game because it looked kinda fun, and when it finally came out, A Hat in Time was one of the rare successful kickstarter games, I feel. The gameplay is interesting, and they vary up the ideas with each world. World 1 is basically a traditional collectathon, on an island overrun by the Mafia of Cooks. World 2 is a Movie Studio where you help two birds film westerns and sci-fi musicals, and ends with two different endings, depending on who wins the fake Oscar. World 3 is a horror game in the woods, and world 4 is an open world free to explore game! Throughout all this, you're a little girl who is in her spaceship heading home, and her fuel (hourglasses called "time pieces") is scattered out to the nearby planet. The game reached stretch goals to receive two extra post-game worlds, which are a Titanic parody with a Walrus captain and Seal shiphands, and a train station crawling with the cat Yakuza. The controls are fluid, and the powerups are fun, one of the first hats (powerups that you can swap anytime) you get is a witch's hat that lets you brew exploding potions to throw. A Hat in Time is on PC, PS4, XBone, and it just came out on the Switch with the first DLC (and a promise that the second DLC will come out soon), so if you have a Switch, you can also play it! (Don't get it on PS4 or XBone, because the DLC isn't out on those consoles for whatever reason) 
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Oct 25, 2019 15:04
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Wow op, that sounds like the book Foundation but in DOS game form. I wanna try it
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Oct 25, 2019 15:44
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Jesustheastronaut! posted:Wow op, that sounds like the book Foundation but in DOS game form. I wanna try it One thing I forgot to say about it is that it also has really good exploration, every planet and moon is different (they mostly have unique graphics too) and you have to weigh factors in choosing where you settle and stuff. A Hat in Time looks good too.
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Oct 25, 2019 19:06
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A good idea for a thread! I've been playing Derby Manager for a while. It's one of those online football/soccer manager games, but much better than all the others i've tried over the years. It moves at a quick pace (one match a day, season takes a month), there's no transfer sniping, it has decent depth, training is actually fun, stats, attributes and ratings all make sense, the community is tiny, but very friendly, and the dev is constantly improving the game and listening to suggestions. Also, it's completely free, with nothing to even spend real life money on. At the start you take over one of the teams at the bottom division of any of 16 countries currently in the game. So there are no real life teams, but all the teams have city names, giving a surprisingly cohesive alternate reality feeling. It started very recently and has been struggling to get players, but the ones who have found it seem to stick around. I'm playing in Italy, but there are a few more players in Belgium including the dev / his friends. The new season is starting in a few days, so this is the best time to jump in and give an honestly great underlooked webgame a boost: http://www.derbymanager.com
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Oct 28, 2019 13:14
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if you're remotely into games like Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon, you really should try out Monolith. it's very much in the same vein, a top down shooty roguelite, though this one leans a bit more into a sort of shmup/bullet hell kind of thing. it doesn't have as much raw content as other games in its genre but it more than makes up for it by being absurdly tightly designed, incredibly fun to play, and having an absolutely gorgeous aesthetic. a good amount of weapons, lots of enemy types, not to mention tons of secrets to find. plus it's pretty darn cheap! like fifteen bucks for the game + dlc (which you should absolutely get) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weV6MxriSPE i recorded this, as this was for a brief time a world record speedrun for this category, and i think it shows off the sort of things you can expect from the game pretty well. it's just an incredible example of its genre and it's an absolute shame that more people don't know about it. cheers
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Aug 11, 2022 10:43
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I want to plug for Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden because while it drew some looks for its unique aesthetic—an RPG played with cards and dice that revels in the feel of that experience—it likewise drew attention for its association with Yoko Taro. Much like Martin and Elden Ring, the Taro influence isn’t as pronounced as the marketing boilerplate might want you to think, at least, not with the first release, The isle Dragon Roars. But with the sequel, that gut-wrenching Taro charm is on display, if in a milder form. The game is a JRPG, but you interact entirely via cards and dice. Even overworld and dungeon traversal are done this way. As you travel across a table covered in face down cards, they flip over to reveal themselves. It can be anything from terrain to random events to treasure. But what’s cool about this is that it’s fog of war meant to encourage discovery and exploration rather than to obscure the unknown for its own sake. Much like Dungeon Encounters, another pleasant small budget Square offering from the last year, the compulsion to expose every corner of a map is a solid driver. But it’s that aesthetic that sells the game. It’s all narrated by one person. The first and second have different narrators and I’ve not gotten around to the first yet, but the wry witicism and plainspoken story really draw you into the experience of sitting around a table and playing a game which was crafted for you. The game knows this, and smartly gives the narrator his own personality in some ways. Random sidequests end in unconventional ways. Characters behave oddly. You’re often thrown random events whose outcomes you could never predict correctly, and the game toys with your expectations of how an RPG should play. It’s just subversive enough to make you laugh and nod. The battle system is pretty simple and bog-standard JRPG. If you’ve ever played one, ever, you won’t struggle with it. But it’s breezy enough to be a pacing elementt, and in that way it succeeds. The polish on the incidental details like elemental magic is great. Cards explode and spin and jab at one another as though they are actual 3D models. It livens things up. I think I like it so much because of how comfortable it feels to play. It wants you to feel like you’re sitting at a table with a DM. And it’s designed with enough surprises at regular intervals that the illusion holds up. Square played this one lovely. Banking on the Taro namedrop to sell units probably hurt it in the longrun. I don’t know the sales numbers, but I’m sure a great number of folks picked it up, and when it wasn’t what they were looking for, just as quickly dropped it. That’d be a shame. It’s a charming, breezy little game that knows how to wink and nudge you while you play, and it hums along with a singular purpose to keep you guessing and prodding. It’s not a deck builder, either, and considering the success of STS, I think it’s an interesting game to release. Probably ballsy, in a way, considering how popular STS is. But if you come at it with the right expectations, it’ll charm the gently caress out of you.
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Aug 12, 2022 00:04
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 18:06 |
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Shibawanko posted:Reunion drat, the 90's were full of weird genremixed sci-fi games. An era before the 4x formula became solidified with everyone trying to emulate MoO2, so we had a lot more weird experimentation. My favorite game from that era is Alien Legacy. It's much more an adventure game than Reunion, most of the game is gathering resources and clues on planets, kinda sorta like Star Control. The main plot of the game is that you're settling a colony from your giant seedship in an alien solar system, so you have to build bases to house and provide life support to your colonists and also produce resources. Then you also build probes to scan the different planets and find clues on what happened to the previous expedition. When you send a probe to a place, it turns out into a kind of expanded resource gathering minigame from Star Control - you fly around arcade-style over the surface and hoover up resources. There's technology tree to improve your stuff and also advance the plot, there's aliems and multiple endings depending on what you do in the endgame. It's a cool little game, because there no rts element and barely any combat, it's a very chill experience, kind of like an incremental game in some ways. Also honorable mention to Ironseed. Best I can describe it is Star Control, but weirder. There's a randomly generated galaxy and you pretty much do the SC thing of going around, doing diplomacy with the different races and solving quests. But everything is way more obtuse, you also have ship crew, that are I guess artificial brains loaded with the personalities of real people, and you have to maintain their sanity or else they break down and become unresponsive. There's an elaborate and awkward crafting system, where you make thing to assemble another thing, etc to make upgrades to your ship. There's of course planet scanning and resource gathering. There's combat as well I guess, but honestly I never got far enough to figure how it works. And all of that behind one of the worst UIs in existence.
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Aug 12, 2022 13:42
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