What's a game you love but can't actually recommend?
What's a game you love but can't actually recommend?
Alternate title: what’s your favorite obscure jank?
Black and White and Black and White 2 (The Lionhead god simulator games, not the Pokemon games)
They were extremely cutting edge for their time but are VERY jank and cheesy and I'm not sure modern gamers would like them.
OOOOOOOOH WE'VE THIS NOTION THAT WE'D QUITE LIKE TO SAIL THE OCEAN
My favorite jank? GTA: San Andreas Multi Player.
Its a mod for GTA:SA that allows better multiplayer action than GTA online does.
Ive been playing it since around 2007 or 08. I like to roleplay as a homeless dude from Blueberry who goes around quoting Carl Marks at everyone. It’s pretty fun, and I’ve been doing it enough that im known around one particular server for doing it.GTA:SAMP isn’t really obscure, but at this point it’s old as fuck, and nobody really talking about it anymore.
Deadly Premonition. It has a cast of very charming and surprisingly well written characters alongside a fascinating mindfuck of a story that is very much unlike anything else I've ever experienced. Heavily inspired by David Lynch's Twin Peaks and the closest I've seen another piece of media come to recapturing its dreamy, surreal vibes. Has a cult following despite being an absolutely shit game by all reasonable metrics. The combat is atrocious, it's unfathomably buggy, you're forced to drive between locations in a janky ass car, and the driving is like pulling teeth. It's really quite an unpleasant game to play for many reasons, and that's if you even get the game to run; the PC port is basically unplayable and requires a fuckton of fiddling on newer systems. Despite all that, it's an experience I remember very fondly. Just don't know if I'll be booting it up for another run in the next decade.
Fallout New Vegas (pure vanilla with not a single mod aka the console editions and the broken PC ports).
It's sometimes hard to recommend FNV to other people due to the fact that the only way to really enjoy the game is using the Viva New Vegas modlist.
I'm never reinstalling Windows so I have to pray that MO2 gets ported to Linux sooner rather than later because I personally despise hacking with WINE prefixes/organizing esps/ESM files myself. Also the fact that
- Mods are distributed through a proprietary network
shitholeservice called Nexus Mods - I own a copy of the game on Steam unfortunately and I know how much I despise interfacing with that program.
- There's so many mods to install goddamn
- Mods are distributed through a proprietary network
Piranha Bytes Gothic and Gothic 2 are some of the best RPGs ever produced in my view. The atmosphere, the sense of progression and danger, the way every single item and enemy is curated and placed in the world with care and thought, the way the game doesn't hold your hand and characters actually behave like human beings - including the player. All wonderful.
Unfortunately, the graphics were ugly as shit for 2001-02 and the combat is unbelievably janky. A large part of the game's difficulty curve comes from how fiddly and frustrating the combat is. So, it is really hard to recommend.
Short answer: Elex, what if Bethesda was both far more ambitious and also far less talented.
Long answer: I’ve been playing Quasimorph recently. It’s a bit like a turn based extraction shooter where you control a single mercenary clone (IN SPACE) and do missions for different factions in a sort of mount and blade style of reputation balancing (or not balancing). Your clone levels up, you can select from different builds, you choose your load outs and missions. If you die you lose the gear and leveled clone you sent (or the fresh meat who valiantly died in recon by fire).
The graphics are somewhat charming in that Gameboy Aliens game industrial sort of way. The music is actually strong, but that’s incredibly subjective.
It’s niche, it’s hard, it’s unfinished, and updates are slow but steady.
I can’t imagine the target audience being large, and I don’t expect the mechanics to change or expand overly much. For what it is, it’s fine unless you are the rare sort who wanted to play a combination of the original XCOM, Caves of Qud, and Escape from Tarkov. So I enjoy it very much, but I don’t recommend it to people unless they’re willing to potentially waste their time on something weird.
Easy answer is E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy.
It's a janky mess built on the source engine. The plot is downright incomprehensible. Gameplay mechanics aren't properly taught to the player, leaving you to work out how everything works (my legs are ok). The maps vary massively in terms of quality (the tutorial area for example has an optional side path that is just an incredibly long empty corridor that takes, like, twice as long to cross than the path you're railroaded towards to reach the same destination). It's basically an unlicensed WH40K game so it's got my dislike of Warhammer to work against to win me over.
Despite this, I have a huge soft spot for the game. It's one of the comfort games I boot up and play when I'm sick and sad.
Old School RuneScape. It's bigger than ever and just had their winter summit where they announced a bunch of stuff coming down the pipeline. It's decades of work by different people piled on top of each other to make this world where you interact with all the resources to qualify to complete quests. The name of the game is self-motivation instead of following a path that's laid out for you. In that way, people have made these breathtakingly beautiful accounts and projects like fighting the hardest boss in the game having access to only a restricted capacity to navigate around the game map to collect supplies and gear.
The gameplay itself, however, is akin to having a double wide chest in Minecraft and clicking around your inventory for 12 hours. Then you have the requisite herblore level for a quest which is a click and point adventure where you talk to people and solve a puzzle for them. Then you have access to another training method which is 15% faster than what you were doing. Then you only spend 22 hours instead of 25 grinding out requirements for the quest you actually wanted to do in the first place. Every breakthrough moment allows you to do an even longer grind than you had just completed to get the breakthrough.
Dragon's Dogma isn't obscure but it fits enough.
One of the very best RPG combat systems with a god tier magic system put in a paper-thin world. The leveling up is shitty and requires playing as different classes because your own class has such shit stats that leveling up is useless. Getting any real enjoyment out of the game is a 20 hour slog to get to the end-game stuff.
War Thunder, this game has so many bad things going for it I probably could rant about it for hours, but I find it really fun. If you do ever end up playing this game, please please don't spend money on it, high tier is an absolute mess and isn't worth spending money on it or grinding for it, just play the game to have fun and unlock things as you go even though it takes fucking forever.
Dungeons Keeper 2, Heroes of Might and Magic III, medieval 2 Total war and Sid Meiet's Pirates!
I love them, but they're too old and I'm sure there's a modern version somewhere that's better. Also you won't get why theyre fantastic unless you were there when they came out. All games that scratch an itch no other game does.
Skullgirls
honkai impact, which i've been playing for a year now bc my wife is a big mihoyo fan and i liked it best out of their three offerings. a lot of the older stuff is very jank/rough, it's a gacha game so it comes off with that usual baggage, and the general art direction is even more male-gazey than genshin. but the visuals/flow of the combat with modern characters is great, and there's clearly a lot of effort put into the choreography and animations that make actually playing the game with the 3-woman teams just really fun.
World in Conflict is the best ww3 game and it was breathtaking for its time, but somehow didn't really succeed and capture a permanent following/sequel cashcow
Marvel vs Capcom 3. It's a sick fighting game but it is also totally fucking psychopathic. I put over 10k hours in that mfer and going back and looking at how ungodly fast and fucked up it is makes me wonder how the fuck I managed to play it at a high level. Playing competitively is unbelievably fuckedd up.
One of my favorite games is Antimatter Dimensions. It's an incremental/idle game. It's kind of amazing. But trying to explain to someone what an idler is is pointless and most people who are familiar just think it's a Cookie Cutter clone. But it's not.
It does vertical prestige layers but like each layer, the mechanic of the first part is built on the entire previous layer, then the second part takes what you've built up to and flips it on its head a bit. This continues for several currencies that are used for various things. In December of 2022, the Reality Update™️ was released and once you get to that prestige layer the game turns into a completely diffeent thing. like if you have ADHD or enjoy Factorio but hate all the walking, I seriously recommend it to those people but if you don't fall into that group, it's probably not for you and I can see it getting marked up as the dumbest game you've ever played.
Antimatter Dimensions is one of my favorite games but just don't. And if it does click with you, it sort of sneaks itself into your daily routine. Check in for 30 mins in the AM and do some purchasing, consult the guide. Maybe let it idle through a time wall. Plan prestige challenges in the evening after work. Might let it run all night and check in these three things I'm grinding for next morning, etc. like it doesn't consume your life but it becomes part of you.
Don't play it lol.
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. The combat is absolutely fantastic, I've tried Mordhau but its just not the same. Unfortunately its almost entirely dead, there's only one server left in the US and it's only populated in the evenings (not even every night). It's also full of chuds, the chat is literally toxic waste.
RuneScape - too much of a 'you had to be there' value. OSRS gets away with this more because you're also going there to play a 'vintage' game with some new content. But I don't really vibe with rs3. The entire plot is all over the place, although the individual quests are extremely well-written. Also, RS3 gameplay isn't all that fun and full of mtx, but OSRS is still worth giving a look.
RS3 is a bad MMO, but it's my bad MMO.
I mean def the most forgotten-to-the-sands-of-time game i've played is Wet. I rly enjoyed it at the time as a suburban teenager with nothing better to do, but I can't recommend because in hindsight it was pretty mid and it didnt come out on pc, so you'd have to put in the extra work to emulate and its not worth it lol
Shining Force! A TTRPG from 1992. The music and character design are really about a decade ahead of everything else that was available then. If you level one of your characters up to lv 10, you can “evolve” them into a different sprite that lets them wield better gear. This was my comfort game growing up, and was remastered for GBA in 2004. If you like it, don’t play the prequel, only the sequel.
World of Tanks.
The premise is 15v15 tank battles, simple enough. You must penetrate the enemies' armour to inflict damage. Easy.
The core issue is that each tank can carry regular shells and shells that do the same damage and just simply have higher nominal penetration, but cost more in-game currency.
Like how the fuck does that make sense.
I had a lot of fun playing Far Cry Primal but the story is practically nonexistent and the gameplay eventually gets super repetitive (although this probably goes for all Far Cry games). It's one of those games where you're having a good time while you play it, but afterwards feel guilty for spending so much time on it when there are practically infinite clearly superior games you haven't played yet.
Cuphead
It is infuriating and I wouldn’t wish the frustration on anyone
Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura remains my favourite game ever. But it is showing its age, it looks much like one of many generic story-based isometric RPGs of its time, and it's hard to understand what the fuck is going on with the gameplay, but once you learn, you realise it's just that the mechanics go scarily deep, the story is astounding, multi-layered and genuinely inspiring. The voice acting is silly in bits, but overall very impressive, and same for the soundtrack. I can still just daydream about the infinite possibilities and characters from that setting. It's just.. so much more. I've played it through 10+ times.
I might go play it again now. I need to see what interactions happen if you get a high enough Charisma to gather all the voiced followers in one big party.
Everquest 1 and BDO
Nostalgia for EQ1 is so strong but unless you got friends trying to get into an old-style mmorpg now is painful
BDO because I actually love the combat style and gameplay but the k-mmorpg inspired upgrade system is just maddening also fuck microtransactions
Kileak: The DNA Imperative (a PS1 game i've played emulated on DuckStation)
its a real-time FPS dungeon crawler where you in a mech (power armor? kinda hard to tell, but i think its a small mech more than a armor suit) explore a tunnel complex full of cybernetic combat drones.
the gameplay is kinda wack, you have to shoot like 30 or 40 shots (in single shot with the base weapon, a lot of rapid button mashing if you want to survive) at basically every enemy to kill them, the other weapons are super hard to find ammo for, and the tank controls in first person are pretty wild (in a fun way. you can move diagonally super fast for some reason. controls remind me of armored core 2), but it has such a sense of atmosphere its like one of those haunted PS1 videogames. Its basically like a slower paced Doom clone with more simplistic level architecture, most levels are linear corridors with some 90 degree turns and 4x4 and 6x6 rooms spread around. theres no jump or crouch or anything, just forward, back, strafe buttons with either L1/2 or R1/2 buttons, and you can't look up or down except by holding R1 and L1 to look up and R2 and L2 to look down at pre-defined angles. it doesnt matter since the game has aim assist, the crosshair moves to lock onto the enemy nearest the center/closest to you (not sure which).
I have a huge soft spot for Capcom's Strider (Arcade, 1989) to the point that I have an actual PCB. Wildly ambitious in terms of design and worldbuilding...and incredibly janky. Also, it has a co-opted soviet council turn into a giant mecha-centipede wielding a hammer and sickle. Notably influential within Capcom's own devteams, having characters who influenced Street Fighter II's Chun-Li and Mega Man X's Vile.
Also fitting the bill more directly, we have Wolfteam's Earnest Evans (Sega Mega Drive/Mega CD, 1991). A lot of 16 bit games successfully played with segmented characters for an early form of skeletal animation - like a lot of well respected classics like Alien Soldier and Contra: Hard Corps - but Wolfteam tried to take things a step further with a entire platformer where the main character has sophisticated ragdoll physics. The end result isn't very playable, but it's pretty impressive for a platform that can't do hardware rotation effects. Also one of the all-time funniest speedruns imo.
A really obscure 90s title called Millennia: Altered Destinies. Unusable UI, but fuck the concept of guiding 4 alien civs through time travel to become peacefully co existing powers ready to defeat an alien invasion was amazing.
Tribes Vengence singleplayer was great and you can fucking fight me Tribes 2 fans I've been around since Earthsiege 2.
I actually liked doom 3
I would say Hinterland, but that game can be got for a couple bucks and really doesn't overstay its welcome if you wanted to just do a single run. Seriously, I love that game enough that I considered modding it, but there's just enough layers of encryption that it isn't worth bothering with for a low-tech guy like myself.
The Isle, which I have almost 2000 hours in because it's incredibly in-depth despite being extremely unfinished and terribly balanced. It's fun to run around as a dinosaur. The people who complain about there being nothing to do are absolutely right, but damn if there isn't something exhilarating about stumbling upon some over-sized prey when it's pitch black in swamp during a thunderstorm, lightning crashing as I strike from the shadows, bleeding a T-Rex to death.
Then there's entire days where I play it and never find any prey.
Don't play it.
Death Stranding, Overwatch, Monster Hunter 3U.
Death Stranding because I'm not going to subject anyone to Kojima's brand of technobabble and self-fellation combined with a (admittedly fairly deep mechanically) walking simulator.
Overwatch because an FPS/MOBA combination has to be doing some actual damage to my psyche, and also it's just a hard sell to start with because of obvious reasons.
MH3U because it's only available on the 3DS and Wii U and it's the last really slow MH of the pre-World MHs. On 3DS it has no online play, and the Wii U servers have been taken down. It's the last MH before they introduced the mobility additions and improvements from 4 that made combat more fluid and fast, and before World introduced the system that basically finds the monster for you, as well as making mat gathering much more easy and less tedious.
EDIT: ooh for something that's more 'obscure jank' I just remembered I LOVED Phantom Breaker on the 360. It was a fighting game by 5pb/Mages that had a split style system. You had to choose between 'Quick' and 'Hard' where one was fast/felt more rushdown-y and the other was slower/felt more defensive. The game was super flashy because you would constantly clash, and meter built really fast WHILE ALSO CARRYING OVER BETWEEN ROUNDS which led to wild round start set-ups. This clip from will it kill is from the newer version but it's fucking hilarious.
Mine probably has to be Unturned. I love the game, and it's free so the jank is really forgivable. But it was originally a Roblox game before the developer made it a full game.
Pavlov VR
Great fun when it's good but increasingly dead
The "_________ of the killer" series by garmentdistrict. They're horror comedy walking sims with a dream-like soundtrack and art that looks like it was made in ms paint. I love the aesthetic and writing of it but most of the ppl I know just find it weird.
THEXDER (1987)
"You control a robot ("mech") that is capable of switching from a 'mech into a jet at any time, wading through levels after levels of high-tech enemies."
download abandonware or play inbrowser
Space Bar to Laser, Z to Activate Shields, Down Arrow to Transform to Jet Mode
"Thexder is a solid PC conversion of Game Arts' hit in Japan, licensed to distribute in the US by Sierra."
I bought it in a store. It was packaged in a big box, the game came on a thin magnetic disc encased in hard plastic, there was a thick booklet also.
Europa Universalis 4