So, I had an snes, which I loved, but my taste in games wasn’t great and my parents objected to violence, which means my collection is a bit weird.
One game I loved which wasn’t universally acknowledged to be great, was Clayfighter. It was essentially a Street Fighter clone, but the assets were all modelled in clay and animated using stop motion technique.
I think it got a lot of flak for being not well balanced and a little slow, so it kind of just didn’t stand out beyond the obvious classics of that genre, but man, I loved it. I couldn’t get Street Fighter because of my parents, but they were fine with clayfighter’s look and more humorous approach. At the same time, it still was a good beat em up, so I spent hours with it. Also, it kind of gave me an edge as SF2 was just the game everybody had, so at least I had a fun game to spend an hour with that people hadn’t played to death already.
The samples will remain burned into my memories forever. “The Blob Wins!!” Good times.
Fallout 4 is, by far, the best Fallout game.
Yes, having dialogs limited to 4 simplified options is unfortunate. Doesn’t matter, the rest of the game and gameplay makes up for that ten times over.
And yes, I am including New Vegas in the comparison.
Also there’s a game called Valfaris that I think is rad as hell. It wasn’t disliked so much as completely slept on. Definitely worth looking at if you like tough retro 2d shoot & platform games
Star Wars Outlaws.
I started playing maybe a year after release. I found a lot of negativity about the game. I am pretty sure that it had a really rough launch and by the time I got around to playing it many of the launch issues had been patched. Based on the stuff I read the game was pretty much a disaster until it was patch.
It did get repetitive at times and the stealth system was either a complete mess or completely OP.
Anyway I had a lot of fun with the game and was bummed when I learned their won’t be a sequel.
Also Nix was such a cool companion.
Launching in a workable state is criminally underated by publishers. A bad game can eventually be patched after launch, sure, but a botched first impression takes decades to switch in the public eye. Look at cyberpunk and witcher games. Beloved after decades of bug fixes, but not everyone has the good will of CD projekt red to burn through. A bad first impression can turn a good if unimaginative game into “that ugly game that was broken at launch” forever. And let’s be real, 90% of a game’s lifetime profit comes during the launch window.
Absolutely!!
This game is really good. I enjoyed the hell out of it and wish we’d get more Star Wars about being a regular person in the world.
I suppose a broad reading is a less well-known game. Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Great, great game.
Asura’s Wrath, the button masher QTE on rail and DLC true end drew a lot of hate at the time, but I loved the storytelling and the visceral characterization.
I think the hate was in the true end being locked behind DLC. I loved the game but could never finish it because the server to buy the DLC was down by then.
The Mount and Blade games feel like such a janky mess, and I don’t know anyone else that likes or plays them. But I absolutely adore the combat gameplay, nowhere else do I feel that merge between tactical medieval warfare and intense personal combat.
All the strategy/diplomacy/trading/RPG stuff on top is fine, but only as a context for the combat gameplay.
I liked Watch Dogs 1 mainly because I didn’t consume any pre-release media about it. Whatever downgrade there may have been, I was unaffected. The game and its story are about as Ubisoft as they come (and I don’t mean that in a particularly positive way), but it was great for fucking around.
I also liked Cyberpunk 2077’s launch version, but at the same time, I think the people who are trying to memory hole the objectively dogshit launch state of both 2077 and The Witcher 3 are perpetuating the problem.
I also liked Watch Dogs, I enjoyed the darker tone and it’s more serious setting. Good game play, story was good enough, a bit janky with some optimization issues. But overall it was good.
I don’t think I really cared about the downgrade either. But it really was around when my trust in what Devs and publishers were saying about their games was the lowest. So many games were bullshots and rendered trailers so you took the idea and if it was interesting you just waited to see the actual product.
Cyberpunk was also my game of the year, I had immense fun with the launch version and I was lucky enough to have minimal bugs and most were dumb shit. I think I had 2 which were gameplay and caused issues. It launched in a terrible state and I expect it as well, CDPR don’t have a great history of releasing bug free games. But, they do have a history of patching and fixing the broken bits. It also should not have been anywhere near the old gen consoles, that was stupid.
Deep cut: World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor
This expansion represented a huge shift in playstyle and made questing much more cinematic. Everyone was pumped after the huge success of Mists of Pandaria.
But Blizzard bit off more than they could chew and this expansion has the biggest laundry list of cut content ever. Particularly, the endgame content was far less than what was expected. Blizzard promised to re-add stuff as they had time… they never found the time. Raiders and competitive players were furious. A lot of people quit WoW because of this expansion.
I was not a raider, nor a competitive player, I was a solo quester. So I had a blast in what is still called one of the worst expansions in the game’s history.
The Garrison missions did get old after a while, but I still fondly remember logging in to the sound of Rescue the Warchief.
I loved MoP and WoD. I had played WoW since vanilla. I did a some raiding during vanilla, but just didn’t have the time. So i was a filthy casual and it was great. I played vanilla for a while and then quit. That was the pattern I did until MoP. When MoP was released my kid was in the 11th grade and my work had changed so I had more free time. I started raiding in MoP and continued that into WoD.
I loved those two expansions.
Final Fantasy 8
It’s my favourite one actually.
It was unforgettable the way it released but it would’ve been even better if the devs had more time to complete the whole story. We didn’t get enough of Laguna because of it.
Dark Souls 2 at its release
(even before the “Scholar of the First Sin” Remake)I just liked the more fluid combat mechanics compared to Dark Souls 1 and as far as I remember it didn’t have this weird Windows Live thing
There’s a good hbomberguy video that agrees with you.
I also liked Dark Souls 2 but sadly never finished it as I lost my save because it didn’t support Steam Cloud and I didn’t have the energy to start over.
Saints Row IV - I liked aspects of the earlier games, but I actually really enjoyed the meta silliness of IV. I accept that I don’t have a lot of company in having this opinion 🙂
I LOVE Saints Row IV! It’s my favorite of the entire franchise. Yes, it’s extra campy and over-the-top, but that just makes it more enjoyable.
Probably my favorite mission of Saints Row III was where you took an experimental drug and it gave you super-speed for a little while, so you could sprint across the city faster than if you were driving a car.
Saints Row IV just gives that to you as a permanent upgrade at some point. You don’t need cars later in the game, you can just run ridiculously fast and leap skyscrapers in a single bound.
I can’t remember if you can fly too, but I wanna say you can. It’s been quite a long time since I played that game.
I had so much fun in Saints Row IV, most of my playtime is just running all over the map and dicking around with NPCs once I was too OP for them to do anything to me. It’s hard for me to go back to the other games after that.
Im glad Im not alone here! I loved the shit outta Saints Row IV
Underneath the silliness, SR4 had a good story and great performances. I remember tearing up a bit during the car segment of the final mission.
It is one of the few open-world sidequestapaloozas I have ever beaten because the story and insanity kept me coming back.
I absolutely loved Star Wars: Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Two of the most gorgeous games ever made along with being fun and not too long. They nailed the feeling of being a Na’vi, you really feel very tall and nimble. And I love not having super powers and a light saber in a star wars game, you’re just an average human and need to be real sneaky and creative to succeed.
I fell for APB: Reloaded and Rogue Company. APB was lauded for it’s customization and open world cops and robbers situation, but fell flat graphically after GTA V came out and hasn’t offered much new.
Rogue Company, IMO, had legs but it never caught on to the Twitch streamer following they wanted; Dr. Disrespect got into hot water a few years after launch and they had a whole map dedicated to him. Servers are still up but they announced no more updates, sadly.
Salt & Sanctuary
People didn’t like it? It was great.
And also SMTV
Ah, another game that comes to mind: Persona 3 FES
Dunno how not liked it is, but I always see people getting scared away because of the difficulty, and that trying to convince people to play that version for the good part of a decade now.
But just saying, learning the ins and outs of the game makes it far more manageable, and even gets mechanics of P4G and Persona 5 to make sense.
Also, pinning a god-like being to the ground for ~50 turns thanks to Thunder Reign and making another god-like being slap itself to death thanks to Marakarn and Tetrakarn, both due to exploiting mechanics to my benefit, were certainly high points of the game. =D
Even Mitsuru was useful for a single battle in my whole 170h save because of having to exploit the game’s mechanics
🍞🔥
(“burn by bread” reference)
