Games

The FATE series. No, not the anime, the Diablo ripoff computer game with stolen music sold by WildTangent. I was a kid that got by playing only demos, and this game was one I reinstalled over and over again to get those free plays.

It's a pretty simple dungeon crawling game with procedurally generated floors where you have to get to floor 5x and defeat the named boss there so you can reincarnate and start it over again.

I reinstall it every couple of years to play it. It's got hardly any story, quests are generated for the floors you're about to reach, stats are randomly generated. It's just pure gameplay, though a bit repetitive as it can be. I love that it has a similar fish mechanic to Torchlight for your pets.

I remember seeing a nostalgia post on the game on Reddit and the developer of the game series had commented on the post. It was like meeting one of your heroes. Definitely very memorable for me.

The third game supposedly has all the content from the first two, so here's the steam link if anyone's curious.

Ogre Battle, either March of the Black Queen or Person of Lordly Caliber. It's such a weird cul-de-sac of tactical RPGs. The same company made Tactics Ogre, which then became Final Fantasy Tactics, which in turn inspired a zillion other post-2000 tactics games; and Tactics Ogre got a remake version recently. But the Ogre Battle side of the family just disappeared.

Dirtybomb

Power Blade on the NES. You are a Schwarzenegger-in-his-prime-like character in the future fighting the robotic underlings of an AI gone rogue. It has only 7 levels or so, but it has a nice gameplay to it, and the music was composed by Kinuyo Yamashita, who also did the Castlevania music. Needless to say, the soundtrack is top notch.

The Banner Saga, beautiful hand drawn rotoscoped visuals and animation, great characters, strong story and lore. Gameplay is turn based strategy, and it’s very addicting. Absolutely fantastic music. Never hear anyone talking about it.

Rune factory 3. It’s not popular anymore, nor do I see it talked about but I still play it from time to time. Sometimes I leave it open just to listen to the music/background and sometimes I fire up youtube and my speaker just to listen to its OST.

Comix Zone. It was a beat-em-up on the Sega Genesis with a gorgeous, comic book art style. It wasn't the greatest game, but it had character and it stood out against some of the other fighting games at the time. I'd really love a remake or sequel at some point. Doing it in the style of the Spider-verse movies would be rad.

Rocket Slime was one of my favorite games as a kid! I didn't even find out what Dragon Quest was until like a decade later when 11 came out

Might and Magic 6. It was such a weird product of its tech limitations, but they managed to squeeze such a good rpg power curve into it, it's still super fun.

Einhander on PS1 was a great side scrolling shooter by squaresoft with a sick techno soundtrack and a pretty fun weapon-stealing gimic.

Allegiance

Wildly asymmetric sci-fi RTS sorta - one player per team was actually playing an RTS but everyone else on the team flew one of the actual ships, so the commander was more like making suggestions. Super fun space dogfights and sometimes you could just chill and be the turret on a bomber. One hilarious advanced strategy was to have some of your extra supply ships line up nose-to-tail with the bombers and accelerate them towards the enemy base.

It is not that unknown and it's getting some traction but I'm still surprised how many people are sleeping on Riftbreaker, its such a well made polished (and Polish) game with tons of updates and communication from the devs who are also working on adding co-op to it which is a huge task! Look at the absolute unit of a blog post they wrote about it. It is very much a labor of love and I think more people should know about it.

I used to play a lot of games on miniclip wayyyy back when flash was a thing, but nitrome games were my favorite:

• Final Ninja series (2 games I think?), 2D platformers where you could swing around and also shoot enemies with ninja stars. had a lot of levels to complete
• Dirk Valentine, 2D platformer, similar to final ninja but with a different theme
• Avalanche, a 2D game where you are a penguin trying to escape the avalanche by sliding and avoiding obstacles. I think this had a lot of levels too

Looks like nitrome has these flash games to download on their website, but they also converted / are converting them to html5 as well. I'm so glad these aren't lost!

Soul Bubbles is a puzzle-action game released for the NDS. You encase the souls of the departed in magic bubbles and blow them around levels to help them to the afterlife, dodging spiky terrain, marauding creatures, and wind currents.

It might have gotten more attention if its production run wasn't so small and it wasn't sold exclusively at Toys 'R Us.

Backyard baseball, loved that game as a kid.

Not my favorite but in my top 10 is from the depths. Never seen anyone ever mention it without going out of my way

Dear rising I would love a reboot of the first one with new mechanics but the same overall crazy feel

That was one of my favorite games as a kid! I think it was super ahead of it's time too, the mech battling feels really MOBA-esque especially in hindsight.

Mine would be Anarchy Online. Still around, though FC has ran it to the ground and not too obscure, considering it used to be quite big before 2005ish, but almost nobody talks about it in EU and the few times they do is to comment on the dreadful launch.

But I doubt there's a game I've sunk more hours into, playing constantly from release up to 2011 and then on and off until last year. Eventually I figured out it's just nostalgia and it's not worth it anymore, the time, let alone the sub.

Back in the day Hidden & Dangerous was a fantastic game. Spent many hours crawling on my stomach sniping. And the multiplayer LAN parties were epic for the sheer fun and hilariousness of the bugs we found. Only my friends at the time have ever heard of it though.