Mine has to be Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime, a DS spin off of the Dragon Quest series that sees you playing as a slime operating a tank and rescuing the people from your town. You run around the overworld, collecting items to use as ammunition and saving money to upgrade your tank. The art and music are just as great as you’d expect from the Dragon Quest series. It made fantastic use of the DS’s dual screens. It’s also written for a younger audience, so a lot of it is just really silly and fun! Try it out for sure, I’m so sad there’s no sequel :(
In certain circles it is well known, but Baba Is You is one of the most ingenious games for a long while and should be known even wider.
One of the only puzzle games that made me think I’m dumb and give up. It’s fantastic
Fantastic game. If anyone is interested, you can download the original concept version of the game that the dev made for a Game Jam. It kinda acts like a free 20 min demo for the full version. You can find the download link here.
Played it with some friends on a pass the controller night. Really fun and makes you think.
Initially looks just a simple twist on Sokoban, but the game mechanic just keeps going deeper and deeper and blowing your mind.
I could do that?
I COULD DO THAT?!
Every time you solve a puzzle, you feel like you’re cheating and that can’t be the intended solution. It’s such a tough game
I’m not a gamer but I do enjoy Real Civil Engineer’s youtube channel, he’s played Baba Is You a few times.
Truly a unique game. Super challenging for people who think they “know” puzzle games lol
I really want to finish it but my brain can’t keep up and stops working after a while
Rise of Nations. It’s like Civilization but as a real-time strategy game and I really enjoy it. Microsoft actually released an updated edition in 2014 which was good of them but I basically never hear anyone actually talk about it which sucks because it’s such a cool game. The single-player Conquer the World campaigns are also cool, and have some elements reminiscent of the classic Risk board game.
There’s also Star Trek: Bridge Commander, which is often mentioned in discussions of “what Star Trek games were good?” but not much outside of that context. It strikes a perfect balance between having starship combat that really feels like you’re commanding a ship with a lot of mass behind it and actually being fun and easy for an average person to pick up and play (which is where stuff like the X Universe games fall down). There are tons of “space fighter” games out there but I’ve never really seen anything that captures space capital ship combat as well as Bridge Commander.
God, I loved RoN! It was like a better version of Empire Earth which, to me, was already like a better version of Age of Empires.
I mostly enjoyed the era changing, my favourite being the Napoleonic era. And I remember it having a good choice of campaigns/scenarios to play.
I thought RoN would spawn a series of titles but I think they just had Rise of Legends which was interesting but definitely not the same.
Still have my Rise of Nations CD somewhere. I loved games like Civilization, don’t even remember how I stumbled upon RoN, a really great game.
I was a Bridge Commander fanatic, picked it up at launch, played way too much of it, modded til it broke dozens of times, participated in the forums, even wrote a GeoCities page where I put out tips for the more challenging campaign missions and did write-ups on every playable ship in the game. Good times.
RoN is also awesome, and is on sale on Steam! Purchased!
Bridge Commander’s modding scene is something else. So many cool ships, graphics overhauls, and even mods that added new mechanics like saucer/multi-vector separation. Truly amazing how much you can mod that game, even if it does get pretty unstable.
And glad you could take advantage of the Steam sale to pick up Rise of Nations: Extended Edition!
I saw an ad video for bridge commander on my armada 2 cd, I wanted to play that game so badly, but by the time sales had stopped.
Years later I “found” it online and had a blast playing it.
Is it available anywhere now?
https://www.gog.com/en/game/star_trek_bridge_commander
They should have Armada as well.
Thanks, seems like I finally get to play it officially 😃
Rise of Nations was one of the best games ever. I spent so many hours playing.
My Summer Car. It’s probably still #1 for play time on Steam for me. I bought a whole-ass racing wheel setup just for that game.
Looks like Mon Bazou - though probably with less maple syrup power ups 😂 https://store.steampowered.com/app/1520370/Mon_Bazou/
It’s exactly where the inspiration for Mon Bazou came from. People been asking for My Winter Car for years
I used to watch a streamer play My Summer Car whenever I could. I love the games that are just their own thing.
I concur, hell I am so tempted to buy a Datsun 100A irl just because of that game…
If I had a legitimate opportunity to buy one I would seriously consider it
Return of the Obra Dinn is an amazing game that I wish I could play again for the first time. The art style is super unique and the attention to detail in every aspect of the game is incredible.
Highly recommend.
Legend of Dragoon for PS1. It has the single best timed-input RPG combat system of any game ever. Think Mario RPG but way better.
GUST OF WIND DANCE!
FYI this game is available on PS5! Also, if you’ve bought it on PS3 you should be able to download it on PS5 for free!
VOLCANO!
American McGee’s Alice and the much later sequel which is my favourite game of all time - Alice: Madness Returns.
The aesthetic, the puzzles, the sound design, the voice acting, the political statements underlying the narrative, Alice’s outfits, the collectibles hidden in obscure places, the different art styles for each world level. I just love it! I mean sure, the combat mechanics are not as complex as some games but they fit nicely into Alice in Wonderland lore and if you up the difficulty settings it can be more challenging.
I’m also really enjoying Inscryption at the moment. A puzzle/card game interweaved with an escape the room horror story.
Both are great games! Inscryption was the only game I’ve ever bought on launch after seeing gameplay videos and I had no regrets. Hope you enjoy it too!
Among all the love Bioware gets for KotOR and Mass Effect I’m genuinely surprised more people aren’t talking about Jade Empire.
It’s a full fledged classic Bioware RPG set in an interesting world based on Chinese mythology, has some great characters and a fun (if simple) combat system. Voice acting is mostly good too, especially for a 2005 game and it even has John Cleese doing a part!
I loved it when it came out and am stumped as to why it never became a BioWare mainstay. Maybe releasing as an exclusive for the original Xbox just killed it, but if you enjoy this style of RPG I highly recommend checking it out!
Any love for the Monkey Island series here?
Puzzle Pirates was a MMO in the early to mid 00’s. Each task on board the ship had a puzzle mini game associated with it. Sailing was sort of like Dr. Mario, pumping out the bilge was a match 3 game, loading the canons was sort of like Chu-Chu Rocket. The thing I liked about it was that your character’s ability to preform a duty had nothing to do with what gear you had equipped or how many skill points you had in a stat (there were none), it was all about how well you, as a player, could play the particular mini game.
In battle, sailors would generate movement tokens to allow the captain to maneuver the ship, gunners would reload the canons after they’d been fired, carpenters would repair any damage you’ve taken, while the bilge pumpers would keep the ship from foundering. Once you closed in and grappled the enemy ship, everyone would participate in a Super Puzzle Fighter-like sword fighting game; defeat the enemy crew to pillage their hold.
Absolutely incredible obscure game. Foil-duels with the great sword fighters on the docks until you learn how to perform instant kill attacks was a highlight of my childhood
My mom loved this game back in the day. She tried to get back into it recently but sort of bounced off. If there’s any game that deserves a sequel, it’s Puzzle Pirates.
It fulfills a niche that few other games (none that I know about) fills, an MMO where the primary gameplay isn’t an RPG but a series of puzzle games; where most importantly, you can specialize, only needing to play the puzzles you enjoy (unless you’re captaining your own ship solo, in which case you need to be able to at least adequately perform all of the puzzles necessary for keeping a ship afloat).
I think it’s wonderful for giving an audience used to shitty Facebook match-3 games a more involved and social experience of what games can be.
You tart. Glug glug glug. Then you play poker for hours.
10/10 experience.
One Must Fall 2097, an awesome robot fighting game for DOS, which is quite different from every other fighting game, because in this one you have to select both pilots and the robots, and each pilot and robot have their own specialities and back stories, so it makes for a lot more interesting gameplay compared to other games in this genre.
Incredible Machine, Metal Arms Glitch in the System, Wargroove, Gradius 3.
Thank you for reminding me of The Incredible Machine! I am going to add its two sequels that most people have never heard of, TIM: Contraptions (essentially a HD re-release of the first game in a new engine.) and TIM: Even More e Contraptions (What would now be sold as DLC.)
Holy crap there was an HD re-release? I am not even sure which one I actually played. I think it was just TIM 3.0 from 1995
+1 for Metal Arms Glitch in the System. It had some great characters and gameplay. It’s a shame that they never competed the sequel.
Planetside 2 - someone else already mentioned it here, but it’s the only game in it’s genre and nothing else really comes close to what it offers (persistent 1v1v1 +300 player battles across infantry, land, air, and sea). It’s been kicking for over a decade now and I’m not sure what could replace it if or when it finally kicks it. It’s truly singular, and responsible for some of my fondest memories in gaming. It’s also free!
Black and White, it was a god simulator on PC in 2001. You interact with your villagers and the world as a floating hand, casting spells to raise faith in villages or throwing rocks to smite as necessary. You also got a giant pet that you could train to do your bidding.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%26_White_(video_game)
Mine is Dark Cloud. It was a PS2 launch title (or near enough to it) that was sort of a PlayStation answer to the Zelda franchise. Along with the original Spyro trilogy, Dark Cloud was by far my most-played game back in the day. It had an absolute banger of a soundtrack and a few pieces of really interesting unique gameplay including an RPG element where the primary progression system was not in your characters, but in upgrading your weapons, and a city-builder where you have to place all the people in each village near or away from various other elements in the village to meet their needs.
I almost never hear anyone talking about Dark Cloud, but extremely randomly one of the like four Twitch streamers I actually watch (all of whom are Age of Empires streamers, because that’s basically all I watch these days) happens to play its soundtrack frequently on her stream as background music. So that’s been really fun.
I played Dark Cloud and it’s sequel like crazy. I loved the fishing element. It was one of the first games I got with my PS2 and I had no idea what it would be about. This is probably first time I have seen anyone else mention it.
I’ve just recently downloaded an emulator and started replaying it. Going quite slowly through it, but I hope eventually to actually finish it.
As a kid I got up to the Dark Genie twice (on two separate playthroughs), but I never actually managed to beat him.
Dark cloud! I remember buying a PS2 from my cousins in 2012 and it came with Dark Cloud. It was my first introduction to Rogue Like games. Managed to scratch the Zelda itch while having an entire identity of its own
I played the second one before the first, I really liked the mix of action RPG and town-building. Still need to finish the first.
Crimson Skies for OG Xbox. It’s pirates in planes dogfighting, we need a remake badly.
