Not super obscure, but still nowhere near as appreciated as it should be: Alpha Centauri.
Game was way ahead of its time. No clue why the IP was left in the dirt, especially with all the attention they gave to its cousin Civilization. Putting aside the state of modern gaming, in theory I'd absolute love an Alpha Centauri 2.
It's the same reason why we see even 4x strategy games getting frequently dumbed down.
The main issue with modern Civ is that the AI can't play or pose a challenge within its own environment.
The bare-bones vanilla base game drops and the AI is dogshit, but also represents the pinnacle of PvE play because every subsequent DLC and game update adds new mechanics that the AI simply can't handle.
The player ends up either having to avoid new content or use house rules to keep things even remotely balanced.
I love 4X games where I can fuck around with my enemies by raising mountains to alter the local weather pattern and cause their colony to undergo a crash famine and the resulting riots as people starve to death.
Because, as much as I love the third generation of Big Name Game Devs (Sid Meiers, Will Wright, Warren Spector, Gabe Newell), they all found their meal ticket and cashed in their creative drive to get it.
I had a friend who was massively addicted to Alpha Centauri back in the day. I never got what he saw in it. I guess I was a normie gamer kid who liked Civilization.
It takes place on an alien planet, so it's not in space, but yes, it's a sci-fi game similar to Civilization. If you want in space, check out the Galactic Civilizations series, or Endless Space 2. No sci-fi, but speaking of Endless Space, Endless Legends is an excellent fantasy 4X.
For more on planet ones sci-fis, there's Civilization: Beyond Earth (which I've heard not so great things, but may have fixed some of their stuff...I hate 2K though...), as well as Age of Wonders: Planetfall. There's also some 40k stuff, like Gladius.
Civ: BE is OK. I'd personally rather play it (with mods) than Civ V/VI. Diplomacy is pretty weak (and actually worse with the expansion IMO), but you can fix nearly every other problem I had with the game (including "it's not a worthy successor to Alpha Centauri") with mods. I need to play that or the Civ IV Planetfall mod again.
It's a spinoff of Civ, in the same engine (I think) as Civ 2. One major difference I remember was that you could design your own units by mixing and matching components.
The engine is similar but there's some pretty notable differences (terrain and units mainly.) Enough that I don't think it's quite fair to call it "the same", but unlike CIv II and Civ III (for example) there's probably a lot of shared code under-the-hood.
Those Bullfrog "god games" were really neat and fun to toy around, but better in concept than they were addictive games in practice. The concept is so cool though that it would be amazing to see a visionary game creator run wild with modern tech to make something stunning today.
I liked that game but never got much in to it. I was a bit young when I played it and I could not understand why I could not put out a fire with a storm and why was my hand turning evil.
you could take the rock outside of your influence where you shouldn't be able to interact and then start setting things on fire so it worked out as a cheat
Or just throw fireballs in random directions and see what gets hit 🔥
I once had a sort of ragequit on the mission where your creature gets kidnapped by another God, ended up lobbing a fireball randomly while pissed off and of all the things to land on I somehow managed to score a direct hit on my own, still imprisoned, creature.
Infinite food miracle comes to mind. Tap the mouse button to start the miracle then stop and the duration never diminishes.
This was similar to how GTA San Andreas could spam cycling forever by just tapping the cycle button instead of holding it down so the Stamina bar never dropped.
Its unfortunate that the game barely worked even at the time. Like, good luck actually finishing some of the later levels without a guide to explain just how certain broken things were.
Big shame how much a different direction the sequel went in, but that's just Peter for you. Fable 2 also sucked compared to Fable 1.
I still have my disc for that one. I wish the second installment had lived up to my expectations. It's right there alongside Creatures 2 in terms of games with brilliant concepts that weren't quite able to realize their full potential and were decades ahead of their time.
Lords of Magic.... but Sseth did a review of that one so now people might know it
Warhammer 40k: Rites of War, hex-based turn-based strategy game. Played the hell out of it as a child. Looking it up to ensure I got the name right I found out it was based on the Panzer General 2 engine which was also a great game that nobody I've talked to has heard of.
Bushido Blade. A fighting game with a genuinely realistic damage model. Most hits will cripple or kill you, you really have to be on point and it's incredibly unforgiving.
It's also translated poorly so actually getting to the end is very unintuitive. It's completely possible to win every fight and still lose the game.
But my goodness it was such fun to actually play this game.
And if you dare interrupt the speech of the final boss while he's monologuing, because you can still control your character the whole time, then you get the bad ending lol.
Lost Odyssey. A JRPG made by Mistwalker, vets from Final Fantasy trapped on the X360 of all consoles. It emulates in Xenia almost perfectly but the stuttering in gameplay and sound is noticeable. One day I'll be able to replay it.
My one complaint is how it can start to drag later on, parrticularly with the later dungeons. A combinationn of the absurd encounter rate and the length of battles in them, even when doinng the fights optimally, really started ot make it unenjoyable. Everybody probably remembers how annoying that stupid puzzle dungeon was because of that.
I dreaded the controls...and then I watched Chuggaaconroy play it. His fifth episode went into how customizable the controls are.
That convinced me to buy it--and hundreds of hours later, it's now one of my favorite video games of all time.
It did not help that everyone--including Nintendo themselves--were telling you to control the game THE WRONG WAY.
It's also the funniest game I've ever played. Seriously, Uprising's writing should have won awards, and S. Scott Bullock should be a bigger name in voiceover than he is--even if he did also play the big bad of FF13.
What do you mean the controls were bad? Once you got used to them they were pretty workable on the 3ds. It's been years since I played it, though, and the orginal 3ds wasn't ideal for it - people usually bought the attachment, or played it on the n3ds like I did with more buttons.
Also, that game sold pretty well, lots of people played it.
They weren't bad. But the default, intended way to play it would cramp your hands, and I've heard so many stories of this happening, including reviewers of the time.
The game even tells you on the first level "You can target enemies with the stylus," hence my saying Nintendo was telling you to play the game wrong.
The solution is surprisingly simple: Don't use the stylus at all! Use your thumb directly on the touch screen! The pad of your thumb, where you'd make a thumbprint--NOT your nail.
I had TONS of fun this way on my New 3DS XL...or maybe I just have really large hands for my height? Regardless, no hand pain whatsoever.
And yeah, I know the sales numbers...but nobody (aside from the aforementioned Chuggaa) talks about the game, and when they do, they bitch about the controls. That's why I had to say this.
Am I really the only one that figured out there was a better way?
Oh, and speaking of that extension you mentioned...the game came out in 2012, and predates the Circle Pad Pro, thus is not compatible with it. Chuggaa confirmed this himself. If you have a New 3DS (what a stupid name), the right nub performs the same function--that is, nothing in this game.
Not to mention...the unique control scheme means Uprising must be a BITCH to play properly in emulators.
The original NDS included a plastic pad mounted on a strap that you could attach on your thumb to get a smooth, low friction "thumb directly on the touch screen" thing. And it was included because of the obvious use in the Metroid Hunters demo the first units shipped with.
I'm surprised they didn't bring that back and instead did that weird 3DS stand thing.
I can promise you you aren't. My entire friend group, compromised of multiple people from different circles themselves, wank the game off every chance they get.
Mostly because I hate it, simply because I cannot do timing so I sucked at the basic combos.
Mostly because I hate it, simply because I cannot do timing so I sucked at the basic combos.
Having played it with everybody in my mian party at least once (even maxed all of Lavitz's Additions, interestinng to find the differences between his and Albert's despite being basically the same), Kongol and Shana/Miranda was a solid choice. Kongol's D.Attack even maxed out at 4 so it was easy as fuck.
One of the best (and often forgotten) simulators made by Maxis in it's golden era.
As the name implies it's an ant colony simulator which was reasonably popular back in the day, but then it just fell through the cracks of time
It's baffling to me that EA/Maxis never tried to resurrect the franchise. And after the drama surrounding what should've been SimAnt's spiritual successor "Ant Simulator" (where the dev took all the crowd sourced money and spent it on coke and hookers) I don't see many indie devs trying to pick up the ant mantle.
The only decent ant game I can play to get my fix is Empires of the Undergrowth, which is more like a RTS than actual ant colony management.
Kid Klown in Crazy Chase (Super NES)
Short and sweet, arcady platformer. Very trial-and-error, though, and the final segment is pure RNG. I don't blame anyone for using save states playing it today.
Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Nintendo 64)
Prototyped the 3D action-adventure gameplay model a full year before Zelda: Ocarina of Time did (7 August 1997 vs. 21 November 1998). Wacky Japanese humor, amazing soundtrack, and generally stuck in my mind as THE game of my simpler childhood times.
Along those lines, Mischief Makers for the N64. A very good side-scrolling platformer, where at one point you play a dodge ball game against a small, helpless cat, and on the next stage you're riding the cat in a fight against a giant tank that you defeat by catching its bullets and throwing them back at it.
The first of its kind: an online RTSS (Real Time Strategy Shooter). One player on each team was elected as a commander by the other players and played an RTS style game where he ordered units to build things and attack other areas. The rest of the players played in the world in an FPS/TPM pov. The largest match I was a part of had 128 players.
Unfortunately the company that made the game never really managed to recapture the spirit of the original and eventually they went bankrupt.
Pretty much nobody I knew even heard of it, let alone played it.
They both came out around the same time. Savage 2 lent towards RPG style levelling with it's classes. I think it's possible get the last versions of the games free to download.
NS1 version 1.0 released (which is what most places list as the mod's "release date") about a year before the first savage open beta, but had been in very popular and basically complete beta versions for at least another year or two before that.
When news of Savage came out it very much felt like "oh, finally a professional standalone game in this genre".
I thought there was only about a 6 month gap between proper release.
There were other games before NS or Savage like that, for example Giants citizen kabuto mentioned here, had parts where you would build a base and farm resources and build stuff.
Encarta era, but not part of that suite. There was this game with little yellow things, and they followed a path. And you had to set the room up properly so they'd not die, but follow the path to freedom. Except for the red ones, who would eat the normal yellow ones. Think lemmings but top down not side scroller.
I've been trying to find that game I played as a kid (1998 ish) on the school computers for ages.
While not the game you're asking for, but in the vein of Lemmings, I'd add in Troddlers, a potentially co-op Lemmings type game which had you play as part of the map and not just an ominously floating God hand changing things.
everyone talks about tie fighter, and tie fighter is a good game, but I spent so much time in the custom battle Creator in X-Wing alliance, I barely even made it through the second chapter of the campaign. no Star wars flying game has come close this game.
my only wish is that there was some way to mod the controls to properly separate the yaw and roll of the craft. the game has a large cult following, yet nobody has done this yet.
I can't even tell you how hours my buddy and I spent, me in an X-Wing, him in the Falcon, trying to take on a Star Destroyer and its full fighter complement. I don't even remember if we ever got it.
Mercenaries 2 for PS2. Objectively the game was garbage, but it was my first open world game and I spent so much time fucking around in that shitty open world.
I played that about a year ago with the PC copy. It kinda works but is a little finicky to get working on a modern system. Grinding up airstrikes is kinda time consuming but between calling in a dumb bomb or wasting RPG rounds to take out a pill box? Oh yeah, calling in fire support never gets old.
I don't know if it was objectively bad on PS3 and PC. It turns out the PS2 version is inferior to the PS3 (and I assume PC) versions. They had to remove a lot to get to get it work on old hardware 2 years into the PS3 era. It may have been better on other platforms.
I tried getting into that one years back but it never quite clicked for me. Maybe I just didn't spend enough time sitting down to figure out the mechanics but it just never hooked me, which is weird since it looked like it was right up my alley.
I had a friend who every time we hung out he had a new fighting game he had been practicing that no one else he knew had ever played, so I played that game a time or two.
I doubt the title was Endless Waltz, it was only series versions and not EW-Custom variants, not to mention it opens with Rhythm Emotion, not White Reflection.
Unless they actually had a second fighter that WAS Endless Waltz.
As soon as I replied I had just remembered "oh wait, it may have been 'Endless Something,' just not 'Waltz.'" Yeah, Endless Duel definitely sounds like what I recall.
Always EV Nova, I have seen people talking about playing similar games or recommending games like it but can't recall much if any discussion about the game itself.
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. This game was yet another attempt to copy the GTA formula in the PS2 era, but unlike nearly all the others, it actually worked! Set in a militaristic warzone, the game set you on the task of capturing an entire Deck of 52 and more or less just let you decide how you were going to go about that. There was no linear story to follow; just gather intel by doing jobs for four factions that didn't always cooperate with one another, and figure out where the faces and aces were so you could capture or assassinate them. What was great about it was that every mission let you decide how you wanted to accomplish it. Sometimes, you'd be given some toys and air support options to help you, or you could think outside the box by ordering even more things from your friends in the Russian Mafia. Unfortunately, no one talked about this game at release, and after the failure of the second one, it vanished into the void. It's never even gotten ported to PC or newer consoles
War of the Monsters: Awesome kaiju beat-em-up made in a similar vein to the King of the Monsters games from the 16-bit days (which are also examples). Unfortunately, it showed up with minimal hype and disappeared swiftly thereafter. And I seem to be the only one who ever played it (or owned it).
The Witcher. Yes, everyone and their grandmother is familiar with The Witcher now, but as far they're concerned, the third game is the only one that exists. No one ever wants to even try the first game, even though it frequently goes on sale for a freaking dollar and can be run on a potato chip. Why? Because they're so convinced it's a confusing and unplayable janky-ass mess simply because it's old (as in it was made before 2011), even though it really isn't either of those things anymore. And because they would rather play the latest buggy-at-release piece of crap at $70. It's very irritating.
The Witcher was somewhat popular. It had the advantage of having the naked girl cards collection to balance out the combat.
Speaking of combat, I enjoyed Witcher 2 more then 3. I like 3 a lot, don't get me wrong but I enjoyed 2 the most and I also like the first one, the story in the first one was a bit emotional for when you are a kid.
To be fair, it is a janky ass mess, just not an unplayable one. I don't regret playing it through to completion but it definitely had some rough edges to it. Good game, but definitely has some flaws from what I recall.
That's what I was going to say. He's wearing rose-colored glasses if he doesn't think the controls are confusing at first. Nowhere near as bad as Gothic though, and I adore that game.
The Witcher was a slight step up in complexity from the mindless auto-attack systems that are common in RPGs, and especially in MMORPGs. The only thing it added in was a rhythm game mechanic where you clicked the mouse once the cursor prompt appeared, and a dodge you would occasionally use to avoid getting mobbed. The only way to get confused by the controls was to not bother reading the tutorial messages in the prologue.
I had a blast playing this as a kid. """"Story"""" mode always kicked my ass, but it seemed tacked on to the multiplayer mode which was up there with Smash, Kart, Goldeneye, and Mario Party with my friends and I at the time
Did it even have computer bots? I cant remember anymore. But yeah during that time Perfect Dark, Duke Nukem 64, Mario Kart, Diddy Kong racing, F-Zero, Smash, was all pretty fun with friends. But Forsaken was kinda special because I had that one friend I always played with who camped all the good items then blew you up with the titan missle if you approached and got a new one. So I guess there were bots or else I would have nothing to do there unless to instantly die to the camper.
The place I rented my games from had this epic poster for Forsaken, and I thought that was the coolest shit in the world. Never got around to playing the actual game lol.
Faxanadu (NES). It played like a better Zelda 2 with much better graphics and story. None of my friends had heard of it or cared to play it. It turns out that it's part of the Dragon Slayer series of good games that never got good marketing in North America. The ones that made it across the ocean were marketed as independent games and not as part of a series. They might have gotten a mention in Nintendo Power but they never captured mindshare and you never heard about them again.
Was this by Falcom, or is their Xanadu stuff something else entirely? I find it hard to believe I was really only introduced to Falcom's stuff in the past decade, when they've been around for so long, Ys is as old as Zelda.
I had this. When it got stale I was trying to sell it to a friend. His mom, who was super religious, freaked out that it mentioned "monsters" on the box. "Oh I don't know! This sounds dangerous and impure!"
Spycraft. Game was basically all the "boring" parts of James Bond or Mission Impossible: they'd have missions where you'd photoshop images to fool assets into thinking certain people were in jail, do voice recognition on phone calls, facial recognition at crime scenes, analyze background noise of phone calls to locate people, analyze bullet trajectories to find where an assassin was hiding, etc...
Most of the levels ultimately culminated with you...sending an email to your boss with the solution to the problem at hand. Though there are a couple levels that are full-motion-video style first-person shooter, and there's a turn based top-down tactical level at one point. And you do have to have a decent memory of things that happened/you were told earlier in the game to progress later.
But it was one of those games where I as a kid saw it and wanted to be able to make the computer do the things you did in the game. And one of the opening videos in the game shows a guy get his head blown off, and my mom wouldn't let me see those kind of movies as a kid but let me have this game. But I always got stuck on the photoshop level.
I played it again last year and had a lot of fun. There's not so much drudgery it feels like work (which is a real danger since the game is essentially an "email job simulator").
Spycraft: The Great Game. Thanks for reminding me that game existed. It was locked in foggy memories I had from watching a guy stream it on twitch way back, and I only halfway remembered the game was even real, but your description brought it all back. From a quick search this intel report in particular stands out to me and confirms that it's the one I'm thinking of.
(On a weird personal note: I now recall while watching that stream on one monitor I was playing Nier Replicant on another, so the memories of both games got jumbled together into one, making it even harder to pin down.)
I'm still shocked that no other creature collector ever did the "mix and match parts during breeding" aspect. Its such a neat feature that can make actual unique creatures for each playthrough and adds a ton of depth to whether you want to keep a "pure" bloodline that is mechanically weaker just for theme.
The sequel is also really good, if so completely different its barely a sequel.
Always wanted to do that if I got good in programming but sadly, programming isn't the only aspect in game making so I never did. Really, really enjoy the genre and there's none that do this afaik and it's a damn shame.
Honestly, I doubt anything could ever approach the level of quality Jade Cocoon 1 provided.
Pokemon still doesn't have voice acting, while it had it on a PS1 game for its full duration. While also looking fucking amazing for its time. Not to mention the level of details going on under the hood that you could mostly see or figure out for yourself.
Shit I can barely think of any games where you can just walk up and fucking stab the shit out of a creature to weaken it yourself in any of the genre. Sure Levant is basically too weak to be of use by the end, but it felt good to have that choice.
Battlezone 98, a vehicle shooter-RTS hybrid, in which the Cold War goes hot, but in space. The sequel is more popular, but I don't think it's nearly as good. No coop, even in the re-release, so it's harder to introduce to friends. I don't think it originally even broke 100k copies sold.
Redux, which is alright. The HD stuff is hit or miss, but it works properly on modern systems, which is all you can hope for at this point. Ironically works better than BZ2, which is a great game to try if you want to experience DOS-era mouse troubleshooting on your modern OS in 2024.
It's amazing how many games are actually obscure. Sega non main games generally sold in the hundreds of thousands only. So I love Phantasy Star, but it's forgotten.
Gunslinger Stratos for the arcade has a strong fan base in Seattle, and no where else. That game is awesome. It's a character death match game with controllers that change how you're attacking based on how they're being held. The same people made a magic school deathmatch game where you moved your hand to send out spells. ByKing and Squaresoft made some killer games.
Card and character based battle RPGs for arcades. Awesome stuff, sold terribly in the US.
Arcade Racing games that need a save card to fully enjoy. Midnight Club is the more famous one.
Virtual On for the arcade. Strong fan base, but nothing outside of it. They still sell the controllers for modern consoles.
Konami Wai Wai World. Konami man must save the various characters in the Konami universe.
The guy who wrote for Leisure Suit Larry also made a children's game about walking around a farm. You can play it on the Internet library.
The chess with fantasy characters game. It's like a chess board, but you set your pieces down based on what you want. It's an incredibly complex game with tons of strategy against an opponent. I had a roommate who loved that game.
Virtual On for the arcade. Strong fan base, but nothing outside of it. They still sell the controllers for modern consoles.
Remember paying a pretty penny for the Saturn controller and Dreamcast adapter because the Dreamcast version of the controls were so expensive at the time.
PS3 and XBox 360 seem to be where emulator devs start running into issues, though a lot of the games for those systems aren't exclusives. Emulators exist, but it's not to the point where you can just fire up a random game and expect it to work out of the box.
Commander Keen
Really old jump'n'run. I remember playing with a friend back in school. We took turns on a 486 PC, or maybe even a 3 or 2, it's been a while. Of course we only had the shareware version.
Blue Estate
On-rails shooter with delightfully offensive humor. There aren't enough of these games. Especially in today's environment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OTVzOYaRso
Singularity
One of the last good story-driven singleplayer FPS. After that it all turned to shit. Now it's all just cobbled-together open world mush or Doom-style twitch shooters. Still pretty good today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbk6yENRkaw
singularity looks great. The graphic is not bad and the gameplay looks a ton of fun. In the back of my mind I knew about it although I've never played it.
Mission Thunderbolt. Turn based rogue like for Mac. It was a Nethack clone in a sci-fi setting that had some innovative feature for its time. Such as a "capture" mechanic where instead of game over the first time your HP goes to zero your character is imprisoned without any gear and you have to escape.
Star Fighter 3000: A somewhat arcadey sci-fi flight sim with a checkered history. Originally released for the Acorn Archimedes, it saw a release for the Panasonic 3DO, and later the PS1 and Sega Saturn. You flew around in your aircraft, and everytime you destroyed something, you could pick up colorful shapes that when they were arranged in a certain order resulted in power ups for your aircraft. PS1 version (via Duckstation) is easiest to get into emulation wise followed by the 3DO version (via RetroArch). Also, apparently the original Acorn version also received updates YEARS after it's original release, but good luck getting it to work if you have no experience with RISC OS (I tried for days to get it to work, but it all flew over my head, as the command prompt syntax was completely foreign to me even with slight experience in both MS-DOS and Linux Mint).
Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels: Sequel to the original Space Hulk game for DOS and Amiga, it was originally released for the Panasonic 3DO and ported to the PS1, Saturn, and PC. It combines elements of both First Person Shooters and Turn Based Strategy, which along with the asymmetrical nature of the gameplay (5 or so slow Terminators vs swarms of lighting fast Genestealers), makes for a type of game that I have not seen repeated since. To this day, I hold the position that Space Hulk: Ascension and Space Hulk: Deathwing are two halves of what should be one big game.
SimCopter and Streets of SimCity: Both are fun but flawed games with troubled development histories. Their gameplay styles differed somewhat, but you could create a city from scratch in SimCity 2000, save it, then use it in either game (from the air or from the ground, respectively). Some mad lad even went out of their way to create patches so that they could run on modern machines with little to no issue.
I believe for chamber of secrets, you want the gameboy color one. I know there was some weirdness either two studios switching back and forth who made the GBA game and who made the GBA game. In any case the there were several very good Harry Potter JRPGs in the early 2000s, as weird as that feels to say.
Not super obscure, but still nowhere near as appreciated as it should be: Alpha Centauri.
Game was way ahead of its time. No clue why the IP was left in the dirt, especially with all the attention they gave to its cousin Civilization. Putting aside the state of modern gaming, in theory I'd absolute love an Alpha Centauri 2.
The main issue with modern Civ is that the AI can't play or pose a challenge within its own environment.
The bare-bones vanilla base game drops and the AI is dogshit, but also represents the pinnacle of PvE play because every subsequent DLC and game update adds new mechanics that the AI simply can't handle.
The player ends up either having to avoid new content or use house rules to keep things even remotely balanced.
I love 4X games where I can fuck around with my enemies by raising mountains to alter the local weather pattern and cause their colony to undergo a crash famine and the resulting riots as people starve to death.
It really was all downhill from there, huh.
Because, as much as I love the third generation of Big Name Game Devs (Sid Meiers, Will Wright, Warren Spector, Gabe Newell), they all found their meal ticket and cashed in their creative drive to get it.
I had a friend who was massively addicted to Alpha Centauri back in the day. I never got what he saw in it. I guess I was a normie gamer kid who liked Civilization.
So it was civilization but in space? I’ve been looking for such a game
It takes place on an alien planet, so it's not in space, but yes, it's a sci-fi game similar to Civilization. If you want in space, check out the Galactic Civilizations series, or Endless Space 2. No sci-fi, but speaking of Endless Space, Endless Legends is an excellent fantasy 4X.
For more on planet ones sci-fis, there's Civilization: Beyond Earth (which I've heard not so great things, but may have fixed some of their stuff...I hate 2K though...), as well as Age of Wonders: Planetfall. There's also some 40k stuff, like Gladius.
Headed to Steam now. Thanks!
Alpha Centauri is on GOG only, I think, by the way. Oh, it's also $1.49 right now. :D
Civ: BE is OK. I'd personally rather play it (with mods) than Civ V/VI. Diplomacy is pretty weak (and actually worse with the expansion IMO), but you can fix nearly every other problem I had with the game (including "it's not a worthy successor to Alpha Centauri") with mods. I need to play that or the Civ IV Planetfall mod again.
It's also got some of the best quotes and voice-overs for the various secret projects and technologies ever seen in a video game.
Almost makes me want to crack it open again for a few hundred hours...
Cool!
It's a spinoff of Civ, in the same engine (I think) as Civ 2. One major difference I remember was that you could design your own units by mixing and matching components.
Sounds cool! Can’t wait to dive in
The engine is similar but there's some pretty notable differences (terrain and units mainly.) Enough that I don't think it's quite fair to call it "the same", but unlike CIv II and Civ III (for example) there's probably a lot of shared code under-the-hood.
At that particular moment in history it looked like "God games" would become a solid and popular game genre but it eventually fizzled out.
Also shout-out to "Populous" I and II.
Those Bullfrog "god games" were really neat and fun to toy around, but better in concept than they were addictive games in practice. The concept is so cool though that it would be amazing to see a visionary game creator run wild with modern tech to make something stunning today.
I liked that game but never got much in to it. I was a bit young when I played it and I could not understand why I could not put out a fire with a storm and why was my hand turning evil.
Or just throw fireballs in random directions and see what gets hit 🔥
I once had a sort of ragequit on the mission where your creature gets kidnapped by another God, ended up lobbing a fireball randomly while pissed off and of all the things to land on I somehow managed to score a direct hit on my own, still imprisoned, creature.
Could never make that shot if I tried.
Infinite food miracle comes to mind. Tap the mouse button to start the miracle then stop and the duration never diminishes.
This was similar to how GTA San Andreas could spam cycling forever by just tapping the cycle button instead of holding it down so the Stamina bar never dropped.
I know that now :) but back then I was just a stupid kid.
Its unfortunate that the game barely worked even at the time. Like, good luck actually finishing some of the later levels without a guide to explain just how certain broken things were.
Big shame how much a different direction the sequel went in, but that's just Peter for you. Fable 2 also sucked compared to Fable 1.
I still have my disc for that one. I wish the second installment had lived up to my expectations. It's right there alongside Creatures 2 in terms of games with brilliant concepts that weren't quite able to realize their full potential and were decades ahead of their time.
Lords of Magic.... but Sseth did a review of that one so now people might know it
Warhammer 40k: Rites of War, hex-based turn-based strategy game. Played the hell out of it as a child. Looking it up to ensure I got the name right I found out it was based on the Panzer General 2 engine which was also a great game that nobody I've talked to has heard of.
Lords of Magic was brilliant and still holds up today. It also holds the distinction of having one of my favorite instruction manuals.
Bushido Blade. A fighting game with a genuinely realistic damage model. Most hits will cripple or kill you, you really have to be on point and it's incredibly unforgiving.
It's also translated poorly so actually getting to the end is very unintuitive. It's completely possible to win every fight and still lose the game.
But my goodness it was such fun to actually play this game.
I have not. PS1 is the only PlayStation I've ever had. They never really captured the sheer variety of games they had on that platform.
And if you dare interrupt the speech of the final boss while he's monologuing, because you can still control your character the whole time, then you get the bad ending lol.
Damn, so obscure I can't even find it on search engines. Shame, it sounds interesting.
That's because I got the name mixed up with an old board game because I hadn't slept in a couple days.
The video game is Bushido Blade, my bad.
Ooh, yeah I have heard good things about that one.
Lost Odyssey. A JRPG made by Mistwalker, vets from Final Fantasy trapped on the X360 of all consoles. It emulates in Xenia almost perfectly but the stuttering in gameplay and sound is noticeable. One day I'll be able to replay it.
My one complaint is how it can start to drag later on, parrticularly with the later dungeons. A combinationn of the absurd encounter rate and the length of battles in them, even when doinng the fights optimally, really started ot make it unenjoyable. Everybody probably remembers how annoying that stupid puzzle dungeon was because of that.
I started playing that when my brother brought his console home. It was nice from what I recall and does seem to be praised by many.
Kid. Icarus. Uprising.
I dreaded the controls...and then I watched Chuggaaconroy play it. His fifth episode went into how customizable the controls are.
That convinced me to buy it--and hundreds of hours later, it's now one of my favorite video games of all time.
It did not help that everyone--including Nintendo themselves--were telling you to control the game THE WRONG WAY.
It's also the funniest game I've ever played. Seriously, Uprising's writing should have won awards, and S. Scott Bullock should be a bigger name in voiceover than he is--even if he did also play the big bad of FF13.
Guess what other line he gave us...
What do you mean the controls were bad? Once you got used to them they were pretty workable on the 3ds. It's been years since I played it, though, and the orginal 3ds wasn't ideal for it - people usually bought the attachment, or played it on the n3ds like I did with more buttons.
Also, that game sold pretty well, lots of people played it.
They weren't bad. But the default, intended way to play it would cramp your hands, and I've heard so many stories of this happening, including reviewers of the time.
The game even tells you on the first level "You can target enemies with the stylus," hence my saying Nintendo was telling you to play the game wrong.
The solution is surprisingly simple: Don't use the stylus at all! Use your thumb directly on the touch screen! The pad of your thumb, where you'd make a thumbprint--NOT your nail.
I had TONS of fun this way on my New 3DS XL...or maybe I just have really large hands for my height? Regardless, no hand pain whatsoever.
And yeah, I know the sales numbers...but nobody (aside from the aforementioned Chuggaa) talks about the game, and when they do, they bitch about the controls. That's why I had to say this.
Am I really the only one that figured out there was a better way?
Oh, and speaking of that extension you mentioned...the game came out in 2012, and predates the Circle Pad Pro, thus is not compatible with it. Chuggaa confirmed this himself. If you have a New 3DS (what a stupid name), the right nub performs the same function--that is, nothing in this game.
Not to mention...the unique control scheme means Uprising must be a BITCH to play properly in emulators.
The original NDS included a plastic pad mounted on a strap that you could attach on your thumb to get a smooth, low friction "thumb directly on the touch screen" thing. And it was included because of the obvious use in the Metroid Hunters demo the first units shipped with.
I'm surprised they didn't bring that back and instead did that weird 3DS stand thing.
It was a fun game. I only played a part of it because it belonged to my roommates.
Hard to say if this would count, though I start to wonder if I'm the only one that fondly remembers Legend of Dragoon.
It was a great JRPG that is often overshadowed by the final fantasy games.
Rose was my favorite character in that game.
Hey I play it every 3 years or so so at least 2 of us remember it fondly
I can promise you you aren't. My entire friend group, compromised of multiple people from different circles themselves, wank the game off every chance they get.
Mostly because I hate it, simply because I cannot do timing so I sucked at the basic combos.
Having played it with everybody in my mian party at least once (even maxed all of Lavitz's Additions, interestinng to find the differences between his and Albert's despite being basically the same), Kongol and Shana/Miranda was a solid choice. Kongol's D.Attack even maxed out at 4 so it was easy as fuck.
Shogo: Mobile Armor Division.Criminally underrated.
I also give honorable mention to the JRPG-esque Septerra Core that often shipped with Shogo in a two-disc pack.
SimAnt (1991)
One of the best (and often forgotten) simulators made by Maxis in it's golden era. As the name implies it's an ant colony simulator which was reasonably popular back in the day, but then it just fell through the cracks of time
It's baffling to me that EA/Maxis never tried to resurrect the franchise. And after the drama surrounding what should've been SimAnt's spiritual successor "Ant Simulator" (where the dev took all the crowd sourced money and spent it on coke and hookers) I don't see many indie devs trying to pick up the ant mantle.
The only decent ant game I can play to get my fix is Empires of the Undergrowth, which is more like a RTS than actual ant colony management.
Kid Klown in Crazy Chase (Super NES)
Short and sweet, arcady platformer. Very trial-and-error, though, and the final segment is pure RNG. I don't blame anyone for using save states playing it today.
Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Nintendo 64)
Prototyped the 3D action-adventure gameplay model a full year before Zelda: Ocarina of Time did (7 August 1997 vs. 21 November 1998). Wacky Japanese humor, amazing soundtrack, and generally stuck in my mind as THE game of my simpler childhood times.
When Goemon blew that conch and the giant mech appeared I laughed because it was going to be that type of game
Along those lines, Mischief Makers for the N64. A very good side-scrolling platformer, where at one point you play a dodge ball game against a small, helpless cat, and on the next stage you're riding the cat in a fight against a giant tank that you defeat by catching its bullets and throwing them back at it.
Five year old me was completely baffled.
I was playing the Super Mario RPG remake and thought about how much I want another Goemon game.
Savage: The Battle For Newerth.
The first of its kind: an online RTSS (Real Time Strategy Shooter). One player on each team was elected as a commander by the other players and played an RTS style game where he ordered units to build things and attack other areas. The rest of the players played in the world in an FPS/TPM pov. The largest match I was a part of had 128 players.
Unfortunately the company that made the game never really managed to recapture the spirit of the original and eventually they went bankrupt.
Pretty much nobody I knew even heard of it, let alone played it.
Oh yea, I've played Savage way too much :D Savage 2 was pretty great too, IMHO.
I have to dispute the first of its kind claim. The Natural Selection mod for HL1 did it years earlier, and honestly better too.
A mod, not a full fledged game.
This is from back in the day when total conversion mods were basically just F2P games without the bullshit monetisation.
NS got far more player hours than Savage ever got, whether people made money off it or not.
They both came out around the same time. Savage 2 lent towards RPG style levelling with it's classes. I think it's possible get the last versions of the games free to download.
NS1 version 1.0 released (which is what most places list as the mod's "release date") about a year before the first savage open beta, but had been in very popular and basically complete beta versions for at least another year or two before that.
When news of Savage came out it very much felt like "oh, finally a professional standalone game in this genre".
I thought there was only about a 6 month gap between proper release. There were other games before NS or Savage like that, for example Giants citizen kabuto mentioned here, had parts where you would build a base and farm resources and build stuff.
its driven me nuts for 20 years.
Encarta era, but not part of that suite. There was this game with little yellow things, and they followed a path. And you had to set the room up properly so they'd not die, but follow the path to freedom. Except for the red ones, who would eat the normal yellow ones. Think lemmings but top down not side scroller.
I've been trying to find that game I played as a kid (1998 ish) on the school computers for ages.
While not the game you're asking for, but in the vein of Lemmings, I'd add in Troddlers, a potentially co-op Lemmings type game which had you play as part of the map and not just an ominously floating God hand changing things.
I tried that a year or so back and they didn't know the one. Might try it again though yeah.
Crud, I know exactly what you're talking about but I can't remember it either.
Star Wars: X-wing Alliance
everyone talks about tie fighter, and tie fighter is a good game, but I spent so much time in the custom battle Creator in X-Wing alliance, I barely even made it through the second chapter of the campaign. no Star wars flying game has come close this game.
my only wish is that there was some way to mod the controls to properly separate the yaw and roll of the craft. the game has a large cult following, yet nobody has done this yet.
I can't even tell you how hours my buddy and I spent, me in an X-Wing, him in the Falcon, trying to take on a Star Destroyer and its full fighter complement. I don't even remember if we ever got it.
Mercenaries 2 for PS2. Objectively the game was garbage, but it was my first open world game and I spent so much time fucking around in that shitty open world.
I played that about a year ago with the PC copy. It kinda works but is a little finicky to get working on a modern system. Grinding up airstrikes is kinda time consuming but between calling in a dumb bomb or wasting RPG rounds to take out a pill box? Oh yeah, calling in fire support never gets old.
I don't know if it was objectively bad on PS3 and PC. It turns out the PS2 version is inferior to the PS3 (and I assume PC) versions. They had to remove a lot to get to get it work on old hardware 2 years into the PS3 era. It may have been better on other platforms.
It's much better on PS3
SpellForce. RTS/RPG hybrid with a decent amount of eurojank thrown in.
I played the crap out of that game back in the day, it also had two great expansions.
I tried getting into that one years back but it never quite clicked for me. Maybe I just didn't spend enough time sitting down to figure out the mechanics but it just never hooked me, which is weird since it looked like it was right up my alley.
Gundam Battle Assault 2 on Playstation 1.
It is a 2d fighting game with many of the Gundams from various series: the first gundam series, Zeta Gundam, Gundam Wing and G Gundam.
Very underrated title and it is pretty fun to play.
I rented that once.
Wealth and glory to the victor!
I had a friend who every time we hung out he had a new fighting game he had been practicing that no one else he knew had ever played, so I played that game a time or two.
I know both Gundam Wing and G Gundam each had their own SNES fighters.
I doubt the title was Endless Waltz, it was only series versions and not EW-Custom variants, not to mention it opens with Rhythm Emotion, not White Reflection.
Unless they actually had a second fighter that WAS Endless Waltz.
As soon as I replied I had just remembered "oh wait, it may have been 'Endless Something,' just not 'Waltz.'" Yeah, Endless Duel definitely sounds like what I recall.
Always EV Nova, I have seen people talking about playing similar games or recommending games like it but can't recall much if any discussion about the game itself.
Loved EV Nova.
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. This game was yet another attempt to copy the GTA formula in the PS2 era, but unlike nearly all the others, it actually worked! Set in a militaristic warzone, the game set you on the task of capturing an entire Deck of 52 and more or less just let you decide how you were going to go about that. There was no linear story to follow; just gather intel by doing jobs for four factions that didn't always cooperate with one another, and figure out where the faces and aces were so you could capture or assassinate them. What was great about it was that every mission let you decide how you wanted to accomplish it. Sometimes, you'd be given some toys and air support options to help you, or you could think outside the box by ordering even more things from your friends in the Russian Mafia. Unfortunately, no one talked about this game at release, and after the failure of the second one, it vanished into the void. It's never even gotten ported to PC or newer consoles
War of the Monsters: Awesome kaiju beat-em-up made in a similar vein to the King of the Monsters games from the 16-bit days (which are also examples). Unfortunately, it showed up with minimal hype and disappeared swiftly thereafter. And I seem to be the only one who ever played it (or owned it).
The Witcher. Yes, everyone and their grandmother is familiar with The Witcher now, but as far they're concerned, the third game is the only one that exists. No one ever wants to even try the first game, even though it frequently goes on sale for a freaking dollar and can be run on a potato chip. Why? Because they're so convinced it's a confusing and unplayable janky-ass mess simply because it's old (as in it was made before 2011), even though it really isn't either of those things anymore. And because they would rather play the latest buggy-at-release piece of crap at $70. It's very irritating.
The Witcher was somewhat popular. It had the advantage of having the naked girl cards collection to balance out the combat.
Speaking of combat, I enjoyed Witcher 2 more then 3. I like 3 a lot, don't get me wrong but I enjoyed 2 the most and I also like the first one, the story in the first one was a bit emotional for when you are a kid.
To be fair, it is a janky ass mess, just not an unplayable one. I don't regret playing it through to completion but it definitely had some rough edges to it. Good game, but definitely has some flaws from what I recall.
That's what I was going to say. He's wearing rose-colored glasses if he doesn't think the controls are confusing at first. Nowhere near as bad as Gothic though, and I adore that game.
The Witcher was a slight step up in complexity from the mindless auto-attack systems that are common in RPGs, and especially in MMORPGs. The only thing it added in was a rhythm game mechanic where you clicked the mouse once the cursor prompt appeared, and a dodge you would occasionally use to avoid getting mobbed. The only way to get confused by the controls was to not bother reading the tutorial messages in the prologue.
Forsaken from the N64 isnt mentioned often. But it was pretty fun with lots of overpowered weapons.
I had a blast playing this as a kid. """"Story"""" mode always kicked my ass, but it seemed tacked on to the multiplayer mode which was up there with Smash, Kart, Goldeneye, and Mario Party with my friends and I at the time
Did it even have computer bots? I cant remember anymore. But yeah during that time Perfect Dark, Duke Nukem 64, Mario Kart, Diddy Kong racing, F-Zero, Smash, was all pretty fun with friends. But Forsaken was kinda special because I had that one friend I always played with who camped all the good items then blew you up with the titan missle if you approached and got a new one. So I guess there were bots or else I would have nothing to do there unless to instantly die to the camper.
Idk whether I am remembering certain singleplayer bits or if there are bots but I am in the same spot there-hazy memory
Great soundtrack too. It's got that unique dark sci-fi feel you just don't get anymore.
Guess I will have to check that one out again, cant even remember.
The place I rented my games from had this epic poster for Forsaken, and I thought that was the coolest shit in the world. Never got around to playing the actual game lol.
Sacrifice
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Faxanadu (NES). It played like a better Zelda 2 with much better graphics and story. None of my friends had heard of it or cared to play it. It turns out that it's part of the Dragon Slayer series of good games that never got good marketing in North America. The ones that made it across the ocean were marketed as independent games and not as part of a series. They might have gotten a mention in Nintendo Power but they never captured mindshare and you never heard about them again.
Was this by Falcom, or is their Xanadu stuff something else entirely? I find it hard to believe I was really only introduced to Falcom's stuff in the past decade, when they've been around for so long, Ys is as old as Zelda.
I had this. When it got stale I was trying to sell it to a friend. His mom, who was super religious, freaked out that it mentioned "monsters" on the box. "Oh I don't know! This sounds dangerous and impure!"
Castle of the the Winds episode 1 AND 2. I still play them to this day. Try topping that one.
Soulbringer for pc. Retro gothic wintertime pre-grimdark grim dark fantasy adventure rpg
It does not look bad. Never heard of it before. I think I'll give it a chance.
Spycraft. Game was basically all the "boring" parts of James Bond or Mission Impossible: they'd have missions where you'd photoshop images to fool assets into thinking certain people were in jail, do voice recognition on phone calls, facial recognition at crime scenes, analyze background noise of phone calls to locate people, analyze bullet trajectories to find where an assassin was hiding, etc...
Most of the levels ultimately culminated with you...sending an email to your boss with the solution to the problem at hand. Though there are a couple levels that are full-motion-video style first-person shooter, and there's a turn based top-down tactical level at one point. And you do have to have a decent memory of things that happened/you were told earlier in the game to progress later.
But it was one of those games where I as a kid saw it and wanted to be able to make the computer do the things you did in the game. And one of the opening videos in the game shows a guy get his head blown off, and my mom wouldn't let me see those kind of movies as a kid but let me have this game. But I always got stuck on the photoshop level.
I played it again last year and had a lot of fun. There's not so much drudgery it feels like work (which is a real danger since the game is essentially an "email job simulator").
Spycraft: The Great Game. Thanks for reminding me that game existed. It was locked in foggy memories I had from watching a guy stream it on twitch way back, and I only halfway remembered the game was even real, but your description brought it all back. From a quick search this intel report in particular stands out to me and confirms that it's the one I'm thinking of.
(On a weird personal note: I now recall while watching that stream on one monitor I was playing Nier Replicant on another, so the memories of both games got jumbled together into one, making it even harder to pin down.)
Jade Cocoon. Barely anyone I know or talked to played it. Great rpg monster collector on the ps1.
I'm still shocked that no other creature collector ever did the "mix and match parts during breeding" aspect. Its such a neat feature that can make actual unique creatures for each playthrough and adds a ton of depth to whether you want to keep a "pure" bloodline that is mechanically weaker just for theme.
The sequel is also really good, if so completely different its barely a sequel.
Always wanted to do that if I got good in programming but sadly, programming isn't the only aspect in game making so I never did. Really, really enjoy the genre and there's none that do this afaik and it's a damn shame.
Honestly, I doubt anything could ever approach the level of quality Jade Cocoon 1 provided.
Pokemon still doesn't have voice acting, while it had it on a PS1 game for its full duration. While also looking fucking amazing for its time. Not to mention the level of details going on under the hood that you could mostly see or figure out for yourself.
Shit I can barely think of any games where you can just walk up and fucking stab the shit out of a creature to weaken it yourself in any of the genre. Sure Levant is basically too weak to be of use by the end, but it felt good to have that choice.
Battlezone 98, a vehicle shooter-RTS hybrid, in which the Cold War goes hot, but in space. The sequel is more popular, but I don't think it's nearly as good. No coop, even in the re-release, so it's harder to introduce to friends. I don't think it originally even broke 100k copies sold.
It got a remake and is sold on GoG
Redux, which is alright. The HD stuff is hit or miss, but it works properly on modern systems, which is all you can hope for at this point. Ironically works better than BZ2, which is a great game to try if you want to experience DOS-era mouse troubleshooting on your modern OS in 2024.
I remember playing that a lot back in the day. Great game. Might even still have the disc in some box somewhere :D
I remember Captain Claw. Same guys who made Blood and Shogo
It's amazing how many games are actually obscure. Sega non main games generally sold in the hundreds of thousands only. So I love Phantasy Star, but it's forgotten.
Gunslinger Stratos for the arcade has a strong fan base in Seattle, and no where else. That game is awesome. It's a character death match game with controllers that change how you're attacking based on how they're being held. The same people made a magic school deathmatch game where you moved your hand to send out spells. ByKing and Squaresoft made some killer games.
Card and character based battle RPGs for arcades. Awesome stuff, sold terribly in the US.
Arcade Racing games that need a save card to fully enjoy. Midnight Club is the more famous one.
Virtual On for the arcade. Strong fan base, but nothing outside of it. They still sell the controllers for modern consoles.
Konami Wai Wai World. Konami man must save the various characters in the Konami universe.
The guy who wrote for Leisure Suit Larry also made a children's game about walking around a farm. You can play it on the Internet library.
The chess with fantasy characters game. It's like a chess board, but you set your pieces down based on what you want. It's an incredibly complex game with tons of strategy against an opponent. I had a roommate who loved that game.
Remember paying a pretty penny for the Saturn controller and Dreamcast adapter because the Dreamcast version of the controls were so expensive at the time.
You should look up the Gundam Pod Game. Or the MechWarrior pod game for that matter.
Will do, thanks
It's obviously changed a ton, but the Phantasy Star franchise is still trucking on.
Phantasy Star Online? Yes Another stand alone game? Not really
If you haven't yet check out Syphon Filter for PS1. It's like metal gear solid but only the shooting parts.
PS2 is the big one. You've got that taken care of. Nintendo Wii with a softmod. I think PSPs are still popular for their moddability too?
PS3 and XBox 360 seem to be where emulator devs start running into issues, though a lot of the games for those systems aren't exclusives. Emulators exist, but it's not to the point where you can just fire up a random game and expect it to work out of the box.
A couple come to mind.
Commander Keen
Really old jump'n'run. I remember playing with a friend back in school. We took turns on a 486 PC, or maybe even a 3 or 2, it's been a while. Of course we only had the shareware version.
Blue Estate
On-rails shooter with delightfully offensive humor. There aren't enough of these games. Especially in today's environment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OTVzOYaRso
Singularity
One of the last good story-driven singleplayer FPS. After that it all turned to shit. Now it's all just cobbled-together open world mush or Doom-style twitch shooters. Still pretty good today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbk6yENRkaw
Updoot for Keen!
If you call me Captain Keen one more time I'm taking you with me!
singularity looks great. The graphic is not bad and the gameplay looks a ton of fun. In the back of my mind I knew about it although I've never played it.
Pirates! Gold for Sega Genesis is my favourite game of all time.
That game was amazing.
Mission Thunderbolt. Turn based rogue like for Mac. It was a Nethack clone in a sci-fi setting that had some innovative feature for its time. Such as a "capture" mechanic where instead of game over the first time your HP goes to zero your character is imprisoned without any gear and you have to escape.
Star Fighter 3000: A somewhat arcadey sci-fi flight sim with a checkered history. Originally released for the Acorn Archimedes, it saw a release for the Panasonic 3DO, and later the PS1 and Sega Saturn. You flew around in your aircraft, and everytime you destroyed something, you could pick up colorful shapes that when they were arranged in a certain order resulted in power ups for your aircraft. PS1 version (via Duckstation) is easiest to get into emulation wise followed by the 3DO version (via RetroArch). Also, apparently the original Acorn version also received updates YEARS after it's original release, but good luck getting it to work if you have no experience with RISC OS (I tried for days to get it to work, but it all flew over my head, as the command prompt syntax was completely foreign to me even with slight experience in both MS-DOS and Linux Mint).
Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels: Sequel to the original Space Hulk game for DOS and Amiga, it was originally released for the Panasonic 3DO and ported to the PS1, Saturn, and PC. It combines elements of both First Person Shooters and Turn Based Strategy, which along with the asymmetrical nature of the gameplay (5 or so slow Terminators vs swarms of lighting fast Genestealers), makes for a type of game that I have not seen repeated since. To this day, I hold the position that Space Hulk: Ascension and Space Hulk: Deathwing are two halves of what should be one big game.
SimCopter and Streets of SimCity: Both are fun but flawed games with troubled development histories. Their gameplay styles differed somewhat, but you could create a city from scratch in SimCity 2000, save it, then use it in either game (from the air or from the ground, respectively). Some mad lad even went out of their way to create patches so that they could run on modern machines with little to no issue.
Feel like I'm being called out as a video game normie as even the niche games I played had a dedicated player base.
If I was being cheeky, maybe Dead Space 2 multiplayer, it was janky and favoured the Necromophs too much but was fun.
Asymmetric multiplayer is criminally underused in general. AvP and Splinter Cell come to mind. It just keeps things interesting, and often hilarious.
AvP 2000 was glorious in it's jank and every sequel and rerelease was more and more generic
left4dead had something like that
The original Harry Potter gba games. Honestly one of my favorite from my childhood. Turn based combat was chefs kiss
I believe for chamber of secrets, you want the gameboy color one. I know there was some weirdness either two studios switching back and forth who made the GBA game and who made the GBA game. In any case the there were several very good Harry Potter JRPGs in the early 2000s, as weird as that feels to say.