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.

Map games

But i dont “love” them

I “love” them in the same way a flagellant “loves” his whip

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 shithole service 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

ITT: a bunch of games that are fucking awesome and i’d absolutely recommend them to others

I couldn’t recommend most people play MGS 1 or 2 in the current year, but they are amazing works of art.

I wish more people could experience those games in full, but yeah…

Dwarf Fortress, I’d recommend it but only to someone I know had some interest, especially if they want to play the ascii version. Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead would be another. They’re pretty hardcore, Aurora 4x and Dominions would also be hard to get people into unless they had some interest

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

gameplay is excellent, probably still the best fps/rpg hybrid, especially if you love kicking enemies off of/into things, but the story is extremely generic

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.

There’s an old rogue-lite called Castle of the Winds from ages ago in all its 16 bit glory

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.

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.

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.