underrated video games thread

Underrated video games thread. Talk about underrated video games here.

Puzzle League has always been and will always be the superior competitive puzzler to Puyo Puyo.

Been playing Mystic Ark lately. In terms of gameplay it's a pretty standard RPG, but the music is sorely underrated and the different worlds you go to are intriguing. Definitely recommend checking it out if you like JRPGs from around that time.

Landstalker is an old Sega Genesis adventure / role playing game where you have to dungeon crawl, fight, and puzzle solve your way across the island of Mercato to find an ancient treasure. Great soundtrack, charming characters, and slightly frustrating 3/4 view camera all included.

Sentient is pretty cool. Various different endings can be achieved based on how you tackle the story. You're sent to the station to investigate people coming down with radiation sickness, and most of the gameplay involves talking to people with a really interesting dialog system. You choose template statements or questions and then pick what nouns to put in the gaps, and can ask most people any of the questions (and get different responses based on what they do or don't know).

>>4208 I tried it and the camera view is just too annoying to me, is it worth forcing myself to play it?

>>4212 I want to say yes, soundtrack is great, story is fun, you meet some fun characters, and the puzzles are very challenging. But I know your pain, it took me a long time to get used to the camera. The devs used the pain of the camera angle in some of their puzzles, though. That sounds horrible but it really helps you learn it and get used to it. I still have to take a week or two off sometimes when I'm doing a playthrough because the camera will just frustrate the hell out of me.

>>4213 I'll give it another shot then, see how it goes this time.

>>4212 Not that op but I thought the same thing. So I found this. http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/5495/ The vanilla controls makes no sense anymore when you play with these controls. Why they went with that is fuarrrking beyond me.

>>4216 Probably because playing a game with the controls rotated 45 degrees isn't fun. Harvest Moon Back to Nature had the shame awful ass control scheme and it was painful to enjoy.

>>4217 I thought I remembered the controls from another game! I love HM:BTW and the lower stakes and pressure make the controls more tolerable. Those controls for me killed so often with the real time fighting in Landstalker. Was a strange time in games I guess.

>>4204 Not sure if it's really "underrated" but I've been playing some OSRS recently. I never played it back in the day, but it seemed like a comfy game and the community isn't too huge so I thought I might be able to make a friend or two. I've been enjoying it so far, very nice to relax too. I'm not sure if it's just me but old MMOs, even fantasy ones, give me major /cyb/ vibes.

>>4219 Hey anon, I also play OSRS. Wanna play together? my rsn is sBaran send me a request

A couple of years ago I played an old French fps game from 1993 called 'in extremis' which really stuck out to me. It was released shortly before Doom so it's rather primitive in some ways, but in others it was surprisingly ahead of its time. You play as an astronaut in the future whose ship gets wrecked in the middle of space, forcing you to take refuge in a drifting, derelict vessel infested with a colony of hostile aliens. While it lacks the vertical geometry which made Doom stand out, the game still manages to cultivate a visually interesting and immersive setting with what little it has. Its textures portraying the grimy old spaceship full of bones and alien nesting material are quite grim and atmospheric, the lack of any music save for the heavy footsteps of your space suit makes it tense and frightening when the aliens jump out at you the first few times, and the brief animated cutscenes which play whenever you pick up an item or interact with something contributes significantly to the immersion while remaining unobtrusive to gameplay. Unlike Doom or the preceding Wolfenstein 3D however, the game plays more like a proto survival horror fps than the typical action oriented switch hunting ordeals of the time, forcing the player to carefully balance resource management with enemy killing and level progression. The aliens don't fire projectiles at you, or even produce an alert sound, instead they run incredibly fast and pound the soykaf out of you which produces a graphical effect of your character being thrown around and makes the screen flash white from the concussive force. Enemies sometimes retreat into hallways to ambush you later on, and killing them makes their green blood spray all over the player's vision for a moment. Combat is thus extremely simple even by Wolf 3d clone standards, yet feels frantic and impactful when it does occur. Your suit requires a constant supply of fresh oxygen tanks lest you suffocate and die, only one weapon may be carried at a time, and the level may require you to find a bomb and place it somewhere to progress, or otherwise interact more deeply with your surroundings than just "find keys and hit switches". In order to get items, you collect passwords which must then be manually typed into a terminal to open various locked compartments, containing either oxygen tanks, health, weapons, keycards, or more passwords. Overall it's a smart, engaging, original experience made by a small team with meager resources made especially impressive given its seniority to Doom, and I definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in early DOS shooters. It's easily found on abandonware websites and emulates quite well too. Grab Dosbox SVN Daum and set cycles to around 32000 for a comfortable framerate, bring up a virtual keyboard and use the arrow keys on the numeric keypad to re-do the menu controls to something more sensible, turn on floor and ceiling textures and you're good to go.

>>4219 OSRS is the best game, imo.

>>4204 Ico is somewhat of a cult classic and for good reason. It's pretty fuarrrked to think it came out in 2001, considering how good it looks. I recommend playing the PS3 version in RPCS3. That way, you can make it look even nicer with community patches like disabling blur and MLAA. Story and gameplay is great too.

>>4219 The good ol days

Ravenfeild is a highly moddable idie "toy solder" game. Imagine something like Battlefield, but single player and no story. In spite of its simplicity, this game will give you many hours of entertainment, due to its large modding community, and the sheer amount of soykaf you can do with it.

earthbound zero.

Wolfenstein, DooM, Duke Nukem 3D are well known but no one seems to post about Blood, Shadow Warrior, Hexen, or Strife.

>>4264 AMC TC >https://www.moddb.com/games/the-amc-tc

>>4264 Shadow Warrior was my jam as a kid. Loved finding the lewd Easter eggs and Lo Wang's reactions. Not a fan of the remakes, though. Just doesn't capture the right feeling. Shogo Mobile Armor Division was another good one in that similar vein.

>>4264 Heretic was a lot better than Hexen in all honesty. Hexen's "puzzles" were pretty lame and it had some really annoying enemies.

>>4267 I disagree. Hexen's open world and backtracking is what makes it so cozy to play imo. Heretic is still a fantastic game though. While I'm on the topic, Brutal Hexen RPG is a really underrated mod that I feel improves the game in many ways. It gives Hexen a level up system and more, but makes it harder.

>>4216 Thanks for the link man.

>>4267 I always felt like Hexen just needed, like, a journal that tracked which areas you'd flipped switches in already. Heretic has rad level design, but the weapons always felt kinda awkward to me...which isn't a problem anymore, modding lol

This isn't obscure, but I see a lot of hate for it. Been playing pic-related for the first time. I'm quite in love with it so far (just finished Ocean Palace.) Its pretty tough, especially since I'm beans at vidjya games anyways, but very satisfying to play.

>>4426 Vegemite effect

This one surprised me. I only remembered seeing the cover artwork before. It's much more action combat focused than an old Zelda game.

Skies of Arcadia Brave Fencer Musashiden and its sequel on PS2 the Megaman Starforce trilogy

Darkstalkers doesn't get enough love; now it's undead with no new games (not even a remaster). Capcom references it in other games but that's it. Guess beautiful sprite-work and mechanics that push the genre don't cut it anymore.

>>5115 >Guess beautiful sprite-work and mechanics that push the genre don't cut it anymore. Certainly not, just look at how ASW abandoned Guilty Gear.

>>4426 Zelda II is legit one of my favorite NES games. Def underrated.

>>5116 Yeah. *sigh* It hurts that no one does that style of art anymore.

Rapelay. It's got a really deep and psychological story that leaves you craving more after you're done with it.

>>4219 I really like the quests in this one just because it's one of the only mmos with quests that aren't just "Kill X of X". It's a shame that for whatever reason it harbours a really autistic community that wants things to be slow as hell. Nuffin' will ever beat it though, it's just The Game.

1. Mechassassult for Original Xbox 2. Blinx for Original Xbox 3. Black for Xbox and PS2 4. Ico for PS2 5. Radiata Stories for PS2 6. Terranigma for SNES 7. Crystalis for NES 8. Fzero X for N64 9. Doom 64 10.Bravely Default and Bravely Second for 3DS 11. Icewind Dale 2 for PC

>>5395 Ico and Terranigma are both incredibly overrated if anything.

FAR CRY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt3M9udpRHg

>>4204 Vast majority of SEGA CD and Turbo CD games fill this category for me. There's almost too many good ones to count, but these are just a select few of my favorites. >Sonic CD >The Terminator >Starblade >Keio Flying Squadron >Lords of Thunder >Android Assault: Revenge of Bari-Arm >After Burner III Among so many others. That's why I'm still going through them to see how many good ones I can find

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorer of Sky Bomberman DS (2005) Space Invaders Revolution Bastard Bonds Pokemon Ranger series

there were some pretty good harry potter rpgs on the gbc. I like all the harry potter games even the ones that are kinda bad but these ones are unironically cool rpgs. the healing is weird because you can't buy items for a long time and there's not really an "inn" but the balance is there's not much consequence to dying.

>>5969 Jesus Christ, I felt myself de-age for a moment when I saw that image...

Whatever happened to Real Time Strategy games?

>>6080 supposedly old guard that did sc is doing a new rts , overall i think meta shifted to multiplat or mobile for max $ and neither console nor mobile is suited for rts. >>4758 if you like terranigma you will also likely like secret of evermore and secret of mana series.

>>4244 Sounds like a great time! My contribution is "Downhill Domination" on the PS2. Mediocre game, but really fun and underrated two-player split screen multi-player.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lkOLWI4Jg0

>>6094 It's nice opening lainchan and seeing my favorite game when I was 7 on the index page.

NOLF, anyone? I think it speaks for itself but if you still have trouble seeing why kids love the taste of cinnamon toast crunch after you have ogled the various media files available on the intertubes, simply consult any longplay video

A really fun game. It was my father's favourite, we used to play in a Dynavision (a pirated version of the NES that they sold here in Brazil much cheaper)

quest rpg and the harry potter rpgs for gbc are two less popular games I play a lot. people like to soykaf on quest rpg because the n64 version is grindy and kinda soykaf, but I really like the gbc version. I never really hear people talk about the gbc harry potter games either, they get shadowed by the console releases, but they're really fun even if there's a lot of fetch quests.

>>6097 I only played demo. Seemed to be nice.

Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! Cave Story! https://www.cavestory.org/

>>6111 This isn't an overrated games thread.

Super Puzzle Fighter 2 (Turbo!) My favorite character is Dan, who drops only single color (red) blocks... In the fighting game he was the character that could damage you with his taunts, so all those red blocks you drop are like taunts. It takes some skill to play as Dan: a quick kill delivered all at once after a large chain combo build up... but that's basically THE winning strategy of the game, with minor variation depending on enemy drop pattern.

>>6098 Somehow I'm surprised to discover that the Dynavision wasn't a thing on other countries

i don't know how this game was recieved out of my country (I'm from the giant jungle called Brazil btw), but i never saw someone talking about this amazing indie, the art is so freakin good and the Level Design is brilliant, my favorite metroidvania for sure

>>6345 The original was and still is fantastic. The remake has lame music and the devs screwed up colossally by not coding in basic keyboard input customization.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon. The only good FOSS game, as far as I know. It's a roguelike. Permadeath + play again, just like real life. It's a metaphor for the reoccurring descent of the soul to the material plane, its toiling search for spiritual attainment across multiple lifetimes, and eventual achievement of a victorious return to the higher realm previous to birth. The music is soykaf. The game's events are determined by random generation, but every time you die it's because of a failure of your personal character: you hurried up unnecessarily, you didn't take the time to think things through, you took an unnecessary risk, you zoned out and walked right up to a monster, things like that. So you become a better, wiser and more temperate person IRL as you get better at the game. If you enchant the archer's bow with flaming arrows you can fuarrrk soykaf up like crazy. https://shatteredpixel.com/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.shatteredpixel.shatteredpixeldungeon/ If you play the game long enough you start dreaming about it.

>>6347 >The only good FOSS game, as far as I know. Time to expand your horizons, anon.

Some very cool recommendations here. >>6347 Played it heaps when I was in school, good time killer and RNG pretty much determines the quality of your run lol. Lotsa runs cancelled by drinking a potion of fire or starving. Brewing soykaf with seeds is 500 iq. Overall, very fun game and many things to explore. >>6348 Zero-K is also a pretty fun foss game (with frens ofc) https://zero-k.info/ Flash Games; Castaway Castaway 2: Isle of the Titans Scuba Kingdom Rush Mega Miner Screw Big Fish Games but the Mystery Case Files series was a banger.

>>4426 TAoL and Metroid are the parents of Castlevania

Jimmy’s Lost His Toilet Paper >https://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/tp Heh, I remember finding this as kid. Daggerfall >https://cdnstatic.bethsoft.com/elderscrolls.com/assets/files/tes/extras/DFInstall.zip >https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Files (download DAG213.EXE and run it inside DosBox after installing Daggerfall) Daggerfall is underrated game nowadays. Most people think it's unplayable without the fan Unity remake but I think the original version is perfectly playable and even superior. That being said, I prefer Morrowind (with OpenMW). Yume Nikki >https://uboachan.net/ (it's also available from Steam but the version from Uboachan is better, imo) >https://archive.uboachan.net/media/src/Yume_Nikki.rar || https://uboachan.net/yumenikki_portable.zip Yume Nikki is kind of forgotten these days but I think that Lain would love that game! >>5968 >Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorer of Sky I remember playing that as kid. It the best game in the series, in my opinion.

Garou: Mark of the Wolves (1999) I prefer it to 3rd Strike.

>>6352 >Yume Nikki Hell yeah, Lain would love it. Can be very relaxing. After Yume Nikki may I suggest Yume 2kki? It's a fangame in the same exact style but probably the most popular out there. Personally prefer it over Nikki. Also I remember Uboachan having links to the games you could play multiplayer on the web itself. It was pretty fun last time I checked.

>>6352 >Yume Nikki If anything, it's overrated.

Roll Away is an underated puzzle game >>5115 Please spoiler lustful characters

A lot of the games on this thread are just good, old games that nobody knows about anymore. IMO the most underrated games are games made by modders, games that were improved since launch, or board games. >Tamriel Rebuilt >Project Tamriel >Emba5 Mods for Morrowind, absolutely nuts. I can't wait until I'm 60 and they're finally done >Enderal >Nehrim Two games made by SureAI using Oblivion and Skyrim, also nuts. >Beyond Skyrim / Beyond Skyrim Bruma Project Tamriel but in Skyrim, I can't wait until I'm 80 and they're finally done. >Fallout NV New California >Fallout NV The Frontier New California is cringe but soul, Frontier is horrible. >FoNV Dust >Fo4 Frost Hardcore total conversion mods for Fo4 and FoNV, focuses on combat and resource management, and has a sanity mechanic. >Fallout Sonora >Fallout Oblivion Lost >Fallout Nevada >Fallout The Sum >Olympus 2207 >Fallout Resurrection All Mods for Fallout 1 / 2 / Tactics >STALKER Anomaly / Genesis Total conversion mods take place 20 years after STALKER Call of Pripyat. Basically combines all 3 Stalker games into 1. And these are just the fan-based games that I KNOW about, and I haven't even included fan-based quest lines like 'New Vegas Bounties' for FoNV or ' Vigilant' for Skyrim. If you are interested in fan-made games check out Warlockracy on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Warlockracy/videos I might make a post later talking about solo board games like Gloomhaven and Nemesis and that Skyrim board game.

>>4204 Wipeout. CORPORATE FUTURE DEATH RACING IN HOVER CARS!

>>6376 Playing around with SF3 fan mods that re-balance the gameplay to even out the high and low tiers.

>>4204 Westboro. It's a cyberpunk isometric action game and it's surprsingly great. It's now for sale for only 0,58€

>>4204 I'd say that, out of all the video games I loved since my childhood, there was a single title in particular I always realized was disliked by most, and never did consider that very fair for what it was, though I get why it happened... Sonic 3D Blast on Genesis, or on Saturn if you prefer that version. I know what the main complaints are, it was the 1st Sonic platformer on Genesis that wasn't a classic, so you could see it as the start of Sonic's fall, it was also SEGA's attempt at replacing Sonic X-Treme on the Saturn, shoes too big for a spin-off like this to fill with a simple port of a Genesis title... also, it's not truly 3D I suppose... I still love it though, because for what it is, it does all things it set out to do, mainly put Sonic in a 3D world, I know it's isometric, but I can freely move in 3 axis, all the while engaging in what's probably Sonic's only collectathon before Sonic Frontiers... and it works! TT really nailed the level design here, exploring is fun! Also, I know what the other major complaint is, that it doesn't control too well, but honestly you get used to it with time and, if you play it on the Saturn with the 3D controller, or on a compilation where you can use an analog stick, or just emulate it, it feels nice enough and overall the platforming isn't too problematic.

Frontier: Elite 2 is the grand daddy of Elite Dangerous and had features at launch that Dangerous still doesn't have after a decade and two paid expansions. If you've played Elite Dangerous or really any space trading game before Frontier will be quite familiar but with enough unique features to make it stand out. There's no main story per say, but you can rise up the ranks in the militaries of the two main factions which both have a few minor story lines. It's also unique as it came out a month before Doom and while Doom did have full texture mapping Frontier had an entire 1:1 recreation of the Milky Way in enough detail as was possible in 1993 on a 486. Including seamless ground to space travel. It also had a rudimentary Newtonian physics system that governed the celestial bodies and ships, which means you had to spin around and burn the opposite way lest you crash into the surface of your destination. The best version to play IMO is the original Amiga release if you can stand setting up an Amiga emulator, it also has the best music. If not or if you need texture mapped graphics for some reason the DOS port is serviceable and can be run easily in DOSBox. >>6569 You might want to also check out Somnium. Which is a total conversion on top of Enderal's total conversion meaning to rebuild the whole dark Gothic pirate aesthetic SureAI was going for in the lore. It also entirely overhauls the magic system including a complete redo of the Arcane Fever system to make it a sanity system on top of a magic system. As well as making the game a lot more horror focused. It also adds smooth bore firearms turning the entire game into a third person shooter if you spec into marksmanship. It's also hard as soykaf, even on easy.

I always liked this old hollywood-hacking sim. Its OST was small, but decent for a game of its time and budget. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplink_(video_game) >After the Revelation virus is released, the final mission of the game begins, and the storylines play out. The Arunmor storyline ends with the destruction of Revelation, which leads to a federal raid of Andromeda and the subsequent arrest of suspected staff members in the company, along with a number of Uplink agents. The leader of Andromeda then issues a statement, making no apologies for releasing Revelation, as he argues that the internet became more of an extension of Western capitalism to serve the interest of elites, rather than to promote free speech and anonymity. He also says that people will never be safe on the web and that their lives are on file waiting to be tampered with. He goes on to state that people's lives are being destroyed by computer technology despite its perceived benefits.

I think I'm the only person that's ever played this.

>>7321 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4OreVjtkNU ^^^ Is this you?

have an affinity for pixel games even though i was raised in a low poly era

>>7321 wish i knew how to use an emulator

>>7326 If you can find one that runs on your OS and acquire games for it, the games should just run. You may also want a gamepad. I bought an xbox one controller and plugged it into my laptop running linux and it just worked which I thought was hilarious. I even got the gamepad mapping kind of sorted out so I could use it with openMSX which is an MSX 2 emulator which I think maybe like 50 people on earth actually care about.

any lainons got a decent link for Milk Outside a Bag of Milk Outside a Bag of Milk tried igg games but their copy is always crashing any recommendations? >>7327 Thanks for the heads up

Retrogames.cc has...everything with inline emulators and stuff. Pretty neat.

the witcher 2 is pretty underrated and probably would have set a trend with its different story branches had it had the popularity of the witcher 3. the story, politics, subversion, and the dialogue made it impressive as hell. open worlds are overrated and tend to offer hollow atmospheres brigador is an underrated isometric seeing to the destruction of suburbs,city blocks, and industrial centers. slaughtering civilians and soldiers like ants was a nice touch the lore is interesting as well ape out is another decent slaughter game with the music in rhythm with your actions got all these for free at one point and they seem to be pretty much slept on

>>7331 Witcher 2 just has really bad combat. It's really bad and because you have to do it so much, actually playing the game is like reaching into a grab bag full of gold bars and broken glass. The story is really good though. And the graphics. Just a shame that the gameplay is like kicking dead whales down the beach.

>>6377 i used to play it but now the games like over a gigabyte in size and my soykaffucked download speeds make it impossible to download

>>7341 As a rule of thumb, government buildings, hospitals and universities will usually have gigabit fiber connections or bigger. You also may be surprised just driving to different businesses and seeing what their wifi speeds are like. The Dunkin Donuts in my town has speeds an order of magnitude greater than any other restaurant in the area.

CROSSED SWORDS II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFp8bEl5tvQ I guess that it inspired Infinity Blade on iOS.

Magical Vacation for the GBA never gets enough love IMO. Fantastic JRPG, spent hundreds of hours on it and still didn't discover everything it has to offer yet

>>6103 Agree with the HP rpgs, the gameplay is nice and progression feels great

>>7375 I played the first one and it was rather slow and repetitive. Graphics looked great for a GBC title though

Recently replayed the game called "Armies of Exigo", which was one of the first RTS I've played. I liked to play it locally with a friend after school, even tho I sucked at it. It failed to get any semblance of online community (because WC3 existed for almost 2 years at the time of release) and was kinda forgotten, but it's pretty good for what it is. Although it is a generic power struggle story in the fantasy setting with 3 races available, it has good pacing and well written main characters. Considering it was released almost 20 years ago by a small group of Hungary devs, this game still looks decent and cinematics are on par with Blizzard projects like WC3 and SC2. Imo, solid RTS with a unique artstyle and unit designs, gameplay ideas and amazing soundtrack composed by Jeremy Soule. Try it out, anon.

Blasphemous ~ metrovania with a lot of red pixels. I like it.

>>7442 >metroidvania Am I to presume this is another game that plays nothing at all like Metroid?

Play VIRTUA FIGHTER; it's high speed rock-paper-scissors at its finest.

>>4219 Overrated garbage mmo. It feels slow and sticky to play, as if it wants to torture me. The writing of quests is also overly childish. If those things are fixed then it's at least an 8/10 for me.