Bargain bin games you found by chance and love

[happyninja42]

Not sure if it would be bargain bin, but one night at 2am, after cancelling my EQ account, and itching for a new game, I went to Wal-Mart and saw a copy of Homeworld sitting unremarked on the game shelf. I hadn't really heard anything about it, but I looked at it and was like "Eh, this might be fun, and it's not too expensive."

......I went home and read through the book (a VERY thick book with LOTS of lore in it) for the first 30 minutes, and totally forgot to bother installing the game. I was so engrossed in the world they created, that I was completely distracted from installing the game. Then I installed the game, and was sucked into a fun and engaging world.

Homeworld is one of my personal favorite games, because of the mood and atmosphere they presented. It's one of few games that actually made me care about the little pixels on my screen, and made me have genuine emotional reactions to what was happening.

This lead me to buy Homeworld: Cataclysm later, which was an even more engaging story personally. Loved the whole series, even though HW 2 was kind of lame.

Best random, uninformed game purchase ever.

 

[Olas]

One of the (few) downsides to being someone who makes every game purchase after much careful consideration is that you rarely stumble upon any hidden gems. That being said, there is one game that definitely fits this category for me.

Spoiler

My dad actually bought it for my little sister, I guess because it has a girl on the cover and therefore must be a game for girls or something. For a game licensed from a movie that nobody went to see, it's pretty damn competent, I'd even call it ambitious. Actually, looking back it's basically a Zelda clone. But since I'd never played a Zelda game before it, that never dawned on me. I just knew it was a licensed game based on a bad cartoon and therefore expected it to be arse, and instead it was a pretty solid game that stands on it's own. Of course I'm not trying to say this game is good by any objective measure, you're better off just playing a Zelda game anyway, but it's a thousand times better than it has any right to be.

 

[Ubersupersloth]

Digital Card Battle for the PS1. That and Digimon World for the PS1 were AWESOME! (I don't even particularly like Digimon, they were just damn good games)

 

[Doclector]

Pool nation. Screw you, it was on sale for under a pound, it counts.

I downloaded it almost out of curiousity of how bad it would be. The cover art looked TERRIBLE as little as that matters on xbla and "pool nation"? How generic can you get?

But seriously, as much as pool sims aren't the most popular kind of game, this just works so well that I can't help but love it.

That said...that doesn't beat how something magical started when I found Earth Defence force 2017 for £7 on an easter holiday.

Now I am dedicated to making the world realise the power of the one true shooter god.

 

[sovietmisaki]

I found Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater at a local Gamestop for like $6-$7 iirc. While I had sort of tried out the first MGS on a demo disc, I was never really drawn into it. Then I played MGS3: Snake Eater. Although the top down camera was frustrating at times, I loved almost everything else about it. That was the game that made me into a Metal Gear Solid fan once and for all. Not even the fact that I have ditched the consoles for the PC, is going to make me rescind that stance.

I could say that was a stroke of luck on my part, since I could've just as easily bought another game that day in July 2007. Although I was kind of short on cash at that point, and desperately looking for a game to buy. Guess I hit the jackpot on that one

 

[The Random Critic]

Huh, didn't think OP meant actual copy of the game (ie not steam)... I am ashamed of myself

So to repost.. I did brought Two World for under 5 bucks. Yes, this is the first Two World

And I enjoy plenty of it despite it's glaring flaws

 

[DudeistBelieve]

I just picked up Dark Void, Crackdown and Gears Of War 2 for under ten dollars at my local gamestop. Haven't gotten to playing any of them yet. Well I have played Gears before, this was to replace my broken copy (And only a buck! Wooo!)

 

[demoman_chaos]

I remember snagging Rome: Total War for about $20 ever such a long time ago. Before R:TW, I was a big fan of Warcraft 2 and 3 and WoW had not been announced yet. I'd also played some C&C: Red Alert on PS1, so I was an RTS fan and love history so it seemed perfect. I cannot go back to the Warcraft/C&C/Age of Empires style RTS games now. I have literally sunk at least one-THOUSAND hours into that game, and STILL play around on it to this day.

I remember seeing something about a game called Mount&Blade, I think it was some youtube videos if I am not mistaken. I got the demo, wasn't too impressed. After a bit more fiddling, I went ahead and bought the game for $15 I think. It was one of my best purchases. M&B Warband is my favorite of the series, but playing around with the mods and superb game engine pretty much ruined other action-RPGs. The combat is just too damn fun and I really wish the Elder Scrolls games could have large battles and such superb combat mechanics.

I picked up a copy of Gundam: Crossfire for about $7 a few years ago. I had been a fan of the Federation vs Zeon games and figured I'd give it a shot. It is a bit clunky, but gobs of fun. I really wish they would make a new one with similar (but better implemented) mechanics, larger maps, and many many more mechs on the field. You could make it like Star Wars: Battlefront in mission mechanics.

 

[Prime_Hunter_H01]

Ace Combat 4

My dad picked up a bunch of bargain games he thought looked when we went shopping for games for my then new PS2. I did not know anything about it but I had it so I gave it a shot. It is now one of my favorite series as I got each game in the franchise since. And I swear no game has come at all close to how perfectly Ace Combat mixes arcadey and simulation combat flying everything else is either to simulator, or to arcadey. Even Assault Horizon which is the worst of Ace Combat games is still a great game because it retains that same arcade-sim mix.

My love of Armored Core also started when after recognizing the name from a store demo I played i picked up Project Phantasma and loved it, Made sure to track down as many of the games as I could from then on.

 

[josemlopes]

I just picked up Dark Void, Crackdown and Gears Of War 2 for under ten dollars at my local gamestop. Haven't gotten to playing any of them yet. Well I have played Gears before, this was to replace my broken copy (And only a buck! Wooo!)

Crackdown is fucking great, a lot of people only bought it for the Halo 3 beta but the game was worth the full price alone for me.

 

[NoeL]

Not technically a bargain bin, but my roomie bought Kya: Dark Lineage on the PS2 for cheap online because her name was "Kyla", which is kind of like "Kya". Turned out to be a surprisingly engaging platformer that we loved playing through, although it was buggy as all hell.

 

[Malevolentcafe]

This may not count, but yesterday I got Dishonored for 15 dollars at a con. Aside from that, I got Rayman: Hoodlum Havoc at my local grocery store for 10 dollars in 2004, so I consider that a plus for me.

 

[Kotaro]

I got P.N.03 for fifty cents. It's not perfect, but it's basically a 3D/third-person bullet hell game. And damn if I don't love those.

 

[Veylon]

I once got two calendars for Christmas and ended up bringing one back to the store. In exchange, I ended up picking up an obscure title called "Hearts of Iron" for $12. Then I discovered that I was a Grand Strategy fan.

 

[Strain42]

Mine is sort of a long story. It was not only the game I love, but the game that I'm thankful for because it lead me down an interesting road in gaming.

One day I found a GBA game in a bargain bin for like 8 bucks. That game was Robopon 2: Ring Version.

Not only did I play this game and absolutely love it (lost it at some point, been meaning to get another copy of it) but it was also published by Atlus. I didn't really know who Atlus was at this point, I just remember seeing the logo on the box.

A few months later, I saw another GBA game at another store called DemiKids: Light Version. Seeing the box I almost dismissed it as some weird Pokemon knock-off, but then I saw two things that changed my mind. The first was the Atlus logo, and the second was, no joke here...Jack Frost, the mascot for Atlus. He just looked so cute and cool to younger me that I wanted to play this game.

So without Robopon 2: Ring Version in that bin, I may have never discovered DemiKids, which was my first MegaTen title. Without that, I may not have noticed the familiar monsters a few years later in Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army. Without that I wouldn't have shown it to my friend Adam who showed me Digital Devil Saga, and without that I wouldn't have looked up the Megami Tensei series as a whole, and I may have never discovered Persona 3 the following year because my personal tastes had mostly grown out of JRPGs by that point in my life.

So without Robopon 2: Ring Version, I may have never discovered any of the Megami Tensei games, which are currently my favorite franchise of games of all time. And also the games responsible for me having any semblance of internet fame by doing a parody webcomic.

 

[Dragonlayer]

"What's this 'Dawn of War' game? It looks kinda like something I saw in an x-play review I saw once that sounded interesting, so why not?" (this was on steam by the way, as circuit city was my primary source for pc games and this was post-bankruptcy).

*5 years pass*

Ethereals be praised, a new edition of 40k which shall allow a fully-mechanized list without ForgeWorld product!

So yeah, that game indirectly started me on the path to all of my current hobbies, save videogames. Not to mention the hundreds of hours I've poured into it and the expansions/sequel/sequel's expansions.

Basically, I really fucking love Dawn of War.

I still play Dark Crusade pretty regularly with friends: no matter how much I rant and rave at the time, trying desperately to hold off the Greenskin horde on Insane AI never loses its appeal.

I just wish Soulstorm and Retribution hadn't been so weak in the campaign department....

OT

Years after it was released I found a cheap copy of Mass Effect 2 and decided to see what all the hype was all about. Skip forward to the present day and I've bought the complete trilogy and all the DLC twice for different consoles, completed each game three/four times for the 360 *and* PS3, have the official artbook, the first comic....

Oh, forgot to mention! The Darkness for the PS3 - surprise personal hit and the chief reason I was optimistic for Wolfenstein: The New Order.

 

[Silberescher]

In terms of games physically found in a bargain bin, the best is probably when I went to K-Mart to buy an SD card or something similarly unrelated and found a collection of the first three Metal Gear Solid games bundled for... $30, I think. Not a huge discount, but it definitely made the next couple of months for me.

Digital bargain bins are so overwhelmingly plentiful these days that almost every game I own was plucked from one of them. So I'll go with the most recent: I picked up Card City Nights from the Humble Store on a whim because it was 75% off ($.99) and a forum poster said it was a modern version of the Pokemon TCG game for Game Boy, which I loved. It turned out to be a really charming title based around an unusual card game that was completely unlike what I expected; the design was much closer to Super Puzzle Fighter than to Magic the Gathering.

It was saturated with references to other Ludosity games, none of which really registered with me, because I haven't played them, but now I'm definitely going to pick some up (next time they're on sale, because I'm still really frugal about PC games).

 

[INVALIDUSERNAME]

Mount & Blade: Warband.

I picked it up on a Steam sale after my friend told me about how great it was and how the singleplayer was so open and expansive. Then he tells me its got some decent multiplayer too, so I give it a shot.

I bought it for about $5.00 and I've put in maybe 500+ hours just in the multiplayer. If you can play with friends, it's one of the most entertaining fucking games I've ever played in my life. It looks horrible but it has some really satisfying combat to toy around with if you can manage to get semi-decent at it.

The DLC, Napoleonic Wars, wasn't as good but still pretty great in terms of fun you can have. Like Siege battles where 200 Germans take on 200 Frenchman trying to hold a fort in some gigantic maps.