Nerdfury said:
Also, NOT ONE mention of Okami! Okami for PS2 was a beautiful game surrounding Japanese Shinto mythology. A platformer, wherre you literally painted effects on the world while playing a wolf goddess. Awesome game, fantastic story and graphics and the music is wonderful.
Yes, I did. Second page:
Although the game got great reviews, Okami was highly overlooked, and Clover closed down due to its lack of success. I really really hope it sells better on the Wii.
Psychonauts is interesting in the sense of what time you place the context in. It obviously got overlooked at the time it came out, because its sales were not that great at all, but when you look at it today, I rarely see as single thread of any sort on any topic go by without about a handful of people finding a way to mention that Psychonauts is mana from Heaven.
Although I don't have too much first-hand experience with the game, I do know that Beyond Good and Evil does have a very small but very strong fanbase and is mostly known by those who follow gaming as a "scene."
I'm also going to take this conversation in a direction I don't believe has been touched upon yet, but at a time when MMOs are the big craze, I feel it important to mention two games that did a big part in tiding people over as they waited for the MMOs as we know it to be invented.
Back before the internet was essential to day-to-day life, there was a strong subculture of cyber-nerdiness that revolved around what were known as Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). A BBS would be run off of somebody's computer, and people would dial in on their modems and access the information and programs that were available to them. Hacks, cracks, piracy, porn, and how to make bombs out of conventional household materials were readily available through these means, as were potent computer viruses that punished those who actually downloaded this information. But one of the ways in which to pass your time while logged in to somebody's mother's basement was through turn-based online games like Legend of the Red Dragon and Usurper, which stand out amongst the others.
So, basically a run through of how online gaming worked at this point. First to note was that everything was turn-based and text-based. You would log in, and for each day of real-time, you would be allowed a certain number of moves that your character would make. There were a lot of things you could do that did not cost any moves, like going into a store and buying/selling things, but most things that involved some sort of gain to experience would cost a move, and sometimes you would be rewarded with extra turns. Eventually, you run out, and wait until the next day before you can do more. Or, you might die before you run out of turns and have to wait until the next day before you "respawn."
Legend of the Red Dragon was a great game of this sort, based on its good mix of simplicity and providing enough to do to keep the daily grind interesting, and backed it up with a biting wit. Usurper was far more elaborate, and covered such a large scope that there simply wasn't enough time in the day to do everything, and I'm not saying that as a negative. LORD was great for an entertaining grind of dungeon crawling and PvP feuds, while Usurper had so many things to do that it was a far more immersive role-playing experience. Both games were fantastic but for obvious reasons could not exist at a retail level and were known only to those who were active in the BBS scene and frequented the BBSs that featured these games on their system.