Great games you found by accident

[Relish in Chaos]

Mario Kart: Super Circuit, my first Mario Kart game, which I bought for £8 at a market. It's a fun little racer.

 

[esperandote]

most games i played in my younger years, there wasn't any marketing for games available so we just judged games by they cover.

 

[TotallyNotABot]

Crayon Physics Deluxe.

Came on my school computer for some reason, played it and found it to surpass every expectation I had for a game like that.

 

[TrevHead]

So anyway, enough about my own little discoveries - what games did you find without them being pushed into your face and wound up loving?

Most of games I have a pretty good idea of what to expect, especially with western AAA made games. Niche Indies and Japanese games due to their quirkiness are where I get most of my surprises.

I have to agree with you on the quality of the Exceed games which although looking like Touhou have a different playstyle to them. Exceed 3rd Black Package is one of my favorite shmups and has a good balance of intermediate difficulty and aggressive scoreplay.

My 2 big surprise shmups have to be:

1) Blue Wish Resurrection: My first bullethell shmup that I found while looking for some good freeware games to play. And boy was I bowled over by all the mayhem onscreen, similar to Exceed 3rd it plays like a easy CAVE shmup with slow moving bullets which makes it much easier to learn to play these games.

2) Crimson Clover [Yotsubanes] A fantastic mix of Rayforce & CAVE bullet hell, the break mode super weapon is good enough, but the first time I went into double break mode and the screen fills with your beam of death is so over the top and I love it!


Non STGs

3) Recettear: Running an item shop doesn't sound like fun to me, but wow was I wrong.

4) Noitu Love 2: I tend to not like 2D sidescrollers that are m&k controlled at they tend to lose much of the gameplay that makes sidescrollers fun in the first place. But somehow Konjak was able to make a 2D m&k game that have a good arcade game feel to it.

5) Fortune Summoners: This was panned by most folk who said the controls where bad, its quite the opposite infact, they are just oldschool like a NES castlevania or fighter rather than a crappy instant attack button masher like Castle Crashers that most of us are spoiled with nowadays. The enemies have the best AI ive ever seen in a 2D sidescroller.

6) Gungirl 2: Ive played the original which is fun (both freeware) but the sequel is really impressive! Plays similar to Cave Story but as a 2D version of Dead Rising with awesome weapons and zombies to wail through. Feels so good!

7) Y's Origin, such a tight and action paced 2D Zelda type game, fantastic balancing and great boss fights, almost zero grinding.

 

[MetalDooley]

I was pretty late to the original Xbox party(my friend gave me his when he got a launch 360)so I had no real idea about a lot of the games available for it.I pretty much just bought games and hoped for the best but among the ones I got were..

Knights of the Old Republic
Jade Empire
Fable:The Lost Chapters
Mercenarieslayground of Destruction
Sid Meier's Pirates

All turned out to be great games

 

[AgentLampshade]

Grandia II. I never owned it, only ever rented it. First time I did was because my friends were making fun of the cover (it was purple coloured, that's all I remember about it) and it turned out to be the best RPG I had played and the first I'd finished all the way through.

Seriously. Picture it, a 10/11 year old kid who loves good stories plays an obscure RPG with an awesome story about gods and conquering false religions for the very first time. It's probably the game that got me into gaming as a whole. I needed more stories!

Also Folklore for PS3. Remember that one? Travelling to the netherworld and battling souls of dead people. Also Ireland.

 

[Erttheking]

Dark Souls, I heard about it online a little bit but I never watched any gameplay. One day I saw it a reduced price at Best Buy, so I decided to buy it. Haven't looked back since.

 

[The Doughboy]

There are a few.

I had just bought the brand spankin' new spiderman game for my PC and we needed a graphics card with something called "transforming and lighting" capabilities. I got a graphics card for my b-day and it had 3 of the best pc games ever.

Sacrifice, No One Lives Forever, and Aquanox.

Yeah, it was like that.

I also bought Sid Meier's Pirates on a whim and loved it to bits.

Pirates>Ninjas

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

The game based off Peter Jackson's King Kong. Was expecting a crappy fighting game where you fought dinosaurs as King Kong. Got a very fun survival horror FPS with unique enemies, minor puzzles, good fire psychics, and fun gameplay.

 

[Gorilla Gunk]

Years ago I went into one of those no-name mall game shops and found a copy of a little game called The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind: GOTY Edition. Never heard of it and it was cheap and they didn't have the game I wanted so I got it.

Life. Changed.

 

[deathninja]

Space Empires III (and later IV and V), and Morrowind.

 

[Troublesome Lagomorph]

None. Can't afford to buy anything without knowing about it first.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

As a kid, I found a demo of Heroes Of Might & Magic 2, and fell in love. The series may have gone downhill a bit, but it's still a wonderful game to play. Grid-based strategy combat with spells, towns to be laid siege to, a variety of units and so on. Never played anything else quite like it.

HOMM3 was great too, but it's never really been the same since the first three games. I've been really pleasantly surprised by the newer King's Bounty games though, which are somewhat similar. I wasn't expecting much of them at all, because they were made by some Russian developer I'd never heard of and kind of bizarrely pulled the King's Bounty name out of nowhere almost 20 years later (where the original King's Bounty is what the first HOMM was actually based on/inspired by). Turns out they're not at all your typical crappy cash-in reboot and are way more fun than the recent HOMM games have been. I feel like I ripped them off getting the first one for a dollar in a sale a couple years ago completely on a whim, but I guess it did get me to buy the sequel and its expansion after that...

How difficult are they to run? I mean, I've got a PC these days which could probably run HOMM2, but anything more modern than that may cause it to explode...

They're not very demanding, but they might not run on something quite that ancient, depending on how much you're exaggerating. The first one will probably run pretty happily on most stuff from the past five or six years as long as it has a "real" video card instead of just on-board video, and the newer ones use the same engine. The minimum requirements listed are something like a mid-range Pentium 4 from 2003 and a video card old enough that I saw a better one on sale for literally $12 yesterday. They go on sale all the time on Steam and Amazon and other places, and it looks like at least the second one of them has a demo you could try too.

 

[OpticalJunction]

Binding of Isaac. I would never have even known about it if not for the steam sales and everyone's praises. At first it looked crap, shit graphics, lame style. But after a while... wow. The gameplay is actually *fun*. It's challenging and doesn't hold your hand. Rare to find an indie game so well designed, apart from the graphics.

 

[Irridium]

I thought Sid Meier's Pirates was some sort of Civilization expansion. It wasn't, but it was so fun I didn't care.

Best buying mistake I've made.

 

[Stealthygamer]

Gotcha force
an awesome gamecube about toy robots who fight other toy robots for the safety of earth and mankind

Persona 3&4
Found them at a booth at Fan Expo, bought them both for a total of 70$, dont regret it at all

 

[SlaveNumber23]

Ocarina of Time actually, when I was about 7 or 8 my parents took me to the shop to buy me any N64 game I wanted. I knew absolutely nothing about Ocarina of Time, had never even heard of it before, but when I saw the cover something draw me to it and I picked it, the other games didn't even stand a chance.

 

[DanielBrown]

Singularity. Found it in a sale bin when I was in a Gamespot somewhere. Decided to grab it since it was only ~100SEK(£9) and had tons of fun with the game. Way more than I expected at least.

 

[juggalosqueaks]

Aside from virtually every game I owned on the NES and SNES I'd say Legend of Legaia, Jade Cocoon, Valkyrie Profile, Civilization IV and the Legacy of Kain series just to name a few. Legend of Legaia I rented based on the story description way back when and the rest I stumbled upon in various friends' collections and got hooked.