What's your favorite unheard of and/or unappreciated games?

[Leftnt Sharpe]

Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone. Its written by RA Salvatore, has a pretty good combo system and you fight a Red Dragon. Oh and you get to play as Drizzt Do'Urden, even if it is only for one level.

 

[DSEZ]

Alien hominid was one of my favorite ps2 games of all time

 

[Nyaliva]

Klonoa for PS. It had a few sequels but no-one I know has heard of it and it was seriously one of the best games of my childhood. I still have it and play it every now and then. Something more recent, Golden Sun. It displays many of the problems with JRPGs: Long talking sequences, random monster encounters etc. But Golden Sun was, and is, one of the best because for every hour of grind-tastic levelling, there's a cool cave with tons of puzzles for you to solve by using elemental superpowers. Seriously, awesome.

And one more, which actually isn't unheard of or unappreciated (for those who've played it) but I just have to say it: The Professor Layton Series. Again, awesome.

 

[inFAMOUSCowZ]

I got 3

Alan Wake

Too Human

Brutal Legend

If you havent played these games please do so there a lot of fun. Well Be careful with Too Human, since most people really hate that game, but the other two are great.

 

[GrizzlerBorno]

Defcon and Darwinia by Introversion software.

 

[Admiral Stukov]

Unreal 2.

 

[Mouse One]

Dogfighter by Darkwater games. Basically, the concept was/is a 3D flying multiplayer TPS (or FPS, you can change the view). It just hasn't taken off, despite a highly involved dev team and some giggle worthy concepts like aircombat inside volcanos or triplanes carrying guided missiles. Part of the problem was that people either wanted something as easy to dive into as a typical WASD using FPS, or they wanted another PC flight sim (despite the ads for the game starting off with "This is not a simulator"). Darned pity, because it's different from pretty much anything out there, except maybe the old Crimson Skies game.

I got the game on Steam, I don't absolutely regret buying it but I guess its my fault for not looking into the game a bit more before buying it. My 1 and only qualm is No kind of Flight Stick support in the game. I don't mind that the game is arcadey but I thought being restricted to playing a "PC" flying game solely with a keyboard was a thing of the past. Great game though, i'm starting to get used to the keyboard controls.

They actually did add joystick control in a patch a few months back, worked for my Thrustmaster and MS Sidewinder. But they had some trouble with getting a couple of others, notably the Saitek X52, to work. It does take some fiddling on the preferences and tweaking of sensitivity-- a how to is here: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1382771

It underlines a couple of problems for indie studios. According to the devs on the forum, basically they ran out of money (which meant developement time) and felt it was a choice between releasing without joystick control or going out of business. So a lot of early customers bought it and said "What? No joystick control?". So they lost some market right off the bat.

The other problem is that while keyboards are pretty standardized, if a game genre requires (or is perceived to require) non-standardized controllers like joysticks, it's going to cost more.

Keyboard/mouse is actually not that hard to use (I was fine with it until the joystick patch, and FWIW, I'm a RL pilot). But it was definitely quirky, and more importantly, not what the market demographic expected. I think Rainchild's reaction was not uncommon: Quirky "arcade style" flight model is good, but quirky controls not so much.

 

[GiglameshSoulEater]

Chaos Gate for the PC. Sweet turn based space marines done brilliantly.

The difficulty curve on that game was brutal.

There's Squad Command for the DS for similiar 40,000k action, even if the scale is a bit lower.

Chaos League, basically bloodbowl before the crappy xbox port of it.

 

[FightThePower]

This game is so badass it doesn't use any lower case letters. Not a single one.

 

[chocolatekake]

Baten Kaitos. End of Discussion. Doesn't get more unheard of than that

Fucking ninja'd, I was coming into this topic to tell people about that game.

Voice acting was passable at best, but every else was amazing.

The storyline, its characters, The music (OMFG! the music), and one of the most realised worlds in a jrpg, makes it one of my most favourite jrpg's alongside Chrono trigger, Final fantasy VIII, and star ocean the second story.

Brilliant, brilliant game, can't recommend it enough.

THIS GAME! Definitely! And I totally agree with you about the music. Motoi Sakuraba is my favorite composer.

Also, it seems like only die-hard JRPG fans know about Tales of Symphonia, unfortunately.

Another great one that nobody I know has ever heard of is Riviera: The Promised Land for GBA.

 

[Fidelias]

I'm not sure it's unheard of, but I haven't seen too many people ranting on about the epicness that it is:

The Darkness

Seriously, it's not just because you can have your demon-thing eat the hearts out of corpses (though that's kind of awesome too, in a disturbing kind of way, I mean...)

The game just really let's you understand how the main character feels. The story is awesome, and I love the bittersweet ending.

But then again, I'm just a sucker for the badass emo anti-hero.

Edit: Okay, so I kind of described it poorly... I don't know how to describe it... It's based off a comic book... dammit! I'm making it sound even worse now! Just look it up, It's really much better than it sounds.

 

[aLivingPheonix]

Primal. It's a... Third person something for the PS2. I haven't played it in a while, but it was awesome. Especially the gargoyle, who's name I forgot.

If I remember correctly, it has a female character who's not a slut. I could be mistaken, though.

I remember that one! I remember it being alright. Not fantastic, but quite good. By the way, there have been a number of non-slut female characters in video games.

I'm a bit surprised no one's said Okami yet. I'm not sure how obscure it really is, though.

As for mine: Uplink, which is on Steam now (so you should go play it), and Commander Keen. Seriously, I talk to people all the time who have never heard of that one, and it makes me a sad panda.

I love Commander Keen! It was one of the first games I played.

I know there are a quite a few non-slutty female characters, but at the time I played primal, the only one I knew about was Farah, from PoP:SoT.

 

[MAUSZX]

Deadly Premonition should be played by everyone.
It's so damn bad, that it's really quite fun.

So says Mr. Stewart.

I've never played a game like that.

 

[F'Angus]

supersonic acrobatic rocket powered battle cars... So much fun

 

[MAUSZX]

Ghostbusters
Alan Wake
Army of two 40th day
Castelvania Curse of darkness
X2 wolverine revenge
And Sims 3 for consoles.
All of them unappreciated, those games did'nt sell that well or never mention when it comes to good games.