Strife - last commercial release (at least until a recent retro game using it) of the Doom Engine. Picked it up for £3.50 or something about '97.
Think Hexen but plot, charming pixel-comic art, and some potentially frustrating boss fights and rpg lite elements.
Lots of fun, and does interesting stuff. I quote the voice acting quite a lot, but no one notices.Tactics Ogre. I see people drop Final Fantasy Tactics as the greatest tactics game of all time. Then you always see Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and Disgaea after. People sleep on Tactics Ogre. It’s a mechanically superior game to all of the mentioned. It’s story is equally as good as FFT. I think the graphics are better. It’s a challenging game from the start. FFT was created with the Tactics Ogre director and lead artist to be a more accessible version of TO. People see 90s golden era Final Fantasy and automatically put FFT on a pedestal. TO is like Undertaker stalking AJ Styles ready to obliterate whatever is in its way.
Guardian Heroes was an outstanding RPG beat 'em up on Sega Saturn. It had
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a two player co-op storyline with branching choices to get alternate endings
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unlockable characters for a 6-player arena mode
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incredibly unique characters to unlock, spellcasting with ➡️⬅️⬆️⬇️ input
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and a kick ass soundtrack.
Nothing has really scratched the same itch since (yes, in aware there’s a sequel, but it’s terrible).
That sounds great. The kind of game I’d’ve loved but never had any Sega consoles (and no one really spoke about emulating them) so missed all of it.
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Balrum
Beautiful isometric game inspired by 80’s and 90’s CRPGs.
Mars: War Logs, and Technomancer
Cyber Empires (PC), Shadowrun (Genesis), Betrayal at Krondor (PC).
I think I’d have to say La-Mulana.
Dysmantle.
Casual post apocalyptic survival etc game. It’s also available on consoles, switch and mobile.
Endless Sky According to wikipedia it is a space trading and combat simulation game. Its free and open source, has a lot of content (even more with plugins). You do missions to get the storyline forward and to get money, you can also mine asteroid, trade with other planets, attack other ships and plunder them. You discover new species and Outfits to make your space ship better, etc.
Shadow Tactics Desperados III The Thaumaturge
Bugsnax. It’s like Pokemon Snap/Legends Arceus, but the Pokemon are food items, like a sub-sandwich centipede or a lollipop dragonfly. You can feed them to people, and when you do, their body parts turn into the food they just ate. It’s great!
Kinetica - a racing game where the ‘vehicles’ are people in mechanical suits that make them look like sexy mecha, racing to old techno
Bloody Roar - a series of fighting games where you fight as people who can suddenly shift into other forms, some recognizable animals and some abstract, and with the ability in some arenas to kick people through walls or over ledges into new arenas
Forsaken - 3D hover vehicle battles
Tiny Tank - a game where you play as a sweary AI tank
Megaman Legends 1 and 2 - Megaman as a 3d adventure game with a storyline and characters
Gitaroo Man - a rhythm game I enjoyed, later imitated by some others
Shadow of the Colossus - more known but not cared for these days. A game in which there are only boss battles. A subtly told story. Part of the ICO universe.
Titan Souls - One boy, one bow, one arrow that can be magically recalled to the bow, and giant stone destroyers that he must conquer with nothing more. Kind of a 2D Shadow of the Colossus
BPM: Bullets Per Minute - everyone has the idea for a rhythm FPS. This is the only one that does a good job of it.
Receiver - a game in which you don’t just hit R to reload, but have to go through the full manual of arms, dropping the clip, holstering the weapon, loading each round into the clip, drawing the weapon, seating the clip, racking the round, checking the chamber to make sure it fed correctly, aiming, firing, clearing the jam, all while worrying about killer robots.
Valley - a movement game that has such an amazing feeling of freedom in its movement
Tunnet - lovecraftian network technician game
Wiz n’Liz
Escape Velocity and its open-source spiritual successor, Endless Sky.
Escape Velocity also had a sequel or two done by Ambrosia Software themselves. I remember playing and enjoying them.
kagis
Escape Velocity Override and Escape Velocity Nova.
It looks like Ambrosia Software’s website is now down, so I assume that one can’t legally purchase it any more.
It looks like Escape Velocity was never ported to anything outside of classic MacOS, so playing it today probably entails obtaining a classic MacOS emulator and abandonware copies of the binaries.
While Endless Sky is neat and last I looked still getting expanded, it also didn’t have as much story content as the Escape Velocity series either (again, at least last I looked).
The image of each planet in Escape Velocity series (not really worth keeping IMHO, as they were saved at 8-bit depth) were done with KPT Bryce, a now out-of-print terrain generation and rendering software package. Probably one of the better-suited applications for it, as it was pretty good at letting one quickly turn out alien-looking landscapes. While there are newer terrain generation software packages, I have to say that Bryce did a lot of neat stuff and I don’t feel that there’s something that quite fills its “exploration” role in modeling and rendering software today. For example, procedural generation of textures using slope and altitude (so, for example, you could get rocky faces where generated terain was steep, or snow at high altitude on mountains).
Re. EV series ports - check the first link in my previous comment ;)
And I had the same experience with Endless Sky when I first found out about it some years ago. It has gotten a lot of updates since then, but I am holding out for a 1.0 release
Ah, gotcha!
EV Nova is what got me hooked on Star Citizen
Epistory and Nanotales
Both fantastic games with beautiful graphics and good for typing practice.
