Games you have a soft spot for despite its flaws.

[Mordecai "3 Finger" Brown]

The Legend for the Mystical Ninja for SNES

The dollar store at the mall used to sell shovelware SNES titles for 20$, which was cheap at the time.

My brother bought this one (I think I bought Star Boy)

It had couch co-op, neat graphics, zany enemies.

Interesting mechanics, like powerups making your melee weapon comically long. And your projectile was coins you could throw but was also your currency.

Colorful bosses that were fun to beat.

I recall there was some sort of carnival level halfway through the game, so we'd often beat the first couple of levels just to play minigames against each other at the midway for hours.

 

[Glory To Arztotska]

Legend of the Mystical Ninja was my first ever video game. Found it in a Walmart bag on the sidewalk walking home with my folks in the rain when I was a kid---despite that and a crack in the cartridge casing it still worked fine (we got an SNES later).

Still a fun romp even today, honestly. And I credit it for my becoming a filthy degenerate weeb lifelong love of Japanese culture and history, even if it was intended as parody. (The haunted temple level is pretty legitimately atmospheric though.)

 

[Absolutego]

Anyone remember Observer? The indie horror cyberpunk game that had Rutger Hauer voicing the main character?
It's short, the story is kind of ehh, and the gameplay is classic slavjank but man, that atmosphere fucking rocked.

 

[Sir Baz the Intolerant]

This game here is probably responsible for everything from my War Thunder addiction to my career path. I would be genuinely surprised if anyone else even knows about it as it's the very definition of a Blockbuster bargain bin buy, and fuck me does it have the gameplay to match. Controls were clunky, the camera wasn barely responsive, and even for a game made for 5 year olds the story was almost non existent and because it was 2002 the localisation amounted to the efforts of some guy in an office in Tokyo playing guesswork with a Japanese to English dictionary.

But despite all that I remember it being a very fun little tank game that I poured God know how many hours into as a wee un.

 

[Glory To Arztotska]

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This game here is probably responsible for everything from my War Thunder addiction to my career path. I would be genuinely surprised if anyone else even knows about it as it's the very definition of a Blockbuster bargain bin buy, and fuck me does it have the gameplay to match. Controls were clunky, the camera wasn barely responsive, and even for a game made for 5 year olds the story was almost non existent and because it was 2002 the localisation amounted to the efforts of some guy in an office in Tokyo playing guesswork with a Japanese to English dictionary.

But despite all that I remember it being a very fun little tank game that I poured God know how many hours into as a wee un.

You ever play Battletanx?

 

[Giant Troonade]

Fallout 3 is unironically my favorite Fallout. Yes the dialogue and story is trash compared to New Vegas and New Vegas as a whole is just a refinement on FO3, but man I just get lost in the Capital Wasteland every time I play. I will admit I only ever play it with TTW installed anymore. I wish Fallout 4 and 76 weren't such atrocities but I will die on the hill of Fallout 3 being underrated.

Atomic Heart was a cool game with a great art direction just let down by some baffling design choices, the infinitely spawning repair drones make any part of the game that isn't in one of the facilities a slog where it's better to just haul ass whenever possible instead of wasting ammo and consumables on the enemies. It's still a 7/10 game in spite of that and I like to think Mundfish will make a better sequel, if one ever gets made. It would be a shame to let the IP go to waste.

Pikmin 2 is the best Pikmin game and I won't let autistic video essayists addicted to baby movies slander it's name. Maybe the game does rely on dungeons a bit too much but I still prefer the dungeon gameplay over the overworld focused Pikmin games. I'm glad Pikmin 4 brought them back.

 

[Dysnomia]

Deadly Towers. It's not a great game. But it had potential in there so I love it for what it is.

 

[ShiftyBoi]

War of the Monsters.

A very passable arena fighter that gets by on its incredible music, sound effects, and art direction.

The main menu is a movie projected on a drive-in screen! Brilliant!

That said the combat is not terribly deep, certain stages have trouble finding the balance between too big and too small, and certain throwable objects are completely broken. I picked it up and played it with my brother a few years ago, as fun as it is the premise wears thin pretty fast with how shallow the combat is, and once the arena is destroyed it becomes just a fist fight between two characters that might as well play the same.

 

[WilliamDeLaPole]

Goosebumps Escape From Horrorland

Over the top acting, pretty short, that shitty werewolf sequence, and Jeff Goldblum is in it for some reason. Still I can't help but enjoy it.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Ascendancy is a space "4X" vidya released by The Logic Factory in late 1995. It has a rather unintelligent AI compared to other "4X" vidyas of the time, and can have rather repetitive gameplay with excess micromanagement. However it does have good pre-rendered 3DCG graphics, and very alien-looking aliens. Still like Master of Orion 2 more BTW.

 

[Town Drunk]

Anarchy Online. Game made to be broken. If you didn't know how to crunch math, have buff items, beg for buffs, have a total plan on which items to equip on how to put on other items, etc on how to put a level 200 item on a level 50 charecter, the game was almost unplayable. Certain classes could not solo. Only made worse in the expansion, where they raised the armor on all the new enemies so that the old stuff was useless.

Also, there were no instances, so every dungeon had people spawn camping, or running from the respawning mobs and leading them to you.
If you were too high level, you couldn't even enter, hence the need to twink.


But it's the best MMO I've ever played. The world was massive, the lore was deep, so many shops and flavor items/areas/quests. Setting was amazing. The starting areas got nerfed with the alien expansion pack, but it added player citys. Also had customizable housing, which most MMOS don't have even today.

Sadly, was left to rot. Hasen't had an update in over a decade, even the offical downloader doesn't work anymore. (or didn't as of two years ago when I last tried it)

One of these days I plan to put the effort in to try to get a private server going, just so I can make myself a mod and fuly explore it's depths.

 

[Soup Sammiches]

Turn and burn dogmeat!

 

[Glory To Arztotska]

Turn and burn dogmeat!

GIANT MUTANT BRAIN-EATING FIREFLIES!

 

[Neodanthril]

banjo kazooie nuts and bolts. i never had the og banjo games growing up so i didnt have banjo nostalgia, and the game was shit, but me and my friend had a lot of fun building silly contraptions in the singular multiplayer level of any signifigance.

 

[Bruce LaLiLuLeLo]

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The Legend for the Mystical Ninja for SNES

The dollar store at the mall used to sell shovelware SNES titles for 20$, which was cheap at the time.

My brother bought this one (I think I bought Star Boy)

It had couch co-op, neat graphics, zany enemies.

Interesting mechanics, like powerups making your melee weapon comically long. And your projectile was coins you could throw but was also your currency.

Colorful bosses that were fun to beat.

I recall there was some sort of carnival level halfway through the game, so we'd often beat the first couple of levels just to play minigames against each other at the midway for hours.

Oh this one I really fucking love this game. It has open ended levels with quests, it's a beat em up + platformer, the character design is very good also.

I'm gonna go with ice age 2 the meltdown for ps2 I think, maybe ps3. It's not a Activision dreamworks game so it's not an S tier movie tie in game but I really liked the scrat gameplay and different mechanics, especially the acorn point system. It has a lot of shitty scripted sections but towards the end it becomes much better, has a lot of zelda like puzzles n stuff.

Also brigador, it's by no means a bad game but it runs pretty badly on pc and is very repetitive. Excellent soundtrack though.

 

[Cardinal Cardinal]

I had a lot of fun playing too human with my friends. We ragged on how shitty it was the entire time

I think that was the game where in one of the cutscenes a pillar was about to fall on a dude and he said "by odins beard! Nooooo!" and it took a while before the pillar actually hit.

My pick is Resident Evil 6, the story was trash, the beginning of Leon's scenario had one of the worst drawn out walk n chats before you could actually play, and several other areas had oddly long, unskippable exploring/story phases between combat.
What I did like was you could go through the majority of the game using just melee and counters if you knew the timing. Doing dumb shit like jumping back or sliding forward while firing on the ground. I also like the idea of joining other online players when the story of their scenario crossed into yours. Mercanaries was also fun as fuck, you could do all kinds of moves like shoot a zombie in the leg, shoot him in the shoulder to make him spin around, then snap his neck from behind.

 

[Glory To Arztotska]

Relatedly Resident Evil 5 has its problems but it basically made Resident Evil 4 gameplay in co-op and who would say no to that if your buddy booted it up and asked if you were doing anything else today?

Also I like that you can play each chapter individually and try for gimmick/challenge runs at your leisure instead of having to go through the game in one sitting.

 

[Maxwell Carter]

"THERE'S A BOMB! FIRE! FIRE! EVERYBODY RUN! I love being in YIIK."

 

[Counterfeit Obol]

Also brigador, it's by no means a bad game but it runs pretty badly on pc and is very repetitive. Excellent soundtrack though.

Man, I can't wait for Brigador Killers...

 

[Glory To Arztotska]

STALKER is classic Slavjank even amongst other Slavjank games. It also is refreshingly uncompromising on the difficulty and has "ecosystem" AI that is still only rarely replicated today.

And mods for STALKER Anomaly (itself a mod) can do some absolutely genius stuff.

STALKER 2 looks like junk, though. I dunno whether to praise GSC for ever getting it out or thinking they shouldn't have bothered and telling the people who wanted to consoom it that badly they're dumbass fanboys.