Underrated Games

[consortium11]

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Thirded.

Looking back it actually could be my favourite RP of all time...

[Rosier]

Not so much in the way of videogame RPG's, but there's two games that come to my mind for being underrated:

- The Disgaea franchise, I enjoy the games quite a lot and some of the humor the series has. Started on the PS2, has a game for the DS, PS3 and I think one or two for the PSP. Personally, I prefer the DS version (it's a game that fits the handheld quite well), but I haven't found myself enjoying it any less on the PS2 or PS3.

- Homefront, and this is a first person shooter. When it was released, the publishing company and the development team (at this time, KAOS) failed to realize how many servers they would need and their servers ended up being overloaded. This caused a lot of network, connection and lag issues with the game early on that turned a lot of people off. (I don't think many of the PS3 community still play this game). As time went on, some glitches in the game (invisibility glitch, for one) cropped up and people left due to this, and due to the small gun selection and so on. I've played it on the 360 with minimal trouble, and I find this game incredibly balanced and just insanely fun. It's such a joy to buy an Apache helicopter and tear up the other team, and it's a joy to go around blowing up campers who are sitting all the way at the back of the map. Plus, the 32 player lobby (for objective gametypes) makes it a lot more chaotic and fun, hard to miss out on the action.

Plus, I don't know who wouldn't love shooting a helicopter out of the sky with an Abrams tank.


Those are the two most obscure, underrated games I've personally played and enjoyed.

[Shjade]

Jagged Alliance 2. I will orally pleasure this game from now til the end of eternity. A decent game on its own, but once the modders got their hands on it, it became a great game. I love it, though it's good luck getting other people to play it.

Just bringing this one up again because it's currently on sale for $5 on Steam.

[CmdrRenegade]

Bioshock 2.  Honestly, I don't understand all the hate it gets.  I thought the plot was good, although it should have a bit more development and the gameplay was still fun.  I didn't even mind guarding the Little Sisters as they harvested.

[Shjade]

I didn't even mind guarding the Little Sisters as they harvested.

Probably why you don't relate to the hate it gets. Aside from whatever issues the story may or may not have (I haven't successfully run Bioshock 2 on my machine to get the bulk of it firsthand, though the Yahtzee version was not optimistic - as if that's a surprise), most gamers I know, myself included, hold escort and protect NPC missions at the very top of the list of things games do to irritate the crap out of players. Not true for everyone, but more often than not.

[Sabby]

The hate is exagerated... the protect missions are short and not mandatory, and really, when else do you have a chance to set up some traps, knowing someone will actually run headlong into them?

Plus the new Hypnotize Plasmid made the game for me. Being able to bring a posse of Splicers where I go was a total game changer.

As for the plot...

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

Sofia Lamb was a perfectly Anti-Ryan, in my opinion. Andrew was all about helping yourself, while Sofia thought that grooming a society was the better option, not the individual. You can't build Utopia, as Ryan tried to do. Rapture is just a place, and the people inside of it are what ultimate destroyed it. So until a society was ready to embrace Utopia, it could not exist.

Her daughter, Eleanor, was taken and turned into a Little Sister, in the experimental 'Alpha' program, or the early stages of Big Daddy research. As far as I know, Eleanor and Delta were the only successful pair, bonded telepathically to each other. Alpha's were more intelligent and able to use Plasmids, and were also faster, which Yahtzee called out, but he seems to have missed the all important detail that Alpha's were dropped because they were prone to insanity. Losing the bonded Little Sister and having all those Plasmids made them a bad Monday waiting to happen... The Big Daddy's you see now are streamlined, a much simpler and easier design who would protect any Little Sister, unlike Delta, who loves Eleanor unconditionally. 

Eleanor was later rescued and partially reformed. Elements of her Little Sister heritage remain, the ability to comunicate with and control Little Sisters, process Adam and reform her tissue (this one I don't understand, as her Adam slug was surely removed). Sofia saw this as 'a blessing in disguise'. Eleanor was always meant to be a an example of a Utopian, and now she had the ability to siphon knowledge and memories from blood... and was surrounded by the dead or Spliced up remains of the greatest minds on Earth.

Sofia's plan was to have Eleanor absorb all of this knowledge with her unique Little Sister traits and use it for 'the common good', a selfless and logical being. A Utopian, first of a new race. The new age Jesus, basically.

Depending on your choices, Eleanor either kills or saves her mother, and you all escape to the surface, where she finally drains all of Delta, taking him from his body and into her mind, as her 'conscience'. She says 'the world is not ready for her, yet here she is'. I may be wrong, but I understood those words as things not always going perfectly to plan, as Sofia would have wanted, but its not as bad as we think it is.

[CmdrRenegade]

Probably why you don't relate to the hate it gets. Aside from whatever issues the story may or may not have (I haven't successfully run Bioshock 2 on my machine to get the bulk of it firsthand, though the Yahtzee version was not optimistic - as if that's a surprise), most gamers I know, myself included, hold escort and protect NPC missions at the very top of the list of things games do to irritate the crap out of players. Not true for everyone, but more often than not.

In most cases, I would agree with you.  I played on Normal and I didn't find the Little Sisters too difficult to protect.  Trap Rivets and a couple of Mini Turrets took care of most things.  It also helped that I had the Tonic equipped that gets them to harvest faster. 

[NotoriusBEN]

OH! Valkyria Profile: Lenneth is the PSP version?! Didnt know that. dammit. it was at the store for 20$.

as for under-rated games...

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective -- just came out for DS. its got a good story, a bit wordy (its a JRPG) but its modern, not fantasy.
Persona 3 and 4 -- again modern JRPGs. these games just rock, and 4 was such a huge refreshment from fight the evil empire of so many RPGs. You gotta solve a murder mystery.

Alpha Protocol - good story and amazing dialogue system. Now take this dialogue system and story and boot strap Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory's gameplay and it. will. be. epic.  one of my gripes with AP is that I got hung up on a 2foot tall sandbag wall. >.> easy enough to step over but your agent is apparently not as dynamic a thinker as you are.

Kill.Switch -- this game is to cover mechanics what Metal Gear: Solid is to Stealth Mechanics. There were no games before these of their genre. Kill switch was a little... weird... in that you basically kept moving forward through cover, using blindfire and grenades. You could even spoof the enemy and flank them if you kept their heads down. actually turning 90degrees right or left was a chore, and the camera was a bitch to move. but it wasnt a big deal with enemies that were always in front of you. the final level actually had some alternate paths so it was a bit hectic then.

XCOM: UFO Defense -- I've seen games try to do this service, but nothing is as awesome as this for turn-based, Men in Black awesome.
It was turn-based yes, but you *could* perform swat tactics with it. the only caveat was those damn crystalids. They had 40 eggs which they could implant with a melee prick, instantly turn your operatives (that you trained and mentored for hours of gameplay) into zombies that were lost to you. when you killed your former teammates TWO MORE crystalids would spawn from the husk. Did I mention they are resilient to most small arms, lasers and plasma? which is about 95% of your arsenal?

literally, one crystalid could wipe out your entire 12man team in 2 turns. just restart the mission, cuz the organization would take too much of a setback to train green recruits with new gear .

[Sabby]

Hellboy: The Science of Evil.

...this ones strange to explain, because really, its not that impressive. At all. Graphics, gameplay, story, all of it is very average, and it doesn't really try and do anything different. Its just a mostly fixed camera third person game where you run around punching various monsters or lifting them over your head to hurl them like javelins into whatever looks fragile.

Having said all that, its a decent beat 'em up, which is like an extremely endangered species in this age, with God of War and Ninja Gaiden the two abstinent panda bears we're lavishing so much attention on.

[Sabby]

Uhg, I take that all bad. Looked it up on Youtube. Looks like I was extremely bored when I played it, because I remembered it WAY too fondly.

[Bayushi]

A PC game I grabbed off of Steam for cheap, that I was always seeing a friend playing.

Torchlight, it's basically Diablo done right. Except it doesn't have multiplayer/LAN play, nor online multiplayer.

Torchlight 2 is supposed to be out very soon, which I'm looking forward to, as I would LOVE to play this game with my friend online, as the Torchlight 2 is supposed to have LAN/Online coop play.

Otherwise, it's just like diablo... health bubble, mana bubble; with Potions for each. Hack'n'slash dungeon crawling with spells and the like. Monsters drop gear/scrolls/gems(like Diablo 2's runes).

Strange story, that I couldn't even provide spoilers on (as I haven't completed the game yet). I think Torchlight was an experiment to gauge the interest in the game, with Torchlight 2 acting as the "full" version.

It's strange that I just don't hear about this game outside of random references on different gaming forums.

[DarklingAlice]

I second Torchlight. Although it can wear on you as time goes by. I tend to play it in spurts. And I play it on max difficulty with hardcore mode on and thus still haven't beat it <_<

Which reminds me. ROGUELIKES. An entire genre of games that gets completely ignored by mainstream gaming. Seriously. Head over to RogueBasin and check them out.

[Oniya]

Oh god - the computers at my college had the original Rogue on them. 

[Inkidu]

The hate is exagerated... the protect missions are short and not mandatory, and really, when else do you have a chance to set up some traps, knowing someone will actually run headlong into them?

Plus the new Hypnotize Plasmid made the game for me. Being able to bring a posse of Splicers where I go was a total game changer.

As for the plot...

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

Sofia Lamb was a perfectly Anti-Ryan, in my opinion. Andrew was all about helping yourself, while Sofia thought that grooming a society was the better option, not the individual. You can't build Utopia, as Ryan tried to do. Rapture is just a place, and the people inside of it are what ultimate destroyed it. So until a society was ready to embrace Utopia, it could not exist.

Her daughter, Eleanor, was taken and turned into a Little Sister, in the experimental 'Alpha' program, or the early stages of Big Daddy research. As far as I know, Eleanor and Delta were the only successful pair, bonded telepathically to each other. Alpha's were more intelligent and able to use Plasmids, and were also faster, which Yahtzee called out, but he seems to have missed the all important detail that Alpha's were dropped because they were prone to insanity. Losing the bonded Little Sister and having all those Plasmids made them a bad Monday waiting to happen... The Big Daddy's you see now are streamlined, a much simpler and easier design who would protect any Little Sister, unlike Delta, who loves Eleanor unconditionally. 

Eleanor was later rescued and partially reformed. Elements of her Little Sister heritage remain, the ability to comunicate with and control Little Sisters, process Adam and reform her tissue (this one I don't understand, as her Adam slug was surely removed). Sofia saw this as 'a blessing in disguise'. Eleanor was always meant to be a an example of a Utopian, and now she had the ability to siphon knowledge and memories from blood... and was surrounded by the dead or Spliced up remains of the greatest minds on Earth.

Sofia's plan was to have Eleanor absorb all of this knowledge with her unique Little Sister traits and use it for 'the common good', a selfless and logical being. A Utopian, first of a new race. The new age Jesus, basically.

Depending on your choices, Eleanor either kills or saves her mother, and you all escape to the surface, where she finally drains all of Delta, taking him from his body and into her mind, as her 'conscience'. She says 'the world is not ready for her, yet here she is'. I may be wrong, but I understood those words as things not always going perfectly to plan, as Sofia would have wanted, but its not as bad as we think it is.

I think Bioshock 2 isn't so much underrated (though it is) as it is probably the greatest missed opportunity in the past ten or so years in the industry.

Jack at the end of Bioshock is more Big-Daddy than Alpha ever was. Such a waste. The idea of being a Big Daddy is that shit ain't supposed to be steppin' all up in your diving mask. Irrational new this, and they acknowledged it in several interviews (among which was Game Informer and several other respected video game sources). However, I think it has to do with not having gamers for play testers or something.

Instead of being a half juggernaut at the start of the game and being able to handle basic splicers like they're candy your suit is made of what has to be wet paper and you die way too easily. I mean you should at least be on par with other BDs but you're not. You're just Jack all over again. The problem is people were there and got the T-shirt.

Big Sister who was supposed to be a single recurring boss from what I understood got downgraded to Big Daddy with boobs
Just a host of missed gameplay chances.

On topic: I think Deus Ex: Invisible War was underrated. It was tried way too early to do what it was attempting. The game still had multiple paths, endings, and customization. I saw what they were trying to do though, they were trying to get you out of arbitrary stats and more into the choices of implants you wanted to make, what you wanted to focus on and all that. It didn't turn out so well, but only the most hardcore fans are the one's spewing venom I find. More augment slots would have helped a lot too.

[DarklingAlice]

Oh god - the computers at my college had the original Rogue on them.

The computers at my elementary school had the old D&D ASCII dungeon crawler which predates even Rogue. I lost so much of my childhood to that game. I really wish I could find it again.

[Shjade]

Strange story, that I couldn't even provide spoilers on (as I haven't completed the game yet). I think Torchlight was an experiment to gauge the interest in the game, with Torchlight 2 acting as the "full" version.

Could be true if not for the existence of FATE. Torchlight is basically FATE 2.

[Geeklet]

Well, the people who made torchlight, also had their hands on both Fate and the original Diablo, so is it really any coincidence?

[Shjade]

Of course not. Torchlight pretty much combines baseline Diablo with 90% of FATE's mechanics (pets, fishing, generational hero promotions on retiring, childlike graphics, etc.). It'd have to either be a blatant knock-off or continuation of work by some of the same folks.

[coolhands]

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Defiantly agree with this one.  This was an amazing game, a little broken at times but it was so worth every second i put into it.
i would also like to add the PC game Deus Ex another one of my favorite underrated games.

[Callie Del Noire]

Defiantly agree with this one.  This was an amazing game, a little broken at times but it was so worth every second i put into it.
i would also like to add the PC game Deus Ex another one of my favorite underrated games.

I LOVED Arcanum (even brokern) and I'm looking forward to Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

[Shjade]

Deus Ex may have an underrated RPG side to its FPS gameplay, but I dunno about the game on the whole being underrated. All it takes is a quick browse through some Youtube clips of the voice acting in that game to remind me why I've never had the urge to go back and play it again. x.x;

[Callie Del Noire]

Deus Ex may have an underrated RPG side to its FPS gameplay, but I dunno about the game on the whole being underrated. All it takes is a quick browse through some Youtube clips of the voice acting in that game to remind me why I've never had the urge to go back and play it again. x.x;

True.. but they got GOOD voices this time around.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution extended trailer [HD]

[coolhands]

i am so excited for Human Revolution as well.  There are so many amazing trailers out for it now.

[Callie Del Noire]

i am so excited for Human Revolution as well.  There are so many amazing trailers out for it now.

Just found all this sort of things.

I am looking forward to next week.

[coolhands]

Another great underrated game was sphinx and the cursed mummy.