/v/ - Video Games

hidden gems thread?

>>15718238

I hate that I've watched a couple of his videos and enjoyed them.

I fucking hate it.

All right anon, here's your one chance to be cool. You're gonna follow this Vector link and click the big green download button and get yourself Vacant Ark, a really well polished freeware shooter with an innovative gimmick of ammo management. It's easily better than Cave Story and a lot of those other overrated fad games that came out around the same time.

https://www.vector.co.jp/soft/win95/game/se396826.html

I'm going to have to shill Super Daryl Deluxe. Imagine a newgrounds-era flash game about a high school that's full of portals between dimensions. You can envision it, right ? Now picture it as a fully fledged game with content out the ass, a solid sense of discovery, tight balancing between the gold you collect and what the vendors asks for, and genuine creativity as you progress. They even include Napoleon as a major character and don't make fun of his height like your average dumbass.

>>15718238

Shut the fuck up. Don't associate every little known games thread you see with this faggot, you've gone so far to ridicule this e-celeb that you've gone right back to unironically shilling him.

>Overload

Do you like good level design? Do you like Doom? Do you like Doom in zero gravity? Have you even heard of Descent?

If so, go play Overload right fucking now. It's a six-degrees-of-freedom FPS featuring fifteen full-sized 30-minute long complex labyrinthine keycard-gated true-3D levels (just fucking look at it) with a minimum of 5 secrets for each level, by the original creators of Descent. Every level you have to blow up the reactor, and then make it to the emergency exit in time before the facility self-destructs. You get eight primary and eight secondary missile weapons of which are all balanced, and you get to ram into enemies to get a bit of health back and inflict stun. Enemies come in many shapes, variants, and even behavior. Some like to rush you, hang back and snipe you, or just perform hit 'n run attacks like the cheeky buggers they are.The AI is actually intelligent here (they can even respond to your flares and flashlight). The controls just feel smooth and natural. It looks good, especially where the dynamic lighting in dimly lit alien caves is concerned. It sounds good, the music is suitably pulsating and the sound design sounds both satisfying and is helpful to let you pinpoint the position of sounds.

It's an Unity Engine game that's actually optimized (it won't run on your Pentium though, it's still Unity), which the developers accomplished by simply rewriting most of Unity's rendering code themselves. There's a story that's told largely through audio logs, but you can skip most of it and turn down voice chatter. Throughout levels you can find upgrade points which can be used to upgrade your ship inbetween levels. Weapons can be upgraded to different branches, like picking between automatic fire for your shotgun or increased damage and push force. Since this game takes place in zero gravity, the force of your weapons can influence the direction of enemies, so by shooting them off-center you can make them turn in another direction so they can't properly aim at you, rewarding good aim.

There's multiplayer, but it's kind of dead, as matchmaking can take a while and there's little guarantee you won't be matched against a Descent veteran in Australia with 10 years of experience under his belt. When you complete the game you get access to New Game+, which revamps all levels to include more enemy types you'd normally find towards the end of the game, making the game more challenging overall. Overload also came with a level editor on release, and just like in the old days, some of the community-made levels for Overload are sold in an official community level pack which isn't half bad either.

I don't think it's an overexaggeration to say Overload is the best FPS released in the past decade. Not just because of a lack of competition either, it takes almost everything Descent 1 and 2 did and improves on it, and is now the de facto standard for what a 6DoF FPS should strive to be. When you look at the upcoming official Descent reboot, it just looks wank in comparison.

>>15718225

>>15718225

Great game, the original is one of my favorite games of all time and Clean Sweep did a great job of living up to it even after the semi-disappointing Park Patrol.

Kururin is a lesser-known Nintendo series of 3 games (GBA/GBA/GCN). You navigate a constantly spinning stick through mazes with different obstacles. You can control the move speed and rotation speed by holding different button combos, so it's great if you're into shaving seconds off best times. It's also been an assist trophy in some smash games

famicom tantei club part ii

(don't worry about sequels, it's the only one translated into english and chronologically the first anyway)

You are a young detective tasked with investigating the death of local high school girl Yoko. What at first seems to be just another simple murder case takes you deeper than you could possibly imagine.

Amazing game, takes about 7 hours to complete. If you like Ace Attorney, you will like this game. I've included the prepatched rom with the post.

Gladiator Begins. It's a sequel to Colosseum: Road to Freedom (Both titles are グラディエーター in Nippon), which was an alright PS2 title, but fixes virtually everything wrong with the original. The Roman setting is actually a bit more than window dressing: Gladiators come from specific provinces and are themed around them, historical reenactment fights reference real battles and the odd historical figure appears. Playing as a female character also changes the dialog substantially, with several NPCs being shocked that some of the female patrons are interested in you slave pussy.

Gameplay wise you have 5 sections of armor: Left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg and helmet. You also have four attacks that roughly correspond to attacking these areas. If you attack an area enough the armor attached to it falls off. Notice I said roughly correspond to each area: Attacks will damage whatever they actually hit, so depending on your distance and positioning you can hit different body parts. This includes attacking the chest, which can't have armor and is the most advantageous to attack. Since each attack also moves you, it can change where enemy attacks hit and possibly interrupt them.

>>15718225

>SUOMI

>>15719785

>enforcing a time limit independent of the game's system on others

>demanding victory

>no true scotsman fallacy

I agree they're great games but your approach is all fucked up.

Arino can't beat a lot of games but you could never say he's not a gamer. He did beat Battletoads though, so perhaps ought else matters

nothing too niche but easy to overlook (especially as they never had an official english release)

>Lagrange Point

A sci-fi RPG on the NES. An AI has gone berserk on a colony class space station and you're here to fix it.

>Cyber Knight 1&2

Everything Mass Effect should have been. Pseudo-tactical RPGs with space exploration, charting new planets, walker suit robots, and an impressive amount of inspiration from Fred Saberhagen's Berseker novel series.

>Live A Live

Journey through 7 vastly different but tenuously linked stories set in various eras from caveman days to the far future. Watch it all come to a head in the unlocked 8th story and go right off the rails depending on who you choose for the 9th.

>Magical Vacation

You played Magical Starsign, right? Right? Well this is its predecessor on the GBA.

>>15720166

more

>Energy Breaker

A tactical RPG featuring cute anime people. Moe by the 90s standard. Kind of neat but I haven't gotten far enough into it myself to go in depth on it

>The Adventure of Hourai High School - Transfer Student Drama Bomb

A wacky as fuck JRPG based on the world's most ambitious pen & paper campaign ever played (seriously, this thing was played by snail mail by over 200 players for many years). Enjoy being a Japanese transfer student in a much better game than Persona 3.

>The Firemen

Okay, this one did come out in English but only in Europe. A fucking fire has broken out in a chemical company's building. Get your ass to the top and put it out. An excellent arcady game where the villain is nothing more than a terrible industrial accident and the damn near sentient fires it spawned.

Has a sequel on PS1 with multiplayer but it's untranslated. It does however have robot dinosaurs on fire so it might be worth a play even if you can't into moon

>The Violinist of Hameln

A decent platformer with a humorous storyline. Save the world and charge out the ass for your services.

>StarTropics

Okay, I know at least one of you niggers hasn't played StarTropics. Stop what you're doing and fucking play StarTropics. Made by Nintendo's hardware peripheral development team of all people, it's so ambitious you'd think it was made by their A team as a pet project.

The password for the end of chapter 4 is 747 (you normally need a feelie for this).

Just play the entire Kunio-kun series in release order if possible, I know some are impossible to get. If possible play Renegade via its Arcade Port, and as for Ike Ike Nekketsu Hockey Bu from this link you might need to grab the untranslated version.

http://www.angelfire.com/games5/nekketsu/eng.htm

If you've played River City Ransom, Super Dodge Ball, Renegade, Nintendo World Cup or Crash 'N The Boys then you've played a Kunio game. Regardless, this little midget is kind of what started the whole beat-em-up genre (or at least most popular beat-em-ups at the time like Double Dragon take inspiration from Kunio) despite moving onto mostly sports games later on. The games, however, are extremely ambitious for their time.

The sports games are essentially just "sport but you get to brutally kick peoples' shit in and not get a penalty for it" but it's great fun. The SNES and 3DS eras are kind of lacking too, and the DS was… an experiment, but I cannot recommend doing anything BUT playing in release order so you can see exactly what the hell went on. However, the genre shift can be kinda jarring.

If you're looking for a free-roaming beat-em-up RPG, River City Ransom and Technos Samurai is what you're looking for, MAYBE with Shodai on SNES. For 3DS any Kunio game works since they're all kind of that way, but I would not recommend starting with them.

If you're looking for traditional beat-em-ups, play the Renegade Arcade port to get your history on, and Shin Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun for that.

If you're looking for sports games, that should be just about everything else. Dodge ball, 2 soccer games (football for britbongs), cross country, hockey, basketball, and Street Challenge. Should be easy to tell which one's which. They're that sport except you can beat the ever-loving SHIT out of anyone and not get penalized.

Finally, there's Nekketsu Katakou Dennetsu, which is a 4-player platform fighting game on the NES with the ability to create your own character and save via password. 2-on-2 or an all-out rumble, with plenty of moves and varying stages.

Most of these games are pretty short and honestly pretty easy, but it's straight up historical and if Technos wasn't such a shit with localizations at the time the series could've been a staple in the west considering nearly every game's success

>>15719949

>Kururin was Nintendo

For some reason I had convinced myself that was a Sega game. Maybe it's because they were both neat puzzle titles that were GBA launch games.

Continuing my journey into the original gameboy's library. This one's surprisingly good. Play as various Loony Tunes characters, each with a different gameplay style. Daffy is a regular platformer. Tweety gets chased by Sylvester. Porky is a shmup, and so forth.

This one's nothing major to write home about, but it is an adorable babbies first run and gun. You play as a kid piloting a mech. The American release swapped the girl protagonist out for a boy. There's also a sequel that feels technically more solid, but doesn't have quite the same charm to me.

>>15729170

I recognize that music. That's fucking Radical Rex. I had that game on the Genesis. I remember a lot about it being really frustrating, but it wasn't a bad game. I had no idea there was a Game Boy version.

Honorable Mentions that are niche, but anyone browsing forums or chans knows almost certainly knows about

>Mr. Gimmick!

>Little Samson (Lickle: Legend of the Holy Bells)

>Dark Cloud

>God Hand (Or anything by Clover Studios)

>Hylics

>Ghost Trick

And there's probably some I missed, but those are the ones I happen to see people talking about fairly often.

>Haunted Mansion

Although the story and dialogue is cheesy and very "gamey" at times, the puzzles and mechanic quirks are phenomenal. It plays sort of like a "reverse" Luigi's Mansion where more emphasis is put on the environments rather than the characters. And rather than combat, there's more puzzles as you have to turn on the lights before being able to capture friendly ghosts that come out, which leads to pretty interesting situations as you have to figure out how to clear a room first. It's also worth noting, it's not based on the movie what-so-ever, it's a completely original concept and story. So much so, it seems the game is based off a missing Haunted Mansion cartoon or something, it's very typical Disney and you won't be disappointed if that's your thing. It also adds to the "Spooky 6th Gen Console" games, perhaps a trilogy consisting of Luigi's Mansion, Grabbed by the Ghoulies, and of course, Haunted Mansion. They all play very differently and have their own design quirks, but they're an absolute blast to play around October/Halloween, which is what I did recently.

>Marvelous: Another Treasure Island

It's made by Nintendo themselves, yet I don't ever see this game get talked about all too often even by hardcore Nintendo fan's standards. Mole Mania, StarTropics, Captain Rainbow, even Virtual Boy Wario Land all seem to have more love than this game gets. (By the way, play those games too if you haven't, especially Mole Mania.) It plays much like any Legend of Zelda game, it's the very reason Eiji Aounuma was chosen as director for the Zelda series from then onwards. Instead being a 1:1 Zelda clone, it has more emphasis on puzzles rather than combat and even includes a mechanic similar to point and click adventure games that allow you to search around the environment and click on unknown things or objects or interact with them in other ways. The game is even structured in a way similar to point and click adventure games or a Saturday morning cartoon or even a movie, containing a lot of flashy elements. It has a vibe very similar to the Goonies too, my only gripes with the game is that it's shorter than most Nintendo games and it can get tedious at times. Aside from that, it needs more attention, I'd love it if Nintendo were to revive some of their older series and I think this is one that could benefit.

>Apotheon

Granted, it probably has a following, but I've never seen it talked about here. It's a Metroidvania-esque game that bases it's entire artstyle and setting on ancient Greece. It's only Metroidvania in the sense that you can tackle most tasks you want in whichever order you want, there isn't much backtracking or item powers. The combat is decent, there's little side challenges here and there that spice up the game, but the main appeal lies within the Greek inspirations, setting, and lore. It can drag at times, but if you allow yourself to get invested, it won't be much of a problem.

>Q-Boy

Yes, it's a bootleg, but hear me out. The game happens to be completely original, other than it's artstyle, which happens to be inspired by Kirby. Yes, it is a tad wonky, that's expected of a bootleg. But I'll be damned if it isn't one of the best or most fun bootlegs I have ever played. It also has a mechanic I've never seen in other games, being that your movement and jumps are tied to your attack, use too much of either and you'll be winded. The level design also plays into this and understands this. It's another case of being pleasantly surprised from unexpected situations or "don't judge a book by it's cover." You never really know where a good or fun game can come from until you play it for yourself. It's important to have games like these to remind us again to hold back on our preconceived judgements or assertions.

>>15730377

It's not entirely a point and click, the mechanics are more similar to scanning the surroundings with the GameBoy Horror in Luigi's Mansion, only it's required in the game and leads to imaginative situations incorporating it's usage into puzzle elements. It's still worth the experience just to see what other sort of games Nintendo has or might have on the backburner.

>>15730403

I only say that because Steam lists it as a Metroidvania and that's why I say "Metroidvania-esque" and not entirely Metroidvania.

>>15730445

Okay, then it would be great to hear what recommendations you may have.

>>15732265

>vaguely Zelda related spiritual sequel

I don't even like Marvelous for it's vaguely Zelda-esque elements, I like it for it's own things. Each Nintendo series sort of operates as the representative for that genre.

>Mario - Platforming

>Zelda - Adventure

>Pokemon - RPG

>Pikmin - RTS

>Animal Crossing - Sim

Etc, etc, etc.

My point is that Marvelous offers something other Nintendo series don't. With it's Point and Click elements, heavier emphasis on dialogue and story, environmental puzzles. Not to mention it's Goonies / Boyscout aesthetic and vibes. I mean it in every sense of the word when I say it's a shame it's been forgotten to time. And it's a shame in the 20+ years, there hasn't been a similar game like it. I believe there's so much more that could've been done with the concept and so many situations you can make out of it. It's especially sour seeing as point and click games are mostly dead, at least to public perception. I really hope there's someone at Nintendo who is considering reviving it. I wouldn't necessarily want a remake, but using the same elements and having a new game out of it.

>>15718373

>make fun of his height

Napoleon wasn't short.

There's a small little Swedish game called Ittle Dew.

You play as a girl looking for adventure or something who crashes onto the beach of a strange island.

The puzzles are pretty neat and creative though they become a massive fucking slog when you inevitably have to backtrack but the combat is quite awkward and clunky, resulting in a lot of unfair damage taken from enemies.

At least the artstyle is pleasant to the eyes.

There is a sequel, but I haven't played it yet but it's always a good idea to play a series from the first game up if it's not a massive series like some AAA games.

>>15734091

Yup. They also made card city nights.

>>15737102

>Sin & Punisment-like shooter.

The term is Cabal shooter. All of these games can trace their roots to Cabal. Speaking of which go play Cabal. It's an excellent game that's aged really well.

Bump

Bumping with fortix 1/2, fun and dirt cheap where you move and draw lines to take chunks out of the battlefield when you box them in

>>15750280

Is this a take on Rampart?

>>15719604

>that pic is real

>nothing in that pic was edited

>it's 100% a real thing