This is a list for those games which were not considered good by most people, sometimes even myself, but for one reason or another, I enjoyed and/or look back fondly upon. Could be I had fun playing it with my brother, maybe I liked the setting or a mechanic, or maybe it just reminds me of a period of time about which I'm nostalgic.
Ragnarok Online is some kooky Korean MMORPG with cute sprite art on simple 3D environments. It is grind heavy, class based, and filled with desirable hats.
They used to give out two-week trials if you had an email address, so my brother and I ended up with a lot of secondary email addresses, and eventually we ended up subscribing for a few months. Later we played on one of many semi-illicit 'private' servers for a while as well.
The environments were pretty with a water-colour styled look, and the character and monster sprites were cute across the board. My two mains were a thief with a raccoon theme (smokie hat, smokie pet, grey/brown dyes), and a holy spec'd lady Crusader with the helm and ear-wings. But I played all the the job level 1 classes and most of the second tier jobs.
It was a pretty shitty waste of time game with extremely rudimentery interface and GUI issues, most of the players were Korean, bots, dicks, or any combination of those three. The music varied wildy from cruddy to great.
All in all, it was not a good game in any meaningful way, but I still get nostelgic for it from time to time. Had some super-fun times with my brother, playing it all day all night some summer days when we were in the early years of highschool and not working.
A sequel seems to be stuck in development hell, and probably wouldn't be any good.
Played this on Genesis, I must have been 8 or 9 if it came out in 1990. It was one of those games we rented that was just a little complex for us when we were that young - the single player strategy game was a mystery to us, a fact that was aggravated by the lack of an instruction manual.
But we played the ship-on-ship combat a lot that weekend, and I think we rented it more than once.
It is significant as it was one of the first times we discovered and understood multiplayer imbalance - some ships were god tier, others were shit tier in pvp. An important lesson for two boys under 10 to learn.
This was another formative experience in the arcade. I was probably 10 when I played this for the first time, and I was spell-bound by it. I thought about it for days after playing it the first time, and it was a fixture of the dodgy local arcade for years.
Helluva quarter muncher, and a pretty generic game overall. I remember at one point when I was an early teen I guess, playing this through to ALMOST the very end. A few years ago when we discovered the joys of MAME my brother and I replayed it -- and CHRIST, we must have been much better players as kids, either that or we dumped more than $20 worth of quarters into this beast.
An artifact of its time, but back then, man....
One of the most sub-par and most loved games on this list. Every year, at one time or another, I am overtaken with the need to play it again.
Turn-based, dice-roll-ruled WW2 commando firefights with destroyable terrain? Fudge Yeah!
Nerd FACT: As older children/early teens my brother and I created and played an ad-hoc version of this game with green army men, coins, dice, and agreed upon rules/decisions.
Bought this on Steam Sale Xmas 2010, and I have to say I really loved it.
I am a sucker for hub-based action-RPGs that permit a wide range of player decision making, and this game delivers. Ridiculous, but fun. My first playthough I specialized in stealth and melee attacks, in the course of the campaign I probably only killed five or six dudes with firearms, but I sure stabbed a bunch of fools in the neck alright. This game received more bad press than I believe it was due; not to say it was a solid or consistent experience, but I experienced no serious glitches, no gamebreakers or anything more than some visual clipping on high detail NPCs in zoomed out shots of cutscenes. My computer is mighty and quarrelsome.
This is another action RPG that didn't get a fair shake from its publisher and was released under-developed. Fan patches required, the game is great but terrible in some parts. The embarrising cover art fooled me when the game was released, but years later I heard about the game (and its broken launch leading to fan-support) and finally tracked it down. Loved it, even with its rough parts (the terrible sewer level tested my investment and is remembered with bile by all who experienced it).
My original playthough as a stealthy but violent bare-fisted Brujah has influenced other characters in games like Oblivion and Alpha Protocol.
This is like the third hub-based action RPG on this list, and like everything here, I can plainly see that it is not a very good game in many ways, and I doubt many people would play it for more than a few hours. Pathetic PS2-era graphics look absurdly dated, but the game has 23 different endings, allowing/forcing the player to make dozens of decisions with consequence - and a large element of grindable loot and such. Do you play the upright but inflexible samurai? The wanton and self-preserving bandit? Do you champion one of the major factions, or do you help sell the province out to the armies of Oda Nobunuaga? Or do you simply fight outcast ronin and demand bare-bladed refunds from merchants? I read through "Shogun" at a young age and though I have little love for the weeabo corner of the internet, my belief that samurai are badass is bone-deep. This game is firmly rooted in classic samurai tropes, I wish it were a better game, but I love it as it is regardless. Also, one of the head models totally looks like Itto Ogami/Toshiro Mifune.
