Yoku’s Island Express. Before playing it, I didn’t like pinball or search-action games (metroidvanias). I ended up loving it. I still don’t really enjoy pinball on its own, but I now have a deep love for search-action.
It’s definitely the best pinball-metroidvania postal service simulator available.
Unreal Tournament, the one that was abandoned in favor of Fortnite (eugh). Like sure it would never be a big hit like Fortnite, Arena Shooters are out of fashion after all, but Epic didn’t even give it a chance for starters, they basically just rushed it out the door with a skeleton crew, no budget whatsoever and were begging for community members to do free work on the game for them. In retrospect the game was doomed to fail from day one.
It STARTED from the work of community members. Then Epic jumped in and took over with the promise of their backing of the community team. Then once they had control over it they scuttled the ship.
Battle for Middle Earth. With the resurgence of RTS games lately, including many older ones getting remastered, I would absolutely love to see a proper remaster and release of BFME2. Unfortunately rights issues mean it’s very unlikely to happen.
Total War: LOTR would be pretty neat
It was one of the first PC games I played as a kid. Incredibly simple mechanics: you are a marble and you roll and try to reach the finish line (sometimes you need collectibles first). But the level design was top notch. Perfect blend of challenging and rewarding.
Retro/Grade is a rhythm/shooter mashup where you travel backwards through time and un-fire a bunch of lasers to un-kill a bunch of ships. It was designed for a guitar hero controller if I recall? I found the visuals nauseating and the music lackluster but that premise is gold and deserves another chance.
Also PLEASE play the music backwards??? It’s a game about going back in time, c’monnnnn.
Alley Cat for sure
Alley Cat actually got a second chance! Look up “Alley Cat: ReMeow”
Happy to see some fellow Alley Cat fans around!
Cue the tune in my head. Thank you, it’s so lovely. 😍
Would love a reboot of this game
i love destroying city :)
pure wonderful button-mashy fun with just a hint of strategy. I always look for it when I visit retro arcades
also Dr. Veronica is my waifu
aaah i see, good choice tho lol
Don’t know quite how underrated/forgotten this is, but I wanna see a remake of Vib-Ribbon. That, or have an open source clone of it made by someone who actually knows how to properly program (not me), if it already doesn’t exist.
Technically there is a successor to Vib-Ribbon but it’s iPhone only if I recall? “Russian Dancing Men”.
Too bad I don’t have access to any apple products I could use to try it. Gonna have to look into this.
Edit: looked it up and it looks like something similar to Vib-Ribbon in terms.of gameplay, but from what I can gather, it’s been over a decade since any updates. Also, I’d hope for a PC port of a Vib-Ribbon clone because there’s no way you’re getting me to play any more rhythm games where you have to use a small touch screen to play. No idea if that Russian Dancing Men has the ability to take local files stored on your phone and use them to generate levels, though, or where you’d go to get a legit copy of the app anymore even if you have an apple product able to play it.
F-ZERO. Truly a devastating loss. 99 is cool, but there’s no guarantee we’ll ever see a completely new title ever again. There was no other series with the same level of snappy controls, character design, music and challenge. It really is in a league of its own.
MechCommander 1 and 2
Kolibri for the Sega 32x addon for the Genesis/Megadrive. Most of the reviewers that weren’t down with the game either complained about the difficulty or lack of story/making sense, but it was a beautiful game for the time that took the space shooter concept and made it into a game that was somehow chill while also being difficult enough to sometimes momentarily make you want to rage quit. If you enjoy games like the Raiden series, you’ll enjoy this.
Shout to Knuckles Chaotix (the most unique take on Sonic gameplay of the classic 2D era) and also Shadow Squadron (very Star Fox-esque), which are also slept on because 32x.
Exclusive to the Genesis/Megadrive, it’s a crying shame that the Vectorman games never received a third iteration and have seemingly disappeared into the grey goo of IP purgatory. Vectorman and Vectorman 2 were amazing for the time: they were arguably the best 2D platformers of the era, graphically beautiful, oozing with charm, and with an amazing soundtrack to go along with it all. It’s crazy that the developers were able to squeeze the performance they did out of the hardware and playing emulated versions of it now still doesn’t compare to how it feels and looks playing it on the original hardware with a CRT and a nice sound system (but you should still check it out absent that setup).
On PC, also from the 90s, Descent was truly groundbreaking and unique. It’s an FPS that said “what if you were playing as a space ship and had six degrees of freedom to move about?” It was also the first truly 3D FPS game.
Descent did get 2 sequels and also a spinoff, Descent: Freespace and later Freespace 2. F2 has seen a HUGE amount of mods, partly due to the engine going open source back in 2002
Freespace 3 could be awesome, what with Elite seeing a rebirth.
Very cool, I’ll check that out. Thanks!
Definitely Icy Tower
Also, not really a video game, but those desktop destroyer type games. I’m not sure what any of them were called but it was a fun waste of time in my computer class.
I can still hear the jumping sounds in my head! Thanks for the memory!
Flying dragon for the N64
Apparently it’s very rare but I have a cartridge of it
The music from it was awesome very 1990s
Burning Rangers from sonic team on the Sega Saturn. Such a unique concept.
Dark cloud 2
