Gaming

I enjoyed Spore when I was a kid. It was legit fun evolving and designing your creature.

Tacoma. Incredible game, barely has any gameplay, though, and is very short if you don't actively look for side-content, which is the main focus of the game. It's mostly storytelling through holographic logs of an abandoned station. Your goal is to salvage previous data in there and an abandoned AI, that your company needs to reclaim.

Although the entire game has kinda become a meme in recent years, I love The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Its a really charming game, and although people like to rag on it for being "generic lotr fantasy" I dont think thats a bad thing. Sometimes you just wanna play a run of the mill fantasy game and explore some dungeons. Plus it still had enough weird and bizarre things to keep it interesting, like the Shivering Isle dlc. I have fond memories of playing the game all the time back in school. One time I beat the entire Knights of the Nine dlc in a single sitting. It can be really clunky, weird, and downright broken but I still love it. Morrowind is still better tho

Master Of Orion. Both the original, it's sequel and the modern remake. It's nice to play something with different pacing from other games. And the random outcomes from AI throughout the game's progression keeps things spicy from playthrough to playthrough.

I loved Stuntman on the PS2. In it, you play a stunt driver across a series of movie sets. You drive the car while a director barks orders into your ear. If you complete all the set pieces in a scene, you move on to the next (more difficult) one and then onto other movies.

I love the process of refining the run over and over until you get it just right. The worst thing about the game is the load times. I don’t remember how long they were, but I remember they were very long. This is tough in a game that’s asking you to do something over and over until you get it right. Super Meat Boy handled this aspect much better years later, but I enjoy the premise of Stuntman more.

For all its flaws, I loved Mass Effect Andromeda. It was a fun one to play.

I appreciate overwatch, because the sequel cured my videogame addiction (it's so much worse)

Dear Esther is a beautiful piece of art that communicates its story and themes through visual, environmental and interactive symbolism, both random and scripted prose, and movingly composed music. At worst, I think anyone can at least appreciate the beauty in this world they created, the use of symbolism in the environment, and/or the music.

I think of it as the video game equivalent of a Terrance Malick film where you are basically driving the camera and triggering the narration. I totally get if you don't have preferences for that type of thing, but I think it's extremely healthy for the medium to have works like it. Few games scratch the kind of itch this one does.

Additionally, the act of moving and investigating a 3D, digitally-realized island constitutes interactivity and, thus, marks it as something inherently different from a movie or book. Modern "games" do not have to have deep or challenging mechanics to utilize interactivity artistically.

I've played and beaten plenty of difficult, mechanical or systems focused video games, including most the modern From Software games, Hollow Knight, and old NES games so my appreciation for it isn't some kind of aversion to challenge or mechanical depth.

Planetside 2. Loved huge coordinated battles with hundreds of players even though it often was a buggy, laggy mess.

I really enjoy enter the matrix, it's a little janky but it's got some pretty cool for the time set pieces and I think the entire idea of the hacking mode is interesting, if very weird. For a licenced early 2000s video game I thought it was a step above most of the stuff in that field.

The driving sections are... Not very fun though.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto

It was a kinda janky 3D Action Adventure from around 2000. Back then it had really beautiful and colorful graphics. I remember playing it on my first "real" PC and being amazed by how it looked.

It also stands out to me for being actually funny and comitting to being a comedy game.

I wouldn't call this unpopular because it's disliked, just unknown to a lot of people because I don't think it was marketed much in the US. One of my all time favorite games is Dragon Quest Builders 2. It's got just the right difficulty for me where it's mostly easy with a few challenging boss fights that might take a few tries to master. It's got a nice balance between questing, building, and farming. It's a bit silly, but it gets to be cute and endearing. I love the graphics. You're building in 3D with blocks like Minecraft but it's actually pretty, Minecraft was always too ugly for me to get into it.

I only know about this game because Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest games were my boyfriend's favorite growing up and it's still his favorite series.

any arena shooter in the style of Quake, Halo, or Unreal Tournament. It’s a shame they aren’t more popular

Pretty much any of the Zachtronics games. Shenzen I/O, ExaPunks, Opus Magnum, and Last Call BBS are all fun "puzzle" games for programmers and people with programmer brains.

People love to rag on it but there's nothing that quite compares to just fuckin around in the Mirror's Edge Catalyst open world

The Risen games. Sure they’re janky, miss polish, look meh. But there’s just something so charming about these games that I prefer them over many polished triple A rpg’s.

If we’re talking unpopular as in not very well known outside of its immediate community I gotta say Ultrakill. It’s a retro shooter distilled to its most essential parts with a style meter tied into it. It’s like ballet… with shotguns and exploding demons- so not a lot like ballet. But it’s good! Buy it!

Not necessarily unpopular in general, but unpopular within its own series are the DS Zelda games, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. These games have some great dungeon design and I really liked most aspects of the touch screen controls (except blowing into the DS). These games used the DS to its fullest and will sadly be locked there as a result. I might have been one of the only people disappointed with Link Between Worlds for adandoning the touch screen for traditional controls.

I've always believed that Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts deserves way more love than it got. I can understand it may have been just a the wrong time (and not what fans were hoping for with a BK revival at the time) but the core vehicle building gameplay and physics are so much fun to play around with.

I've beaten the game a few times over now, and each time I try to challenge myself to make wilder vehicles than before. Or sometimes avoid making a vehicle entirely and attempting to make some sort of contraption machine. The music is some incredible work from Grant Kirkhope and Robin Beanland, bringing in a more modern but still very Banjo sound to the game.

I think now with the game being nearly 15 years behind us now, if you have GamePass please do yourself a favor and give it a try with an open mind! It may not be for everyone, but the building mechanics were pretty ahead of their time for 2008! You may just find a new favorite game :)

I liked Balan Wonderworld. i didn't love it, but i certainly don't understand the hate- I haven't ran into any bugs, some of the powers were neat, the music was phenomenal, and the simple controls were a selling point for me. it was like playing a new Dreamcast game in 2023 for better or for worse, another Billy Hatcher or something.

The original Secret World is still my guilty pleasure. It was the only MMO I ever got to endgame on. It's shame what they did to it when they tore out all of it's uniqueness and went FtP.

Not quite unpopular but titanfall 2. The movement is exquisite, the chaos that unfolds when titans start dropping is incredible. There is nothing quite like getting cornered by a titan as a pilot and desperately darting through buildings with your AT weapon trying to survive.

Sword Art Online: Lost Song.

Total weeb game with a whisper of a story and super grindy, but it has some of the best flight and 3d mobility controls I've ever seen.

Nobody ever says this but Halo Infinite isn't that bad if you ignore the battlepass

Vintage Story. It's a minecraft-mod turned game that focuses on slow progression through the ages. You need to survive winters and they just had a lore update recently. I play it with my SO and it's definitely a slower paced game, but the progression feels more rewarding.

AI War 2. It is a strategy, 4X, tower defense light game where the AI already won the war and conquered the galaxy. You have to fight your way to the AI home world to win. The game is very well optimized and designed for multithreaded CPUs. The more threads the better. The late game can have 10s of thousands of ships on the map or more.

I played both Fable 3 and Assassin's Creed 3 and enjoyed them immensely. I don't always finish games, but I finished both of them. Then I went online and found out at the time both of them were considered the worst of their franchises. Shrug I still had fun, dangit.

i don't know if this really counts, as they were super-popular in their day, but I like re-playing several PC games from the 90s that most people today wouldn't know of or, perhaps, remember.

• the Myst series
• The Ultima series, including Ultima Underworld I & II
• I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
• The Journeyman Project

a few others

Niche. It's a genetics game, where you control a colony of critters that hop from island to island.

It has a thousand flaws, and it gets repetitive/boring over time but damn, the breeding mechanic feels so right. Not just because it's "realistic", but also because it feels sensible and intuitive.

Imperator: Rome actually. I think I've been seeing a bit more appreciation for it recently (or maybe I'm just imagining it), but the launch was really rough and none of the updates, which changed quite a lot, really got the player counts up until Paradox just decided to abandon it. It's definitely flawed, but I have kind of a soft spot for it and still enjoy the occasional game. For me the army automation was really nice, since microing stacks has always been one of the most annoying things for me to do in these games, the pop migration and stuff helped it feel like my cities were really growing more organically, and where the basegame falls short there are still some pretty decent mods to improve things (one major mod is actually still being regularly updated years after the game was axed by the devs).

The Guild 2 and 3. They are so janky and absurd. Half the mechanics barely work, the dialogue is ridiculous, but the game just has charm. It's got just enough economy mechanics to keep my math brain engaged while mostly playing it like The Sims.

Watch_Dogs was my first platinum on PS3. Everyone was shitting all over the game due to the PC port controversy, but I really enjoyed it. Huge city, different environment, actually good on-foot movement unlike in GTA games, and toooooooons of side stuff to do.

And oh dear, all the hacking stuff was such fun. Yes it was all just one button, but everything was well implemented. The amount of personal details you could pull from phones was amazing. I kept doing it all the time and it wasn't until near the end of the game that they started repeating.

And the trademark unique Ubisoft multiplayer. Shame it didn't have full-blown online mode, I can see myself getting lost in it.

Yea great game. Didn't deserve all the hate unrelated to its actual accomplishments.

The DLC... Bad Blood I think? Was even better.

I can't emphasize enough how cool some of those VR side-missions were. Some would qualify as fun standalone indie games on their own.

I actually really enjoyed playing Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex. Maybe I just first played it when I was too young to notice differences with it compared to the previous entries. Grew up loving it and didn't learn how generally hated it was until a few years ago.

TimeShift never felt as bad to me as a lot of people said it is. Was pretty good actually and I had fun playing it.

Also Bionic Commando didn't score that high on metacritics but I liked it very much and played it like 3 or 4 times (completed it).

Back in the days of C64 I had those two games called "Ace of Aces" and "Wings of Fury" which most of my friends hated. I didn't understand the topic or why I had to shoot others, but I played those games over and over again.

Homeland 2: The Revolution is actually a super fun game.

It was buggy on release, and combined with the fact it was a sequel in a franchise nobody asked for meant that it's review scores are atrocious. If you buy it on steam today, all the bugs have long ago been ironed out and it is a fun ride. Imagine: A Far Cry style game, but in an urban setting and on the Crye engine. The gunplay is solid, especially the shotgun which is amazing. It's got some of that "take out enemy bases sector by sector" gameplay that you'd expect in a Far Cry game, but if you like the combat, it's no problem.

Even premise actually isn't that bad. The original game was "North Korean manages to invade the USA...somehow", but in The Revolution it's actually got an entire alternate history diverging back in the 1940s to explain why North Korea was successful. TLDR is after WW2, North Korea become a big time technology producing country (ala Japan IRL) and got really wealthy, while at the same time the USA got hit by multiple economic downturns. In the "invasion" the super high tech North Korean just kind of walked in without a fight to "reconstruct" the USA. Really when you're fighting the NK is so cyberpunk looking its like you're fighting a megacorp and you can forgot they are NK at times.

Seriously, if you can pick this game up for $20 and enjoy open world shooters, try it out.

I just loved the gameplay in Anthem. Not particularly the loop, the grinding, the enemy "variety" or mission design. But the base of it all, the flying and hovering and fighting. Especially the idea of turning the common formula around by making the combat ability focused with guns being more like support items, instead of focusing on shooting and using your abilities in between (like in Destiny 2 or The Division, for example).

The game really is the prime example of "wasted potential" when it comes to video games.

I just wish it would've been developed by a company with more experience in online multi-player games and released by a publisher that's less egregiously openly focused on maximizing profit above everything else like EA.