I don’t see people talk about the Katamari Damacy games very much which is a shame because I think they’re delightful! I also wish more people talked about Cattails (especially the sequel, Cattails: Wildwood Story), these games deserve more love imo haha
Katamari Damacy
These are apparently the remasters of the first two games for PC:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/848350/Katamari_Damacy_REROLL/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1730700/We_Love_Katamari_REROLL_Royal_Reverie/
From looking at Wikipedia and Steam, I don’t think that there’s a PC version of Me & My Katamari.
Cattails (especially the sequel, Cattails: Wildwood Story)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/634160/Cattails__Become_a_Cat/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1882500/Cattails_Wildwood_Story/
The Katamari remasters are very well done as these things go. Just the right amount of graphical and compatibility boosting while not screwing with the gameplay, audiovisuals, or quirky vibes which made the originals so great.
All four games are also on Switch!! That’s where I played them!
I feel it. I feel the cosmos!
This is what me and my partner say to each other when we drink good coffee.
Lah, la-la-la-la-la-la-laaah lah la la la-la lah!
I’m currently playing to a T, by the Katamari creator.
Not remotely similar, and hard to recommend to most people tbh… but it has the same joyful silliness that just makes me smile, somehow.
I saw an article about it!! I really want to play it but alas don’t have anything that can run it, but once I can get a PS5 it’s totally going on my shopping list!
One of the greatest games of all time from a design and gameplay perspective. There’s a reason it’s in the MoMA. The soundtrack is an all-timer as well.
Cattails series mentioned! I’ve replayed those two multiple times they’re so cute and the gameplay loop is so soothing and fun.
Cat Quest series (which is more dungeon-crawler, not cat sim) is also adorable and accessible but doesn’t seem to be mentioned too often.
Man I keep meaning to replay Wildwood Story but I know once I start again that’s all I’m doing for the next few day lol… I love the colony layout editor so much, spent so many hours fine-tuning my colony to make it exactly the way I wanted it
Cat Quest series
The Thief series. I LOVED the first one especially, Thief the Dark Project. Medieval (low magic fantasy?) stealth shooter. The more valuable you pick up directly translates to what you can buy as a load out for the next level so you’re encouraged to explore, though even the low level enemies can kick you ass so you have to be sneaky. Actually great stealth mechanics even for an old game. The world building is amazing, with it’s own lore, culture and slang. The plot of the games are also great.
The Kingdom of Loathing is a game I’ve played almost non-stop since about 2003. Web based and free, it’s based off of old text based games. But it’s fun. Really fun. And hilarious. The currency is meat. The classes are goofy. Saucerer? Disco bandit? Seal Clubber? A lot of games deal with things like power creep or inflation, or how the heck to get people to actually help pay for it. This game solves problems like these elegantly. The user base is fun and friendly and corporative, there’s always new stuff coming out to try, they do a holiday special every year, and all the pictures are crudely drawn stick figures.
Disco bandit checking in! You got any meat paste?
I stack my meat like I stack the bodies of knob goblins in my wake
The Moxie on this one!
Half-Life, Thief, and the original Sims games (City, Ant, etc) were my original gaming go-tos!
Sim ant rules, you can be a spider sometimes
There’s a cheat code for that.
The Kingdom of Loathing
I can’t believe that game is still around lol. It was probably 2009 or so when I logged in last. I had ascended 3 times and figured I had pretty much seen all there is to see. So cool to see they are still around and doing well. I guess I’m going to have to playthrough it at least one more time :)
Oh man they have added and changed so much since you dropped off
Kenshi. Ive only ever seen 1 person mention it in the year I’ve been on Lemmy.
It’s like depressed RuneScape.
… Was I that person?
I evangelize Kenshi like the Holy Nation evangelizes Okran.
Also…!
Kenshi is one of those great war crime simulators
Kenshi
https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/
Ive only ever seen 1 person mention it in the year I’ve been on Lemmy.
I’ve brought it up a bunch as an example of a game that I like that’s really a “one-game genre” – it didn’t really get cloned, like most good games do. Kind of a bummer, because if you’ve played all of Kenshi, there’s not much more to do if you want more short of waiting for Kenshi 2 to be finished.
kagis
https://lemmy.world/post/5593904/3755382
https://lemmy.world/post/2703109/2113199
https://lemmy.world/post/7471136/4950578
https://lemmy.world/post/25365592/14990415
https://lemmy.world/post/10421126
There’s also a community here for it, !kenshi@lemmy.world. Not much activity, though.
Kenshi has so much scale and depth it’s hard to explain what you “do” in the game I love it
Die.
A LOT
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
I have been playing this game my entire life on/off, and have the most hours in, but I have never beaten it. I came close 1 fucking time, and I will forever remember the one dumb mistake I made that lost it for me just on the cusp of victory.
One day…
God tier game. I’ve never even been close to beating it.
Mount & Blade. It’s not unpopular per se, but somehow I never saw anyone mentioning it around here in Lemmy.
I was playing it on console so I didn’t get to do any mods to really increase the fun but I still had a lot of fun anyway. I do think the devs need to try a bit harder. I feel like they just provide a framework for mods without making a really nice game themselves.
That being said I played hundreds of hours of both and really like them. I just wish they were a bit better
Tactics Ogre. I see people drop Final Fantasy Tactics as the greatest tactics game of all time. Then you always see Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and Disgaea after. People sleep on Tactics Ogre. It’s a mechanically superior game to all of the mentioned. It’s story is equally as good as FFT. I think the graphics are better. It’s a challenging game from the start. FFT was created with the Tactics Ogre director and lead artist to be a more accessible version of TO. People see 90s golden era Final Fantasy and automatically put FFT on a pedestal. TO is like Undertaker stalking AJ Styles ready to obliterate whatever is in its way.
I’ve played Tactics Ogre after I’ve read some accounts of it being described as FFT’s spiritual successor, but I must admit I never finished it–not because of the gameplay which is suprisingly deep for its time, but because of my own perfectionism. I didn’t let myself just play the game without any guides or overthinking, instead went full “I want the perfect gamesave”.|
But yes! what you said is true. FFT is a more accessible successor to Tactics Ogre.
I think this was the game I rented once as a kid and never saw again but pops up as a memory every so often and I could never remember the name… Gonna check it out again.
Try it. It’s a fantastic game. I think the newest version that came out on Steam is the way to go but a lot of people still recommend the PSP Version if you wanna emulate it. Or you can go all the way back to the SNES version. I don’t think there’s a bad version of the game but there are definitely better versions of the game.
Escape Velocity and its open-source spiritual successor, Endless Sky.
Never played Escape Velocity, but Endless Sky was fantastic. Both the main quest lines had fantastic stories, especially the first one.
EV Nova is what got me hooked on Star Citizen
Escape Velocity also had a sequel or two done by Ambrosia Software themselves. I remember playing and enjoying them.
kagis
Escape Velocity Override and Escape Velocity Nova.
It looks like Ambrosia Software’s website is now down, so I assume that one can’t legally purchase it any more.
It looks like Escape Velocity was never ported to anything outside of classic MacOS, so playing it today probably entails obtaining a classic MacOS emulator and abandonware copies of the binaries.
While Endless Sky is neat and last I looked still getting expanded, it also didn’t have as much story content as the Escape Velocity series either (again, at least last I looked).
The image of each planet in Escape Velocity series (not really worth keeping IMHO, as they were saved at 8-bit depth) were done with KPT Bryce, a now out-of-print terrain generation and rendering software package. Probably one of the better-suited applications for it, as it was pretty good at letting one quickly turn out alien-looking landscapes. While there are newer terrain generation software packages, I have to say that Bryce did a lot of neat stuff and I don’t feel that there’s something that quite fills its “exploration” role in modeling and rendering software today. For example, procedural generation of textures using slope and altitude (so, for example, you could get rocky faces where generated terain was steep, or snow at high altitude on mountains).
Re. EV series ports - check the first link in my previous comment ;)
And I had the same experience with Endless Sky when I first found out about it some years ago. It has gotten a lot of updates since then, but I am holding out for a 1.0 release
luanti https://www.luanti.org/
It’s Luanti* - You got the name wrong
ok I edited it
My family (wife and multiple kids) oddly enough have access to both this and Minecraft and actually prefer Luanti most of the time.
Whoah, when did they change the name?
Just recently
October
Kinda cheating, since this game (hell, entire series; linking my fave entry) has kind of a cult following in Central/Eastern Europe.
Oof, my favorite! It was too good for it’s time.
Gothic 1 is one of the most difficult RPG I’ve ever played, in terms of quest. The sequel, I’d still play it if only it ran on my devices.
The video looked cool but for the picture they had to go with the Pixar face??
Legend of Legaia. It’s a JRPG from the PS1 golden era, but it had a relatively small launch and basically zero marketing. It was completely overshadowed by other games like FFVII and Legend of Dragoon. It has a sort of cult classic following now. The story starts off as a fairly basic “world is awful, kid gets a magic weapon to beat the big evil thing” type of plot, but has a surprising amount of twists and turns.
The combat system is interesting, and hasn’t really been replicated since. You string together a series of small attacks, to make larger super combos.
Fair warning, the US release is significantly harder than the JP and EU versions. For some reason, the devs multiplied all the enemy stats by 1.25, and slashed their exp/gold drop rates by 50% for the US release. So you need to grind twice as long to be properly geared/leveled, and the grinding is 25% more difficult.
When videogame rentals were a thing, developers often intentionally made games unreasonably hard to spur repeat rentals or purchases. My money is on that.
Even the EU version is dozens of hours long for a casual play through. The game is surprisingly long for only being one disc; They didn’t use a bunch of pre-rendered cutscenes like many of the bigger games did. Those pre-rendered cutscenes take up a lot of disc space, and are why games like Legend of Dragoon and FFVII have multiple discs.
I got to meet Legaia’s creator Hidenori Shibao. He also created Lennus (“Paladin’s Quest” that I enjoyed on SNES in my youth) and its sequel.
Endless Sky According to wikipedia it is a space trading and combat simulation game. Its free and open source, has a lot of content (even more with plugins). You do missions to get the storyline forward and to get money, you can also mine asteroid, trade with other planets, attack other ships and plunder them. You discover new species and Outfits to make your space ship better, etc.
I’ve been playing a single ship only save this time around and it’s been a ton of fun. I allow myself to use fighters if a ship has a fighter bay, but no escorts (except mission NPCs of course).
I don’t know why but I absolutely love asteroid mining. It’s not like it’s deep or complex, but it just feels so satisfying somehow.
Armadillo Run
Robot Alchemic Drive (R.A.D.)
The Saboteur
Saboteur was unexpectedly good
You are the only person I have ever seen mention Armadillo Run. I used to be obsessed with that game.
And you’re the only person I’ve ever seen recognize it in turn.
Part of me wants to ask where you went to college since that’s the only community I knew who played it, but I also wouldn’t post that here.
The original Master of Magic for DOS. It’s STILL being actively modded 32 years post release and has never quite been duplicated.
The Age of Wonders series does a fairly good job with the feel, but it’s just not the same.
Cyber Empires (PC), Shadowrun (Genesis), Betrayal at Krondor (PC).
Shadowrun for Genesis was amazing! Ahead of its time. The way it semi randomly generated jobs for you to do was pretty unique. Like Bethesda radiant quests, but decades earlier and better. I really enjoyed rising up from the weakest street runner to someone with enough reputation to skip the line at the expensive club.
The leveling system was also pretty advanced for Genesis.
Also the cyberspace hacking was wacky and fun.
Oh man I haven’t thought of Cyber Empires in so long. I remember tunneling through walls so my missile bots could obliterate the enemy base.
Betrayal at Krondor was amazing. Masterfully written, with fun riddles, and that music chef’s kiss
Guardian Heroes was an outstanding RPG beat 'em up on Sega Saturn. It had
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a two player co-op storyline with branching choices to get alternate endings
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unlockable characters for a 6-player arena mode
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incredibly unique characters to unlock, spellcasting with ➡️⬅️⬆️⬇️ input
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and a kick ass soundtrack.
Nothing has really scratched the same itch since (yes, I’m aware there’s a sequel, but it’s terrible).
The anime Uncle From Another World talks about Guardian Heroes a lot. It’s a fun show you should chek it out.
That sounds great. The kind of game I’d’ve loved but never had any Sega consoles (and no one really spoke about emulating them) so missed all of it.
If you have an Xbox, by some miracle they have it available, and it’s $5. I highly recommend it.
Alas, also no dedicated gaming device newer than a 3DS.
I am thinking about getting a Steam deck of some kind though. Maybe it’ll be playable on that?
I’m seeing online that it can be emulated (assuming PC is what they’re referencing in the post), but I’m not seeing it directly through Steam.
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