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Industry Folks Talk Underrated Games
A topic we've touched on several times in the past here is discussed in the answers to another of Gamasutra's Questions of the week. Underrated games are the order of the day. From the article: "Natural Selection by Unknown Worlds is an outstanding work combining FPS action and RTS strategy elements. NS has gained a great following, but it has been overshadowed by success of Counter-Strike. The game play of NS naturally draws players to work together. I have always found the teamwork in NS better than most other FPS network games. The variety of classes in Aliens and Marines provides a lot of depth of play to experience. The RTS elements in the game were beautifully put together." I've always been partial to Shiny's Sacrifice , a weird little First Person RTS title where you play a mage that summons all of your units. Any titles that you think didn't get the attention they deserved?
...Marathon 2: Durandal, and Marathon Infinity. You know, back from before Bungie became Microsoft.
Little press? Are you kidding? Every gaming magazine, website, comic, fansite I've ever been to has heralded how amazing Ico was. It got press everywhere. Just because no one bought it doesnt mean there was little press.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
It had some beautiful environments, fun gameplay elements, and the humor was well done. It was a little "kidish" in a few respects, but I'd recommend it.
The ZX Spectrum hosts a tresure trove of games that are mostly unknown outside of Speccy strongholds. Ultimate (which later became RARE) released a whole slew of games during the eighties which were innovative, fun and often offered types of play which have never been recreated on modern platforms. Attic Attack, Knight Lore, Jetpack, all classics and worth looking up. Plus games like School Daze ( set in a school, Take Two's Bully sounds suspiciously like a remake of this), Fat Worm Blows a Sparky, Knight Tyme, Lords of Midnight, Target Renegade, How To Be a Complete Bastard, too many to name.
The Snes had tons of really great RPG's many of which have only become playable to no japanese speakers thanks to fan Translaton patches. Titles like Bhamut Lagoon, Seiken Densetsu 3 ( the real sequal to secret of manna), some weird ones like Wedding Peach (bloody nuts but oddly fun) and Sailor Mood, plus some stuff that had wester releases but never took off like the Adventures of Spike McFang and Terranigma.
Atari classic I,Robot has got to be worth mentioning, the first true 3d game, released in 1983 in the arcades, sank without trace, but was at least a decade ahead of it's time, Starfox seemed to borrow a lot from this game.
To me however, the most underrated game of all time has got to be Gunpey. Appearing on the Bandai Wonderswan, both game and console were developed by the legendary Gunpei Yakoi, the man responisble for the Game and Watch and The Gameboy. A stupidly simple puzzler, its really worth looking for. You can get both console and game for next to nothing on Ebay, why this never got a western release I'll never know but it's a lot of fun.
Yeah, the word "underrated" is being somewhat misused here. Most of the games are merely "unpopular"- the majority got very good scores from the critics and simply failed to sell well.