(not the 5 i think are the best or even my 5 favorites)
smt nocturne
serial experiments lain (psx)
panzer dragoon saga
baroque (saturn)
mgs2
7 Likes
Kakyuusei
Doukyuusei
True Love Story: Summer Days, and yet…
Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side
Princess Maker 2
6 Likes
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
Battletoads in Battlemaniacs
Biometal
Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom
Way of the Samurai
1 Like
updated:
final fantasy xiv: a realm reborn
final fantasy xiv: heavensward
final fantasy xiv: stormblood
final fantasy xiv: shadowbringers
shining force
5 Likes
Woah you wanna talk a bit more about the Lain PSX game? Is it translated did you play it al naturale?
1 Like
gladly! i don’t speak any japanese. the issue with lain psx is that it’s essentially a sound novel (with visuals and ui), which makes it difficult to romhack because it would require implementing timed subtitles rather than replacing existing text. the solution is a web browser version, which is available at laingame.net - each individual entry has all of the image/audio/video/hypertext assets for that “page” plus a text translation of the included audio. this is a bit of a shame because the original ui is wonderful (see below) and there are other features that can’t be replicated, but it works.
the game itself is actually more or less linear despite its unlocking system, so you can follow an approximation of the original order if you progress entry by entry one level at a time from level 1 upward, generally from bottom to top and right to left, making note of the “depends on” and “unlocks” links at the top of each page. for anyone who is interested in playing, it might take a little getting used to and it’s not super intuitive. there are two “sites,” a and b, corresponding to discs 1 and 2 of the game. in between the two discs in terms of narrative there’s a oneshot manga by yoshitoshi abe, the nightmare of fabrication, which confusingly was actually the first lain work to be released. that one is not included on the site but should be easy to access online.
as for the game itself, i’ll preface by saying that i actually kind of dislike the anime. the game was produced immediately beforehand and follows a different narrative despite some shared lore stuff that is more implicit and subtextual in the game. yoshitoshi abe does the illustrations and the aforementioned manga, but the (extremely off model) animation was handled by others. otherwise, the tone is quite different; while the anime ends up turning into a kind of sci fi/fantasy thing, the game is really concretely about the experience of childhood mental illness, feelings of difference, inability to socially integrate, difficulty expressing oneself to adults, etc., and the science fiction and lore elements are more impressionistic and allegorical. for what it’s worth, i would heavily content warning the game for suicide, gun violence, a lot of mental illness talk, etc. it is much heavier than the anime. in any case, i’m very attached to the hypertext system, which links certain entries together based on keywords that sometimes have clear thematic connections and are sometimes more oblique. there’s a bit where lain’s therapist tells her about an r.d. laing book she read in college, which is a #videogamethingithinkaboutalot. it’s been a few years since i played it and i may never again but i love it very dearly.
i know there’s a 2018 4gamer interview with the developers of the game; if anyone on here was interested in translating it that would be so wonderful!
17 Likes
i always just really wanted to give lain a hug
3 Likes
I feel like there’s more personal truth in my joke answer of just God Hand than a list of five games could express, so I will leave it at that
1 Like
legal step is playing alort of nioh 2 :- )
1 Like
really interested in this take, can you elaborate?
1 Like
this… is usually why i play outrun
2 Likes
“I want to go far away…”
2 Likes
years ago, i wanted to make an outrun clone about two teenagers running away in the stolen car of one of their parents
7 Likes
The search function brought me here! As I did not contribute before, mine would be:
Sekiro: because it’s perfect. It’s razor sharp, tense, poetic and gives me that feeling of reconstructed japan (and japanese music) that I love, and here I found it in spades.
Cave Story: because it’s what a platformer should be. The final, secret, hellish dungeon feels hand crafted and is super challenging, I hated and loved it and I beat it.
The Silver Case: the themes and the way it unfolds make it one of the best sci-fi/hardboiled stories I have ever read.
Shadow of the Colossus: it strikes my more sensitive side, while being super engaging in combat. Beating those colossi and seeing their expression change will stick to my memory forever.
Majora’s Mask: for long time (before restarting to play games more frequently) it’s been one of the parameters to understand if I could trust somebody else’s taste in gaming. The Zelda team does crazy things in this game, gets super creative in its level design (they never matched this), isn’t scared to dare, and the game has super dense atmosphere.
If I had to add a bonus one, Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin. It’s not the best Souls (Demon’s Souls is) but it’s a fantastic game and probably my second favourite Souldborne. I’d pick this because it stroke some compulsive side of mine where I could not stop playing, at times, having to overcome those challanges. For example, some people dislike Iron Fortress, while I thought it was great and required strategy and perseverance. Also, while less coherent than DS1, it’s massive, more varied and more daring.
11 Likes
Disappointed I didn’t post last time—I want to cringe at myself
Reading the prompt my first thought was to reach for short games or good introductory vertical slices, favor adventure games, and steer away from technical games
5
- Life is Strange (Episode 2)
Compulsive overactive empathy with mixed results
- Kentucky Route Zero (Act III)
Bureaucracy, transgender robots, mold computers, broken bodies, stimulants. A Doolittle, a Reckoning, a reckoning, dread
- Necrobarista (“Walking to the Sky”)
Morbidity through the eyes of anachronistic scene-weebs
- Deltarune (“A Cyber’s World”)
Campy, terminally online, touching, metafictional dread bleeding between worlds
- Sonic Dreams Collection
Speaks for itself
9 Likes
Time to re-do this again!!
Katamari Damacy because it’s full of bad jokes and great music
Super Glitter Rush for the aesthetic - it’s perfect for me!!! Also it has the exact right amount of novelty vs. challenge. Lovely lovely game. (thanks @lonelyfrontier)
Earth Defense Force 2017 to understand the exact kind of dumb jank that i love, and also B Movie Horror Aesthetics
Factorio because I will never, ever stop thinking about this game. Ever.
Sonic Adventure for more jank that I love. Ambition > Results.
10 Likes
Hey I never posted anything why not.
Dwarf Fortress - willfully obtuse, beautiful in an insanely ugly way
Grand Theft Auto 3 - brayingly idiotic guffawing as horrible things/glitches happen, good music
Football Manager - attempted intellectualism of sport, strategic and tactical thinking with no control over the actual “game”
RoboSport - best thought of as “Frozen Synapse made 20 years earlier by one of the designers of X-Wing and Tie Fighter”
Escape Velocity - genre mashup, as you take space trading/upgrade plus 2D shooter plus mysterious overarching plot that organically reveals itself as you explore and pick at threads
9 Likes
Why not, I’ll re-visit this. I feel that I’ve shifted as a person a lot in the past five years, hell in the past two (thanks cowona) so.
Pokemon Colosseum - lmao this is absolutely still on the list. If anything, I’ve thought about it more recently than I had for most of the rest of my life. People in my personal life tie me to this game. also the GRAPHICS.
Zeroranger - it’s become quite a part of me since its release! Reinvigorated appreciation for shmups and just. the GRAPHICS. love a limited palette.
Morrowind - Definitely still here too. the GRAPHICS. the more-alive-than-basically-any-big-western-rpg-since-it-don’t-@-me world. the mechanics that so many people have complained about to my face because they’re cowards. love it.
Digimon World 4 - Yeah this hasn’t left either. I haven’t played a lot of video games in the past half decade! I was too dang busy, man. Anyway i still love all of its deeply idiosyncratic bullshit. it’s final fantasy 2 for Cool Teens. also its digimon and i can’t stop thinking about digimon
Earthbound - i didn’t actually get around to playing it until this year! i’ve always been The Kind Of Person Who Would Like Earthbound, but i did not get very far into it at all when i tried playing it as a kid because of Too Stupid-itis. anyway i’m officially The Kind Of Person Who Does Like Earthbound. it’s always been my vibe, and its humor in both writing and game design has always been what i want games to give. oh and the GRAPHICS
(honorable mention to Phantom Brave, which over the years has come to hold more and more significance for me. I should play it again sometime.)
14 Likes
immediately embarrassed by my own effortposting
master of the wind, the rpg maker xp game made by three guys in their spare time over seven years, is decidedly of its time and gradually harder to recommend since then, but deeply personal to me. transparent anger at bush era politics, the sincerity to throw in whatever metal songs they liked for boss themes, episodic releases that showed their personal growth. they did stuff with their dungeons that i still haven’t seen another game brave enough to try. a significant amount of my music taste is still outgrowths of albums this game led me to at like age ten. this is one of the games that convinced me i should keep making games. honorable mention: cave story, because it’s another early “anyone can make games” game and white still makes me cry
yume nikki. it changed what i wanted out of videogames, its aesthetic is wired enough into my brain that it’s responsible for like three articles of clothing i own, i refuse to look at the remake. honorable mention: yume 2kki online
braid. sorry. jonathan blows name is accurate and i hate him but one of my two remaining friends from the period i played this refers to it as my “braid phase” so i am bound to include it. as an eggy, alienated, pretentious and in particular autistic tween there wasn’t a lot out there that made me feel Seen and somehow this game is what i found and it told me things i needed to hear, e.g. not to turn people i was still struggling to understand into puzzles to be solved, not to let obsessive tendencies eat me alive, etc. also i thought the puzzles were clever. i will not return to it in order to find out it’s bad actually. kill the part of you that cringes. honorable mention: undertale (which i love) might have filled this role if i was born like five or six years later, Save the Date!
final fantasy tactics claims the coveted tactics game slot. there are several i think are better but this is the most compelling mess and thus the most honest answer. matsuno’s eccentric enthusiasm is infectious; squeenix recently trademarked “tactics ogre reborn” and i cannot bring myself to care because they didn’t call it “tactics ogre: planet of the tree men, chapter ix in the ogre battle saga.” at this point in my life nearly every game i play compels me to “fix” it and the spreadsheets and assembly hacks for my ideal fantasy tactics are endless, which is as good a love letter as i can write to a game. i’ve read enough of the code to be in awe at the Mime job ever getting implemented and i can only aspire to that level of scope creep. honorable mentions: into the breach, invisible inc, tactics ogre one vision, journey of the five
petscop. beautiful, haunting, crypto-trans, the most artistic merit i’ve seen in the questionable genre of “videogame creepypasta.” a jigsaw with just the right pieces missing, because i love to be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. a messy and mildly problematic story about rebirth and coming to understand old trauma, which, you know, same. within everyone and particularly my brand of autist is a region of the brain dedicated to either conspiracy theories or absorbing the entirety of fan wikis (synthesis: the silent hill page about circumcision) and petscop is like music for that part of the brain to listen to and play back on repeat, each time focusing on a different section or finding a new compelling way to arrange it. you could call it not a videogame if you’re boring but infodumping all my useless knowledge and theories on friends is an act of play. honorable mention: la mulana is the closest a Real Videogame has gotten to scratching this itch for me
25 Likes
You know usually when I do one of these I keep it to myself but Phantom Brave is at the top of my list, so hey, here it is:
Phantom Brave - One of my favorite Nippon Ichi Software games, one of my favorite tactics games, and with less of the fumes that Disgaea is running on nowadays. At it’s core it’s a sweet story in a sweet RPG that times its welcome to a nanosecond and leaves right on queue.
Ninja Gaiden (2004) - You play as a cool ninja who fights many bosses across many environments. This is the first action game I played and it’s probably still one of the best, only rivaled in my mind by God Hand. While it isn’t as tight or open ended, Ninja Gaiden is much faster and looser and has a lot of fighting game nonsense underneath the hood, which appeals to my action sensibilities in particular. This is also a very personally significant game for me.
The Friends Of Ringo Ishikawa - your friends are outgrowing you simulator
Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime - First game I played where it was not only like nothing else I’d played before but it actually completely ruled. Made me understand that games weren’t just the 7 or 8 genres I had access to, with padding minigames for variety.
Dawn of War: Dark Crusade - I would put Warcraft 3 here but while I recognised it as an amazing piece of software, 10 year old me spent more time making huge dudes in Dark Crusade campaigns. Much, much later I would host a poorly planned tournament of this game with my friends using a Russian overhaul mod which went very poorly, but the game surprising held up in a way that Warcraft 3 didn’t. If I had other people to play with this would be War3, but as it stands this is the game that put the love of RTS in my heart.
6 Likes