Best Games Nobody played

[Snargelfargen]

Requiem - Avenging Angel

This is a shooter that can best be described as Jedi Knight meets Quake 2. You play an angel that has to travel through heaven and hell to return to earth, where you must defeat some sort of cult or something. I honestly can't remember the plot but that's not really important. What IS important, is that this is a decent quake-like shooter where you can do totally crazy, biblically awesome stuff. Things such as: Turning your foes into pillars of salt, possessing powerful enemies, bullet time, or literally boil an enemy's blood until they explode. Jedi Knight's force lightning has got nothing on Requiem. Thanks to the quake engine and some decent animations, the game has aged pretty well (or it had about 2 years ago, been awhile since I played it), but finding it now is difficult. Unfortunately Requiem was released not long after Half-life, and it fell into obscurity quickly.

Omikron: The Nomad Soul. Could be frustrating at times, but totally worth it.

I have been searching for a copy of this game for years, but no luck so far. The copies on Amazon are crazy expensive. I did once find a pirated copy, but it was missing all the music. Omikron without it's David Bowie soundtrack might as well be no game at all...

Edit: I just saw that a couple people mentioned Oni as well. It probably has the best hand-to-hand combat system I have seen yet. There is a huge selection of moves, and it manages to stay intuitive and cinematic while still being extremely challenging. This video show the gameplay pretty well, despite the annoying introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjLDz...eature=related
Also, the lead is an actual strong female character, instead of another Lara Croft clone.

[RobF]

RE: Gridrunner Revolution - I felt Gridrunner++ was a much better game really, although people should definately check out both. One of the things I really liked about ++ is that you could be playing it in literally one second of launching the game - great for a quick 5 minute blast.

Yeah, I completely agree that ++ is the superior game. I like GR:R a lot but sometimes it feels like one of those jokes where you have to explain it and so it loses some of its power because of that. It's too slow to come together and the unlock system makes it really hard to introduce people to the best bits when they need to put in at least an hour of play before they'll see it heading into the realms of fabness.

There's a lot of super clever and smart stuff in it* and I've got a real hand on heart adoration of the bouncy mouse stretchy slingshot mode and given the choice, I'd choose both. But if someone put a gun to my head, ++ would be my choice.

The new-mini stuff Jeff is doing on iOS is great too and I'm glad he's finding his funk again. Hopefully the PC versions will see the light soon enough for those non-iOS'y folks to enjoy also.

*the way it handles player death is both amazingly progressive and regressive all at the same time. On the one hand you have a game that wants you to be super overpowered, wants you to recover and fight on like the brilliant person you are but then calls you a loser when you slightly mess up. It's full of grrrrrrrrrnnnnk almost moments like that.

[Spacewalk]

Requiem - Avenging Angel
This is a shooter that can best be described as Jedi Knight meets Quake 2. You play an angel that has to travel through heaven and hell to return to earth, where you must defeat some sort of cult or something. I honestly can't remember the plot but that's not really important. What IS important, is that this is a decent quake-like shooter where you can do totally crazy, biblically awesome stuff. Things such as: Turning your foes into pillars of salt, possessing powerful enemies, bullet time, or literally boil an enemy's blood boil until they explode. Jedi Knight's force lightning has got nothing on Requiem. Thanks to the quake engine and some decent animations, the game has aged pretty well (or it had about 2 years ago, been awhile since I played it), but finding it now is difficult. Unfortunately Requiem was released not long after Half-life, and it fell into obscurity quickly.

Oh Quake engine, I've been under the impression that it was an in-house one made specifically for the game.

I had a lot of fun with this one even if it wasn't as world shattering as I'd hoped it would be. The guns took up the right side of the screen and it was a tad more linear than half-Life but using the conversion power to charm an army of (well modeled) enemies to act as gun-packing meat shields whilst you alternated between sniping anything that moved and shooting blasts of energy that could mow down lines of dumb humans made all of those near identical corridors feel better than it should've. That and the tri-barrelled shotgun ate anything that got close enough to you for breakfast. It's become one of those games that only people were were crazy about their first-person shooters remember and as you said, being released shortly after Half-Life didn't help it at all. Also, being published by 3DO when they were full-swing into developing those terrible Army Men games probably had a little to do with it not lighting the public's interest in it as well.

[Anthile]

Somebody said Requiem?

[LGM]

My problem with Gridrunner, though it's quite likely deliberate, is that I only have the vaguest idea what the hell is going on. There's things all over my screen, I don't know what scores points, I don't know when it decides I've completed a level, I don't know what I did one round to score massively higher than I did in a previous attempt. All I know is to collect the sheep.

On most levels, you have to start shooting at the "sun" as soon as you get a sheep or two. Once it explodes, you use the black hole that remains to bend your shots. I generally favor ships with a circular shot pattern so I can bend them in a circle around teh black hole. You have to always be aware of your distance from the hole and your angle to the hole, once you start finding sweet spots, your multiplier goes up, thus giving higher scores. Each ship has a distinct bullet stream(s), and it gets pretty interesting when you have multiple black holes on screen ;)

[GothicEmperor]

I'm still amazed by how good Terminal Velocity looks and how fluid everything was for a game made in 95. Heck, I only got to play it several years after release and my kid-self was very impressed.

[triage]

The Journeyman Project!

for me, that was like one of the last of the great PC point-and-click adventure era.

[Oshada]

I second Terminal Velocity. Sure it's a bit pixelated now, but the sounds are still brilliant, and it handles really, really well.

[Carra]

7 Kingdoms.

It's an RTS that dares to do things its own way. You had cities which slowly growed, the more people that lived in it the faster it growed. You could then recruit people from it to build mines and factories, or train them as soldiers. The more you recruited, the slower your city grows so it was a balancing act. And from there on your soldiers would be trained and gain levels. A full barracks of 9 top level soldiers was a force to be reckoned with. Often times you'd end up having a war with your veterans in front and then just a ton of low level recruits to help them. The veterans would have ten times more hp than your raw recruits.

The game also had a wonderful diplomacy system and especially the spies were a lot of fun. You could enter a spy into an enemy baracks, he would then be trained as a soldier. If you were very lucky he would be promoted to a general and get his own fort. From there on you could just take over the fortress and anyone in it. Or you could let your soldier try to assassinate their general/King or just bribe the General to walk over to your side so you could take over the forum. Of course, the spying went both ways. If a very good soldier suddenly walked over to your side you could never be sure that he was no spy. So you'd have to add your own counter spy to the fort...

I didn't like its succeeder as much as the original but the original is one of my favorite games of all time. Heck, I feel like getting my GoG copy out again to play some more.