When talking about the best games of all time people generally mention Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario 64, Halo 3, The Last of Us, Nier Automata, etc. , but dismiss other great games.
What games do you think are unfairly forgotten from this conversation?
Personally I think the original Dead Rising and Fable: The Lost Chapters, Dragon’s Dogma: The Dark Arisen and Lunar: Eternal Blue should be talked as some of the best games of all time. They’re such great and unique games!
Marathon Infinity - The whole Marathon trilogy did a lot for defining the story-driven FPS (as did System Shock), but since the first and last title were Mac only for years, they didn’t get the credit they deserved among the pantheon of FPS greats.
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP - For years, whenever someone asked me what the must-have game was for iOS, this was always my answer. It shows up on a fair number of iOS lists, but doesn’t get the same level of recognition on PC. One of the most well-crafted experiences ever.
Clash at Demonhead - Despite having an Easter egg in Scott Pilgrim, this NES game is largely forgotten. It was one of my favorites in my youth and I am always surprised by how few people have played it, let alone finished it.
Journey redefined how I look at video games and the world, and honestly changed the course of my life for the better.
TUNIC may truly be the best game of all time
Outer Wilds shares the top spot with TUNIC
Celeste is the best precision platformer, and easily in the top 5 games of all time, though I suppose it is, much like Outer Wilds, quite highly regarded game among people who know it exists
Citizen Sleeper is unparalleled, I can wholeheartedly say more people need to know about this gem
Tunic has such an unique vision and it executes it expertly. On the surface it’s a zelda-like but it’s so much more than that, and it’s best experienced blind. In fact, that’s the whole idea. The developer wanted to replicate the experience of being a kid picking up a game in a different language that you had to figure out little by little.
Agreed! I don’t know if I will ever again experience as much enjoyment from a game as I did from tunic, but that’s okay, for having experienced tunic
Celeste is on my backlog and i just installed it on my laptop, i need to play it in 2024
Heartily recommend playing it on controller if you can, and enjoy the ride!
Remember: You can do this!
Yeah i’m mostly a controller player so that works for me. Is it that hard? I’ve played stone hard games like dmc/dark souls but this seems very different
Morrowind and Oblivion both have a massive fan following but I think always get unfairly overlooked for Skyrim.
I would return 5 Skyrim remakes for just 1 remake of oblivion or Morrowing. Does a great disservice that those games a regulated to past consoles.
I’m not sure I would trust modern Bethesda to remake Morrowind.
There are some amazing fan projects though:
- While it isn’t a remake, OpenMW improves upon the original game’s graphics - it does not change textures or models though, just rendering features.
- Skywind is a remake though - it uses the engine of Skyrim to recreate Morrowind.
- Skyblivion is the same idea, but with Oblivion.
OpenMW may as well be a remake, it runs very well and updates everything for modern hardware. Thats probably the way to go if you want to play Morrowind today.
I agree, Skyrim was a huge disappointment for me.
After Fallout 3, each Bethesda release was less ambitious than the last. Oblivion tried to do tons of stuff and ended up as a beautiful and memorable total mess (It’s my personal favorite). Fallout 3 was a bold new direction and a more stable but fudamentally compromised experience. Skyrim established the trend of scaling back and making what’s left more consistent, simple, and flashy. Fallout 4 was the last major fan outcry from those who believed Bethesda could have done better while Starfield is a confirmation that everyone’s worst fears about Bethesda are true.
I can tell dozens of stories of buggy hilarious moments in oblivion stories that are memorable and unique. All I remember from vanilla skyrim are the official plots everyone went through. It was just as buggy just charmless.
Too true. Being able to jump over buildings was the basis for many of my old Oblivion shenanigans. You can’t really get weird with the Skyrim options without modding.
It’s truly you! The hero of Kvatch!
Dwarf Fortress deserves a mention for sheer audacity and scope.
Where are my Outer Wilds boys at?
I started playing the Outer Worlds thinking I had simply misheard the name Outer Wilds and found myself very confused but still kept trudging on. Thank you for bringing some sanity into my life; Wilds seems like the game I wanted to play the whole time, not Worlds. I’ll see how chaotic I can fuck out Worlds before I ditch it for Wilds.
Always ready to bump my favorite game of all time, but honestly I feel this is quite a popular opinion (compared to some of the games in OP’s list that are really overlooked on these discussions of best games ever).
But still, what an incredible experience, the OST for outer Wilds was my fourth most listened to on last year’s Spotify Wrapped :)
Thanks for reminding me!
Yeah, it may not be as popular as Mario or Zelda, but I wouldn’t say it’s “unfairly forgotten”. People who have played the game tend to be pretty vocal about it. And justifiably so, I’ve never had a comparable experience in another game. I wish I could forget about it and play it again.
For the people who do find out about it and it hooks them enough sure, it’s not really forgotten or underrated. But I still think it’s kinda obscure / not well known?
I’m not sure how this compares to Spotify but I still feel pretty good about this one
Not a boy but I’m fucking HERE for Outer Wilds. And TUNIC, in the same vein.
The best games of all time are: Go, Soccer, Chess, Poker, Tetris… they’ve stood the proof of time over and over again (respectively: 4000, 2300, 1400, 200, 40 years).
A honorable mention should go to Doom, as in the “can it run Doom?” meme, but it’s anyone’s guess whether it will stand for another 30 years.
All the likes of Zelda, Mario, Halo, Pokemon, etc. are going to get forgotten as soon as the last generation playing the last re-release as a kid, grows out of time to play it actively, and as servers for the multiplayer versions get shut down.
All the likes of Zelda, Mario, Halo, Pokemon, etc. are going to get forgotten
I disagree. The reason being that video games and gaming of this caliber are completely unheard of in all of human history. We’ve come further in gaming tech over the last couple decades than the grand majority of all humans that have ever existed could even dream.
That being said, as long as emulation exists, there will be fans of big ips. The problem with saying “it’ll get forgotten as soon as the last person stops playing” is that the specific circumstance of modern gaming is unprecedented. People are still out there emulating games that came out in the 80’s. There’s really no rule saying this kind of technology won’t last hundreds or thousands of years like more classical games do.
Chess and Go are so old, I’m surprised that the best players in the world don’t already know every possible move to the point that the games are decided after both players make a single move.
They have an exponential number of valid positions, that happen to surpass human abilities to abstract, memorize, and predict.
Chess is estimated to have 10⁴⁰ valid moves, which means not even everyone playing chess throughout all of history, have explored all of them. Like, a billion people playing 1 distinct move a second for 1400 years, would only reach about 10²⁰ moves.
They still can be trained, meaning one person can be way better than another… but a computer trained even more, can be even better… and yet the games surpass even current computers abilities to explore the full possibility space. Maybe quantum computers will be able to do that.
Fun fact, mostly unrelated but something in your message reminded me: I once played against a guy at a Go club, and we had an enjoyable game but he beat me. He wanted to talk to me about the game afterwards, and he started replaying the game for me from memory so he could make commentary. He replayed a pretty decent chunk of the beginning; I honestly don’t remember but I think around the first 25-30 moves of the game.
I later learned he was the visiting Go person who was just stopping by the club for social reasons but could demolish anyone. He was incredibly kind and polite.
Yeah, back in chess club at school, we also got a visit from the local (future) GM as a treat on one of the last days. He took us at something like 15 simultaneous games at once… and beat us all.
Go is slightly different; it only has one piece type, the rules are much simpler than chess, the board is much larger but with 8-fold symmetry, so the first 20-30 moves are likely to fall into some “basic” patterns in some of the octants. By comparison, the patterns in chess get hard to manage after just 10 moves, while Go pros may plan even 100 moves ahead. Where Go gets really complex, is when the patterns start meeting, and the complexity tends towards the 10¹⁷⁰ possible moves, way more than the 10⁴⁰ practical ones in chess.
Doom will last at least until people born in the 80s die
Trog… I played that game for days
Basically everything old. There’s such massive recency bias in game discussions. It’s very much an explicit marketing strategy to promote the new thing as more everything but somehow it’s infected almost all discussions.
Sure ok, playing an old game requires a bit more investment and effort than watching an old film or even reading an old book but mostly it’s just about lack of familiarity. Especially outside of fps style games where I’ll admit prior to halo 1 things were pretty all over the shop many older games are still approachable.
Coupled with the general dismissal of strategy and simulation genres (which were comparatively bigger in the past) and many things get forgotten outside of cult classic status.
Old is relative though. Age doesn’t hit movies or books nearly as hard as it does to games and gameplay mechanics, and where exactly that acceptable limit happens to be differ for each individual - with no doubt a large correlation based on your age.
It’s just really hard to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone who didn’t grow up with them and doesn’t have the appreciation and nostalgia of those times. Heck, back when I was a kid with my PSX, anything on the NES felt like an ancient unplayable relic.Idk, it’s pretty difficult to get my peers to check out black and white film, let alone silent, and yet most enjoy what they see.
I came to gaming after the NES (although I was alive at the time) and have recently been emulating games and have been surprised by how good some are.
There are still modern games that expect you to read a manual before playing, there are still modern games where it takes about 2 hours to learn the UI. There are older games with 3 page manuals and simple controls too.
You’ve got to remember you’re not immune to marketing tactics either. Like part of the resistance to checking out older stuff has been placed in us all by gaming companies training us to interpret stuff like low framerate as bad, or controls that aren’t fluid as bad.
Best game doesn’t necessarily mean most enjoyable now, or even an enjoyable experience at all. Some of the greatest art is difficult, unpleasant, and challenging. Some of the greatest video games are those that set trends, or do something unique despite rough edges, or are even straight up hostile to their player.
One title that comes to mind is Anachronox. A western rpg with a really good story, interesting characters (one of your companions is an entire planet shrinked down to human size), fun humor and a cliffhanger that never got resolved.
I really wish they made a part 2 but I know it will never happen.
It’s an RPG made in the west, but I’ve always heard that it was notable for being a JRPG.
It was a mix of both, the battle system was definitely like a JRPG that’s true.
Come to think of it, I’m not an expert on JRPG’s, so maybe it is? :) What else defines a JRPG?Definitions will vary from person to person, and plenty of games in each camp will represent some but not all of their defining characteristics, but you’ll see some common themes. Historically, I’ve also preferred western RPGs by a wide margin, so that might color some of my definitions below. Also, both of these branches in RPGs had the same starting reference of D&D, and then a multi-decade game of whisper down the lane led to them diverging more and more.
Western RPGs:
- character creation, choosing from classes that you’ll often see represented by other NPCs
- allocating attribute points, both at character creation and as you level up, that govern other things about your character
- generally flatter power progression (you might do hundreds more damage at the end of the game than you do at the beginning, but not hundreds of thousands more damage)
- in attempts to recreate the tabletop experience, will often times allow for outside-the-box solutions to problems besides combat as well as choices that affect the world state
JRPGs:
- usually a finite cast of characters that level up more or less only in one way, but you might have a secondary system for them to customize with equipment beyond weapons and armor
- combat usually doesn’t involve positioning on something like a tactical map but rather a line of combatants on each side of the screen
- magic and abilities are more often limited by a magic points resource instead of a rest system
- dialogue with NPCs tends to be more limited in choices, telling a more linear narrative
I’ll be honest, trying to differentiate these two with a list of bullet points was harder than I thought it would be to articulate. I’m almost more inclined to just say “I know it when I see it”, haha. But for some points of reference, I’d say Baldur’s Gate 3, Pillars of Eternity, and The Witcher 3 are western RPGs; Final Fantasy VII, Persona 5, and Pokemon are JRPGs; Sea of Stars is a JRPG that isn’t made by a Japanese developer; and while also an action game, Dark Souls is closer to being a western RPG than a JRPG.
When you put it like that I suppose Anachronox is definitely more of a JRPG. Either way, it’s a really good game :)
Thank you for your thorough explanation!
I think of it as a branching development becoming different design sensibilities. CRPGs influenced the game Dragon Quest, but JRPGS after DQ were influenced specifically by DQ and the games inspired from it such as the original Final Fantasy. CRPGS, MUDS, Dnd games, and Ultima became the basis for the Western sensibility which initially developed separately from the Dragon Quest branch (although there is still some crossover). This being the case, nowadays each region can make either Western RPGS or JRPGS because we all have pretty easy access to a lot of each others’ games and developers can make the games they prefer to make influenced by what they like regardless of its origin.
Undertale is a JRPG from the West. The maker of the game began making Rom hacks for Earthbound, a JRPG, and used the skills they learned doing that do create their own game. Dragon Quest>Earthbound>Undertale is pure JRPG. Other examples I can think of are messier, but that’s kind of the point.
I think for best games of all time i think fallout new vegas. Its super well regarded amongst bethesda fans but i dont hear it listed as one of the greatest in general and i think i definitely deserves to be up there. The size of the world, the zaney humor, the amount of quests, weapons, amd your effect on the world. There’s just so much to this game
Toribash is quite possibly the best competitive fighting game I have ever played due to it’s unique method of controlling your actions. It’s almost entirely unheard of tho.
MS Solitaire, Space Pinball, and Minesweeper come to mind. They were not my favorites, but I know a few people who have a few hundred hours on one or more of those.
For me it’s C&C Generals Zero Hour. I have had a copy since it released in 2003, it still works, and I still play it in single player mode at least once a week. It’s great because it does not require a huge time commitment and campaign missions take about an hour or less to complete. To me it’s one of the best RTS style games out there. My second favorite? C&C Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge.
I have also very much enjoyed the Assassin’s Creed series up to AC Odyssey.
Adding my Voice for Zero Hour. Excellent game. the multiplayer, skirmish and campaign modes all have something to offer.
It’s crying out for a proper remake. Just a modern patch. Don’t change anything, just make it work easier, especially the networking
I’m assuming you are already familiar with GenPatcher?
Pirate Trainer & Uru: Ages Beyond Myst
I remember trying Pirate Trainer in a Nvidia game booth when VR was new. It was incredible, years later I get a VR headset and its the free game. I don’t understand how no one has improved upon it.
Uru was the first puzzle game I thought struck a good balance between physical and mental puzzles. They were set at a level that felt challenging but not impossible and laid out so you alternated really nicely. Myst Online actually went backwards in this
I tried pirate trainer in a VR demo booth at a con and lost 2 hours thinking it has been 20 minutes!
Plants vs Zombies on PC.
Great, unique, iconic, still fun to play. Its biggest achievement: I have brought a lot of people into the hobby by making them play this as their first video game and there wasn’t a single one not having fun. Tower defense is as a whole an underrated genre if we talk about the best games of all time. It also is a game that offers achievements that add a lot to the gameplay by challenging you to change your tactics.
They of course had to make the second one mobile only and on top ruin it with microtransactions. :( Greed is why we can’t have nice things.
Freespace 1 & 2 deserve a mention here. Old games, so smaller in scope than modern games. But I feel they can compete still.
