An unpopular game you love.

Do you have a Game that is widely consideres to be mediocre or bad but you just love to death?

I don't mean unknown or unrecognized games, i mean games that you would consider to be objectively bad, but you nonetheless enjoyed a lot.

For me that's azure dreams for playstation 1.

I freaking love that game, i used to play it when I was in elementary school with my best friend.

It's super grindy, with barely any story, it has harem mechanics, and most of the game play is rogue like with randomly generated levels.

But man how i loved that game.

Recently was reminiscing with @judaspete about Quake: Champions, and from my understanding that game was panned, hated, and dismissed by a lot of people. Especially people who have never played a Quake game before.

Are the Champions servers choppy and inconsistent? absolutely.

Was its main gimmick-draw riding the Overwatch hype-train? yes.

But it was still Quake, and a well designed Quake game at that, when a match performed well it was glorious, the Quake fans know from Q3 and QLive. It was still a good time and if given enough work, updates, and gone multiplatform, could have been even better and reached a wider audience willing to give it a chance.

*In previous "underrated" threads I've posted about The Evil Within & Demento. But honestly looking back these games get way more love than Quake: Champions ever will.

Metroid on gameboy. Looking back in it it has terrible gameplay. But I really have a lot of fond memories. I can’t believe how badly it’s aged..

Outlander! Oh yeah!

Codename S.T.E.A.M. It's a turn-based strategy game. It's kinda like Fire Emblem, but without the ability to level up. The game is so off the wall. It has the lion from the Wizard of Oz, Tom Sawyer and Abraham Lincoln in it. The cutscenes blew me away. I don't know if the developers had intended for the cutscenes to be so funny, but either way, they're hysterical. The cutscenes were better than the game itself! lol!

@dracula_16: played it up to a certain chapter then I got bored. Game made a great first impression, love the steampunk designs but the gameplay just could not hold me. I recall it was reviewed well and one of 3DS first games. Didn't know its unpopular I read lots of people played it.

On the PS2 Gust makes a lot of isometric JRPG. atelier series, Mana Khemia1&2, Ar Tonelico 1&2 I fcking loved all of them I think they are jrpg underrated gems. Some probably heard of Atelier series but I personally think the PS2 games is very different compared to the later entries as the PS2 games involve world saving plots unlike the later entries.

Ar Tonelico games is kinda hit or miss due to the whole waifu subplot but damn those 2d art backgrounds used in some areas looks phenomenal.

@RSM-HQ: Yeah, Quake Champions is a good time.

I like Gravel quite a bit. Got knocked for not being Dirt Rally, but it is a fun and very arcade racing game. Kind of like a spiritual successor to Sega Rally.

Moto GP 10/11. From the brief time when Capcom had the Moto GP licence. The physics are not realistic, but it's fun to me.

Need for Speed: Nitro. It's not the best Need for Speed, but it was the best Cruis'n before Blast came out.

It seems I'm a fan of mediocre racing games.

Wet is another. Like a mix of Max Payne with Prince of Persia. While certainly not as good as either of those, it is bombastic and fun. To me anyway. Critics were lukewarm at the time, and recent retrospectives have largely been even more harsh.

It's only at 69 on Metacritic, so it wasn't reviewed overly well. See here:

Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. for 3DS Reviews - Metacritic

I don't care about the scores though, I still enjoyed it. :)

@dracula_16: yeah exactly! I play a lot of rpg and jrpg that people say is crappy but i enjoyed them cause I loves the genre. Maybe its just tolerance cause its the shit I enjoy.

@nirgal:

ps3 - wet

ps5- forspoken

Oh, I can definitely relate to that feeling! For me, it's probably Sonic '06. Yes, I know it's widely regarded as a terrible game, and for good reason. The glitches, the awkward camera angles, the convoluted plot - it's all there. But for some reason, I still find myself coming back to it. Maybe it's the nostalgia factor, or maybe I just enjoy laughing at its absurdity. Either way, it's a guilty pleasure of mine. Have you ever tried to go back and play Azure Dreams as an adult? It's always interesting to revisit games from our childhood and see how they hold up.

Only one I can think of is Air Boarder 64. It sucks, but it's also fun. One of my first N64 games (got it for free with the console) and loved it.

It is. I just thought it was unfortunate that they made "heroes". Abilities? Stats? Please gtfo of my Quake. I'd abolustely love to see more Quake, but not Quakewatch.

@hamiltonrichard: i tried once in my 20s and i enjoyed it, i think right now i can't because it's far too grindy.

I would enjoy it but my wife would kill me hahahah.

Alpha Protocol. An older game by Obsidian. Take Jason Bourne, add in some corny-but-fun story, sprinkle in some Die Hard, then give it a vigorous shake and add some Mass-Effect-meets-modern-espionage gameplay, and voila...one of the better action-rpg's of all time that no one played.

I also like the Tomb Raider reboot that scored a 6 here, the one in the jungle. I think it was the second one?

I also like Two Worlds series. If you think Gothic or Risen was rough, oh boy...Two Worlds stepped in and was like "Hold my beer".

OMFG I loved that game. It was unpopular? Bad reviews or just overlooked?

Resident Evil 6, Binary Domain, Code Vein, Dragon Age 2, AC Unity/Syndicate, Enslaved. :)

I played a lot of Metal Gear Survive when it released and almost platinumed it while it was being bashed to hell along with Konami.

It was a pretty fun game actually.

Needs a Sequel.

this thread got me thinking how much i am influenced by big franchises and titles, why cant i think of any unpopular games hahaha

Well that's why marketing usually exceeds development costings by a large margin for these large publishers. I believe the last Call of Duty had a marketing campaign of 882 million U.S. dollars.

Electronic Arts, Activision, and Ubisoft rely way more on a marketing campaign than word of mouth for the companies biggest franchises, the game could flop from a critical standpoint, and still rake in mula.

Quality of games doesn't matter so long as the customer is purchasing the product.

If an advert tells customers it's "the great game of all time", and is displayed on as many platforms and billboards as humanly possible. . majority watching the ad will assume it's gotta have some truth to it, even if the source behind such a boasting quote is questionable (usually a quote from IGN or Kotaku). Cyberpunk 2077 is a great example, as was Fall Out 76; despite horrible reviews both made a lot of money.

Indie and smaller budget games simply get lost in the loud noise that is big-boy business, the only way smaller games explode is if a popular Twitch streamer gets hooked on one of these games and recommends it (back to the word of mouth notion). Usually the games that benefit from this are multiplayer experiences like Valheim and Among Us.

Signalis was one of the best reviewed games of 2022, majority only have praise to give the game, and wasn't even nominated at the Game Awards. Reason? they didn't know it existed, Signalis was made by two people and relied entirely on word of mouth. Survival Horror is a niche genre and so it got lost in the October traffic.

People who call games like CyberPunk and God of War: Ragnarök "the greatest games of all time" are typically caught up in pre-release hype, and one cannot blame the marketing/ advertising team for doing a good job selling the game(s) to anyone who likes being spoon-fed what they want to hear.

Poypoy (PS1) and Ragnarok Online.