Games You Think Are Underrated

Give some love to those games you think were either lambasted by critics, got better with age, were released at just the wrong time, or are otherwise too weird for most audiences to pick up, but you, in all your wisdom see the true beauty behind it, etc. etc.

 

Jet Force Gemini, a great N64 game, yet almost everyone seems to have forgotten about it's existence.

 

I remember really liking a game called Cold Fear which I found in a bargain bin at a game store. The combat was good, the physics were great for what they were, the environment and level design were really good (it took place entirely on a boat in a storm), and the story was kind of cliche and predictable, but still enjoyable. Truly an unappreciated gem in my opinion, but that could be nostalgia talking.

I just looked at wikipedia and it seems that games critics thought it was good, but too short. That's possible, but I don't think I would have cared because I only paid 5 dollars for the game. Maybe if I paid $20-$60 I would have been a little more irritable about the length.

 

Viewtiful Joe. It was a great early 2000s beat-em-up with a wonderful sense of humor and beautiful art that still holds up for the same reason the original Wind Waker's does without need for an HD "remaster" - it looks like a cartoon and focuses on fluid movement rather than cluttering the screen with the maximum amount of realistic detail that the dated hardware can render. It was a critical darling, getting perfect scores in every review source I was familiar with at the time, but sold poorly for unclear reasons.

Super Mario Bros. 2 and Zelda 2: Adventure of Link. These games get a lot of flak in retrospect from people who hopped into these series after their like tenth installments or so for being less like the first games in their respective series than the third ones were - being "not true" installments because the creators actually took risks and experimented with things for the sequels. Me, I grew up with all three NES Super Mario Bros games together and loved SMB2 almost as much as SMB3, not thinking less of it as a Mario game for its lack of fire flowers and the enemies not going squish when I jumped on them and I got into Legend of Zelda by playing the two NES games mere months before Ocarina of Time came out (or two years after it came out with me not finding out about the new one until later?) and Zelda II has always been my favorite Zelda game.

Congo's Caper, an obscure but very solid 2d platformer for the SNES. Its Japanese name was Joe & Mac 2 and while you can see the influence pretty clearly it's definitely not a Joe & Mac game (as the caveman you play is neither Joe nor Mac, and they don't factor into the game at all and nor do that game's main weapon mechanics), leading to the only person I've ever seen talk about it online bashing it. Now design wise, Congo's Caper is nothing but a competent and unspectacular sidescrolling action game, but sometimes that's all you want or need.

 

Viewtiful Joe sold close to 300000 copies, which is pretty good for what it was.

 

The Homeworld franchise for sure.

 

Underrated Because Not Many People Remember It: Shining Force. I have only ever had two reactions whenever I bring up Shining Force:

1) What the fuck is Shining Force.
2) HOLY FUCKING SHIT THAT GAME WAS THE BEST!!!!

Sadly, I've encountered more of the former.

Underrated Because People Gave It Unjust Hate: Metal Gear Solid 2. "UH MAH GAWD I HID 2 UZE RAIDEN N HE IZ SUK N HIZ SKILL IZ SUK!!"
The Metal Gear Solid games are incredibly driven by the narrative that they weave. The whole message behind MGS2 is that genes aren't the most important thing to be passed down. What better way to show that then to have Solid Snake (who can't pass down his genes) pass something more important down to a protege. But many gamers prefer to snort their Ritalin instead of pop it, so this went over many of their heads and brought a lot of unwarranted hate towards the game.

The whole Codec thing was incredibly lazy though.

 

Also I think that was one of the many games X-Play panned hard for no reason other than it was adjacent to being a JRPG in presentation and had voice clips they didn't like, while other reviewers that people I knew were less likely to hear from praised its witty writing.

Or was that Shining Tears? I'm pretty sure it was either something with Shining as the first word or Force as the second.

 

I've never heard of Shining Force.

I remember liking Metal Gear Solid 2, It was a pretty decent game which did get a lot of hate from people over the Raiden thing. Although, in defence of the haters, Kojima brought at least some of the hate on himself by really making people think that Snake was the character who you would play as for most of the game. The advertising heavily implied that Snake would be the playable character, and you start off the game playing as Snake. So, he basically trolled his fans, and his fans were pretty angry because of it.

 

True, but you'vr got to keep an open mind sometimes and look at the narrative. If you want something more gameplay heavy where the narrative takes a firm back seat, the Metal Gear games aren't for you.

 

Clockwork Knight 1 & 2 for the Sega Saturn. Great 2.5D platforming, decent story, and a spectacular underrated soundtrack. One of the games I played over and over in my childhood. Too bad it didn't go on to be one of Sega's beloved franchises (or good, depending on how you view Sega, what with how they put their other IPs on the backburner in favor of Sonic).

 

Sonic Boom is the greatest video game of all time because it got Chris sent to jail.

 

I love Shining Force, but I don't get very far in it because I've never been that much of an RPG guy.
To keep on topic - Vectorman was a game that seemed highly underrated; nice pre-rendered graphics a'la Donkey Kong Country, neat designs for both player and enemies, lots of varied level types and even weird "minigame" levels to keep you on your toes.

 

It was one of those rendered sprite games that, due to object interactions and stuff, successfully fooled players of the time into thinking it was an actual 3D CG game despite looking better than what real-time polygons could do. This would be merely quaint if it didn't also deliver a good action platformer gameplay with good stage design and solid controls.

It's one of those games my mom aggressively played for hours on end until she beat it. I went back to play it again about a decade ago and wasn't able to get half that far, then realized most of my memories of the game were of watching her play rather than playing it myself.

 

If your mom is young enough to play Vectorman that much, then are you old enough to be on this site?

 

I liked the Children of the Nile city building game and most of the historical themed city builders.

 

She was born in 1955. She was loving and playing videogames at least five years before I was born, with Mrs. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong in arcades. My older siblings, born starting in 1971, have fond memories of the family Intellivision the way I do of our NES, SNES, Genesis, and 386 PC or that my two younger brothers do of our N64 and GameCube.

 

Your mom sounds very cool!

 

I have some.

Let's start with my RTS/Strategy games:

I really loved Myth and its sequel. It had a fun Blackadder-esque setting, and unique in that you needed to win the scenarios with just a certain amount of units. It was more tactics than strategy, but grand nonetheless. It had a lot of staying power (people STILL play Myth 2 to a degree), but it was back before Bungie was better known for Halo and less visible than Marathon. Fun Fact: a song in Halo is actually from this game. The Siege of Madrigal if you're curious.


Jesus, this game was one of my favorite tactical based games, and I loved its sequel as well. I was genuinely saddened when my computer stopped being able to play it. This game was seen as mediocre, but I found the game solid, and with a cheesy but fun story for each character.

Now let's get to a gem I would love to see once more:

Holy shit this game. My dad bought it for his PC and I bogarted it like the shit son I am. It had a wonderful dieselpunk setting, was nice and challenging, and best of all allowed you to design your own troops to fight the dickbag who killed your daddy. This baby dropped off the face of the earth, and I honestly think it could've earned a good sequel.

 

Sounds like my mom, haha. I still remember her being quite disappointed with Sonic '06 because she enjoyed the old Genesis titles.