Baiten Kaitos, but especially its prequel, BK: Origins for the GameCube. Both are timed turn based combat using cards, a fantastic story, great characters, and fantastic music.
Control mostly felt like it loved its combat far more than said combat warranted. It's like completely inoffensive stuff but they make you do so much of it when 95% of the time the winning move is just grab shit->throw shit so it gets real repetitive.
As for my own entry to the whole 7/10 game you love thing? Well, first thing to mind is Lost Kingdoms
Was the game full of some genuinely baffling design decisions? Oh, for certain. But for all of that, I think this is the first game I ever played that really grabbed the concept of "card based magic" and ran the fuck with it. None of this abstraction bullshit of card based roguelikes, straight up we're trapping spirits in cards and using them in a real time battle system. An almost-Vancian management of your deck through levels. Cards to call upon as single spells, with no attacks of your own. Throw cards to the ground to summon the creatures trapped in them. The works.
I kinda loved it. Forget about all that Elden Ring shit and give us Lost Kingdoms 3, From Software you fucking cowards.
I love this game so much I wrote a now 9 book novel series inspired by it. Please deliver more of these From Soft.
On that I loved and I don't think anyone else ever played was Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64. It was a fun puzzle action game where you solve puzzles by killing and taking over the bodies of robot animals. It had a weird sense of humor and the levels were genuinely fun to explore
It was made by DMA who made Lemmings and later became Rockstar North
I spent the duration of my time in a grocery store queue yesterday trying to remember the name of that game
I even had the title in mind at one point, but rejected it because I thought there was "something cold" in the name
Anyway I liked that one a lot. It came to mind when I was reading the Rock Paper Shotgun review of Hauntii.
Fun fact about this game: if you had the N64 expansion pak installed this game would hard crash on level select and loading into level 1
You had to put the dummy pak that N64s ship with back into the slot to fix it
(It's something to do with the logic board having a shitfit after the first cutscene and I believe it only affects first generation cartridges)
Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, Earned in Blood, and to a lesser extent Hell's Highway.
They're a tactical, first person shooter set during WW2 that is basically video game Band of Brothers. It follows Sgt. Matt Baker of the 101st Airborne and his struggles with a sort of battlefield psychosis as a squad leader during the Normandy invasion (which is appropriate since yesterday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day). Earned in Blood is the sequel but it runs parallel to Matt Baker's story and is from the perspective of Joe "Red" Hartsock, a guy who is made squad lead right after Baker while in the field. Hell's Highway put you back in Baker's shoes during Operation: Market Garden. The next game was supposed to follow them into Bastogne but Hell's Highway launched in 2008 and then Gearbox just never made the follow up, even after leaving it on a cliff hanger. Around that time they launched Borderlands which became a huge hit and Ubisoft basically axed all focus on anything that wasn't Borderlands. I don't even know if Gearbox still exists, these days.
The crux of it was you commanded a squad, either a fire team or an assault team or both simultaneously. You could issue on the fly orders to your squad to either suppress enemies, flank, or assault them in a full frontal charge. If you were smart you could pull off some really satisfying plays. The commands were pretty simple but effective. Your squad was fully voiced and each character had their own personalities and back stories, which made it hit really hard when one of them died, which is paralleled by the pre mission voice lines from Baker. It was one of the first and maybe only war games that didn't do what I call the Call of Duty Bravado. These weren't supermen fighting through over the top explosions and saving the world. The devs put a lot of time into making these characters normal people from normal places with normal conflicts. And when they died they often died quick and ugly. There were no romantic deaths in that game. One minute your rifleman is there as you get to the mission end and the next he's been blown open by a Stuka dive bomber and you just have to start the next one, stepping around his mangled body and getting on with it. Or you're talking to a guy in a church tower and then a sniper shoots him through the head and you can't deal with it, just immediately fight off a German counter attack. It's, to this day, maybe one of the most brutal WW2 shooters ever made, not because they go over the top with the blood and gore, but because they made it extremely realistic. At least as real as you could get in 2005.
Hell's Highway deviated from the formula a little by introducing a 3rd person cover system and a more "cinematic" experience that was probably taken from GoW. Instead of all of the major events happening in real time in 1st person, they opted for cutscenes which I didn't really like. It's the weakest of the three, in my opinion, but still good and I'm still very mad they never released a follow up. They tried to relaunch the BiA's series as Furious 4, a 4 person, Inglorious Bastards style Borderlands-lite shooter but the backlash was significant and I believe the project got shelved. I think it eventually got completely reworked into a later flop down the road. Like, I think I read they redeveloped it into what became Battleborn. Since then, Pitchford has stated a few times a new, true follow up was in development but no news has ever progressed it out of that early dev space.
It's been 84 years.
Edit: I may be a little disingenuous with this one since personally, I'd rate Road to Hill 30 an 8 and Earned in Blood 8.5. Hell's Highway I'd probably give a 6. But I imagine I hold them in much higher regard than most. I still play through them with some lite mutator mods on my PC from time to time. As I search my feelings I almost don't want them to make a finale. It's been too long and I know, based off the third game and the last, fuck, sixteen years of gaming trends, they'll never try and recapture the magic from the first two. They'll pull a CoD. They'll have Baker ride a V2 rocket out of a secret launch facility and fist fight one of those armored trains and put in a 48 second train crash sequence. Microtransaction bundles to decorate your foxhole in the Ardennes.
I think my own contribution to this thread is going to be Hogs of War.
Hogs of war is a ps1 game that can probably be best described as an early attempt at a 3d worms game, but with pigs, and Rick Mayall doing the voices. It's not entirely successful at what it's trying to do, but man, I put so, so many hours into the multiplayer of this as a kid.
Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death is the quintessential 7/10 game.
You'll have fun playing it, but it's almost completely unmemorable. In fact it's quite possible you've played it before and completely forgotten it existed until you read this post.
It's basically a budget God of War clone. How budget? The main thing I remember about the game is that instead of paying to animate cutscenes, they swooped the camera around a frozen scene dramatically, with stuff in the scene changing off camera. Actually kinda cool, but also cheap.
Oh also check out the description on Steam:
A new breed of WARRIOR returns, committed to destroying the enemies of FREEDOM
When ONE angry man, has a world to protect - There is only ONE future – HIS OWN
No-nonsense hero Marlow never shied away from danger or trouble. But now he faces his ULTIMATE challenge. After crash-landing in Central America, he has an industrial evil to defeat whilst bound to an ancient Mayan Death Mask who’s had no-one to talk to for 2000 years. Another day at the office only this time Marlow is PUSHED TO THE LIMIT , his sweetheart has been abducted, the bad guys are making up their own rules and only one man can judge them – and EXECUTE THE SENTENCE .
Fearlessly fighting through Mayan temples and towering valleys, monstrous machinery, nothing, but nothing, will stand in the way of this bad ass warrior, his girl and the crushing of all opposition.
They told him to go to HELL, he was DEAD ready!!!
With cliffhanger over the top action and cinematic gameplay, Marlow Briggs takes inspiration from the best of blockbuster films, comic book heroes, and action games with its focus on relentless high-octane combat, exotic and danger filled environments and epic set pieces.
• Fight the enemies of FREEDOM with stacks of awesome combos and magic abilities,
• Single handedly destroy HUNDREDS of enemies
• Deploy MIGHTY weapons of destruction
• Leap out of HUGE EXPLOSIONS in slow motion
• Reveal the DEADLY secrets of the Mayans
• Save the ENTIRE planet
Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, Earned in Blood, and to a lesser extent Hell's Highway.
They're a tactical, first person shooter set during WW2 that is basically video game Band of Brothers. It follows Sgt. Matt Baker of the 101st Airborne and his struggles with a sort of battlefield psychosis as a squad leader during the Normandy invasion (which is appropriate since yesterday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day). Earned in Blood is the sequel but it runs parallel to Matt Baker's story and is from the perspective of Joe "Red" Hartsock, a guy who is made squad lead right after Baker while in the field. Hell's Highway put you back in Baker's shoes during Operation: Market Garden. The next game was supposed to follow them into Bastogne but Hell's Highway launched in 2008 and then Gearbox just never made the follow up, even after leaving it on a cliff hanger. Around that time they launched Borderlands which became a huge hit and Ubisoft basically axed all focus on anything that wasn't Borderlands. I don't even know if Gearbox still exists, these days.
The crux of it was you commanded a squad, either a fire team or an assault team or both simultaneously. You could issue on the fly orders to your squad to either suppress enemies, flank, or assault them in a full frontal charge. If you were smart you could pull off some really satisfying plays. The commands were pretty simple but effective. Your squad was fully voiced and each character had their own personalities and back stories, which made it hit really hard when one of them died, which is paralleled by the pre mission voice lines from Baker. It was one of the first and maybe only war games that didn't do what I call the Call of Duty Bravado. These weren't supermen fighting through over the top explosions and saving the world. The devs put a lot of time into making these characters normal people from normal places with normal conflicts. And when they died they often died quick and ugly. There were no romantic deaths in that game. One minute your rifleman is there as you get to the mission end and the next he's been blown open by a Stuka dive bomber and you just have to start the next one, stepping around his mangled body and getting on with it. Or you're talking to a guy in a church tower and then a sniper shoots him through the head and you can't deal with it, just immediately fight off a German counter attack. It's, to this day, maybe one of the most brutal WW2 shooters ever made, not because they go over the top with the blood and gore, but because they made it extremely realistic. At least as real as you could get in 2005.
Hell's Highway deviated from the formula a little by introducing a 3rd person cover system and a more "cinematic" experience that was probably taken from GoW. Instead of all of the major events happening in real time in 1st person, they opted for cutscenes which I didn't really like. It's the weakest of the three, in my opinion, but still good and I'm still very mad they never released a follow up. They tried to relaunch the BiA's series as Furious 4, a 4 person, Inglorious Bastards style Borderlands-lite shooter but the backlash was significant and I believe the project got shelved. I think it eventually got completely reworked into a later flop down the road. Like, I think I read they redeveloped it into what became Battleborn. Since then, Pitchford has stated a few times a new, true follow up was in development but no news has ever progressed it out of that early dev space.
It's been 84 years.
Edit: I may be a little disingenuous with this one since personally, I'd rate Road to Hill 30 an 8 and Earned in Blood 8.5. Hell's Highway I'd probably give a 6. But I imagine I hold them in much higher regard than most. I still play through them with some lite mutator mods on my PC from time to time. As I search my feelings I almost don't want them to make a finale. It's been too long and I know, based off the third game and the last, fuck, sixteen years of gaming trends, they'll never try and recapture the magic from the first two. They'll pull a CoD. They'll have Baker ride a V2 rocket out of a secret launch facility and fist fight one of those armored trains and put in a 48 second train crash sequence. Microtransaction bundles to decorate your foxhole in the Ardennes.
I just don't want to see that.
I only played the first one but remember liking it quite a bit.
A few years back they were on deep sale and I picked them up on Steam, but they have aged rather poorly.
Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, Earned in Blood, and to a lesser extent Hell's Highway.
They're a tactical, first person shooter set during WW2 that is basically video game Band of Brothers. It follows Sgt. Matt Baker of the 101st Airborne and his struggles with a sort of battlefield psychosis as a squad leader during the Normandy invasion (which is appropriate since yesterday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day). Earned in Blood is the sequel but it runs parallel to Matt Baker's story and is from the perspective of Joe "Red" Hartsock, a guy who is made squad lead right after Baker while in the field. Hell's Highway put you back in Baker's shoes during Operation: Market Garden. The next game was supposed to follow them into Bastogne but Hell's Highway launched in 2008 and then Gearbox just never made the follow up, even after leaving it on a cliff hanger. Around that time they launched Borderlands which became a huge hit and Ubisoft basically axed all focus on anything that wasn't Borderlands. I don't even know if Gearbox still exists, these days.
The crux of it was you commanded a squad, either a fire team or an assault team or both simultaneously. You could issue on the fly orders to your squad to either suppress enemies, flank, or assault them in a full frontal charge. If you were smart you could pull off some really satisfying plays. The commands were pretty simple but effective. Your squad was fully voiced and each character had their own personalities and back stories, which made it hit really hard when one of them died, which is paralleled by the pre mission voice lines from Baker. It was one of the first and maybe only war games that didn't do what I call the Call of Duty Bravado. These weren't supermen fighting through over the top explosions and saving the world. The devs put a lot of time into making these characters normal people from normal places with normal conflicts. And when they died they often died quick and ugly. There were no romantic deaths in that game. One minute your rifleman is there as you get to the mission end and the next he's been blown open by a Stuka dive bomber and you just have to start the next one, stepping around his mangled body and getting on with it. Or you're talking to a guy in a church tower and then a sniper shoots him through the head and you can't deal with it, just immediately fight off a German counter attack. It's, to this day, maybe one of the most brutal WW2 shooters ever made, not because they go over the top with the blood and gore, but because they made it extremely realistic. At least as real as you could get in 2005.
Hell's Highway deviated from the formula a little by introducing a 3rd person cover system and a more "cinematic" experience that was probably taken from GoW. Instead of all of the major events happening in real time in 1st person, they opted for cutscenes which I didn't really like. It's the weakest of the three, in my opinion, but still good and I'm still very mad they never released a follow up. They tried to relaunch the BiA's series as Furious 4, a 4 person, Inglorious Bastards style Borderlands-lite shooter but the backlash was significant and I believe the project got shelved. I think it eventually got completely reworked into a later flop down the road. Like, I think I read they redeveloped it into what became Battleborn. Since then, Pitchford has stated a few times a new, true follow up was in development but no news has ever progressed it out of that early dev space.
It's been 84 years.
Edit: I may be a little disingenuous with this one since personally, I'd rate Road to Hill 30 an 8 and Earned in Blood 8.5. Hell's Highway I'd probably give a 6. But I imagine I hold them in much higher regard than most. I still play through them with some lite mutator mods on my PC from time to time. As I search my feelings I almost don't want them to make a finale. It's been too long and I know, based off the third game and the last, fuck, sixteen years of gaming trends, they'll never try and recapture the magic from the first two. They'll pull a CoD. They'll have Baker ride a V2 rocket out of a secret launch facility and fist fight one of those armored trains and put in a 48 second train crash sequence. Microtransaction bundles to decorate your foxhole in the Ardennes.
I just don't want to see that.
I only played the first one but remember liking it quite a bit.
A few years back they were on deep sale and I picked them up on Steam, but they have aged rather poorly.
At least with the first two you can download a mod that allows you to turn on mutators that make certain parts of the game better. Like, reworked weapon sights and sway, I think some audio enhancements, how many enemies there are and how many extra squad members you can have, etc. I've found it's enough to keep the game feeling fresher. There's nothing available for HH, though.
Snowboard kids is an amazing, but different Mario kart clone. As an aside, one of the most expensive n64 games is snowboard kids 2, which was only released in Australia, which I rented, played loved, and never bought.
My other entry is Wolverine origins. Terrible movie, fuckin fun game. You get shot so much you see metal and you grow it back again. I’ve been told it’s a GoW clone (at the time it came out in like 2008?) and I never liked the original GoW series. It’s fun though and that’s what I care about.
Snowboard kids 2 totally released in the states, I played it a lot! It was very fun!
Snowboard Kids 2 is the perfect 7/10 game for me. Has a lot of mechanical issues so it’s hard to make a case for it being rated higher. But dang is it fun!
That pod-racing N64 game is also a good 7/10 candidate, for the same reasons.
For a more recent game… Dave the Diver? It has some design decisions that baffle me, but boy was it fun to play.
The guns and stuff all being so chunky and heavy and real feeling really helps, and the way of you run across an open field you are just asking to get your noggin popped.
Hell Let Loose was a recent WW2 online shooter that was real good until Team 17 bought them and started doing the usual bullshit. Haven't played in over a year.
Hell Let Loose was a recent WW2 online shooter that was real good until Team 17 bought them and started doing the usual bullshit. Haven't played in over a year.
Juggs how you feel about a shooter in the vein based on the cold war?
Hell Let Loose was a recent WW2 online shooter that was real good until Team 17 bought them and started doing the usual bullshit. Haven't played in over a year.
Maaaan
It cruels me how that came went to crap. There was a really vibrant au/nz community for it and then it all just died
Hell Let Loose was a recent WW2 online shooter that was real good until Team 17 bought them and started doing the usual bullshit. Haven't played in over a year.
Maaaan
It cruels me how that came went to crap. There was a really vibrant au/nz community for it and then it all just died
Yeah, I haven't played in forever so I've only seen the reddit community's reaction, which is usually pretty awful for everything. But the British update look pretty dog water so I dunno.
Post Scriptum was a WW2 based Squad spinoff that was great but suffered from a super small player base and lack of updates after the entirety of the dev team basically quit or got fired and left like, one dude working on it. Off World Industries bought the game back and rebranded it Squad 44 and is trying to breathe fresh life back into it. Not quite sure how it's working but I think there was also a pretty solid AU/NZ community for that, too. Probably the same blokes on HLL. I played a lot with them back on the swing shift schedule when I'd need to stay up all night to reset my schedule.
Hell Let Loose was a recent WW2 online shooter that was real good until Team 17 bought them and started doing the usual bullshit. Haven't played in over a year.
Maaaan
It cruels me how that came went to crap. There was a really vibrant au/nz community for it and then it all just died
I was shocked how friendly and fun the AU/NZ community was in that game for a good minute
Just folks being genuinely encouraging to each other and working as a team while doing goofy over-the-top roleplaying, it was a blast
Wolfenstein Enemy Territory was my go to WW2 shooter.
Excellent community, some fantastic maps and class system. (With the sole exception of medic, which at max level gave passive health regen, causing people chasing kills to be medics and then late game all the health packs would dry up as they focused entirely on kills instead of healing and reviving teammates)
I played the engineer, which could repair and barricade objectives and lay mine fields. You would get into protracted faceoffs on side objectives on the map guarding alternate entrances. Because it was played on servers, you'd get a feel for certain players who liked to sneak around to those entrances and lay mines in their preferred paths of access. They in turn would see you on the enemy team and where you laid mines leading to 4D chess min(e)d games with each other.
A Ps2 game set in the later Sengoku period in Japan, beginning with the buildup to the Battle of Sekigahara, and (normally) ending with the Osaka Campaign. Kessen would see players put in the shoes of either the Eastern or Western armies, led by Ieyasu Tokugawa or Mitsunari Ishida respectively (starting with the Eastern army by default). You engage in real-time strategy battles, in which you compose your units, give a broader strategy for the AI to follow, and are then free to micro-manage and give fresh orders as the battle develops. You fight until a set Victory or Defeat condition is met, which is normally the defeat of the Enemy Commander's unit.
That is not all, however, as the beauty of Kessen is what happens before, between, and after the battles. Kessen features a branching storyline, which is just not common to hear about a Strategy game. Win or Lose a particular battle, and the game continues, with differing paths for each result. Winning as Tokugawa at Sekigahara, for example, will set you on the path history would expect, but you can play as Tokugawa and lose at Sekigahara, or play as Ishida and win, and you'll be getting a different story path. This holds true for most of the subsequent battles - there is a timeline wherein Tokugawa wins at Sekigahara but then can suffer a string of losses after the fact.
There's also a tonne of focus on the characters involved, and the various complexities of their relationships with their lord, as well as generals on the opposing side, mostly played out through cinematics before and after battle, but also often during too. You, the player, are expected to pay close attention to this, as there is a loyalty system in place whereby generals can outright refuse your orders, or worse, outright defect to the enemy, either mid-battle or for the start of the next one, if you behave counter to their wishes.
There is no good compendium of cutscenes that I can find, but there is this video that is just, all of the cutscenes but in no particular order, so you have to wrestle with the context a bit. There are a couple of full campaign walkthroughs that people have done on the ol' Youtube, if you'd rather a more coherent display of it all.
What sticks with me the most after these years, however, is the music. It all remains in my head to this day and listening to it instantly takes me back. It encapsulates the drama presented in the game so well that I genuinely cannot describe it in words.
Kessen was one of my first PS2 games that I got as a gift and to this date is the first association my mind makes with any Japanese history, and I occasionally have to remind myself which bits were from the branching alternative history paths and which were based on reality.
Honorable mention to Kessen II which is the main association my mind makes with the Three Kingdoms era in China.
Honorable mention to Kessen II which is the main association my mind makes with the Three Kingdoms era in China.
Oh no!
I'm obsessively in love with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, so I have to restrain myself here a bit, but I would urge you to find almost any other source if you find yourself with the time and interest.
Kessen II is a complicated one for me because I did like it at the time, and I do have some residing fondness for the memory of it, but it fell short. The Music is still sublime, I can't fault that, and the game is still fun, though they took away the alternate story paths for it, it was purely one path for Liu Bei, then one for Cao Cao.
Where it hits the dirt hard is the subject matter.
The first Kessen respects its subject matter and it is clear - if you play as Tokugawa's forces and take the line where you are successful at and after Sekigahara, it will be recognisably accurate to history with a few liberties. Even the alternate branches are ones that you could reasonably understand happening, even if some are decreasingly likely.
Kessen II, however, is the worst portrayal of Three Kingdoms period China that I am aware of. This is quite the achievement by itself, but the fact that the game was made by KOEI - who practically run a gaming monopoly on Three Kingdoms content - is something else. If you want anything close to uh, accuracy - look elsewhere.
Despite that, I paradoxically cannot fault the game too hard either. It was so bad and dumb as to loop around into good again. I could spend hours ranting about all the things they did to editignore blow up the source material that I imagine a bunch of folks who do not care as much will read them and think 'Holy Shit, that's Great. Tell me more!'. It is a good, dumb, stupid time, just please also take in some other form of RotTK media.
Kessen III was also good, and returned to sengoku Japan, but sadly it didn't capture the magic of the first one. It is a sequel, functionally, focusing on the life and campaigns of Nobunaga Oda. It does get marks though, as when Ieyasu Tokugawa appears on screen every now and then, his theme from Kessen 1 starts playing gently in the background.
Oh to be clear I've been exposed to plenty of other stuff relating to that era since, including occasional real actual history, it was just an early enough exposure to it that those versions stick around.
Control mostly felt like it loved its combat far more than said combat warranted. It's like completely inoffensive stuff but they make you do so much of it when 95% of the time the winning move is just grab shit->throw shit so it gets real repetitive.
As for my own entry to the whole 7/10 game you love thing? Well, first thing to mind is Lost Kingdoms
Was the game full of some genuinely baffling design decisions? Oh, for certain. But for all of that, I think this is the first game I ever played that really grabbed the concept of "card based magic" and ran the fuck with it. None of this abstraction bullshit of card based roguelikes, straight up we're trapping spirits in cards and using them in a real time battle system. An almost-Vancian management of your deck through levels. Cards to call upon as single spells, with no attacks of your own. Throw cards to the ground to summon the creatures trapped in them. The works.
I kinda loved it. Forget about all that Elden Ring shit and give us Lost Kingdoms 3, From Software you fucking cowards.
I love this game so much I wrote a now 9 book novel series inspired by it. Please deliver more of these From Soft.
Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Lost Planet feels like a 7/10 franchise.
I would love to see a new one.
+1
Johnny ChopsockyScootaloo! We have to cook!Grillin' HaysenburgersRegistered Userregular
edited June 8
Is Yakuza the most 7/10 series? None of them are perfect, all of them contain varying degrees of jank, not every plot point hits; but the things that do hit in the games hit just right and make you keep coming back.
Is Yakuza the most 7/10 series? None of them are perfect, all of them contain varying degrees of jank, not every plot point hits; but the things that do hit in the games hit just right and make you keep coming back.
I feel like the ultimate beloved 7/10 game is Deadly Premonition. Hilarious technical quality, janky gameplay, but the characters and plot are so weird and bizarre that it's compelling.
Parts of the plot did NOT age well, admittedly.
You know what? Nanowrimo's cancelled on account of the world is stupid.
Posts
Just uh..
The voice quality of the first game leaves a bit to be desired.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
I love this game so much I wrote a now 9 book novel series inspired by it. Please deliver more of these From Soft.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Fun fact about this game: if you had the N64 expansion pak installed this game would hard crash on level select and loading into level 1
You had to put the dummy pak that N64s ship with back into the slot to fix it
(It's something to do with the logic board having a shitfit after the first cutscene and I believe it only affects first generation cartridges)
Had a lot of awesome times with that game.
They're a tactical, first person shooter set during WW2 that is basically video game Band of Brothers. It follows Sgt. Matt Baker of the 101st Airborne and his struggles with a sort of battlefield psychosis as a squad leader during the Normandy invasion (which is appropriate since yesterday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day). Earned in Blood is the sequel but it runs parallel to Matt Baker's story and is from the perspective of Joe "Red" Hartsock, a guy who is made squad lead right after Baker while in the field. Hell's Highway put you back in Baker's shoes during Operation: Market Garden. The next game was supposed to follow them into Bastogne but Hell's Highway launched in 2008 and then Gearbox just never made the follow up, even after leaving it on a cliff hanger. Around that time they launched Borderlands which became a huge hit and Ubisoft basically axed all focus on anything that wasn't Borderlands. I don't even know if Gearbox still exists, these days.
The crux of it was you commanded a squad, either a fire team or an assault team or both simultaneously. You could issue on the fly orders to your squad to either suppress enemies, flank, or assault them in a full frontal charge. If you were smart you could pull off some really satisfying plays. The commands were pretty simple but effective. Your squad was fully voiced and each character had their own personalities and back stories, which made it hit really hard when one of them died, which is paralleled by the pre mission voice lines from Baker. It was one of the first and maybe only war games that didn't do what I call the Call of Duty Bravado. These weren't supermen fighting through over the top explosions and saving the world. The devs put a lot of time into making these characters normal people from normal places with normal conflicts. And when they died they often died quick and ugly. There were no romantic deaths in that game. One minute your rifleman is there as you get to the mission end and the next he's been blown open by a Stuka dive bomber and you just have to start the next one, stepping around his mangled body and getting on with it. Or you're talking to a guy in a church tower and then a sniper shoots him through the head and you can't deal with it, just immediately fight off a German counter attack. It's, to this day, maybe one of the most brutal WW2 shooters ever made, not because they go over the top with the blood and gore, but because they made it extremely realistic. At least as real as you could get in 2005.
Hell's Highway deviated from the formula a little by introducing a 3rd person cover system and a more "cinematic" experience that was probably taken from GoW. Instead of all of the major events happening in real time in 1st person, they opted for cutscenes which I didn't really like. It's the weakest of the three, in my opinion, but still good and I'm still very mad they never released a follow up. They tried to relaunch the BiA's series as Furious 4, a 4 person, Inglorious Bastards style Borderlands-lite shooter but the backlash was significant and I believe the project got shelved. I think it eventually got completely reworked into a later flop down the road. Like, I think I read they redeveloped it into what became Battleborn. Since then, Pitchford has stated a few times a new, true follow up was in development but no news has ever progressed it out of that early dev space.
It's been 84 years.
Edit: I may be a little disingenuous with this one since personally, I'd rate Road to Hill 30 an 8 and Earned in Blood 8.5. Hell's Highway I'd probably give a 6. But I imagine I hold them in much higher regard than most. I still play through them with some lite mutator mods on my PC from time to time. As I search my feelings I almost don't want them to make a finale. It's been too long and I know, based off the third game and the last, fuck, sixteen years of gaming trends, they'll never try and recapture the magic from the first two. They'll pull a CoD. They'll have Baker ride a V2 rocket out of a secret launch facility and fist fight one of those armored trains and put in a 48 second train crash sequence. Microtransaction bundles to decorate your foxhole in the Ardennes.
I just don't want to see that.
Hogs of war is a ps1 game that can probably be best described as an early attempt at a 3d worms game, but with pigs, and Rick Mayall doing the voices. It's not entirely successful at what it's trying to do, but man, I put so, so many hours into the multiplayer of this as a kid.
You'll have fun playing it, but it's almost completely unmemorable. In fact it's quite possible you've played it before and completely forgotten it existed until you read this post.
It's basically a budget God of War clone. How budget? The main thing I remember about the game is that instead of paying to animate cutscenes, they swooped the camera around a frozen scene dramatically, with stuff in the scene changing off camera. Actually kinda cool, but also cheap.
Oh also check out the description on Steam:
I only played the first one but remember liking it quite a bit.
A few years back they were on deep sale and I picked them up on Steam, but they have aged rather poorly.
At least with the first two you can download a mod that allows you to turn on mutators that make certain parts of the game better. Like, reworked weapon sights and sway, I think some audio enhancements, how many enemies there are and how many extra squad members you can have, etc. I've found it's enough to keep the game feeling fresher. There's nothing available for HH, though.
I know it’s 11/10 as far as n64 wrestling games but I’m not sure the conversion rate of that to “all games”
Snowboard Kids 2 is the perfect 7/10 game for me. Has a lot of mechanical issues so it’s hard to make a case for it being rated higher. But dang is it fun!
That pod-racing N64 game is also a good 7/10 candidate, for the same reasons.
For a more recent game… Dave the Diver? It has some design decisions that baffle me, but boy was it fun to play.
Great idea for a thread topic, btw
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
Fuckin
RED ORCHESTRA 2
The guns and stuff all being so chunky and heavy and real feeling really helps, and the way of you run across an open field you are just asking to get your noggin popped.
Big fan
Juggs how you feel about a shooter in the vein based on the cold war?
https://www.antimattergames.com/games/83/
They apparently plan to show a new trailer this month
I'm a big fan of the tactical online shooty shoots like Squad and Post Scriptum.
The last one they made was rising storm two
Which was dope until everyone still playing it was using the real slur for vietnamese people in the chat constantly
Downside of the tactical online shooty shoots!
Maaaan
It cruels me how that came went to crap. There was a really vibrant au/nz community for it and then it all just died
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
Yeah, I haven't played in forever so I've only seen the reddit community's reaction, which is usually pretty awful for everything. But the British update look pretty dog water so I dunno.
Post Scriptum was a WW2 based Squad spinoff that was great but suffered from a super small player base and lack of updates after the entirety of the dev team basically quit or got fired and left like, one dude working on it. Off World Industries bought the game back and rebranded it Squad 44 and is trying to breathe fresh life back into it. Not quite sure how it's working but I think there was also a pretty solid AU/NZ community for that, too. Probably the same blokes on HLL. I played a lot with them back on the swing shift schedule when I'd need to stay up all night to reset my schedule.
I was shocked how friendly and fun the AU/NZ community was in that game for a good minute
Just folks being genuinely encouraging to each other and working as a team while doing goofy over-the-top roleplaying, it was a blast
Steam ID - VeldrinD | SS Post | Wishlist
Excellent community, some fantastic maps and class system. (With the sole exception of medic, which at max level gave passive health regen, causing people chasing kills to be medics and then late game all the health packs would dry up as they focused entirely on kills instead of healing and reviving teammates)
I played the engineer, which could repair and barricade objectives and lay mine fields. You would get into protracted faceoffs on side objectives on the map guarding alternate entrances. Because it was played on servers, you'd get a feel for certain players who liked to sneak around to those entrances and lay mines in their preferred paths of access. They in turn would see you on the enemy team and where you laid mines leading to 4D chess min(e)d games with each other.
It was a lot of fun.
KESSEN
A Ps2 game set in the later Sengoku period in Japan, beginning with the buildup to the Battle of Sekigahara, and (normally) ending with the Osaka Campaign. Kessen would see players put in the shoes of either the Eastern or Western armies, led by Ieyasu Tokugawa or Mitsunari Ishida respectively (starting with the Eastern army by default). You engage in real-time strategy battles, in which you compose your units, give a broader strategy for the AI to follow, and are then free to micro-manage and give fresh orders as the battle develops. You fight until a set Victory or Defeat condition is met, which is normally the defeat of the Enemy Commander's unit.
That is not all, however, as the beauty of Kessen is what happens before, between, and after the battles. Kessen features a branching storyline, which is just not common to hear about a Strategy game. Win or Lose a particular battle, and the game continues, with differing paths for each result. Winning as Tokugawa at Sekigahara, for example, will set you on the path history would expect, but you can play as Tokugawa and lose at Sekigahara, or play as Ishida and win, and you'll be getting a different story path. This holds true for most of the subsequent battles - there is a timeline wherein Tokugawa wins at Sekigahara but then can suffer a string of losses after the fact.
There's also a tonne of focus on the characters involved, and the various complexities of their relationships with their lord, as well as generals on the opposing side, mostly played out through cinematics before and after battle, but also often during too. You, the player, are expected to pay close attention to this, as there is a loyalty system in place whereby generals can outright refuse your orders, or worse, outright defect to the enemy, either mid-battle or for the start of the next one, if you behave counter to their wishes.
There is no good compendium of cutscenes that I can find, but there is this video that is just, all of the cutscenes but in no particular order, so you have to wrestle with the context a bit. There are a couple of full campaign walkthroughs that people have done on the ol' Youtube, if you'd rather a more coherent display of it all.
What sticks with me the most after these years, however, is the music. It all remains in my head to this day and listening to it instantly takes me back. It encapsulates the drama presented in the game so well that I genuinely cannot describe it in words.
PSN: TheBrayster_92
Honorable mention to Kessen II which is the main association my mind makes with the Three Kingdoms era in China.
Oh no!
I'm obsessively in love with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, so I have to restrain myself here a bit, but I would urge you to find almost any other source if you find yourself with the time and interest.
Kessen II is a complicated one for me because I did like it at the time, and I do have some residing fondness for the memory of it, but it fell short. The Music is still sublime, I can't fault that, and the game is still fun, though they took away the alternate story paths for it, it was purely one path for Liu Bei, then one for Cao Cao.
Where it hits the dirt hard is the subject matter.
The first Kessen respects its subject matter and it is clear - if you play as Tokugawa's forces and take the line where you are successful at and after Sekigahara, it will be recognisably accurate to history with a few liberties. Even the alternate branches are ones that you could reasonably understand happening, even if some are decreasingly likely.
Kessen II, however, is the worst portrayal of Three Kingdoms period China that I am aware of. This is quite the achievement by itself, but the fact that the game was made by KOEI - who practically run a gaming monopoly on Three Kingdoms content - is something else. If you want anything close to uh, accuracy - look elsewhere.
Despite that, I paradoxically cannot fault the game too hard either. It was so bad and dumb as to loop around into good again. I could spend hours ranting about all the things they did to edit ignore blow up the source material that I imagine a bunch of folks who do not care as much will read them and think 'Holy Shit, that's Great. Tell me more!'. It is a good, dumb, stupid time, just please also take in some other form of RotTK media.
Kessen III was also good, and returned to sengoku Japan, but sadly it didn't capture the magic of the first one. It is a sequel, functionally, focusing on the life and campaigns of Nobunaga Oda. It does get marks though, as when Ieyasu Tokugawa appears on screen every now and then, his theme from Kessen 1 starts playing gently in the background.
PSN: TheBrayster_92
Excuse me, you did what.
What's the book series called.
I would love to see a new one.
Steam ID XBL: JohnnyChopsocky PSN:Stud_Beefpile WiiU:JohnnyChopsocky
No, Yakuza Zero is an 11/10 game.
although kiwami definitely does not compare favorably to zero, i might put that one at 7/10
The Godzilla PS4 game was probably a 4 or 5 though, yeah... I mean I like it but, y'know
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Parts of the plot did NOT age well, admittedly.