Aerothorn on 25/12/2008 at 02:11
Ace Combat 04 is one of the more egregious examples of this - first off, I don't like games with time limits. I found flight sims too complex and arcade shooters too simplistic. It blew my socks off by having accessible and continuously enjoyable gameplay, a great story, and surprisingly good graphics for a PS2 game.
I was never huge on Half-Life 1, and so Half-Life 2 was a big surprise for me. Good stuff.
I bought Disgaea during a gaming drought, and it ended up being my favorite game of the year. These days it doesn't seem so hot, as Nippon Ichi and friends have proceeded to beat the formula to death...but at the time, it was really something.
KOTOR II was, I think, a lot better than KOTOR I, and so surprised me for that reason.
Trackmania Sunrise. I don't like racing games. I liked this a lot.
Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis. Here was a Gameboy Advance game with an intelligent story relatively free of cliches. Well, at least for most of it - it fell apart towards the end. But it was good while it lasted!
Pikmin 2. The only Nintendo game I've ever really loved (Super Smash Bros. aside).
Katamari Damacy I mean, I heard a lot of good things, but I just didn't get how rolling a ball around could be all that fun. Also, time limits! Boy, was I wrong.
Other games were only a "surprise" when I replayed them - I didn't love them when I played them at a younger age, but when I came back, they blew me away. One example is Planescape: Torment, but the big one is Final Fantasy VIII - I had convinced myself over the year that, while a noble experiment, it was so seriously flawed in so much of its gameplay that I could never trek through it again. And yet, a year and a half ago, I replayed it, and stayed up till the wee hours of the morning replaying it. I still maintain (against basically the entire world) that is far and away the best Final Fantasy.
a flower in hell on 25/12/2008 at 07:25
Quote Posted by Aerothorn
KOTOR II was, I think, a lot better than KOTOR I, and so surprised me for that reason.
I'm going to agree with you on this one. Sith Lords is far and away better than its predecessor in pretty much every way except for story completion, and that's not entirely Obsidian's fault (damn you LucasArts).
Quote Posted by Aerothorn
... but the big one is
Final Fantasy VIII - I had convinced myself over the year that, while a noble experiment, it was so seriously flawed in so much of its gameplay that I could never trek through it again. And yet, a year and a half ago, I replayed it, and stayed up till the wee hours of the morning replaying it. I still maintain (against basically the entire world) that is far and away the best Final Fantasy.
WHAT
vurt on 25/12/2008 at 11:03
Quote Posted by Matthew
Oh hell no. The facial animations were
not horrible.
Not horrible compared to what, Deus Ex? Sure. But compared to HL2 they did look horrible.
It's easy to tell they had to work with a BETA version of the Source engine.
Tulsidas on 25/12/2008 at 16:47
Quote Posted by Matthew
Oh hell no. The facial animations were
not horrible.
Yeah, i'm surprised too. I'm actually playing it for the first time and apart from the poor stealth gameplay i can see nothing that sticks out as *horrible*.
Koki on 25/12/2008 at 18:12
Quote Posted by a flower in hell
WHAT
His entire post was pretty WHAT.
SubJeff on 25/12/2008 at 21:25
Company of Heroes. I only played the demo because a friend said it was good. I don't really like RTS - I even got bored of HomeWorld, tried again with HW2 and got bored.
I'm still playing CoH almost 2 years later. Multiplayer is fantastic.
ZymeAddict on 25/12/2008 at 22:52
I would have to say Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It was the first GTA game I'd ever played, and though I'd heard about all the controversy, I'd never really gleaned anything about the game that really made me want to play it.
A few years back I got a copy (admittedly illegally) at a LAN party from someone else and decided to play some of it on a whim. It turned out to be some of the most fun I've had with a game, and GTA: SA was even better.
Unfortunately there is a down side to this as I came to like the series so much, I went out and bought GTA 4 without learning beforehand about all the problems people have had with it. Of course it runs like absolute shit on my computer. :mad:
RavynousHunter on 26/12/2008 at 20:53
Wish I'd would've gotten enough of a chance to play Bloodlines before my computer went kaput... I actually kinda liked it... :(
Harvester on 26/12/2008 at 21:14
Grim Fandango. The setting (skeletons in the land of the dead) just didn't seem like a lot of fun to me and while I liked the rendered environments, I didn't like the look of the skeletons. But people I knew kept saying it was the best thing ever, so I tried it and now it's my favorite adventure game of all time.
foldy on 27/12/2008 at 02:55
Quote Posted by Renzatic
Oh hell no. Limited size aside, I think Bloodlines sports some of the most thickly atmospheric and interesting sets I've seen in a game.
Yeah, I can't agree with vurt at all. Troika had some amazing artists on staff. The character models were particularly excellent and detailed, and the animation was leagues ahead of, say, Fallout 3.
