Mine has to be Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime, a DS spin off of the Dragon Quest series that sees you playing as a slime operating a tank and rescuing the people from your town. You run around the overworld, collecting items to use as ammunition and saving money to upgrade your tank. The art and music are just as great as you’d expect from the Dragon Quest series. It made fantastic use of the DS’s dual screens. It’s also written for a younger audience, so a lot of it is just really silly and fun! Try it out for sure, I’m so sad there’s no sequel :(

  • richyawyingtmv@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m going to name a few potentially obscure ones from my 30 years of gaming

    • Micro Machines 2 (SNES and Mega Drive) - as far as I am aware, only MM1 had wide release, the rest were PAL only but have modern 60hz and NTSC patches now. Great fun, and you can play as Violet Berlin (for those like me who used to watch Bad Influence!)

    • Looney Toons Collector: Martian Alert!! (Game Boy Color) - this one is hard to categorise! Its a top down adventure RPG like Zelda, you start as Bugs and recruit further characters each with their own skills to traverse the world and solve puzzles. For example, Elmer Fudd has a gun, Tweety can fly over gaps, etc. It is actually really fucking good, and holds up better than many GBC games. You can also trade with other people who have the game, and there’s a sequel I haven’t even played yet!

    • Wario Land Virtual Boy - this is without a doubt one of the best platformers ever made, and it’s a damn shame it’s been forgotten by most. HOWEVER! Emulators exist, and the game runs like a dream in retroarch/mednafen.

    A few tips: the virtual boy is a 50hz console, so set your display to that or use gsync otherwise you’ll have stuttering. The console is also natively a wide-screen display, which is sweet. Steam Deck is perfect for it, and looks great in black and white. If you have a VR headset, that’s a good idea too to get the proper 3D experience, but it’s not essential in any way whatsoever.

    • Neutopia II (PC Engine/TG16) - a shameless Zelda clone that is actually worth playing as a spiritual successor to Zelda 1. A neat little what if, if Nintendo had expanded on the original rather than Link to the Past. It has an awesome soundtrack, save battery backup (wahooo) and is just great fun. The first is good too, but feels significantly more dated than the sequel

    And lastly, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Switch) - I don’t care if it’s the opposite of unknown, I’m recommending this one. Culmination of the best trilogy I’ve ever known in gaming, and by far the best game I’ve ever played. With the 4k, 60fps and rebalance mods when playing on PC it’s simply incredible. Based Monolithsoft.

    The soundtrack is mind-blowing, has the best battle themes in the series and you can tell just how much work went into it (main two characters have flutes they use in the story to send dead soldiers to the afterlife - Yasunori Mitsuda then made those flutes for real to be used in the soundtrack). Just, every single thing about the game exudes more love and care than most games I’ve played and it shows. After so many years of being unable to finish a story due to corporate wankery (xenosaga…), Takahashi finally got to make his masterpiece. And for those who were put off by the anime-ness of Xenoblade 2, 3 is very much reined in, adult and pretty fucking dark. No big anime titties here - it’s war, and it’s not pleasant. It’s more like XB1 - 2 is the outlier, and its happy-go-lucky feeling makes far more sense after seeing what happens in 3.