Thought this could be interesting. I'll start: Homefront In a market full of generic, over-priced, tedious manshoots, I thought Homefront was a pretty intelligent yet overlooked release. Set in the near future, it tries to be a showcase yet a satire of war - it was violent, it was shocking, yet it was emotional and quite powerful in its messages, and it tried to also show that the soldiers of the opposing forces are arguably just as hard-hit. In a way, it's like the video game equivalent of Saving Private Ryan. It just didn't have success, partially due to an overly short single player (4hrs, roughly!), a multiplayer mode that died quickly and - well, THQ behind it.
The Saboteur, an open world third person shooter, somewhat of a GTA clone but set in nazi occupied Paris, you play as an Irishman helping the Resistance. At release it had a lot of bugs so received mediocre reviews, but it's really, really good game. Gameplay wise it has a mix of a few different games, like parkour a little like Assassin's Creed, a decent stealth system, and a really interesting color system.
Everything is in greyscale (possibly with red highlighting for the Nazis?), but as you progress you return colour to areas, I believe.
Yeah, what she said. There's yellow and red, and it's raining and generally very grim in places you haven't liberated.
Popmundo -- This is kind of an on-line text-based game that I played with some friends from my old job for about a year or two. The main focus is the music industry, so you can do things like study (and eventually teach) music/instruments/dance/etc. start, manage and/or simplly be part of a band of any kind (just about all genres are represented -- you want to create a classical string quartet, you can do that). You can take your band on tour, You can also run a club or a music venue, a recording studio, a restaurant, a bank, even get involved in government or law enforcement, or scientific research, become a doctor, a scientist, a criminal, and so on. It's a life simulator and a world simulator, and players control almost everything in that world. /edit BTW, the game USED to be called (back when I started playing it "Popomundo", but they had to change it because, apparently "Popo" means something of a less appealing nature in some other language. BTW, you can spend as little as 5 minutes in the game a day, or you can take it a lot more seriously. It also starts out pretty slow because in the beginning you have absolutely no skills whatsoever. So you have to take free classes, go out on the streets and busk, get a day job (such as being a waiter or busboy), and so on. You aren't going to become a rock star overnight.
BTW, one of the people from work who played was this woman I worked with who never played any kind of computer game before other than maybe solitaire. She got hooked and ended up playing it longer than almost any of us (well at least longer than I did).
Baroque Strange little niche title, it's a third-person action RPG/quasi-roguelike where the entire goal of the game is to die as far into the dungeon as possible, unlocking new cutscenes and bits of the bizarre plot. It's also really damn hard. It originally came out for the Saturn and got ported to the Playstation, then remade for the PS2 and Wii later on.
Hunted: The Demon's Forge It was a very contracting game. It had some really good design, but went for impractical and pointless armour, as well as Big Titted Women. So many corners were cut, though, and the end product really didn't look as good as it should have done. Textures were of different qualities, the lighting and shadowing was poor, it was a little buggy and so on. But it was genuinely a fun game once it 'clicked' for you, and the dialogue between Caddoc and E'lara is some of the BEST dialogue I've ever heard in a game. Graham McTavish and Laura Bailey (I believe) did a great job. So despite being a little repetitive, a bit unbalanced, sometimes a bit boring, it was a pretty dang good game once you got past the flaws.
I'll just throw Clonk in. If there is a game Terraria ripped of, it's probably Clonk. It's a sidescrolling sandbox game, with digging, building, melee combat, catapults, magic, you name it. It's pretty unknown outside of Germany, but it had and has a huge modding scene over here. There are mods for everything, some of the space stuff is great! No idea how good the open source version is, it's been a long time since I played it since it's most fun in multiplayer http://www.openclonk.org/ Then we have SpaceChem. It's sheer brilliance, a puzzle game with totally open puzzles. There are a myriad solutions to every problem, but you can always optimize. It also has the best use of leaderboards ever It's not about chemistry at all by the way... And there is Warsow! Unreal Tournament on Steroids, kind of. Very fast-paced arena FPS with cell-shaded graphics and a cool movement system. It had walljumps before it was cool! I'm rubbish at it, but it's super fun. Small but dedicated community, and a blast on any LAN! http://www.warsow.net/
+1 for clonk Also two of the previous Clonk games are free to download on their site. http://www.clonk.de/ Back in the days I enjoyed playing Soldat it's a 2D multiplayer manshoot the original developer has moved on but the game is still maintained by a council of programmers or what. http://soldat.thd.vg/en/
I'll say I want to add "ShellBlast" to that list. It's... some sort of bomb disarming game, with some of its concepts being drawn from "Picross". In its core concepts it might as well be called a bastard child of "Minesweeper" and "Picross", in fact; still, the way the game presents these concepts is really nice. It has a short~ish (50 missions, some would call that short and some would call that long) campaign where you disarm increasingly difficult bombs, and a few other modes with slightly varying gameplay, as well as a level editor (in which you design the general layout of a bomb and choose its parameters, but the location of triggers is randomized each time you try). The notable things in it are "nukes" - bombs that take the whole screen and are pretty much bosses here. They have their own (good) music, and as the timer gets close to 0 the stage starts shaking slightly (and then more) and you hear additional bomb-related noises, and even before that happens you can feel that pressure. Of course, once you see the trick to solving it, it's not as hard as some people would think it is, but it doesn't diminish much from the value of the gameplay (even more so, because said "trick" relies on having a good memory, it isn't really that mindless a game). Sure, it costs a few dollars, but that is still fairly cheap and the game itself is a nice way to waste some time.
http://armorgames.com/play/5803/cursed-treasure Probably the best tower defence game I've ever played. And it's even free, how about that.
BLASPHEMER!!! http://www.kingdomrush.com Better graphics, funner (re)play, more content, and generally better than Cursed Treasure in every way. Not that CTTMG is bad by any stretch --I'd even call it 2nd best (or maybe 3rd behind KR and Radiant Defense (an app by Hexage Games), but Kingdom Rush beats it (and every other tower defense game) out by a WIDE margin.
Our verdict was that Kingdom Rush isn't bad, but it's largely fueled by grind and a consistent burden of knowledge. I guess it's kind of a mixture of roguelike and tower defence in that respect.
You're both wrong! http://ninjakiwi.com/Games/Tower-Defense/Play/Bloons-Tower-Defense-5.html?language=
Everyone is wrong! Pong was better than every other game ever! Yeah! So there. PosChengBand is a good game. It is based upon Chegband that is based on Hengbad that is based on Angband. The current version has some major bugs though, but it is a good game nonetheless.
Grind? I never had to replay a single level on Kingdom Rush to beat it and get all of the stars. I did have to go back and redo a few for accomplishments, but that's because of stuff like not knowing that you could catch fish with your pointer. How is that grindy?
A) No faster speed. You're plodding through every step of the game - a level takes forever to do. B) You need to complete every level 3 times to beat the game.
