When talking about the best games of all time people generally mention Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario 64, Halo 3, The Last of Us, Nier Automata, etc. , but dismiss other great games.
What games do you think are unfairly forgotten from this conversation?
Personally I think the original Dead Rising, Fable: The Lost Chapters, Dragon’s Dogma: The Dark Arisen and Lunar: Eternal Blue should be talked as some of the best games of all time. They’re such great and unique games!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Okami featured in one of these lists. Just to be sure I looked up some of Polygon’s and even in their Top 500, its not there, which is kinda depressing?
I’m not a fan of Zelda games - or most Nintendo games - but I do love when people take inspiration from them and make their own thing - Tchia, Darksiders, Oceanhorn, Tunic, and Ittle Dew all come to mind just as Zelda ‘clones’ - and I think there’s no higher example of that than Okami, a game that takes its inspiration and surpasses it in every way. The graphics were at the time mindblowing(frankly, still are), with its japanese classic art style cel shading, the soundtrack is phenomenal and Amaterasu has an excellent mobility, zipping across battlefields or simply open areas with easy and fluidity. The paintbrush is a stellar tool, both to use in puzzles and in combat, and the game boasts a charming cast of characters and engaging story. Probably the saddest tidbit about it is that it was also Clover’s farewell game, after its previous, unfairly lambasted, gem God Hand and two attempts at the beat’em up Viewtiful Joe series.
Nowadays the Zelda series has gotten a whole different kickstart with its open-world entries, burying these inspirations even further, but I still believe Okami easily stands atop most entries of that series, and on its own as well.
Okami is “Zelda-like” in its kind of medieval fantasy, action-adventure presentation, and in the way towns and NPCs feel, and perhaps in some of its bosses, but really it’s not all that much like a Zelda game. Okami is an quite standard all-ages real-time-battles RPG, whereas Zelda usually have no RPG mechanics - usually Zelda enemies are defeated in just one or two hits, with little or no stats, points or inventory. Zelda games usually have a lot of focus on puzzles and dungeons, or dungeon-like outdoor areas, whereas Okami has no puzzles. On the other hand Okami is obviously very steeped in (often silly or humorous) Japanese folklore, whereas Zelda is very much less wacky and often a little more emotional and dramatic, and has its own bespoke theming.
I liked Okami but I felt it was paced really quite slowly, and the battles/enemies were a little too RPG-like for my taste, as in taking quite a lot of real time for even weak enemies. I felt it lacked the mechanical polish that Zelda usually does: I felt generally the movement was a little slow and difficult (except in very open areas) and most disappointing of all was the frankly poor recognition of what brush move I’m drawing.
Okami has a fair amount of puzzles, they’re just mostly smaller to show the wider range of mechanics. Get ball into cup, bring vines to location, memorize dots on a page Simon says style. They’re ultimately not too different from a puzzle you might encounter in something like A Link to the Past, or Breath of the Wild. Not difficult enough to be integral but enough to test your understanding of the game mechanics and later reward you for wit. Some of them also become very important for boss battles or speeding up fights with enemies.
Personally I never had an issue with brush move recognition, but I played both the PS2 and Wii versions and use a Steam Controller for PC which is the closest to the Wii’s. Of all of them, analog sticks are probably the slowest, but keyboard control is pretty clunky for movement since it was intended for controllers. Combat on the Wii was something else entirely, it was genuinely meant for that I think as it has the blended analog stick + high speed but accurate input. For today, mouse input is very good as a very light trackball but so-so for a regular mouse - so the Steam Controller (or Deck these days) is a really good medium, or maybe the PS5 controller if you can use its middle touch thing somehow.
I’d say the only complaint I could make about the game is its pacing of the story. In terms of gameplay however, you take it at the pace you want to take it at. Don’t want to fight? Avoid the scrolls. But fighting can be so fast, over in just a few inputs. Only a couple seconds so sometimes the winning battle screens themselves feel like they take longer (but they can be skipped). The isometric style during the battle rewards spacing and the byproduct is the difference in how the movement feels - it also plays into Capcom’s general affinity for artificial difficulty, something like restrictions on camera movements and animation delays for Resident Evil and Monster Hunter. It’s asking how creative can you get in this situation with these limitations?
I think the best analogy for battles with this in mind is to imagine each moment you freeze as the perfect image captured by an artist, but that can only happen when the demons are visible to the human (after Ammy stuns them). With that in mind you stun all the enemies then finish them in one fell swoop!
The game does have some pacing issues in the early game that could have been fixed by allowing to speed up if not skip cutscenes, but otherwise overall I think it nails the widening world adventure game for encouraging the player to really engage with the game engine and their wits to progress forward. I also think the early pacing does a lot for some of the revealing acts of the game, if it was fast and punchy the whole time then later elements like the events of the Ghost Ship of Heaven’s Gate would be less impactful than they are. The stakes start out low as you familiarize yourself and they ramp up as you hit act 2. From there it’s actually pretty easy to skip a lot of side missions as it streamlines you from there, unlike the early game where it can be harder to tell which quests main and side missions. Much like Twilight Princess where in the mid-late game it’s really encouraging you to continue forward but if you take some time to explore you get experiences you’d have missed - although granted Okami is a little less forgiving with the gifts, with the 99 beads being the prelude to korok seeds I swear…
Anyway lol, tl;Dr I agree about the pacing although I think it’s intentionally self indulgent on the story and the payoff is worth it and while the RPG elements you mentioned for battles are accurate, I would say that the speed and movement are more about spacing and timing. If you know the weak spot and the finisher, then each monster can be dealt with in 2 strokes, and placed well that can be the end of the fight right there.
Also not trying to discount your experience, just adding my perspective :)
Don’t get me wrong, I also like TotK and BG3 and just replayed Outer Worlds (Fallout in spaaaace) and love me some “mainstream” games. But I think people unfairly exclude many genres when making these sorts of lists. E.g.: The Sims, Civ5, Minecraft, Pokemon, and many others that sold like hotcakes and have been extremely good games.
Personally, I’m always biased towards 4X, RTS, and similar, and find it strange they’re always overlooked. Europa Universalis 4 is ten years old and still getting DLC and updates – how many people must have played that game over ten years for the studio to justify that continued investment?
Strategy games are never featured outside maybe a grudging nod to StarCraft or Warcraft 3. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a list that mentions a 4X, a sim, or a non-Blizzard RTS. The closest you’ll usually see is someone listing Black & White.
Game journalists have to bounce between games as a job, so it sort of makes sense that the majority of them go for linear, shorter RPGs, and thus over-fixate on them.
I think the actual reason is that they only have a limited presence on consoles, which is what the majority of the English-speaking discourse on games is focused on. The genre also fizzled out in the early 2000s, which doesn’t help.
Even on PC-focused publications like PCG, this same trend holds true.
And RTS may have fizzled out, but strategy did not. XCOM2, Stellaris, Crusader Kings, etc, all big recent-ish games.
Sins of a Solar Empire is one of my all time favorites.
It’s hard to understate the effect Minecraft has had on me.
It got me into programming and modding games. It is such a treasure to me.
Where are my Outer Wilds boys at?
I started playing the Outer Worlds thinking I had simply misheard the name Outer Wilds and found myself very confused but still kept trudging on. Thank you for bringing some sanity into my life; Wilds seems like the game I wanted to play the whole time, not Worlds. I’ll see how chaotic I can fuck out Worlds before I ditch it for Wilds.
Always ready to bump my favorite game of all time, but honestly I feel this is quite a popular opinion (compared to some of the games in OP’s list that are really overlooked on these discussions of best games ever).
But still, what an incredible experience, the OST for outer Wilds was my fourth most listened to on last year’s Spotify Wrapped :)
Thanks for reminding me!
Yeah, it may not be as popular as Mario or Zelda, but I wouldn’t say it’s “unfairly forgotten”. People who have played the game tend to be pretty vocal about it. And justifiably so, I’ve never had a comparable experience in another game. I wish I could forget about it and play it again.
I’m not sure how this compares to Spotify but I still feel pretty good about this one
For the people who do find out about it and it hooks them enough sure, it’s not really forgotten or underrated. But I still think it’s kinda obscure / not well known?
Not a boy but I’m fucking HERE for Outer Wilds. And TUNIC, in the same vein.
Dwarf Fortress deserves a mention for sheer audacity and scope.
Morrowind and Oblivion both have a massive fan following but I think always get unfairly overlooked for Skyrim.
I agree, Skyrim was a huge disappointment for me.
After Fallout 3, each Bethesda release was less ambitious than the last. Oblivion tried to do tons of stuff and ended up as a beautiful and memorable total mess (It’s my personal favorite). Fallout 3 was a bold new direction and a more stable but fudamentally compromised experience. Skyrim established the trend of scaling back and making what’s left more consistent, simple, and flashy. Fallout 4 was the last major fan outcry from those who believed Bethesda could have done better while Starfield is a confirmation that everyone’s worst fears about Bethesda are true.
It’s truly you! The hero of Kvatch!
I can tell dozens of stories of buggy hilarious moments in oblivion stories that are memorable and unique. All I remember from vanilla skyrim are the official plots everyone went through. It was just as buggy just charmless.
Too true. Being able to jump over buildings was the basis for many of my old Oblivion shenanigans. You can’t really get weird with the Skyrim options without modding.
I would return 5 Skyrim remakes for just 1 remake of oblivion or Morrowing. Does a great disservice that those games a regulated to past consoles.
There are some amazing fan projects though:
- While it isn’t a remake, OpenMW improves upon the original game’s graphics - it does not change textures or models though, just rendering features.
- Skywind is a remake though - it uses the engine of Skyrim to recreate Morrowind.
- Skyblivion is the same idea, but with Oblivion.
OpenMW may as well be a remake, it runs very well and updates everything for modern hardware. Thats probably the way to go if you want to play Morrowind today.
I’m not sure I would trust modern Bethesda to remake Morrowind.
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The best games of all time are: Go, Soccer, Chess, Poker, Tetris… they’ve stood the proof of time over and over again (respectively: 4000, 2300, 1400, 200, 40 years).
A honorable mention should go to Doom, as in the “can it run Doom?” meme, but it’s anyone’s guess whether it will stand for another 30 years.
All the likes of Zelda, Mario, Halo, Pokemon, etc. are going to get forgotten as soon as the last generation playing the last re-release as a kid, grows out of time to play it actively, and as servers for the multiplayer versions get shut down.
Chess and Go are so old, I’m surprised that the best players in the world don’t already know every possible move to the point that the games are decided after both players make a single move.
They have an exponential number of valid positions, that happen to surpass human abilities to abstract, memorize, and predict.
Chess is estimated to have 10⁴⁰ valid moves, which means not even everyone playing chess throughout all of history, have explored all of them. Like, a billion people playing 1 distinct move a second for 1400 years, would only reach about 10²⁰ moves.
They still can be trained, meaning one person can be way better than another… but a computer trained even more, can be even better… and yet the games surpass even current computers abilities to explore the full possibility space. Maybe quantum computers will be able to do that.
Fun fact, mostly unrelated but something in your message reminded me: I once played against a guy at a Go club, and we had an enjoyable game but he beat me. He wanted to talk to me about the game afterwards, and he started replaying the game for me from memory so he could make commentary. He replayed a pretty decent chunk of the beginning; I honestly don’t remember but I think around the first 25-30 moves of the game.
I later learned he was the visiting Go person who was just stopping by the club for social reasons but could demolish anyone. He was incredibly kind and polite.
Doom will last at least until people born in the 80s die
Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Kirby Planet Robobot for the same reason: while not the most innovative games and not necessarily my favorites in their respective franchises, they represent nearly flawless implementations of their respective franchise’s ideas.
Sometimes I feel like Mario and a couple popular indie games are the only platformers that get taken seriously honestly.
Sonic 3 is still my favourite Sonic to this day.
It’s kinda insane how much people dismiss “System Shock.” It’s a serious bedrock of a title, so much of what we take as a given of games was really pioneered by LookingGlass. I think a big chunk of that was due to the gameplay not really holding up to modern times, but hopefully now that Nightdive’s remaster is out, more people can experience it and realize just how much of the game holds up.
Probably a close second is the original “Half-Life”, in terms of really cementing the story-based first person shooter, but I don’t think anyone is going to call Half-Life snubbed.
I loved the first level of System Shock, now that it’s been modernized. Then I got to the second level, and resources were no longer scarce, and it didn’t appear to be shaking up the formula from level to level, so now it feels like Doom with an inventory system rather than the games that took inspiration from System Shock.
Half-Life is still pretty great, but as far as organically teaching the player, it’s far behind even its own sequel. There are a lot of cheap deaths that you just have to save scum your way through. My go-to example is that when Half-Life 1 introduces a sniper enemy, you see a hole in the wall that could look like a sniper’s nest if I told you that they existed in the game and if you squint at it a little bit, so you just get shot in the back. In Half-Life 2, you emerge from Ravenholm, and a combine sniper with a laser sight is clearly trained on some escaping zombies, so that you know that snipers in sniper’s nests are now a thing you’ll have to contend with, and you get to observe it safely once before dealing with them in the game. That kind of thing. 90s PC games seemed to be worse at this than their successors and console games at the time.
I feel like these conversations get dominated by games with the fewest explicit flaws rather than the ones that have the most to offer but it’s my firm belief that no piece of art can be truly great which is not also kind of annoying. Not because annoyingness is inherent to greatness but because greatness and annoyingness are both the products of an underlying willingness to take creative risks.
So in that spirit, my answer is Steambot Chronicles.
Best game of all time. I play it every year.
I’ve never heard of it. What makes it so great in your opinion?
Nobody’s ever heard of it; I’ve been singing its praises since 2006, and I’ve never met another person in real life who’s heard of it. It’s an amazing game set in a slightly-steampunk world where cars have only recently been invented, but giant steam-powered mechs were invented around the same time as well. The story’s interesting, but the real fun comes from how much freedom the game gives in how you want to play it:
You can customize your character’s clothes, you can be a good guy, you can be a jerk who charges his friends for every little favor, you can just straight-up be a villain, you can hustle pool, you can play in a band with a bunch of different instruments, each with their own mini game associated with playing them, you can extort or save an orphanage, you can buy and decorate an apartment, then play a dating sim with some of the characters, and that’s all before you factor in the giant mech, which you can customize with a bunch of different pieces and use to fight in a colosseum, explore ruins for treasure, excavate fossils to save a museum, fight giant bosses, transport goods and passengers, and even turn it into an airplane to fly around in.
And that’s all in a PS2 game! Sure, all of the features are limited by both the hardware and the inclusion of so many other features, but they’re all fun, and the graphics look great. I rarely play any game more than once, and I’ve played this game well over a dozen times. It’s helped by the different endings depending on how you play your character, but even the parts that are the same between playthroughs are still fun every time. It’s my favorite game of all time by a huge margin.
That does sound very interesting. I will definitely check it out. Thanks for writing this lengthy reply!
Basically everything old. There’s such massive recency bias in game discussions. It’s very much an explicit marketing strategy to promote the new thing as more everything but somehow it’s infected almost all discussions.
Sure ok, playing an old game requires a bit more investment and effort than watching an old film or even reading an old book but mostly it’s just about lack of familiarity. Especially outside of fps style games where I’ll admit prior to halo 1 things were pretty all over the shop many older games are still approachable.
Coupled with the general dismissal of strategy and simulation genres (which were comparatively bigger in the past) and many things get forgotten outside of cult classic status.
Old is relative though. Age doesn’t hit movies or books nearly as hard as it does to games and gameplay mechanics, and where exactly that acceptable limit happens to be differ for each individual - with no doubt a large correlation based on your age.
It’s just really hard to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone who didn’t grow up with them and doesn’t have the appreciation and nostalgia of those times. Heck, back when I was a kid with my PSX, anything on the NES felt like an ancient unplayable relic.Idk, it’s pretty difficult to get my peers to check out black and white film, let alone silent, and yet most enjoy what they see.
I came to gaming after the NES (although I was alive at the time) and have recently been emulating games and have been surprised by how good some are.
There are still modern games that expect you to read a manual before playing, there are still modern games where it takes about 2 hours to learn the UI. There are older games with 3 page manuals and simple controls too.
You’ve got to remember you’re not immune to marketing tactics either. Like part of the resistance to checking out older stuff has been placed in us all by gaming companies training us to interpret stuff like low framerate as bad, or controls that aren’t fluid as bad.
Best game doesn’t necessarily mean most enjoyable now, or even an enjoyable experience at all. Some of the greatest art is difficult, unpleasant, and challenging. Some of the greatest video games are those that set trends, or do something unique despite rough edges, or are even straight up hostile to their player.
If I’m rattling down a list of my favorite games ever, they’re heavily concentrated in the last decade, with a couple of stragglers from earlier than that. I don’t think that’s recency bias; I think developers have just, in general, gotten better at honing in on what people like, especially in the age of rapid patching. There’s plenty of negative that comes along with this too, but for every game like Diablo IV that patches out builds because they were too much fun and impacted their live service retention rate, there are plenty of games coming out of early access after learning what worked and didn’t work with their players, much more rapidly than the old days of iterating on yearly sequels.
MS Solitaire, Space Pinball, and Minesweeper come to mind. They were not my favorites, but I know a few people who have a few hundred hours on one or more of those.
For me it’s C&C Generals Zero Hour. I have had a copy since it released in 2003, it still works, and I still play it in single player mode at least once a week. It’s great because it does not require a huge time commitment and campaign missions take about an hour or less to complete. To me it’s one of the best RTS style games out there. My second favorite? C&C Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge.
I have also very much enjoyed the Assassin’s Creed series up to AC Odyssey.
Adding my Voice for Zero Hour. Excellent game. the multiplayer, skirmish and campaign modes all have something to offer.
It’s crying out for a proper remake. Just a modern patch. Don’t change anything, just make it work easier, especially the networking
I’m assuming you are already familiar with GenPatcher?
There’s a whole generation of players now who never got to experience Soul Reaver. Brilliant writing by Amy Henning, amazing voice cast.
People lauding Lords of the Fallen dual world forgot that Soul Reaver did it first.
At this point the closest thing would be a Zelda/ Dark Souls hybrid which we haven’t seen?
I think Soul Reaver 2 was the peak of the series for me. When Kain had his monologue during the climax about flipping a coin enough times that one day it lands on its side, jesus. I get goosebumps just remembering it.
flipping a coin enough times that one day it lands on its side
There was a twilight zone episode based on this premise too!
I was thinking Soul Reaver too! I think the problem is that it had a handful of mediocre sequels that made people eventually lose interest in the series. But the original game was one of the best on the PS1. I loved the whole improvised combat mechanic where you have to use anything around you in the environment that could hit the vampires’ weakneses.
Soul reaver is on my short list of potential games to start next. (It’s up against Half Life and Silent Hill). I went through the first blood omen about a year ago and loved it.
Journey redefined how I look at video games and the world, and honestly changed the course of my life for the better.
TUNIC may truly be the best game of all time
Outer Wilds shares the top spot with TUNIC
Celeste is the best precision platformer, and easily in the top 5 games of all time, though I suppose it is, much like Outer Wilds, quite highly regarded game among people who know it exists
Citizen Sleeper is unparalleled, I can wholeheartedly say more people need to know about this gem
Celeste is on my backlog and i just installed it on my laptop, i need to play it in 2024
Heartily recommend playing it on controller if you can, and enjoy the ride!
Remember: You can do this!
Yeah i’m mostly a controller player so that works for me. Is it that hard? I’ve played stone hard games like dmc/dark souls but this seems very different
You will die thousands of times, but until you reach your limit as a gamer it will never feel like banging your head against an unbreakable wall. Just moving around is so much fun in Celeste.
It is an incredibly challenging game, but unlike dark souls it’s an incredibly challenging game that wants you to succeed. If you had the coordination for things like dmc or dark souls I have no doubt you’ll be able to play all the content celeste has, with some perseverance!
Celeste is the best of all time in its genre. i have put more than 100 hours in it and yet i’m still shit, but it’s just so gratifying to complete a harder screen…
Tunic has such an unique vision and it executes it expertly. On the surface it’s a zelda-like but it’s so much more than that, and it’s best experienced blind. In fact, that’s the whole idea. The developer wanted to replicate the experience of being a kid picking up a game in a different language that you had to figure out little by little.
Agreed! I don’t know if I will ever again experience as much enjoyment from a game as I did from tunic, but that’s okay, for having experienced tunic
IMO, it’s hard to claim best game of all time unless it ages well, and not just some unique gimmick the game provided at the time.
Ie, I don’t like Tetris but for sure it is one of the best game of all time.
However, if what you mean is good games that somewhat get outshined by others or lacks media attentions, then I agree. There are plenty of other games, and I think people would have bias toward their favorite genre/type.
“Best” and “most important” are also two very different things. Like tetris, pong, doom and some other trail blazers might not be the kind of long-term engaging many people would think of when coming up with best games. But their impact and long term effects on the tech, the market or design of games is impossible to ignore.
that’s why I argue you can’t put “best” and “all time” together. If the title says “best game of their time but got snubbed by medias” then I might have a couple of my own to provide as example.
Yeah exactly, I agree
Battlefield 1942. Vehicle combat, area-control mechanics, “realistic” shooter gameplay (before that term became an obscene word), and class-based team mechanics had all been invented before, but the way it brought them together and the degree to which it polished them to arrive at something fun as hell was nothing less than revolutionary at the time. It was so groundbreaking that (for better or worse) it basically spawned the “AAA WW2 game” genre that then lasted for decades.
Then, the sequels were so consistently mediocre that the original was more or less erased from history.
Then, the sequels were so consistently mediocre that the original was more or less erased from history.
I will not have you slander Battlefield Vietnam like this. I spent countless hours on a “heliwars” server after school as a kid.
