Underated Video Games

[NedimNapoleon]

Postal 2.....let me explain:

The game was given bad grades almost everywhere for being way too offensive and violent. But the game itself was a parody/mockery of those who said video games are dangerous because of that trend and it was a cluster of every video game, set in a comedic rather than a serious mood. Also say what you want about it being racist and violent, but running around town with gasoline, splashing it on people then throwing matches at them is priceless. Also you can piss the fire out.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom is one of my favorite games of all time, to bad more people haven't played it. I was surprised a few days ago when I checked the credits and noticed Civ5 veteran Ed Beach in the credits.

I've been playing through Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom recently. I find the Impressions historical city building games easier to play than the later SimCities, even if you do get the occasional annoyance (like if a supply of a good suddenly dropped and you can't see why, and before you can do anything all your houses have devolved).

That game is unplayable now. Unlike Pharaoh or Zeus, Emperor has no widescreen/other resolution support.

One of the best i ever played, it's a pity the series stopped there.

I managed to play Emperor fine on my computer, and I have a widescreen monitor. I guess you could always use windowed mode.

Oh. And I liked Zeus: Master of Olympus. One of my favorite games as a kid.

I still play Emperor. I consider it the best of those historical city builders. I never really liked the format of caesar 3/pharaoh. The problem with Emperor was there were a lot of little contrived annoyances that the game threw at you that turned it very tedious, very quickly. I hated the ancestor worship part of the game. It wasn't fun, it was just irritating, especially when forgetting about it resulted in a flood or an earthquake, meaning you had to manually rebuild basically the whole city. I don't know if this is a design or a glitch in my game, but as soon as I conquered a city it would immediately rebel away from me (as in before I could even manage to send a gift) which meant I basically had to conquer every city twice, which made the "rule x cities" challenges a major chore.

Actually I remember why they did this. I would send the whole of my forces to conquer a city usually, so when the troops left the newly conquered city, the city would assess my strength and, seeing as how I had no troops in my city (they are all in his) the ai decides that they can safely rebel. However this is ridiculous and just means that I have to immediately turn my forces around and reconquer the city. It was just tedious.

Zeus was the first of the historical city builders I played, and it's probably my favourite of them.

There is one good thing to come from ancestor worship. If your city has an excess of a certain type of good any you can't get rid of it, you can always give it as an offering. One thing I do find annoying is the Feng Shui. You lay out a housing loop and you think you have planned where all the buildings can go, then you try to place an inspector's tower and find you get bad Feng Shui.

I never liked the military in those games. I think the best one was Zeus in that it can be automated, but Zeus didn't have dedicated armies so your employment will drop.

Playing through Emperor I always get the cities revolting just after I conquered them, but the worst was when a city invaded, just as my troops were fighting them, another city immediately invaded at the same time. I ended up having to surrender and became a vassal, even though I managed to fight off the first invading city.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Is Zeus and Emperor anything like Black and White 2?

 

[Chukchi Husky]

A bit like Black & White 2 in that they are city builders with a historical theme. The big difference is that with the Impressions city builders that's the entire focus, and the goods you gather are for improving the lives of your people. You are simply the leader of a city instead of a god, you don't have any kind of avatar, the controls are less awkward and the map only has your city. I think Children of the Nile is probably a bit closer to Black & White in that the people are free to roam the city, in the earlier games you have to plan all the roads carefully as the people in those games acted like pinballs.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Oh ok thanks.

 

[Arakhor]

Did you play Shivering Isles? You do become a literal god at the end of that.

Very true, but I always thought that was rather silly, personally. I've been meaning to getting around to actually playing the Shivering Isles content, but in six years, I've never yet managed to do it!

 

[cybrxkhan]

Zeus, Emperor, Pharaoh, and I'm pretty sure Ceasar III (I didn't play Caesar) are very puzzle-like in how they work - you have to do everything carefully. Children of the Nile not as much - certainly you can't just build randomly all over the place, but it isn't as restrictive as its predecessors - not that that makes it better or worse per se (though I like it), just a bit different.

 

[Arakhor]

Random question because I wasn't able to find out elsewhere - when you have Children of the Nile installed somewhere, do you install its expansion Alexandria into the same base directory or as a separate install?

 

[Heretic_Cata]

Drakan was underrated ! You get to fly a dragon ! (this was in '99)

Postal 2.....let me explain:
The game was given bad grades almost everywhere for being way too offensive and violent. But the game itself was a parody/mockery of those who said video games are dangerous because of that trend and it was a cluster of every video game, set in a comedic rather than a serious mood. Also say what you want about it being racist and violent, but running around town with gasoline, splashing it on people then throwing matches at them is priceless. Also you can piss the fire out.

Nobody gave this game bad grades because it was offensive or violent. The game is buggy, repetitive and boring as hell, it was inferior to every shooter at the time in term of game mechanics. Plus, the "funny" part of the game is only funny for about the first 5 minutes, after which it gets repeated over and over. Sure, pissing on other people to make them vomit is "funny", but how many times can you do that before it gets boring. I'm guessing this has to do with age, since the target audience was pre-pubescent kids.

 

[NedimNapoleon]

I was trying to say that people missed the point of the game, the game was a parody on the same type of repetitive shooters that were massively coming out, the game was made repetitive and uber violent for a purpose, many people didn't understand that, it was a mockery of Duke Nukem, but the character was opposite of him (skinny guy, with problems) and the enemies weren't terrorists or monsters they were ordinary people or Arab store managers, you can see this in the first mission where anti violence video game protesters try to kill you. It wasn't uber in its game design or gameplay but it wasn't that bad as people said, it had truly funny moments.

 

[KaiserElectric]

I always felt, with the exception of the third game, that the Empire Earth series was a very underrated series of games.

 

[Sonereal]

Especially the second one. The third one killed the series (thanks again, EAxis!).

 

[KaiserElectric]

Quite true. I had a lot of fun writing a review for that piece of crud in the "Where WE review our games" thread.

 

[cybrxkhan]

The second Empire Earth was quite good. To be honest I liked it more than the first. Although that might have been because it was a less Eurocentric in its choices of civilizations or something.


Anyhow, that does remind me of a game I do consider seriously, seriously overrated - Rise of Legends. I thought the balance between the three playable factions was very well-done and thought-out, and I liked how I could easily finish a quick skirmish in less than half an hour (in contrast to other RTS's which take forever) and still feel satisfied that I played a full good game. More importantly, it had one of the most interesting and fascinating "fantasy" settings I'd seen in any RTS - much less any video game, for that matter. Nothing like having Da Vinci's machines blast their way against some mystical Middle Eastern creatures and Living Astronaut Gods of the Mayans/Aztecs using laser beams and stuff. It's a pity they never released an expansion or a sequel (apparently at one point they had ideas for a fourth faction, which they settled on being inspired by Mongolian/Finnic mythology as their inspiration or something - which would have been really cool). Man, that was a good game and a great setting that nobody cared about - heck, even here it won the Best Game No One Liked Award, which is sad: http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/reviews/2554/2006-Game-of-the-Year-Awards

 

[sophie]

I never liked the military in those games. I think the best one was Zeus in that it can be automated, but Zeus didn't have dedicated armies so your employment will drop.

Yeah I agree. I hated that there was no consistency or indication of any kind where the enemy was going to appear, so there was no way to not lose half your town. I loved that you could automate it in Zeus, and I loved the concept of rabble in the game, it made getting curbstomped by military (like would happen in the later levels of Emperor if you didn't build a fort immediately) right off the bat. The only downside is when your city gets really big and you leave automate defense on because you don't want to deal with it and somebody attacks and your city implodes for 4 months because the automatic defenses decides it is prudent to summon every rabble division you have, even though you also have 8 horseman companies.

 

[TheDanish]

I've heard some people say that Morrowind's not as clear-cut on that. Certainly, you can view the story as the standard prophesized hero plot, though one with an amazing setting and background. However, some have said that the player's status as prophesized hero is not actually that clear-cut, and there is some vagueness on whether the player is actually the Neverarine (I can't spell it), whether Azura's just being a troll, and where exactly the lines between good and evil are drawn (particularly between Dagoth Ur and the Tribunal) - though I won't say much more since I'm not really good with Elder Scrolls lore, as much as I admire it.

That said, I still think Oblivion's plot, despite being much more cliche, had a lot of potential.

But those two games already have tons of love. So... yeah.

I'm in the camp that believes Morrowind's story is much deeper than it appears. If you take time to read the dialogue and text during the main quest, and if you read in-game books, cybrxkhan is pretty much spot on. The nature of the Nerevarine and your supposed role as Nerevar reborn becomes nebulous when you consider that Azura, the Daedric Prince who made the prophecy in the first place, is only a Daedric Prince and not a god. He/she can't make you become the Nerevarine - ultimately it is your choice. It fits quite well with the whole style of Elder Scrolls games. And if you bring Vivec into the fold... well, then the story gets a helluva lot wonkier. If you're interested just google Vivec and CHIM.

Getting back on topic... there's this N64 fighter pilot game called Aerofighters Assault that I think is absolutely amazing. Loads of fun. Anyone else played it?

 

[da dick]

not really a underrated game just sort of forgotten or passed over by most people. i just discovered KING'S BOUNTY.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Bounty

probably wouldn't be any HoMM without this game. probably forgotten because HoMM got so famous. it's a primitive game by modern strategy standards but it's a lot more non-linear and replayable than any HoMM campaign.

 

[BC1871]

One of my all time favorite underrated/lesser known games was Imperialism: The Fine Art of Conquering the World, as it had all the best elements of building a Victorian era imperial nation, and also gave the player a high degree of control in how he industrialized, managed his national economy and how he built up/maintained his national defense infrastructure.

Honorable mentions go to:
Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun
KGB: Conspiracy
Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space
Call of Cthulhu: Prisoner of Ice
Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath
Crisis in The Kremlin
Bravo Romeo Delta

 

[Maniacal]

Imperialism II is free, I played it a bit and it was a pretty fun game. Unfortunately it is also extremely fast paced with the colonizable land being gobbled up in a handful of turns :/

 

[GrayingGamer]

Some of my favorite games of all time that I would classify more as niche than underrated, but will nonetheless mention here, are Wizardry 7 and 8. Most enjoyable character-builder, group-strategy RPGs I've ever played.