No Man’s Sky. I don’t like it that much either. I just don’t hate it as much at other people. It’s ok. Easy to get bored after a while. Feels like a AAA blended with a phone game it’s weird, but sometimes smooth brains like me need some simple games to play.

Timeshift: it has 71 on metacritic, so not that universally disliked, but I actually thought it was really great. An fps where you can stop or slow down time, with pretty simple time related puzzles and a lot of slow-motion gore.

It also had an interesting multiplayer mode where you could throw grenades that slow down time in a sphere around them, but unfortunately I never managed to find a match online

I liked Watch Dogs 1 mainly because I didn't consume any pre-release media about it. Whatever downgrade there may have been, I was unaffected. The game and its story are about as Ubisoft as they come (and I don't mean that in a particularly positive way), but it was great for fucking around.

I also liked Cyberpunk 2077's launch version, but at the same time, I think the people who are trying to memory hole the objectively dogshit launch state of both 2077 and The Witcher 3 are perpetuating the problem.

Phantasmagoria 1 and 2

I really enjoyed Cities Skylines 2 even at launch.

i love starfield, despite its flaws. the public opinion was very.... 😬

I don't know what the reception was at the time, but people seem to hate Stuntman, at least in retrospect. I loved it though. It's a driving game in which you play the part of a movie stuntman, driving through a movie set as the director barks orders at you, telling you live how to drive the scene. It has a nice variety of movies, and the scenes are actually cool to drive and to watch.

It tickles a part of my brain that loves repeating a task until I perfect it... and boy, you get to do a lot of repetition.

The one thing I don't like is that you suffer a PS2 load time with each failed attempt. We're talking minutes between attempts. Loved it apart from that though.

So, I had an snes, which I loved, but my taste in games wasn't great and my parents objected to violence, which means my collection is a bit weird.

One game I loved which wasn't universally acknowledged to be great, was Clayfighter. It was essentially a Street Fighter clone, but the assets were all modelled in clay and animated using stop motion technique.

I think it got a lot of flak for being not well balanced and a little slow, so it kind of just didn't stand out beyond the obvious classics of that genre, but man, I loved it. I couldn't get Street Fighter because of my parents, but they were fine with clayfighter's look and more humorous approach. At the same time, it still was a good beat em up, so I spent hours with it. Also, it kind of gave me an edge as SF2 was just the game everybody had, so at least I had a fun game to spend an hour with that people hadn't played to death already.

The samples will remain burned into my memories forever. "The Blob Wins!!" Good times.

The Mount and Blade games feel like such a janky mess, and I don't know anyone else that likes or plays them. But I absolutely adore the combat gameplay, nowhere else do I feel that merge between tactical medieval warfare and intense personal combat.

All the strategy/diplomacy/trading/RPG stuff on top is fine, but only as a context for the combat gameplay.

Pyre by Supergiant. I have no idea how a mystical basketball slash visual novel with RPG elements clicked with me but WOW did it. Its the first game I ever platinum'd too.

I don't know if it's my favorite, but Prototype (and its sequel) comes to my mind. It wasn't that badly received, but most people liked Infamous more, in the same generation.

And a game that I really love, my personal best SNES game ever (yes, even beyond Chrono Trigger and Tales of Phantasia, my numbers 2 and 3), is Terranigma, which is a game that many people who've played it don't like (because they get stuck at the beginning in the Underworld or at the fight with Bloody Mary).

mmos are not especially popular and I just returned to sto and champions online. I would play them all the time if I could. I like hanging out in virtual worlds with a little gameplay to make it interestin.

Final Fantasy 8

Evolve. Even just against bots without any DLC characters is still a ton of fun. I recently replayed it on PlayStation and had a blast getting all the base game hunters and monsters.

Lost Planet 2 was the shit when I was a kid