The Best Games You've Never Played

Originally Posted by RaptorRed
I cant believe only Joe has mentioned Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy the whole control system and mental element makes it superbly atmospheric and the central duality of playing opposing characters at the same time is very original, plus the story is great. And the Dig Ive been trying to find a copy of that for years. Another game I realy like is Fragile Allegiance a strategy game based on asteroid mining with inter species diplomacy, trade and war thrown in for good measure.

I got a copy of The Dig when a friend of mine was clearing out his room almost a decade ago. You can sometimes track it down as abandonware or as part of a lucasarts compilation pack on eBay.

Have you ever played Armed and Dangerous Joe?

I have a copy of it, but it never looked worth the time. It any good?

Very understated packaging and advertising. I can imagine it being your kind of humour. The cut scenes lag a bit with the 360, but it's more then playable

Hm, maybe I'll give it a go once I get over this cold then. Any more suggestions anyone?

Originally Posted by CardJoe
Can you not create a boundary which runs the game with the CPU aff. preset so that you don't have to alt-tab out?

Oh yeah you can do something like -a0 in the shortcut IIRC, I'll try that.

G-police FTW

Just found it among the crap by brother left when he moved so I'm stealing it :D

Dunno what kind of success it had, or how it plays now, all I can remember is I loved it when it first came out, even if I was **** at it.

EDIT: Woops sorry about that.

Woot fixed the core affinity, runs fine now apart from the occasional frame rate drop when there's lots of traffic.

Hehe.. I've got a few of those games. Neverhood, Outcast (Killed my computer when I got it..), Planescape (Really didnt know that it was unknown), Beyond Good & Evil, Vampire and Psyconauts :)

Good call on Condemned. It's a great game.

It's a moot point reminiscing about older games when newer video cards won't support them. It's like a book club discssing out-of-print books that no one can get.

I have a 8800 GTX and a can't play 'Crimson Skies' on it (I bought it from EBay, last week). Searching Nvidia forums for a resolution, I found a slew of older games, like AVP, that Nvidia newer cards don't support.

I'd love to play something like Grim Fandango again, but I seriously doubt that my highspeed JAXA pc machine could play a game older than a couple of years ago.

I can play Grim Fandango fine on my work PC, which has an 8800 and vista etc in it. You do get occasional hiccups and, if I recall, the cutscenes are all jittery - but put text and speech on and it'll be fine for the most part. Especially if its your second play through.

Originally Posted by CardJoe
I can play Grim Fandango fine on my work PC, which has an 8800 and vista etc in it. You do get occasional hiccups and, if I recall, the cutscenes are all jittery - but put text and speech on and it'll be fine for the most part. Especially if its your second play through.

I just picked a classic game at random, I didn't know whether Grim Fandango worked or not! Since I am frustrated with Crimson Skies, and read about other Nvidia problems, I thought that most older games were suffering similar problems as well.

I guess I anticipated, and you should never anticipate, because you make an 'ant' out of 'tis' and 'pate'!

I just bought Psychonauts off of ebay, hopefully that will work.

Psychonauts should run fine. If not, there's always virtual machines...

Originally Posted by RaptorRed
I cant believe only Joe has mentioned Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy the whole control system and mental element makes it superbly atmospheric and the central duality of playing opposing characters at the same time is very original, plus the story is great. And the Dig Ive been trying to find a copy of that for years. Another game I realy like is Fragile Allegiance a strategy game based on asteroid mining with inter species diplomacy, trade and war thrown in for good measure.

Indigo Prophecy was short, the sneaking sequence flash back was terrible, it lost itself in the ending, the sex scene was terrible....and the controls were shenmue styled simon says. You could barely watch the heavy action sequences because of that control scheme. First game on the PC I had to play with a controller.

Besides all that great game! hahaha...

Fahrenheit was awesome, though I agree it had problems. The sneaking bits were a tad irritating, but not really a huge problem and there was only one or two of them which were quite short at that. The heavy action sequences were fantastic though and I loved how the shenmue controls were used - not something I'd like to see in all games, but something I felt was handled well nonetheless. They really gave the game a sense of drama for me.

I agree that the plot kind of lost it half way thorugh, but it's important to keep track of the dates mentioned in the cutscenes to see the timescale the game is set over. You also have to bear in mind Fahrenheit was originally supposed to be episodic, but the publisher forced them to put the game out as a single release like that, condensing the story and ruining the schedule. Things which should have been explained more were therefore skipped over.

The sex scene didn't really bother me. It was there to add depth to the characters, not titillate players.

Always wanted to get Farenheit, never got round to it. There's a lot of games like that for me.

I just got Borrow Hill thru the post today - trying to branch out into old adventure games, because new adventure games suck.
I'm attempting to get the uber-rare Realms of the Haunting, but the *cough*torrent*cough* only has one seed and no peers >:(
So, in three to five years, I'll be able to play that one. By which time steam will have bought every game company on earth, and it'll be available in their catalogue.
I may have to Amazon Marketplace it from some guy in denmark instead...

Okay. So in keeping with this motif of a slanted selection of pre-1995 cheap RPG games, where is Castle of the Winds....?

Having had this brought to my attention recently, I wanted to make my own addition: Blades of Exile. One of the best storylines in a game I've ever played. And you get multiple 'scenarios' which are each as long as something 'big' such as oblivion. They have updated the series with Avernum now which I am just getting to grips with. The thing is, they don't spend time developing the graphics and sound (although they are not painful to use at all), so instead it all goes into the story and things like that!

Ooh, had a look at that just now - looks like something perfectly suited to playing on my EEE PC.

On the subject, I bought beyond Good and Evil the other day, but can't seem to get the game to work without serious GPU glitches. On the menu screen when selecting language, the pgup/pgdown cursor are outside of the screen, i.e. as if its zoomed in and clipping the side

Likewise during the game itself it seems to be full of artifacts, things popping all over the place, anyone experienced this? Had a look around and saw it was a common problem pre-patch and meant you had to tinker with the AA settings on the graphics card, however having done this it still seems to make no difference, I'm stumped :?

Not something I've ever heard of. I'd suggest double checking you're on the latest patch, running in compatability mode and maybe turning hardware acceleration off.

I like playing simple games which are really enjoyable like Gemsweeper or Arcade Lines

Originally Posted by boiled_elephant
I'm attempting to get the uber-rare Realms of the Haunting, but the *cough*torrent*cough* only has one seed and no peers >:(

I actually have the Collector's Edition of this - and I mean /have/, as in it's sat on my shelf in its original box. It's a great game, and the making of stuff in the Collector's Edition is fascinating.

Rock hard, mind - and the "while you're walking down a corridor we'll teleport some enemies DIRECTLY BEHIND YOU" mechanic can get irritating.

Originally Posted by Gareth Halfacree
I actually have the Collector's Edition of this - and I mean /have/, as in it's sat on my shelf in its original box. It's a great game, and the making of stuff in the Collector's Edition is fascinating.

Rock hard, mind - and the "while you're walking down a corridor we'll teleport some enemies DIRECTLY BEHIND YOU" mechanic can get irritating.

Ooh - what's in the Collector's Edition?

Originally Posted by CardJoe
Ooh - what's in the Collector's Edition?

Not a great deal, to be honest. According to the box, the only extras are a "Director's Cut" introduction video which is extended to eight minutes in length and the "The Making of Realms" video. No physical extras, sadly.