Mine has to be Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime, a DS spin off of the Dragon Quest series that sees you playing as a slime operating a tank and rescuing the people from your town. You run around the overworld, collecting items to use as ammunition and saving money to upgrade your tank. The art and music are just as great as you’d expect from the Dragon Quest series. It made fantastic use of the DS’s dual screens. It’s also written for a younger audience, so a lot of it is just really silly and fun! Try it out for sure, I’m so sad there’s no sequel :(

  • @theragu40
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    1 year ago

    Hard to settle on just one. In no order:

    • ChuChu Rocket (Dreamcast): insanely fun and manic couch multiplayer game
    • A10 Tank Killer II: Silent Thunder (PC): the soundtrack alone justifies the time to play this aging flight sim
    • Virtual On (Arcade): this was ported to Saturn and the port is good, but the giant arcade machine is where it’s really at with dual twin stick cockpits
    • Mario Paint (SNES): Really fun non-game from a time when non-games were uncommon on home consoles. I have hundreds of hours into this
    • Dungeon Keeper (PC): darkly comedic evil dungeon lord management sim. I will never forgive EA for what they did to Bullfrog and subsequently the DK franchise. There have been many attempted homages and clones but none have captured the magic.
    • Super Tennis (SNES): an actually fun tennis game
    • Super Play Action Football (SNES): football game with a unique isometric view
    • Hank Parker’s Super Black Bass 2 (SNES): super fun fishing sim. I wish there were games like this today that took fishing more seriously and less arcadey.
    • Brain Age (DS): a genuine sensation in its heyday and largely forgotten now. Really showed off the potential of the DS
    • Cel Damage (GameCube): twisted metal with zany little cel shaded cartoon characters. Never got the respect it deserved and probably never will since they butchered the game’s balance with the HD re-release
    • @Ace_Addams
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      101 year ago

      I played Dungeon Keeper like mad back in the day.

      • @theragu40
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        51 year ago

        It is a seriously incredible game. Such a clever concept so well executed. I know I already said it, but fuck EA, seriously, for ruining this franchise and any chance of a proper revival.

        • @theragu40
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          21 year ago

          Your creatures are fighting amongst themselves!

    • @HappycamperNZ
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      41 year ago

      DK2 took up far too much of my teenage life

    • @[email protected]
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      41 year ago

      You’ve named some classics there!

      • chuchu rocket - I first played this when it came out on the GBA as a launch title. It was the first Sega game released for a Nintendo console, ever, after they discontinued the Dreamcast. Aside from being a fantastically addictive bastard of a game, it was also a surreal experience seeing sega on a Nintendo console. Seems normal now, but back then it was fucking weird.

      • Mario Paint - had this on the SNES with the mouse! Great memories. Been playing it again recently on my MiSTer FPGA along with a modern optical mouse!

      • Super Tennis is indeed awesome and the 3D effects were mental back then. Still great fun

      • Cel Damage I got as a rental along quite a few times as our blockbuster had a three for price of two deal back then. I never bought it but it was great for occasional parties and shit

      Brain Age I never got along with, not interested in fishing, and not played the football game (is that really football, as the ball being kicked, or American hand-egg? No idea, but I’ll give it a go!)

      • @theragu40
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        11 year ago

        I love hearing that others have memories of these games! I actually kind of forgot how great the 3D effects are in super tennis. I need to go back and play it again, it’s been many years.

        Super Play Action Football is indeed football of the american variety. I have no idea if it will appeal to someone who isn’t a fan of the sport but it’s a fun approximation and IMO it stood out from the very crowded pack of that era.

    • @[email protected]
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      41 year ago

      I played chu chu rocket on the game boy advance obsessively after falling in love with the Dreamcast one one fair blockbuster rental weekend

      • @theragu40
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        21 year ago

        Wait a minute. It was ported to gba???

        • @[email protected]
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          31 year ago

          It was the very first third party game Sega released after pulling out of the hardware race. It was a GBA launch title if I remember right and it was seriously fucking weird booting up my new Nintendo handheld and seeing SEGA on the screen!!!

          • @theragu40
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            21 year ago

            That’s a cool bit of trivia, I had no idea. Just goes to show how eras change as far as how you get information. Back then if it wasn’t something that caught my eye in that months issue of EGM, it wouldn’t really be on my radar. I’m still waiting for the GBC port of RE1 that got previewed in EGM and never released :)

            Honestly it’s still surreal to me to see the Sega logo (or hear the voices “Seeeeegaaaaa” when they use it) on a Nintendo system. It was such a bloody divide back in the day.

            • @[email protected]
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              1 year ago

              Heh yeah, I don’t know if you’re in the UK, but we had a service called Ceefax/Teletext, which was a text based service sent through to your TV (sorry if I’m explaining obvious things)

              Digitiser was the games magazine on Channel Four’s Teletext service. It was about 30 pages in total, split between news, reviews, features, and letters. It was updated every day. I was the very first person to know about Sega pulling out back at school in my class because Digitiser had the news that very same day.

              Digitiser was also fucking hilarious. They got pulled from air more than once due to their content constantly pushing boundaries. A feature each week had a different guest writer (all fictitious), such as Mr T (constantly shouting about people messing with his bins), Fat Sow (a pig), George Michael and Phil Mitchell from EastEnders. I genuinely miss it so much. At least we have it mostly backed up online! Here’s one day during the CD32 era, including a contribution from Liam Gallagher: https://www.superpage58.com/digitiser-vault-teletext-screenshot-image-archive-2018-01-03.htm

              When they finally got cancelled, they had a final message, asking you to press reveal on the remote. When pressed, it showed you the channel Four Teletext mascot, turner the worm (a pink worm), being sick (white fluid). Yeah, it’s exactly what it sounds like: https://live.staticflickr.com/212/506622777_1b9520378f_z.jpg

              And it was fucking insane

              • @theragu40
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                21 year ago

                Lol wow. I’m from the US so that is all completely unknown to me. I’m very sure we didn’t have anything quite like that. Fascinating!

    • @Saneless
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      31 year ago

      Play action football on NES was our game. It was the only 4 player football game around until Madden