11mo ago

What games do you think are unfairly snubbed when talking about the best games of all time?

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!

98 comments

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 :)

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.

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.
- 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.

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 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.
  
  I'm not sure I would trust modern Bethesda to remake Morrowind.
- 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.

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.
- Doom will last at least until people born in the 80s die
- All the likes of Zelda, Mario, Halo, Pokemon, etc. are going to get forgotten
  I disagree. The reason being that video games and gaming of this caliber are completely unheard of in all of human history. We've come further in gaming tech over the last couple decades than the grand majority of all humans that have ever existed could even dream.
  That being said, as long as emulation exists, there will be fans of big ips. The problem with saying "it'll get forgotten as soon as the last person stops playing" is that the specific circumstance of modern gaming is unprecedented. People are still out there emulating games that came out in the 80's. There's really no rule saying this kind of technology won't last hundreds or thousands of years like more classical games do.

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.

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.

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?
  
  Seconding the other response. This page should have everything you need to get the game into an optimal, playable state. Like a breath of fresh air when I launched it again. Brilliant work by those involved in the fixes.

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?

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!
  
  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

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.

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.
- @delitomatoes @Lunar
  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.

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.

ooblets and fire watch are not difficult or lengthy games, but both were so enjoyable. i think casual games often get the short end of the stick unless there’s some online element a la animal crossing.

When it comes to arcade racers people seem to either forget or just don't know about trackmania games. They aren't perfect by any means but id certainly consider them among the best
- Trackmania Nations has to be the peak of the series. One aspect that amazes me is that it works equally well with every input method out there. I've played this with a keyboard, joystick, gamepad and even steering wheel (although admittedly one without force feedback).

One title that comes to mind is Anachronox. A western rpg with a really good story, interesting characters (one of your companions is an entire planet shrinked down to human size), fun humor and a cliffhanger that never got resolved.
I really wish they made a part 2 but I know it will never happen.
- It's an RPG made in the west, but I've always heard that it was notable for being a JRPG.
  
  It was a mix of both, the battle system was definitely like a JRPG that's true.
  Come to think of it, I'm not an expert on JRPG's, so maybe it is? :) What else defines a JRPG?

Portal, Minecraft, Stardew Valley are just some you haven't mentioned.
- SDV hardly gets snubbed as one of the best games of all time. It's constantly in the top sellers. I say this as a loving fan.

I searched this thread for Gothic II and it was nowhere to be found. This brilliant masterpiece is even getting snubbed from lists of games getting snubbed. It really should be more known. This is a game that makes (no offense) OP's Fable look like baby's first RPG. Incredible world building, expert progression, meaningful choices, an entirely skill-based combat system that is basically a proto Dark Souls, so many clever touches everywhere. It's so well designed, it's one of few RPGs that credibly crosses into immersive sim territory - that's how well its systems are connected.
- Agreed, best RPG (perhaps best game) I ever played. So good I have to replay it at least once every few years.
- I think Gothic 1 is much better. :p (it would totally deserve a spot in this conversation, but it's a very highly regarded game )
  
  I'm admittedly a bit biased, because I played Gothic II first, but I'm still curious as to why you prefer it over its sequel. In my opinion at least, the second game is a considerable step up.

I think for best games of all time i think fallout new vegas. Its super well regarded amongst bethesda fans but i dont hear it listed as one of the greatest in general and i think i definitely deserves to be up there. The size of the world, the zaney humor, the amount of quests, weapons, amd your effect on the world. There's just so much to this game

Master of Magic. I know strategy isn't everyone's thing and turn based isn't either and high fantasy isn't usually strategy staple, but it's damn near perfect in execution. There are some minor nitpicks, but the game is definitely a 9/10*s. None of the spiritual successors have ever been so well executed. They always fall flat somewhere.

Marathon Infinity - The whole Marathon trilogy did a lot for defining the story-driven FPS (as did System Shock), but since the first and last title were Mac only for years, they didn’t get the credit they deserved among the pantheon of FPS greats.
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP - For years, whenever someone asked me what the must-have game was for iOS, this was always my answer. It shows up on a fair number of iOS lists, but doesn’t get the same level of recognition on PC. One of the most well-crafted experiences ever.
Clash at Demonhead - Despite having an Easter egg in Scott Pilgrim, this NES game is largely forgotten. It was one of my favorites in my youth and I am always surprised by how few people have played it, let alone finished it.

Toribash is quite possibly the best competitive fighting game I have ever played due to it's unique method of controlling your actions. It's almost entirely unheard of tho.
- Toribash is an indie classic. It was mentioned fairly often among indie fans around the time of Cave Story's rise. But back then there weren't so many indie fans.

Freespace 1 & 2 deserve a mention here. Old games, so smaller in scope than modern games. But I feel they can compete still.

It just occurred to me that Death Really (1995) would deserve to be talked about as well, it's just an incredible little game.

Trog.. I played that game for days

Pirate Trainer & Uru: Ages Beyond Myst
I remember trying Pirate Trainer in a Nvidia game booth when VR was new. It was incredible, years later I get a VR headset and its the free game. I don't understand how no one has improved upon it.
Uru was the first puzzle game I thought struck a good balance between physical and mental puzzles. They were set at a level that felt challenging but not impossible and laid out so you alternated really nicely. Myst Online actually went backwards in this
- I tried pirate trainer in a VR demo booth at a con and lost 2 hours thinking it has been 20 minutes!

Plants vs Zombies on PC.
Great, unique, iconic, still fun to play. Its biggest achievement: I have brought a lot of people into the hobby by making them play this as their first video game and there wasn't a single one not having fun. Tower defense is as a whole an underrated genre if we talk about the best games of all time. It also is a game that offers achievements that add a lot to the gameplay by challenging you to change your tactics.
They of course had to make the second one mobile only and on top ruin it with microtransactions. :( Greed is why we can't have nice things.

98 comments