Please suggest video games you think I'd like, based on the stuff I already like!

October 4, 2009 6:20 PM

Please suggest video games you think I'd like, based on the stuff I already like!

Help me find my new favorite game. It can be commercial or independent, old or recent, long or short, graphical or text-based, easy or difficult.

I've put together the following list of common traits I've identified in the games that I like, along with examples. As you can see, I'm probably not looking for an FPS or an MMO, unless it has really strong and masterfully executed elements from this list.

Your suggestions don't have to incorporate all of the traits on this list (that would be quite a feat!); this is simply meant to give an idea of the kinds of things I enjoy in a game.

I have a PC with a 3.0GHz dual-core Pentium 4, 3GB RAM, and a middling video card.

The list (in no particular order):

• Simulation. Games which model complex systems, and put you in charge of engineering and managing those systems. (Civilization; Dwarf Fortress)
• Sandbox gameplay. Games in which no explicit goal is given, or in which the goal can be easily ignored to pursue my own arbitrary goals. (Oblivion; Dwarf Fortress)
• Emergent gameplay. Games where complex situations arise organically from a few relatively simple mechanics. NetHack is the gold standard here (and I suspect that Dwarf Fortress would trump it if I had the courage to take it there). Spelunky has some of this, too. Yes, I've played other roguelikes.
• Atmosphere. Game with a creative, well-developed atmosphere and aesthetic—an original and compelling game world. I dislike stock formulas: battle axes and goblins; space marines and aliens; preteen anime characters waking up in bucolic pixel villages. I prefer stuff that's cerebral, maybe a little more sober and mature, especially if there's an element of mystery or magic or melancholy. (Thief 2—my favorite game of all time; Bioshock; Psychonauts; Knytt Stories; Braid—for the aesthetic alone; the puzzling is a bit too hardcore for me)
• Unique gameplay. I don't really want to play another RPG, or another turn-based strategy game, or another [insert standard genre here]. I like games that are as thoughtful and creative with their gameplay mechanics as the titles in the previous point are with their aesthetic. If the question "what do you do in the game?" causes hesitation as you search for points of reference, then I'm probably interested. Action elements are fine, but twitch gameplay is not. (The Thief series—yes, I've played Shadows of the Metal Age; Dwarf Fortress; Braid, if I actually liked it, which I don't—but it gets an A for effort)

Wow; apparently I really like Dwarf Fortress. I guess that's a pretty broad net, but hopefully it suggests some ideas. Recommend away!

posted by ixohoxi to sports, hobbies, & recreation (24 comments total)

I'm assuming you've played Half-Life 2... ?
posted by purephase at 6:31 PM on October 4

Okami!
posted by santojulieta at 6:37 PM on October 4

You mentioned Oblivion, so I'm assuming you've also tried Morrowind?
posted by aheckler at 6:37 PM on October 4

I watched a friend play Half-Life 2 for a while, and took the controller myself for a bit. As far as I can tell, it's just another twitchy FPS with space marines and aliens, though perhaps a little more tactical than some.
posted by ixohoxi at 6:38 PM on October 4

Oh, sorry. I fail. Okami is for PS2 and Wii. My bad.
posted by santojulieta at 6:38 PM on October 4

Yes, I've played Morrowind.
posted by ixohoxi at 6:39 PM on October 4

If you want originality and unique gameplay, you should check out Giants: Citizen Kabuto. It's an older game, but holds up well and can be obtained at Good Old Games. It's one of my favorites, and is especially good if you're a fan of British absurdist humor.
posted by metacollin at 6:41 PM on October 4

If you liked Oblivion, try Fallout 3... same company, similarly sandboxy, with a different atmosphere (post-apocalypse) and much deeper quests.

Have you tried Spore? It might or might not be up your alley.

Age of Empires might be fun too-- it's got much of the mechanics of Civ but it's different enough to be worth trying on its own.
posted by zompist at 6:47 PM on October 4

Freespace 2 is a win for atmosphere and uniqueness.

If you have an open mind towards what can feel like a twitchy FPS (if you play it wrong) you should check out Far Cry 2. It is the poster boy for mergence in FPS games, with a very compelling mix of fire propagation, weapon decay and crazy awesome AI behaviors is very compelling. Make sure you put the difficulty at as high as you can stand as that brings out the best in the game. There is also a great atmosphere and some sandbox elements, but since you usually only have one goal at a time it never becomes a big part of the game.
posted by The Devil Tesla at 6:56 PM on October 4 [1 favorite]

Based on your love of Thief, I think you might like the Hitman games. There are some similarities in that you can choose lots of different ways to complete your assignment and, like Thief, it is more about moving methodically through the level and picking your spots to 'strike'.

There are weapons, but it is certainly not a twitch game. The goal is to only fire the one shot that kills your target. I always go for the 'Silent Assassin' rating where you get in and out unnoticed without attacking anyone other than the target, and love the challenge it provides.
posted by Arch_Stanton at 7:01 PM on October 4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeworld
posted by CharlesV42 at 7:02 PM on October 4

Noctis IV scores extremely well on the Sandbox, Atmosphere, and Unique metrics. It's a space exploration simulator created by one guy (Alessandro Ghignola), but it's not a space sim in the technical sense. Spaceflight is handled by a simple point-and-click interface mediated by your ship's massive plate glass windowscreens, and automatic once you lock in a destination.

The real emphasis is on, well, exploration. The game uses procedural generation to spawn a galaxy of literally billions of planets from a single random seed. There are gas giants, onyx moons, jungle planets, icy tundras, pink waterworlds. Some even have life. Gameplay consists of flying to star systems, beaming down to one quadrant of one world, and walking around. That's it -- there are no weapons, no enemies, no music, and no multiplayer.

The graphics are very outdated -- the whole thing runs in an MS-DOS-style engine. But it is very evocative in a minimalist way. Very colorful, very hazy. I think this review describes it best:

The real joy of Noctis lies in setting eyes on alien landscapes that nobody has ever seen before. From verdant rain forests to bleak, blasted deserts, the worlds of Noctis never fail to engage the senses. In my voyages I have found icy planetoids so distant from their parent stars that it is impossible to tell where the ground ends and the darkened sky begins. I have swum upon giant worlds with liquid-rock surfaces whose temperatures extend into the thousands of degrees Kelvin. I have watched triplicate stars rise above placid green meadows, their light refracted by a high canopy of crystalline trees. From mountainous peaks extending thousands of meters above rolling oceans, I have gazed down at my distant landing pod and marveled at my own precious insignificance.

There are screenshots after the review. You can download the game for free here.

Another slightly less ambitious game is Stranded II, a survival simulation game. I hope you don't mind if I just copy-paste my description of it from a previous thread:

You start out with a brief cutscene, then wake up floating in the water off the coast of a small jungle island, with the wreckage of your ship washing to shore around you. You have to break open the crates and gather whatever random materials survived, then do what you can to make it through the day. There are abundant resources on the island -- small animals, trees, mineral ores and springs -- but you've got to learn to tap them.

At the beginning its a lovely grueling task to scrounge together whatever raw materials you can find to build an adequate shelter before sunset (there's a day/night cycle). From there on out you have to balance your daily survival needs (thirst/hunger/fatigue/health meters) with an ongoing strategy for leaving the island... however that might be done.

That's all in the main preset "storyline" -- a big 3D sandbox world for you to try to claw your way through survival on to victory. But it's got a lot of other fun extras, too -- map editors, in-engine minigames (think very basic Garry's Mod stuff), etc. And it's all rendered from a first-person perspective in pleasant, cartoonish simplicity. It's one of the most immersive games I've ever played, very entertaining while it lasts, and best of all, it's free.

Screenshots - Free download link
posted by Rhaomi at 7:10 PM on October 4 [2 favorites]

Oops, those screenshots were for Stranded I. Here are the screens from the latest version.
posted by Rhaomi at 7:13 PM on October 4

Another good one is Ur-Quan Masters. It is a free and open source space adventure and simulation game.

I also second the suggestion of Freespace 2, though I recommend getting one of the fan made ports of Freespace 1 for the Freespace 2 engine. The engine has been open sourced and the original game content has been released free of charge.
posted by metacollin at 7:13 PM on October 4

I'm a big Half-Life 2 fan, but let's face it, it has none of the attributes the OP lists. It's a pretty darn linear sci-fi shooter game -- just a very cleverly-designed one.

You might not have mentioned it, but have you tried Deus Ex? It was a very ambitious game that surprisingly turned out pretty well (although the graphics are pretty middling, even for 10 years ago, and the voice acting is generally atrocious). It's nominally an FPS, but with heavy RPG elements that give you a pretty wide variety of choices. (And if you like conspiracy theories or cyberpunk, the setting plot are pretty entertaining, with a lot of little extra details to be found in dark corners.)

Second Fallout 3. Very sandboxy, can be played as a shooter but it's pretty optional (usually). The lack of variety in the settings and situations eventually irked me, but I kept playing it, so I guess that's approval, right? (You'll probably want a better video card for that one.)
posted by neckro23 at 7:15 PM on October 4

Not sandboxy, but one of the more creative games have I played in a long time was Portal (part of the Half-Life Orange Box, but may be available alone). Problem solving; different environment; clever and humorous gameplay; great feeling of accomplishment at completing higher levels.
posted by mr_felix_t_cat at 8:31 PM on October 4

This'll be my second plug today for Railroad Tycoon 2.
posted by pompomtom at 11:00 PM on October 4

Knights of the old republic was fun. Maybe too rpg like for what you are after though?
posted by backwards guitar at 5:20 AM on October 5

Black & White
posted by arzakh at 6:10 AM on October 5

I have two suggestions for you -- first is the stunningly beautiful and perfectly written game The Path. It's an indie game, about $10 IIRC, and a very serious contender for Video Games as a Legitimate Art Form. They call it 'a short horror game', but it's much deeper, more complex, and has zero twitch factor to it. It's very strong on your Sandbox, Unique Gameplay, and Atmosphere axises, with an added bit of You've Never Seen Anything Like This Before.

Second is another indie game, Mount and Blade. This is not your typical swords'n'sorcery fantasy game, instead it is a decently researched medieval simulator as well as being hella fun. You start out as a guy with a horse and a sword -- you decide what you want your goals tobe, (do you want take towns and become a noble? Which king do you want to swear fealty to? Do you want to BE king?) and then you get there any way you choose in this huge sandbox of a world. Combat is active but not twitchy, and the feel of mass hand-to-hand combat is amazingly realistic. I think Mount and Blade may be $15, but there's a free trial that gives you enough time to make a real decision about whether you want to pony up or not. It's strong on pretty much all of your criteria.
posted by Concolora at 6:13 AM on October 5

Ixohoxi (OP), I really like your question! Your tastes seem really similiar to my own, and there are a ton of great answers here. I'll definitely be checking out the good recommendations from upthread.

For my own two bits, I'll just add that I've been very impressed lately with games blog Rock Paper Shotgun. Some of the writers there seem to have the same sort of vibe that you do, and I was particularly fascinated by their reports of obscure Russian developer Ice Pick Lodge, especially:

1. Pathologic. An older game, highly experimental, almost a combination of theater and gaming. Also, if the internet rumor mills are to be believed, hampered (nay, hamstrung) by an incredibly inept translation into English performed by an language company that normally writes aviation mechanics manuals. The best one word sentence description of Pathologic for me comes from Rock Paper Shotgun (RPS) which called it "Oblivion with Cancer". It intrigues me so much that I've tracked down a copy, (easier now that it recently became available cheaply on a legitimate pay-to-download service-- the link is in one of the RPS comment threads) and am actually playing through it even with its huge flaws. It is fascinating.

2. More recently, an English version of the same studio's new game The Void, a more recent, more polished and hopefully more successful game that still wrestles with trying to do something completely different. The short form on this one: You are a recently deceased spirit in a sort of limbo, trying to keep you soul from disintegrating by harvesting colored "memories" from the environment of purgatory. Or something like that, I don't actually have the game yet. (It may need to wait until next month, Mrs. Seasparrow is growing restive with my gaming budget. Domestic stability takes precedence over ground-breaking Russian ludic iconoclastic diversions.)

3. Finally, not Russian, but Scandinavian of some sort, a lone programmer named Eskil Steenberg (sp?) is slowly creating a sort of buildable, deformable miniature world called Love that is randomly (he calls it procedurally) generated, where you go (with other players) and build things and destroy things and so on. I'm not doing it justice. but it looks like it has a lot of potential-- so much so that I've even signed on (cost me three euros!) for the alpha testing.

So, there you go. Thanks again for starting the original question. I am again amazed at the how polished and erudite the many members of Hive Mind are. And again I've wasted far too much time reading Metafilter.
posted by seasparrow at 7:24 AM on October 5

Mass Effect fulfilled some of the qualifications you were looking for definitely. While it has some very frustrating elements to it, but the good and interesting certainly outweighed the annoying. It is at base, an action RPG with a fairly variable set of play styles, and a fairly open world. The plot and world are very well fleshed out and themes are handled in an adult manner. The frustrating elements to me were that the exploration and sidequests can get a bit tedious, and the combat took awhile to get used to.

One of the most interesting play styles the game developed was instead of the standard RPG "choose the next dialogue line," everything in the game was well done voiceovers, and you would choose the general idea of your next line, rather than seeing the actual words already and then watching as your character repeats what you've already read. For instance you click "Not a chance." and your character says something on the general theme of the dialogue choice you picked.
posted by haveanicesummer at 7:47 AM on October 5

Emergent gameplay. Games where complex situations arise organically from a few relatively simple mechanics.

Perhaps games in the "tower defense" genre might scratch the above itch?
posted by de void at 11:42 AM on October 5

I should have some fun working my way through the suggestions here. Thanks, guys!
posted by ixohoxi at 6:04 PM on October 6