Phantasy Star Online (PSO). I have thousands of hours in that game across Dreamcast, GameCube and PC over the decades and I’m still not tired of it. It absolutely nailed the loot system and you’re always looking to get another rare box drop. BlueBurst on PC still has multiple active and populated servers, but I feel like it doesn’t get much discussion in gaming communities in general despite being one of the pioneers of online gaming on consoles.

Kid Icarus.

Unicycle for the SNES.

Knights and Merchants

It is an awesome medieval RTS that you have to also manage your city economy efficiently, feed your population (AND the soldiers, even if they are miles away), manage the finite resources etc.

Check it out, along with this mod: https://www.kamremake.com/

Puzzle Pirates was a MMO in the early to mid 00’s. Each task on board the ship had a puzzle mini game associated with it. Sailing was sort of like Dr. Mario, pumping out the bilge was a match 3 game, loading the canons was sort of like Chu-Chu Rocket. The thing I liked about it was that your character’s ability to preform a duty had nothing to do with what gear you had equipped or how many skill points you had in a stat (there were none), it was all about how well you, as a player, could play the particular mini game.

In battle, sailors would generate movement tokens to allow the captain to maneuver the ship, gunners would reload the canons after they’d been fired, carpenters would repair any damage you’ve taken, while the bilge pumpers would keep the ship from foundering. Once you closed in and grappled the enemy ship, everyone would participate in a Super Puzzle Fighter-like sword fighting game; defeat the enemy crew to pillage their hold.

In certain circles it is well known, but Baba Is You is one of the most ingenious games for a long while and should be known even wider.

Just a heads up there is a GBA and 3DS game in the Slime series, but the 2nd game on DS is the only one that made it to America. No idea if there are fan translations, but might be worth looking into.

While we’re on the subject of DS classics, here’s an even more obscure one: Over the Hedge.

While admittedly it never quite got the time in the oven it deserved, being a release tie-in with the movie and put out alongside all the console versions, this one in particular was something special. It’s a third-person over the shoulder perspective stealth game with tank controls, sneaking into the hilariously well-protected homes of humans to steal their junk food. And if that wasn’t enough, it had you managing two characters in real-time by swapping back and forth between them, using their varying strengths to defeat the ridiculous laser alarm systems and traps along the way. It’s slow paced and relatively simple, and I used to have a blast finding ways to completely break the game because the devs didn’t have enough time to iron out all the kinks entirely, but it never quite got the attention it deserves for being such a unique labor of love.

I have to give it massive props for having so much creative heart when a tie-in for a mediocre animated movie has no right to be that good. The developers saw the opportunity to make something that put its source material to good work instead of just another hack-and-slash romp (like the console tie-ins were) or a minigame collection (like the later DS game (???) was) and their dedication to the craft of game development really shines through some of the jank involved in its presentation and sometimes wonky physics. By now, a unique take on a stealth game is nothing all that special, but at the time this was one that really grabbed me.

Vectorman for Sega Genesis is one of my favorite games on the console but whenever it’s brought up it is almost exclusively known as just another obscure mascot platformer and it’s even been declared a knockoff of DKC just because both use pre rendered graphics. The sequel is also good.

Sally Can’t Sleep. It’s a strange indie first person platformer with a lot of focus on versatile and exploitable movement mechanics. The dev sacrificed visual polish for quantity and style, so the game has a lot of interconnected levels with a wide variety of different mechanics, types of level design, and visual styles - it’s a really good example of how much a solo developer can accomplish. It’s pretty funny, too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game pull a credits gag like it did.

Legend of Dragoon for PS1. It has the single best timed-input RPG combat system of any game ever. Think Mario RPG but way better.

GUST OF WIND DANCE!

Way back when “addictinggames.com” was relevant, there was a game called Avalanche. The background music (dreams of above) was an absolute banger that still gets stuck in my head sometimes. Just a simple platformer, but for some reason it stuck with me, and I absolutely need to get on a computer and see if there is a playable version somewhere.

One Finger Death Punch

Simple, but surprisingly addictive stickman fighting game. Although the title is a lie because you probably need two fingers to play it. I think this was the first game I went for 100% achievements.

Apparently it has a sequel which I didn’t know about. Both are on sale for pretty much pocket change now too.

Incredible Machine, Metal Arms Glitch in the System, Wargroove, Gradius 3.

Boktai. A trilogy of GBA games about a vampire hunter who uses a solar gun to fry the undead. The cartridge has a UV sensor to detect actual sunlight to charge up the gun. It’s such a silly gimmick but it’s used really well.

Sadly the third game never got localized, and although a translation patch does exist it’s just not the same without the original hardware. There’s a fourth game on DS which did get localized, but they rebranded it as Lunar Knights, excised most references to the original trilogy, and even cut a good chunk of content. It also ends on a sequel hook that will never get resolved.

It’s sad to me that we’ll never see games this experimental ever again.