Einhander on PS1 was a great side scrolling shooter by squaresoft with a sick techno soundtrack and a pretty fun weapon-stealing gimic.

Golden sun and its sequel on GBA

Ogre Battle, either March of the Black Queen or Person of Lordly Caliber. It’s such a weird cul-de-sac of tactical RPGs. The same company made Tactics Ogre, which then became Final Fantasy Tactics, which in turn inspired a zillion other post-2000 tactics games; and Tactics Ogre got a remake version recently. But the Ogre Battle side of the family just disappeared.

N+ it’s such a good game and no one ever knows what I’m talking about.

Return of the Obra Dinn is an amazing game that I wish I could play again for the first time. The art style is super unique and the attention to detail in every aspect of the game is incredible.

Highly recommend.

Kid Icarus.

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.

Planetside 2. Been playing for a decade. One of the best games and only one in its genre of MMOFPS. I don’t know what I will play when it dies. It’s the one and only thing I play and enjoy now. Nothing else is fun.

Starport GE. Amazing little game. Played tons of it. It’s been almost 18 years of it. Played hardcore for atleast a decade before life got in the way and winded down now. My brother manages the account and activity now. Still alive but barely. It’s a game of strategy and alliances and carefully managing a galaxy to control it all. Make friends make enemies. There’s been dozens of people that have come and gone over the years through it. Due to its small player size. We all knew each other very well and were acquainted. You don’t like someone you decide to go to war with them start taking all their colonies. The game has no alliance mechanism or war mechanism. It’s all on you to decide what to make of it.

I know everyone here got many favorite and probably wonderful games but who here has played only 2 games with more than a decade of dedication to each?

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. Made by I think 3 or 4 people. Solid space flight shooter with charm. It’s just fun.

The legend of dragoon has to be one of my favorite jrpgs and I would love for it to get a remake/remaster. Sadly it seems like Sony doesn’t care about it tho so I’m not hopeful

Mine is Dark Cloud. It was a PS2 launch title (or near enough to it) that was sort of a PlayStation answer to the Zelda franchise. Along with the original Spyro trilogy, Dark Cloud was by far my most-played game back in the day. It had an absolute banger of a soundtrack and a few pieces of really interesting unique gameplay including an RPG element where the primary progression system was not in your characters, but in upgrading your weapons, and a city-builder where you have to place all the people in each village near or away from various other elements in the village to meet their needs.

I almost never hear anyone talking about Dark Cloud, but extremely randomly one of the like four Twitch streamers I actually watch (all of whom are Age of Empires streamers, because that’s basically all I watch these days) happens to play its soundtrack frequently on her stream as background music. So that’s been really fun.

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.

Not much nostalgia for Jet Force Gemini, a Rare third person shooter where you adventure through missions, each having secret routes to find using guns/keys you slowly unlock. The game had a bit too much completionist vibe to get to finish it, but was exciting as a kid.

On the 3DS, I also liked Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D. Basically RE’s best arena mode expanded out with perks on a game you could play mobile, and online. I still hope to see more of that type of experience.

Mine is definitely Freelancer. The game by Chris Roberts that actually got finished by firing him.

I love that game, the story is engaging and the characters are likeable.

I’m probably just seeing it with nostalgia but I like to play it until this day. I installed it on my Steam Deck and gave it a go. It was awesome.

May be a little off from what you’re asking but one of my favorite games period is Bookworm on the GBA. It was originally a flash game but when it came to GBA you could save your progress. The music was so cute and the sound effects were just awesome. They tried to bring it to the DS without that music and the effects and it just didn’t work. Other iterations exist as well, none as cool and enjoyable as the GBA version. I’m stuck emulating until someone rediscovers this neat little game and brings it to switch or steamdeck.