Games that were so good they surprised you!

[Segataritensoftii]

Nights on the Saturn. I knew it was going to be excellent from the first time I saw it, but when I actually opened up the box I got in the mail and played it, it turned out to be a far more joyful experience than I ever could have imagined.

 

That said, I have much lower expectations for the sequel. I expect it to be good, but not as much of an immensely fantastic experience as the first one was. I'm also concerned about the release date for the game. September for the US? I find that to be much too short and will likely result in a rushed and shoddy game. I'm hoping the release gets pushed back to at least December so the development team can give it some polish.

[shadow460]

Virtual On: Operation Moongate. I figured this would be another ho hum arcade shoot 'em up. The visuals at the time were nothing short of amazing, and the slow motion death to melee weapons was a nice touch.

 

wipEout 64: How many times can one re hash a racing game? Not a lot, methinks, but wipEout 64 is a very solid addition to the series. XL was good as it is, but the 64 version added the final touches that XL desperately needed. If you never got good at XL, you wouldn't have noticed a lot of difference.

 

Shining the Holy Ark: I brought home my copy of FF7 a day or two after it was released. It found a nice comfy spot on the shelf until I was done with Shining the Holy Ark. 'Nuff said there.

 

Smart Bomb (PSP): I thought this can't be a good game, not for $10 and being some title that's PSP only and not well known. Wrong. The puzzles are very innovative, and they are actually puzzles, not some action based tile arrangement mess. Each level throws four or five completely different puzzles at you, then it ramps the difficulty to max on one type, and follows all that with a memory game. The gameplay is a puzzle in itself. If you try to solve all the puzzles as fast as you can, you'll certainly fail, so you have to use several game play elements to your advantage. Either you'll like this game, or you'll want to smash it with your PSP.

 

Beef Drop and Pac-Man Collection! (7800): I expected these to be good, but they are more than good. These are titles that you will crave to play until you finally bust out the 7800 and load them up. Some of the system's library can do this, but the older games don't have near the polish and the style these new ones do.

 

There are a lot that I can list, really. These are the ones that came to my head. Smart Bomb is the latest one that hit me with its "wow!" factor.

[jpfalcon2003]

Atari 2600: Klax, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Stargate, Tapper, Road Runner

Atari 7800: Beef Drop, Alien Brigade, Pac-Man Collection, Midnight Mutants

[Rev. Rob]

Panzer Dragoon Saga

 

I am always skeptical going into an RPG, and though the Panzer shooters are good, they're not amazingly good, so I was blown away when I bought this game. It is by far the best game ever made.

[Technosis]

Communist Mutants from Space for the 2600 (due to the neat options menu), and the most recent "surprise" was In The Hunt for the Playstation.....for a 1995 port it is quite good!

Edited July 5, 2007 by Technosis

[Atariman]

Nights on the Saturn. I knew it was going to be excellent from the first time I saw it, but when I actually opened up the box I got in the mail and played it, it turned out to be a far more joyful experience than I ever could have imagined.

 

I think I could go along with that - when I bought my copy of NiGHTS, I knew it was good, but I didn't realize that over the days that I learned some of the finer points of the game, it would eventually be video game crack.

[2600Lives]

Second Sight on the GameCube. Paid 5 bucks for it new, but DAMN, what a great gaming experience, and it has THE best twist ending in the history of video games, period.

[shadow460]

...NiGHTS...

...video game crack...

 

Perfect analogy!

[Stefan_L]

"Buffy the vampire slayer" on Xbox... movie/tv-series licenses usually aren't good so Buffy really surprised me by being really great. The same developes later did an Indiana Jones game (forgot it's name) but it was just an average, i was hoping on Buffy quality

[+FujiSkunk]

Burnout 3 on the PS2. I know, it was a relatively big release from a very big company, but even then, this game was a big surprise. I hadn't even heard of the Burnout series before seeing this game on display at Best Buy. In less than five minutes I went from "What's this?" to "I gotta have this!!"

[ManShowBoy]

Well, I just found a Tomba 2 game for PSx out in the wild. Never played it, heard it was rare and really fun...so I bought it. Needless to say this game is fantastic, I can't believe I never got around to playing it when it was released. What a fun game...definitly a sleeper hit.

 

I need to buy the first Tomba! now

Edited July 14, 2007 by ManShowBoy

[spacecadet]

My list, across all systems:

 

Rez (DC/PS2) - one of my favorite games of all time. When I first read about it, I didn't even get what it was trying to do. It looked so crappy in still pics. It got middling reviews. Then I played it and I was blown away. I still play it every once in a while - as recently as last night!

 

Pac-Man (5200) - I'd heard about how awful this game was because of the controller. I find it perfectly playable, and such a huge step up from the 2600 version that it's almost ridiculous. There hasn't been a generational leap this large in many years.

 

Microsurgeon (Intellivision) - Who would have thought a game about surgery would be fun? I played this game for like a year straight when I was a kid. And I cringe at the site of blood!

 

Virtua Tennis (DC) - it's easy to forget that before the first Virtua Tennis, there hadn't been a popular tennis game since probably Nintendo's Vs. series in the 80's. Me and everybody at my office was so addicted to VT that we had 4-player doubles office tournaments every week.

 

Sin & Punishment (N64) - another of my favorites. Yeah it's Treasure, but I wasn't a big Treasure fan at the time yet... all I knew was "N64 rail shooter". Yuck. Then I saw it at Nintendo Space World one year and I was hooked. I still think it's the system's best game.

 

Beach Spikers (GCN) - basically the same deal as Virtua Tennis, and same type of game. I just couldn't stop playing it once I put it in. It's almost ridiculous how much better this was than DOAXBV, which got all the attention because of the goddamn swimsuits!

 

Winning Post (GBA) - there weren't many launch games for the Japanese GBA (which I got), so I got this and a couple other more mainstream titles (including Mario). I ended up playing this way more than the others. It was difficult - I had to figure out what the characters were saying based on repitition and the situation, but I got it eventually and it's a really deep an addictive game. I totally understand why these games are so popular in Japan.

 

Puyo Puyo (multiple systems) - this series kind of found me rather than the other way around. I think I actually found it through a MAME rom pack or something, and again I just couldn't stop playing it once I started. I ended up buying up all the puyo puyo releases for every system from them on (including the neo geo pocket color, where it was a mainstay of my subway commute for about a year). I am probably the only person you know who owns a copy of Puyo Puyo Da! for Dreamcast.

 

Skygunner (PS2) - I saw this at either E3 or TGS the year before its release and thought it was a joke. The graphics sucked and there was huge slowdown and other technical glitches. They released it in basically that same state. But somehow, it's easy to ignore all the glitches because the gameplay is just so fun. It's a fantastic little flight shooter.

 

Well, that's enough. Usually I do pretty much know what to expect from games, but those ones definitely snuck up on me.

Edited July 14, 2007 by spacecadet

[Impaler_26]

Sega Saturn: Panzer Dragoon Saga, Thunderforce V, Shining Force III (Part 1), Deep Fear, Nights.

 

SNES: Super Turrican II, Secret of Mana.

 

Atari 2600: Crystal Castles, Millipede, Solaris, Road Runner, Medieval Mayhem, Reindeer Rescue.

 

And most recently Dennis Debro's Pacman4K (2600). I never played the Arcade-version so i didn't care much about it first.

But after i spent some time playing it i was really surprised how much more fun it is than atari's version.

I love that red ghost chasing you.