i want another midnight club

Bit of a deep cut, but Tobal #2. TOTALLY ahead of its time as far as 3d fighters were concerned; and chock full of Toriyama design.

Seibu Kaihatsu’s Dynamite Duke (1989), a pretty novel hybrid Cabal-like/Beat-'em-up with a lot of love put into it. The arcade version’s got a pretty slick art direction, the environmental destruction vfx rock, and the animation’s pretty slick. The whole thing’s got that passion project charm to it. Unfortunately, Cabal clones were only really in vogue in that late '80s/early '90s space, and the beat 'em up gameplay isn’t fleshed out or consistently applied enough to be satisfying in a post-Final Fight, post-Streets of Rage world. I’d like to see something like it, but there’s no way to bring Duke into the world of modern game design practices without drastic reformulation at a minimum.

Notably, Seibu had really high hopes for Duke, being a passion project and a intended magnum opus. Unfortunately, lukewarm reception brought in poor returns, the company slipped into dire straits, and they were forced to make something simpler and lower stakes as a hail mary. That title - a simple, Toaplan-esque shooter nobody had any real faith in - turned out to be Raiden, which would become a darling in arcades, pushing 17,000 units solds worldwide in the first year after release, and becoming the fifth highest grosser on the Japanese market in 1991. (Beating out some offerings from much bigger players like Konami)

Star Wars: X-wing vs TIE Fighter

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_X-Wing_vs._TIE_Fighter

Rock Manager. It was very limited in scope and quite short, but it was a really fun game with tons of potential.

I’ve been unsuccessfully looking for games like it that are as good as it could have been or even as good as it was for over 20 years now.

Spore and Impossible Creatures

Kind of similar but these games are conceptually genius. How tightly Creativity and Strategic Interest are packed together is hardly seen ever again.

And animals are always a good idea. Even horrible games like Pokémon survive just because we like funny little friends.

Absolver. It was the precursor to Sifu, but with slightly slower and more methodical combat (more like a Soulslike, almost).

The coolest part of it is, as you play and fight players and NPCs, your character will slowly learn and unlock the moves that are used against them, which you can then put into your moveset and chain together with other moves to create your own style. If you don’t want to do that, you can join a player-run school, and be given the fighting style of that school’s master, which your character will learn as they use it.

The story mode is pretty short. It’s mainly about PvP (although, before development stopped, it DID get a free DLC with a co-op dungeon run that’s worth killing a couple of hours on). Of course, a PvP-focused game with nobody playing it isn’t exactly the most entertaining thing to spend your time on, so- outside of a small collection of diehards- it pretty much stays a ghost town.

It had heart, it had ambition, and it had creativity. My friends and I were really hoping the success of Sifu would mean people might start going back and maybe breathing a little life into it, but that didn’t happen. We hoped maybe they’d announce a second one, but that hasn’t happened yet, either. It’ll probably just be another Sifu. That one was a proven success, so it makes more sense.

The servers are still up for now. No idea how much longer it’ll be supported. But, if you’ve got friends you can play it with, it might be worth looking into and seeing for yourself what the game offered, and what could’ve been.

Sacrifice

Operation: Inner Space

Blur

Mega Man Legends. Fuck you, Capcom, for killing the blue boy.

A new Command and Conquer Generals. It was a big departure from the classical C&C formula of stuff being built on the UI on the right and more like every other RTS, but it was fun nonetheless. Zero Hour bringing the specialized generals was also a nice idea.

Dunno if it counts as a game, but something like MTV Music Generator on PS1 and PS2 would be awesome, especially with the ease of sharing stuff around nowadays.

There are many Star Wars games that deserve a second chance, but I think Republic Commando could really use the sequels “Imperial Commando” and “Rebel Commando” first. I’d personally love a sequel to Jedi Academy

With all the “boomer shooters” making a comeback, Heretic and Hexen could receive their respective 3rd installments.

Lastly, Virtual On Cyber Troopers. Something that plays like the very first game of 1995, that’d be 😗👌. I think that game is what paved the way for the many Gundam games that play a lot like it - On PC, you can get a taste of that gameplay with Bootfighter Windom XP

I was gonna say I was still waiting for a seaman 2, but apparently it existed in Japan. Still, with AI bullshit being all the rage I could see it make a comeback.

I waited to see if anyone mentioned it, but, POD. A old 1997 racing game from Microsoft built by Ubisoft. You can get the gold edition on GoG for rather cheap but I would absolutely love to see a remaster or remake. Unfortunately I would rather it not be made by Ubisoft as I don’t want to be forced into a separate account login setup from Ubisoft.

kenshi is the post-apocalyptic life/ant sim that I never knew I wanted. There is no story other than what is in your head, and that’s beautiful.

Fatal Racing