Games that Unexpectedly Grabbed You?

What are some games that kind of snuck up on you and then robbed you of all your gaming time? I recently finished Killzone on my PS4 (the criticism for this is too harsh, if you ask me), and was set to start on ACIV. But the other night, just before I was going to boot it up, I decided to make sure I had the latest free PS Plus games downloaded on the PS3. At the time I was also holding my 8 month old, so rather than booting up ACIV, I decided to try to find something that I could more easily play with him grabbing for the controller constantly.

That's when I saw Xcom in my list. I played this late last year for awhile on the PC, I enjoyed it but found it frustrating. The main reason I was frustrated at the time was because the game was NOT clear in the beginning just how important satellites were. So I had a game going where I had lost significant parts of the world, my economy was in shambles, and I was therefore falling far behind the curve. So Xcom lost me. I have kids, I don't have time to restart games. I have a million other games to play, too. (And I had just gotten an Xbox 360 at the time!) So shelved it was.

Playing it the other night, and starting with the knowledge I needed to make satellites a priority, I'm now having a blast with the game. I'm playing it much safer, and having a lot more success building my team, and running a much more efficient upgrade path.

It works great on the PS3 as well, and it gives me the added benefit of superior sound. While my PC is beefy enough for great graphics, I only have a 2.1 speaker setup. In the living room, I have mid-level surround sound (Andrew Jones Pioneers, Denon Receiver). It makes gaming a great experience for me in the living room.

So what's a game you either never expected to like, or never expected to play again, that suddenly grabbed you and refused to let go?

RESOGUN on the PS4. I downloaded it for free to give it a shot. I've never EVER been a fan of bullet storm shoot em up games. But I freaking love this game and have played it everyday since the PS4 launched.

Recently, Euro Truck Simulator 2.

40 winks

I'm going to say it, guys.

Dark Souls.

Was pretty adamant about never giving it a shot. Like, I was prepared to dig my heels in and say, "Nah, bro. I'm good." forever. I'd watched a bunch of it over livestreams and simply figured A) it looked so janky, and B) it didn't look like the sort of game for me.

You don't really get a fair appreciation for the meticulous balance of the difficulty, or for the eminently reliable mechanics, until you sit down and play it for a few hours.

So, yeah. Consider me a convert.

I'm with you guys on both of those, too. I played a tiny bit of Super Stardust, but was never all that in to it. I LOVE Resogun on the other hand. Sounds, plays and looks great!

I also never imagined I'd be buying Euro Truck Simulator. But there I was, just trying to back the thing up alone sold me.

Holy shit. Dark Souls is another game I just started playing. I dunno, I feel like having the PS4 has put me into some kind of gaming renaissance.

2012 was the year of Skyrim for me. I really didn't play much of anything else (Note that I have 2 small children so 120 Hours of Skyrim took me about 9 months to play).

@i_stay_puft: shit yes.

I would say I-Ninja and Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy.

I accidentally spent over 80 hours playing Pokemon X. Whoops.

Aw man im with you on I-Ninja, got that game as a gift and thought it would be terrible but it was great little action platformer.

For me it was the first Orcs Must Die, just grabbed it in a Steam sale for cheap and didnt really expect much but that game is so damn good. All the traps were inventive and the main character had some good one liners. I played level after level like a madman because setting up the perfect sequence of traps felt amazing.

I'm playing LEGO Marvel Super Heroes right now and it's pretty good, first Lego game I've tried and I can see that I'll probably have my fill on this one game, but I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would.

Probably the Disgaea games? To the point where I have a folder on my computer entitled "Disgaea Nonsense" where I sit and plan out my team painstakingly for every time I go back to play one of them. Didn't really expect that, cause mostly strategy games of any kind just bounce off me.

I have also played a lot of spore, which is weird because I don't even think spore is particularly good.

I have to say Xcom as well. I would never normally play a game like that but became interested after hearing it talked about so much on here - plus it was free when ordering Bioshock Infinite.

It is pretty accessible for a newcomer while still being fun and strategic.

Sanctum 2 and Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed are a few that immediately come to mind.

I enjoyed Sanctum 1, but it was kinda like "whatever." I bought 2 because I wasn't playing much at the time, it was only $15, and it seemed like a decent time-killer. I didn't really expect to give a shit about it after a few weeks or so. Whelp, 55 hours later and it's now one of my top 10 games of 2013. I can't even place my finger on it really. It just struck all the right chords with me kinda like this next game...

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. I had heard the first was pretty okay and I bought this because it was super cheap on Steam, but come the fuck on. I feel like this game has no fucking reason for being as good as it is. Think about it, tt's a fan-service packed, kart racer from fucking Sega. None of that sounds like a recipe for greatness. That said, I feel like I can look anyone in the eyes and honestly say I had the dumbest, childlike wonder-filled smile on my face every single goddamn moment I spent with this game. You don't even know. I still remember when I played the Burning Rangers stage for the first time, the Burning Rangers theme kicked in, and I heard Chris' voice. I shit you not: I jumped out of my chair like I was like a little kid and just started laughing and screaming not because I thought it was funny, but it made me that happy. I can't explain it. This game is one of the weirdest experiences I've had with video games in years because I expected so little from it and ended up enjoying it probably more than 95% of the games I've played this generation. Thanks to this game, for a brief moment in time, I stopped being a bitter 20-something year old gamer and reverted back into a little kid when everything was awesome.

Fire Emblem, Dragon's Dogma, and Etrian Odyssey.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Had never played a game like it before, and now i'm in love with that genre.

Etrian Odyssey IV, PXZ (I know lot of people dropped it, but I thoroughly enjoyed all of that game for some reason).

Right now I'm neck deep into La-Mulana. Such a fantastic game that feels super rewarding.

Radiant Historia, after dropping so many JRPGs halfway through I marathoned it in five days this summer. All the tropes are in place but it reminded me of the good ol' days.

Yuuup. It was an impulse buy just so I'd have something downloaded on my Wii U, and I couldn't believe how how fast the buyers remorse turned into possibly my most well-spent $30 of the year. That game couldn't be any better at kicking you right in the nostalgia balls. It's an absolute blast to play.

Dark Souls, kept hearing all the hype and then whole introduction just felt really confusing and now at a point in the game where I could play the game without any help and buy into the mythology.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 and Binary Domain.

Long Live the Queen.

I was like "here's a dumb cute VN, this will be embarrassing." It was embarrassing for me, just not in the way I expected.

Come on girl, don't just throw anything into your mouth.

That adventure game, Book of Lost Tales, was a lot more fun to me than I expected.

That game is mad addicting. I played 20 hours of it in one week. Time just flies while you play it. It's so relaxing.

Persona 4

Hell yeah, Orcs Must Die is one of my all-time favorite games. OMD2 was also good, but there were a few core design decisions that simply did not work well for me (primarily the way that although you could get through all the levels solo, they were clearly designed for co-op).

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, I have no fucking clue why I spent 7 hours playing this bullshit...

The best part about that happening to me? I still haven't beaten the fifth gym. Yeah I'm almost at the leader (finally), but battling each trainer in the gym only when you have a Prize Money power to pop off takes a good chunk of time, on top of about 20-30 straight hours of grinding money/levels (in increments of maybe 15-20 minutes) because it was fun and I was a bit busy with other stuff to concentrate on any serious progression.

Also, having a team of level 80+ (99 Venusaur at the highest) at that point in the game is hilarious. And a good 4m Pokedollars. I should really get back into playing that.

I've also sunk 55 hours into Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl somehow. 5 into Clear Sky and 14 into Call of Pripyat. Should get back into those last two sometime.

Steam logs me at 24 over two playthrouhs. Though I still think that game has hella charm, if nothing else.

@ervonymous: I've heard nothing but great things about the game, I got it a while back and have been meaning to start playing it.

Imma say it as well Dark Souls

I rented it and at one point said to my housemate that it was "boring" and then returned it. Sometime later I bought the PTD edition and started again. 4 playthroughs later, I can still gladly pick it up and begin and play another 30/40 hours. Every aspect of it is truly incredible.

Sacred 2 Fallen Angel & Deadly Premonition, didn't know much about either before playing it & wound up finding the time spent not only fun but quite a long amount of time too.

I agree with this one, too. From the QL, I figured it'd be pretty good, but I would never have imagined it'd earn a spot in my heart alongside Day of the Tentacle and The Curse of Monkey Island as one of the best adventure games I've ever played. Book of Lost Tales is an absolute point-and-click delight.

Wow.. I didn't even go into a single dungeon or anything! I just played it like some capitalism-sim featuring a (what?) 7 year old Japanese girl and her annoying fairy-homie..

Terraria.

What a great game. And I never really got into Minecraft.. for some reason Terraria got to me. I guess it.. it just looks a bit like FFVI ?! And it´s a great game too.

this year's Tomb Raider, didn't like it much for the first half, and then i just went into a weird trance where i'd walk along a wall, watching her arm go up to push against it, and listening to the noises made underneath her feet, and that was it, hooked, played it really carefully and meticulously from then on, found all the hidden stuff except 2 things without looking up a guide, finished it three times so far.

You mean "The Book of Unwritten Tales", right?! That one was pretty cool, but I somehow lost it during the Temple bit, where all three characters are in the same spot. It didn´t have that Monkey Island/Tentacle spark for me.

For me, this year? It has to be Splinter Cell Blacklist. I bought it with great reluctance last week and I expected to hate-play it because there's nothing else I'm interested in. Turns out Blacklist is the best Splinter Cell since Chaos Theory. It's just a Tom Clancy-ass story with evolved Chaos Theory gameplay. Spies vs Mercs is still amazing as well. All in all I've been kicking myself for not playing it sooner. Fantastic game and a worthy successor to the CT throne.

Driver: San Francisco. I picked it up when it came out, and was totally prepared to enjoy a cute little mechanic and be done with it. But it blew me away, and I still remember it now.

Right, The Book of Unwritten Tales. Sorry, I wasn't thinking and just went with what the other poster wrote. I agree that it might not have quite as much style/personality as MI or DotT, but I do feel that it's one of those rare cases where it just does everything right. Maybe not perfectly in all aspects, but everything is solid. Specifically, I'm talking about:

• The humor: Making games funny is hard as hell to do properly. But TBoUT manages (in my opinion) to be sharp but not snarky, clever but not up its own ass, and self aware but smart enough to limit references to indirect allusions and subtle nods.
• The voice acting is surprisingly not awful. I don't think it's absolutely mind blowing, but it's more than serviceable.
• Mechanics: At any spot that you would click on to walk to another scene, you can double click to teleport there. You can examine anything on the screen without the character needing to walk up to it. You can pick up items that you'll need later without needing to know why (no more "Nah, I don't need that right now" bullshit). And if memory serves, you can transfer items between characters by just dragging items onto their portrait. TBoUT wasn't the first to use these best practices, but there are enough games that don't use them that it's noteworthy.
• Puzzles that are logical, original, clever, and challenging (without being arbitrary or needlessly obscure/specific).
• Locations where you can choose between multiple characters, leading to unique sets of puzzles as well as meaningfully different character-specific variations of solutions to common puzzles.

dragon's dogma

Man, gaming is beautiful. You're all beautiful.

tribes ascend...at first i was like "wtf another mmofps" but now i really got addicted to it, been too long since i have seen a good fast paced arena game since quake 3

Spelunky

It was a while ago, but I got SpaceChem because it was like $2 on Steam and I got really hooked into it. That game might have been the thing that finally pushed me into software engineering.

Another game that has surprised me is Tower of Heaven. I listened to the soundtrack because it was a part of the Game Music Bundle and played the game after, and they're now one of my most favorite game studios.

Bayonetta too, I got it just because it looked ridiculous and I didn't know that it would be the best action game I've ever played.

Might & Magic: Clash of the Heroes. I got it for free for being an Xbox Gold member. Downloaded and never played it, becuase I had just bought a PS3 and was going through some exclusives. I finally started playing after I finished GTA V. I'm about 20 hours in. It's addictive as hell.

Probably Persona 2:Innocent Sin. I only bought it as it was in a double pack with P3P, but I really loved that game, probably more than P3P ( though I had played most of FES beforehand). I also fell into a really deep and unexpected Killzone 3 multiplayer hole.

Warframe on the PS4. I figured I should try it at least, after all I "pre-ordered" it and got PS+ freebies for it, so why not? Then I played it almost exclusively when I was home for almost a week for Thanksgiving.