I am particularly fond of the all-encompassing loop in the Rune Factory series, especially in Rune Factory 3 and 4. Every single mechanic in the game feeds into each other. It all starts with growing crops. With the crops you grow, you can earn money. You can also cook with the crops to make restoratives. You use the money and the restoratives to prepare yourself for dungeon crawling. You go dungeon crawling to acquire materials and tame monsters. You use monster produce and materials to craft items. You use these to better equip yourself to go dungeon crawling, or you give them to people to befriend them and then take them along on your expeditions. In the end, everything you can do in the game ultimately either feeds into your money pool to continue expanding your house and purchase essentials like animal feed, or to better prepare you for the dungeons. This means you ultimately want to try everything, because everything gives you an advantage.
The entire Dark Forces/Jedi Knight package is on steam. Should be 75% off when on sale. It's worth it (Dark Forces 2 might need some work to get it going though)! Dark Forces 1 and 2 are 60% off on GoG right now. DarkXL works with the Steam version and adds mouse control, hardware graphics acceleration and more options.
LucasArts made some rad shooters back in the day with Dark Forces, Outlaws and Republic Commando!
People are probably better off getting Dark Forces 2 on GOG, since they put in the work and got it running out of the box on modern Windows systems while the Steam version is a real PITA.
I concur. I bought Jedi Knight on Steam and could never, ever get the 3D accelerated mode working without a flickering border or the soundtrack to play (I know it doesn't come with the Steam version default, but none of the workarounds people proposed worked - using a cd image, some weird hooking program that fakes the existence of a drive and points the game to audio files, etc). I then re-bought it on GOG, and can confirm that their version works perfectly without any tweaking required.
I'm concerned about the collective ignorance of non-Japanese, non-English games. Disparate titles such as Tsumera (a Taiwanese PC pinball game similar to Devil Crush), the legendary Taiwanese RPG Xianjian Qixia Zhuan, the Korean platformer Eol's Adventure, the Korean action game Zyclunt, the French god-game Deo Gratias, the German East/West unification city-builder Aufschwung Ost, and the Polish space colony business simulation Kosmos are all interesting games almost wholly unknown to the larger English-speaking gaming community. Only the last two even have Giantbomb wiki pages, and only the barest stubs.
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