Surprise! That Game Was Awesome

Picked the 2008 reboot of Prince of Persia up for £5 not too soon after it first came out. I knew the art style looked pretty, but the rest of the game really blew me away. On a similar Ubisoft note, I didn't think that Rayman Origins would be quite as fantastic as it was.

God of War 1

I bought it bundled when I got my PS2. I had made no research at all about what it was...

@rvone: Cybernator loved that game

Ocarina of Time, knew nothing about the game except kids talking about it on the bus to school 2 years after it came out. Didn't even make the connection that it was related to the game on the NES. Turned out to be one of the greatest games ever made, huh.

Anachronox. I didn't like Deus Ex and hated Daikatana so I don't know why I picked up a game by the same studio. It was a buggy mess but It turned out to be one of my favorite RPG's ever.

One of developers took the build home after Ion Storm shut down and continued to fix some bugs for some of us in the community which we tested for him. He fixed a lot but it's still buggy.

That ending though...the story will never be finished.

Three games come to mind for me.

1)BattleTanx: Global Assault. Little me loved tanks, and boy did this game deliver on its ridiculous box art. I played through the campaign a dozen times, and countless hours were spent playing the multiplayer, blasting the "destructible" buildings, and the lovably incompetent bots.

2) Gladius. I wanted a gladiator game, so when I saw this at blockbuster I grabbed it without even looking at the back of the box. I had so much fun with it, and it introduced me to Tactics style games. It may have had some balance issues but its still worth a play.

3) World War 2 Online. Some people had WoW, I had WW2OL. I don't even remember how many thousands of hours I poured in to this one. It got to the point that my mother wanted to throw the computer out the window because my dad and I spent nearly all our free time playing. There were a lot of novel ideas to be found, even if the tiny dev team that was Cornered Rat Software couldn't fully deliver on them. I would never have thought that a box I picked up thinking was a Medal of Honor clone would be my most fondly remembered game of my youth. It had everything. Planes, ships, tanks, and enough grognards to keep everything "historically accurate". I still remember gargantuan forum threads over whether or not various tanks had a few too many millimeters of armor, or the speed at which turrets turned. Good times man, good times.

@gatehouse said:

Picked the 2008 reboot of Prince of Persia up for £5 not too soon after it first came out. I knew the art style looked pretty, but the rest of the game really blew me away. On a similar Ubisoft note, I didn't think that Rayman Origins would be quite as fantastic as it was.

I loved that game. I couldn't do some of the quick time events because I cant press the button fast enough. On one of the bosses I just couldn't beat it because of that. But my brother didn't for me.

The Witcher 2 has an easy 'qte' option; that was really good of them.

Bust a Move 2 on the Playstation. Picked it up cheap because it had Bub and Bob (my brothers and I played way too much Bubble Bobble on the C64), but had no idea if it was any good.

Ended up playing a lot of it with my friends.

Metal Gear Solid and Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven.

No One Lives Forever

I remember going to a Best Buy & seeing a HUGE display for N.O.L.F., including an entire wall of game boxes, and thinking it looked like cheesy imitation-Austin Powers crap.

A few months later I bought some discounted game bundle that included N.O.L.F., so I decided I might as well give it a shot and absolutely loved it. So much so that I bought the sequel which somehow managed to improve on the original as well as Contract J.A.C.K. which is basically a cynical middle finger to everyone who didn't appreciate the brilliance of the first two games.

I enjoyed F.E.A.R. (what is with Monolith and those acronym titles?), but nothing Monolith has done has been as good, for me, as N.O.L.F. 1 & 2.

Legend of heroes: trails in the sky and maybe Radiant historia will join it when it falls into my mailbox.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. I was sort of on the fence about Final Fantasy in general back then while my brother was getting into the series despite not playing a single game. When we got this, I eventually warmed up to starting my own campaign and man was I was surprised on how addicting it was. I never finished it, but I spent hours training and recruiting the best classes into my team and doing all the side missions first before I got into the story missions. This was also my first time being exposed to good final fantasy music, and some of the tunes were stuck in my head. Definitely one of my favorite TBS games ever!

Viking: Battle for Asgard

For some reason that game just really clicked with me. I've completed it 3 times on 2 different platforms. And when I say completed, I mean I did everything, even the side quests (except for the red skulls, because fuck that).

It made me think of Eternal Sonata. I bought it because I was intrigued by the premise, but I was expecting the actual game to be terrible because I'd never heard of it. It was surprisingly not terrible.

Still one of my all time favorite surprises:

So damn good.

BTW. From the makers of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay and Wolfenstein: The New Order (sort of)

@guanophobic

YES, man, Extreme G was the fuckin' best!

Dragons Dogma.

I watched the quicklook, thought "hey this looks like a shitty action RPG i could burn some time playing", Turns out it was a SUPER FUN shitty action RPG that i could burn ALOT of time playing!

Well lemme clarify that. The combat was super fun and engaging, the pawn system was fun and neat. (i ended up dressing my female healer focused pawn in increasingly slutty clothes cus she'd get rented more often and i'd get prizes for this till i realized i was effectively pimping out my pawn and then i felt really dirty about myself) While the plot was a mess and the characters were significantly worse than anything from a bethesda game, it made skyrim NPCs look like they had oceans of depth.

It's a blast of a game, with great combat and amazing boss battles. The story and characters are complete garbage though. But i was still blown away by the the game, i expected a kinda crappy RPG to keep me busy, and got one of the best playing RPGs ive ever played. Fighting those giant creatures was amazing.

To be continued...

Honestly, this is the one series I would love to see get re-made or finished.