I already had a turn on this but I'm watching a Let's Play about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and there's a game that we're already seeing being forgotten. In the broader context of even the series itself, we're just forgetting it as part of the post Team Silent era of the games. So many people don't even consider it like a real Silent Hill game. But it was one of the first horror games to really eschew combat and focus on the horror aspects, building up the world through exploration and using your powerlessness to create tension as the creatures keep trying to kill you.
Additionally it's really crazy the way that things in the game built up around you and the small things you did. It's so easy to make fun of games like Mass Effect for having the morality system just broken into like two sides and there's some choices in there, but the way that your character looking at things, answering questions, etc, changes how people look and act towards you, without making conscious choices, is amazing. Games do a lot to make the story change based on obvious choice, but don't do so much with making how characters change towards you for those intangible things like that. It's pretty fascinating - and while it all culminates the same, the characters can still mutate in ways that bring in multiple aspects. The lets play had elements of the character being driven by lust as well as elements of violence, so the enemies and NPCs were like combinations of the two.
Games just build so much of themselves on big obvious things, it would be nice if there was something we could take from this to let games hide the way they work from you a little more. Don't make it so that it's a binary choice and with obvious branching parts.
I'm always worried that Chibi-Robo will be forgotten - because even Nintendo's forgotten what was so amazing about that first one.
There was just something so wonderful about the mundanity of what you're doing - cleaning a house - mixed with the domestic drama of the family. It's not something you see in games very much, especially one published by a console manufacturer and pressed on a disc, and the combination of the interesting characters who had real world problems like addictions, old age, personal sacrifice, even a character who refuses to take responsibility for his children. The scene where the wife gives her husband the divorce papers is one of the hardest things I've sat through in a game in terms of raw emotion. All told through the lens of a robot who cleans houses.
But as they put out more of them Nintendo's forgotten what mattered about that one, and why it was so special, and instead we get platformers or terrible photo games.
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