RANK 81 (3 votes)

RANK 81 (3 votes)

RANK 81 (3 votes)

RANK 81 (3 votes)

RANK 39 (6 votes)

A progenitor of the 'wiki always open' game, a staple of simulation-task allocation games, and a testament to freeware and the indie scene as a whole. Dwarf Fortress maintains a strong legacy of 15+ years with constant updates by two brother game designers, not needing a paid release until just recently. The result is a project in which the player manages and overlooks a fledgling expedition squad of seven dwarves as they dig into the earth and utilize their environment to establish a blossoming settlement.

The spartan ASCII ant farm-like visuals of your dwarves scattering about for tasks keenly betrays the intense meta-detail of each material buried within the generated world, as well as the complexities of keeping your dwarves not just busy, but alive. Keeping a consistent crop cycle going turns into managing a trade depot turns into keeping a hardened defense force standing. Its a notoriously difficult game to parse at first, one that demands constant experimentation, wiki-dives and creative thinking. But it's also the paramount example of the notion 'Losing is fun!'.
(PolaroidJack)

RANK 64 (4 votes)

RANK 47 (5 votes)

Just feels like the perfect blend of everything: tightly structured on a macro level, but full of small pattern variations that require adaptability, experimentation, and effective use of your kit. For how visually creative and exciting its scenarios and enemy attacks are, the opacity of it all is never really lost, all the while only changing the core mechanics for one specifically special moment.

Even for how little you have to engage with it, its story has charm through the interactions of its protagonists, giving it a personal element that just makes things feel complete. That final segment of gameplay, tied to that piece of music, is made all the more impactful because of the context behind it… there's something there that feels so grand, but still so intimate.

Add in a desert highway motorbike section… the cherry on top.

Everything I wanted out of a game. Not sure if anything else can top this one.
(Reyn)

RANK 22 (10 votes)

If there's a single aspect in Live A Live I could point to that signifies its draw and cult appeal, it'd be using the RPG structure and the melting pot of influences across medias and the world to weave together an incredibly powerful story of reconciliation and love. Whether its explicit about the woes of rejectment and isolation like with Sundown Kid's western legends, unfolding a cold, bitter tale of discord and disassociation that Cube witnesses in the far future, the respect of a fight and an opponent in Masaru's quest to become a champion in the present, or subtly using the dichotomous paths Oboromaru can follow when carrying out a stealth mission within Edo Japan, there's numerous beats that flow back to these two themes and expressions of the tragic villain in question. No matter if it's with the 1995 fan-translated original or the newly released and localized 2022 remake, I hope it aspires others to reapproach and better themselves for what they may face in the future, just as it has for me, my friends, a sliver of key figures like Toby Fox, and others.
(BlazingWaters)

RANK 81 (3 votes)

RANK 81 (3 votes)

RANK 81 (3 votes)

RANK 39 (6 votes)

A good measuring stick for arcade racers derives from the drift mechanics: how versatile, how organic, how consistent, how well-integrated into the overall handling model? OutRun 2 veers so far into the fantasy side of those spectrums that the car damn near goes perpendicular to the asphalt when you lean into a powerslide. Never before had a car felt so effortless to control while simultaneously so twitchy as to spin out of control at the slightest unwanted bit of torque. Beyond maneuvering these corners and U-turns with grace lies little else in a perfect display of AM2's characteristic economy of design. 15 minute-long tracks weave together in a lattice of potential routes for the player to take, all of which the game extrapolates into a bevy of white-knuckle races and quirky minigames in the console version's mission mode. With all that the team inherited from the original two decades prior, they fused those familiar hallmarks of the series into that handling model, which took the pseudo-3D kludge of the original into something just as exaggerated as its predecessor while simultaneously laced with nuance accrued from years of experience building arcade racers. In this way OutRun 2 provides the perfect capstone for Yu Suzuki's tenure as head of AM2, unquestionably the most innovative arcade designers at the height of the coin-op era.
(Pangburn)

RANK 81 (3 votes)