What are some obscure but groundbreaking and innovative games that deserve way more recognition?

[Mago]

I know what you mean. I don't view it as much of an achievement, the idea seems pretty obvious when you think of how loose and free 3D games are - players are going to want to re-orientate and Sega just made a mechanic of it.

The way it's blown out of proportion seems forced when it comes to Zelda 64's case.

Yeah I think it's largely a thing where you have certain groups who want the established classics to get all the credit for innovating and paving history, Which sounds insane but I swear i've seen people like that. They almost seem to think the innovations of lesser known games should be completely overlooked in favor of their child hood favorites. NGL its a large part of why I made this thread tbh. People treat innovation like it happens in a vacuum.

 

[FTLOTG]

Yeah I think it's largely a thing where you have certain groups who want the established classics to get all the credit for innovating and paving history, Which sounds insane but I swear i've seen people like that. They almost seem to think the innovations of lesser known games should be completely overlooked in favor of their child hood favorites. NGL its a large part of why I made this thread tbh. People treat innovation like it happens in a vacuum.

I've seen the discussion around this devolve into semantics too. "So what if X did it first? Y game popularized it." Which is the point where you can safely walk away and call them an idiot.

 

[Mago]

While it wasn't the first I still think that Ocarina of Time as a video game changed the entire paradigm of how you make an adventure and how combat in 3D could be made.

Of course VirtualOn had it first but it was a much more simple arcade game compared to OoT so it was much more developed.

It's like how Resident Evil redefined horror game despite that Sweet Home and Alone in the Dark were the two inspirations for it.

I totally understand people saying that Ocarina of Time is one of the best game ever made or how it revolutionised gaming as a whole.

I think it helped evolve adventure games and obviously it got way more recognition, but I also think a lot of what it did was already done by Megaman Legends the previous year. I do think Ocarina improved how the lock on mechanic worked ofcourse and was more polished overall, though I also think theres a lot of things MML did better than Oot or that were more innovative. And there was that one 3D Ganbare Goemon game which didnt have lock on but established the other same basics of how a 3D adventure game worked.

With Resident Evil I guess thats true? I just don't like say acting like Resident Evils ideas came from nowhere or that it was the first to do everything it did. It was just the first to get the major recognition for those ideas. Project Firestart is an incredibly obscure game, it came before Sweet Home but i'd argue it was the first game to really check almost all the boxes of what the survival horror genre would become.

Post automatically merged: Mar 3, 2025

I've seen the discussion around this devolve into semantics too. "So what if X did it first? Y game popularized it." Which is the point where you can safely walk away and call them an idiot.

Yeah I hate that lol. Sure if a game popularizes something that deserves mention but it doesnt mean it created that idea or even did it best.

 

[Ikagura]

I've seen the discussion around this devolve into semantics too. "So what if X did it first? Y game popularized it." Which is the point where you can safely walk away and call them an idiot.

Why would you call them that? Being the first to do something isn't the same as being the first to do it right.

This is why Doom is the game that made First Person Shooters what they are and not Mazewar, Catacombs 3D, Wolfenstein 3D or any other game prior to 1993.

I think that it's just a contrarian mindset to try to devalue Ocarina of Time's impact in gaming.

 

[Mago]

Why would you call them that? Being the first to do something isn't the same as being the first to do it right.

This is why Doom is the game that made First Person Shooters what they are and not Mazewar, Catacombs 3D, Wolfenstein 3D or any other game prior to 1993.

I think that it's just a contrarian mindset to try to devalue Ocarina of Time's impact in gaming.

I think you're misunderstanding? No one said being the first to do something, is the same as being the first to do something right. At the same time being the first to be recognized for doing something doesn't mean the same as being first to do something right. Some games can do it right first and still fall to obscurity for a variety of factors and get overshadowed by a later game that may not even exactly be better, just more fortunate.

The Doom thing is weird to me. Doom is far superior to Wolfenstein 3D but I still see credit given to Wolfenstein 3D for being the first real fps all the time or the one that kickstarted the fps boom. If anything Wolfenstein 3D steals the credit from Catacombs 3D since that game is actually largely forgotten.

Tbc ive never played Catacombs 3D but from what i've seen I don't think its too different from Wolfenstein outside theming but I could be wrong.

 

[FTLOTG]

Why would you call them that? Being the first to do something isn't the same as being the first to do it right.

This comes across as an implication that the other games were doing it wrong. So much of game design is iterative it's hard to even name a game that 1:1 clones Zelda's lock on. What about it makes the idea something that was beyond intuition that it needs to be the golden example? Virtual On being the first major and popular game with such an implementation is noteworthy because of how much the mechanic accomplished and how it influences play. There's significantly less nuance to Zelda's implementation and it's far less mechanically robust for something that followed 3 years of iteration.

Really the only game I can think of from another franchise that mimicked zelda lock on is half-life on PS2, but that is only a horizontal lock and gives you options for vertical aiming to target weak points, giving it more depth than zelda lock on.

 

[Mago]

This comes across as an implication that the other games were doing it wrong. So much of game design is iterative it's hard to even name a game that 1:1 clones Zelda's lock on. What about it makes the idea something that was beyond intuition that it needs to be the golden example? Virtual On being the first major and popular game with such an implementation is noteworthy because of how much the mechanic accomplished and how it influences play. There's significantly less nuance to Zelda's implementation and it's far less mechanically robust for something that followed 3 years of iteration.

Really the only game I can think of from another franchise that mimicked zelda lock on is half-life on PS2, but that is only a horizontal lock and gives you options for vertical aiming to target weak points, giving it more depth than zelda lock on.

Also maybe worth mentioning is that there was a Battle Angel Alita game that came out like a month before Oot that used a lock on feature.

But yeah while Oot evolved the lock on system, there have been games since that continued to evolve it, along with the action adventure game formula. Again not trying to discredit the games impact, I just think people go too far with giving it essentially all the credit, and some people acting like these other games shouldn't even be mentioned.