Favorite games that nobody's heard of or played.
 

Battlezone II

I have no idea what Battlezone is or why this is the sequel to it (online searches resulted in little to no information). This game takes some of the best parts of Starcraft (Humans and aliens both playable) and Command and Conquer (Tesla coils, though not by name) and mixes them together. With that said it still manages to be one of the most unique games I've ever played.

The game itself is played primarily in the first person, with your character able to walk around and interact with the environment directly as well as taking control of any allied or unoccupied vehicles, you can even enter buildings and defensive structures, be the Tesla coil! While in first person on foot you get a sniper rifle and you can take out the pilot of some of the smaller vehicles and then commandeer them. If you build a command bunker you can even turn the view into a 3rd person overhead view and play the game like a traditional RTS. Another unique part of the game is that while you do get a solid variation of different vehicles, as you go up the tech tree you can even change the armaments on those vehicles.

The only issues that I had with the game were that the controls could of used a bit of streamlining, but for playing FPS mode while simultaneously commanding an army/building a base it was still manageable. The other issue was that you couldn't build additional Recyclers (Main building) and the second you or the enemy's recycler was destroyed you/they were defeated.

Despite those setbacks the game's graphics engine was amazing for it's time, even in 1997 it was full 3D and ran extremely smooth.

The game obviously fell under the radar as Pandemic/Activision wasn't a big name in PC gaming at the time, and quickly went to the $5 bin. This is a shame because if this genre kept going for another couple of generations there could of been some amazing creations in this style.

If any of you know any games that resemble this please let me know because I'd be interested in giving them a try. :)

I wonder what failed/invisible games my fellow EQ players found to be much higher quality then they were given credit for.

I actually owned the PC release of Battlezone which was an Activision game that came out not long after Mechwarrior II: Mercenaries. It was similar-ish to the arcade game of the same name from back in the day but had this whole "develop a base" aspect to it with various missions and such. I never actually played all the way through the game because on of the levels always crashed out on me, but what I did play was really fun.

Are we then only talking about games we programmed ourselves?

How about underrated or low advertised games?

Carfax Abby (Texas Instruments TI99-4A)
Barrage (Texas Instruments TI99-4A)
Total Annihilation (PC)
E.Y.E. Cybermancy (PC)

Game was MASSIVE.

There's probably a ton of people that have played the first two Arc The Lad games on PSX but you never hear them mentioned when people talk about classic rpg and srpg's. For that I'm throwing them in this list because they are a great set of games, had solid srpg mechanics and a wide spanning story that was worth playing for.

That and it had great humor throughout, most noticeably in their manuals.

http://i.imgur.com/4H3xol.jpg

Shining Force was pretty rough, particularly because you didn't know which characters were going to end up neigh obsolete until you've wasted a ton of experience on them (there was no such thing as grinding or 'random encounters' in that game).
Shining In The Darkness was another painful RPG, just navigating that labyrinth... There were no online walkthroughs in 1992 ;)

You could def grind in the Shining Force series if you wanted to - kill most of the monsters in a fight, egress out, repeat.

Maybe the sequels but I don't remember egress in the first game.

This is what I played before EQ..

Legends of Kesmai:

http://i.imgur.com/xRwCbJz.jpg

2D timed turn-based Gameplay:

http://i.imgur.com/ATU0lMh.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/7L3YiBL.jpg

One of 4 or 5 world maps:

http://i.imgur.com/18Zrps3.jpg

Paper Doll:

http://i.imgur.com/Bdnv1N1.gif

http://i.imgur.com/utjgv4p.jpg

The world map of the death zone.. If you died, you had to solve one of 8 or 10 quests, all based on egyptian myth, each of which had 2 versions. Some of them were super easy and quick, and some were long, tedious, and or required skill or luck.

http://i.imgur.com/z2nLbjO.jpg

Bank full of shinies:

http://i.imgur.com/qhgucSG.jpg

there are several rival LoK emu's too