Obscure games you love to bits, and why you love them

[Bofferbrauer2]

Spindel said:

This is kind of old by now, but I must say Imperium Galactica 2.

Fly trough space, colonize starsystems.
Once in a starsystem switch to a sim cityesque colony building simulator.
Once you have a couple of colonies start building your starfleet and upgrade gear for it.
Then go on and eraticate other space traveling species.
Space battles are RTS with different classes of spaceships from smaller nimble ships for delivering a pay-load to big ass star destroyers releasing swarms of tiny fighters.

God I loved that game, it had it all except a FPS portion.

EDIT:// I just discovered that it is available from the mac appstore so this I will buy (yes my computer is a mac)

Both the first and the second game are available at GOG for whatever platforms you may own.

But yeah, both games are also part of my list.

I'll go even further back in time: Super Solver: Challenge of the Ancient Empires. We played that game at school (our teacher gave it to us) and trained our brains pretty well on thinking ahead and problem solving. It being educational and not kiddy simplistic in terms of gameplay and difficulty meant we had great fun with it.

Speaking of such old games, Battle Chess, anyone? Always funny to see how your figures got maimed to death from their opponents.

Also, the first Dune title. It's a genre mix pretty difficult to explain (it's simulation, adventure, RPG, economics and wargame rolled into one) and largely forgotten compared to it's successor. It's also pretty easy once you know what you're doing and how the Harkonnen will react. It's the first game I finished.

The whole Exile/Avernum series. It's getting remade yet again btw. Pretty deep RPGs - in every sense of the word.

Stars! is an 4x title, but with vastly different, abstract, fully customizable races. Despite being an obscure Windows 3.x game, it has an active community to this day.

Speaking of old games with an active community, One Must Fall. A beat-em up with giant robots on PC with a pretty deep fighting system for just using two buttons. Also has an extensive career mode where you upgrade your robot and pilot more and more, making the combats super-fast at the end.

There are still plenty more on my list (most titles I play actually fall into these), but I'll leave it at this for now