I've been playing GTI Club: Supermini Festa! for a while now, and I'm SHOCKED and DISGUSTED by the lack of any sort of fanbase for it. I love me some arcade-style racers with ridiculous physics, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. While most of the reviews I've read have been obnoxious dismissals, I can't acknowledge some of the points posited by these reviews when considering the pure fun I have experienced through playing the game. The problem is, I seem to be the only person in my social group who likes and / or understands it.

The same could be said of the likes of "Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters", "Cu-on-Pa", "Unirally", "P.N.03", and "Monster Hunter 3". I don't post much about these games, because I'm a SOCIAL OUTCAST and pretty crap at explaining the PURE JOY of these games anyway.

I always considered P.N.03 to be less of a third-person shooter, and more of a shmup with broken controls. Something in me adjusts perfectly to these perceived inadequacies and gets into the meat of the game (which is pattern memorising and high score beating). A similar collective abhorrence happened with Monster Hunter 3 and its quirky design, where I can't convince any of my real, fleshy friends to like it (and I'm too frightened to enter the official thread for online jollies because there's so much to read and catch up on).

Describe your obscure joys here, elaborate on why you like them, and perhaps even explain why the critical reception to them has given you a case of SADFACE. Maybe we can convince others to consider some hidden gems.

This series is popular in europe, because most people outside of USA don't go with Hype and reviews.

CONTROVERSIAL.

Also: OH MAN I can't believe I forgot to mention Kororinpa. I'm like one of maybe a dozen people in the whole world who likes that series. My neighbour's daughter came close to explaining the appeal of it, though she also explained why the game may be a major turnoff. You'll fall off the mazes may, MANY times, but the urge to beat them is strong. Basically, you have to be a masochist. I now view my neighbour's daughter in a totally wrong way.

echochrome:  okay so i'm not the only person who appreciates the game but it is way more awesome than most people acknowledge.  the soothing music, the rhythm of the foot steps, the joy of thinking you found the absolute perfect solution and then finding a new path that reduces the time to beat a puzzle to under 20 seconds.  god i loved this game.  first game i got 100% of the trophies for to boot.

echochrome ii is reason enough for me to get ps move...so hyped!

Wizard of Oz: Beyond The Yellow Brick Road:

I don't know anyone else who has ever played it, those who have heard of it instantly disgard it as a crappy Licensed game.

Wii Music.

Somehow, no one finds the right vibe for that game but me..... >_>

Lovely DS RPG from the Wild Arms developer. It never came out in Europe, so I bought the NA version.

I would say Final Fantasy XII, but then I went to Japan for a year and realised that there is a big fanbase for it there too (read ridiculously expensive ffXII collectables and rarities due to demand and children I was teaching having cooler/more FFXII stuff than me and being more obsessive about it than me)

But as far as english speakers go FFXII, it is not just my favourite game, but favourite piece of storytelling on any medium, ever

I would be glad to be wrong on this and have loads of people come back saying they love it too, but I doubt it will happen.

OT: There's not a single game where I think that I'm the only one who "gets" it. I'm convinced that every music piece, book, movie, comic book or (video/board) game someone likes has at least several 10.000 other fans around the world.

Less known games (outside of its fanbase) I recently liked are the great point&click adventure games from 2009 only few people played:
- Ceville
- The Whispered World
- Runaway: A Twist of Fate
- The Book of Unwritten Tales (this one was not yet released in English speaking countries)

Recent adventure games which objectively aren't nearly as good as the 4 above but which I enjoyed anyway:
- Perry Rhodan: The Adventure (The Immortals of Terra: A Perry Rhodan Adventure in NA)
- Murder in The Abbey (The Abbey in NA) => the IGN review for this game showed me how much the whole p&c genre seem to be hated by some US reviewers these days