Earthbound! Seriously, one of my favorite games ever. It's such a classic game, marred by an idiotic marketing campaign. ('This game stinks!' was the tagline.) I'm still pissed at Nintendo for not bringing over Mother 3 (Note for the uninformed - Earthbound is known as Mother 2 in Japan). Currently waiting for the fan-translation patch, follow the progress at
http://mother3.fobby.net The translator, besides being a total Earthbound maniac (along with the rest of the fellows at Starmen.net) is also a professional translator - he does it for a living (various anime and such), so you know it is in good hands. If you've ever played Bahamut Lagoon, he did the translation for that as well.
Okage - I own and beat the game. Has a good style and a decent story, very Tim Burton-esque graphics. Overall, I just found it a bit boring. I didn't feel there was much incentive to exploring either. Still, it wasn't bad, and I got it cheap. It was a fun diversion. Earthbound is the better of the two in my opinion though.
Lunar. Ahh, I love Lunar. Many people complain, because they felt Working Designs took too many liberties with the translation. (i.e. some of the pop-culture jokes given to random NPCs, who probably said the same thing as another NPC in town) Some think the voice acting is cheesy, but I like it. I really like the 'Boat Song' (aka Wind's Nocturne). Such a shame that Working Designs went out of business. =/ Have you played Lunar 2 at all? Even though it is 1000 years after the first game, I thought it was just as good and it still manages to have a couple returning characters (nope, not gonna spoil it.)
Mandrake42 - for Might and Magic - Xeen was the combination of the fourth and fifth games. The fourth was Clouds of Xeen, I believe, and the fifth was Darkside of Xeen, and combined they made World of Xeen, where you could travel (mostly) freely between the two games, with some extra content available if you had both. I was sorely disappointed with the Might and Magic games I've played past V. I just didn't like them nearly as much.
Hmm, I remembered a few other games that should be in here. For newer stuff, there's the Ys games. Out of the recent offerings, for PC, Ys: Oath in Felghana (a remake of Ys III, formerly on SNES if you remember that) is probably the best, although it is currently available only in japanese, there is an english patch in the works. (and a leaked beta version, but I shall not help with that) The remake successfully turned the game that was most peoples least favorite in the series and turned it into most peoples favorite. It's classic gaming at its best. Definitely a lot like an old-school action RPG, it's a fast paced hack'n'slash with a pretty good story and some great bosses. Oh, and the music is awesome. A lot of which are pretty challenging, especially on the higher difficulty settings, where besides getting stronger, they get a few new tricks up their sleeves too. I'm currently playing through it again on the 'Nightmare' difficulty, and phew, it's rough. And I thought Hard was tough. It's great that a semi-big name developer (Nihon Falcom) is still making great games like this, even if they don't see an english release. Also to look into for the recent offerings - Ys VI: Ark of Napishtim is available on the PS2 and PSP (ports courtesy of Konami (even if they did replace the sprites with polygons on the PS2 version.) And they added a *little* bit of new content and voice acting. Ys VI is what really got me back into the Ys games, although it isn't as good as the other two, which are PC only and japanese only. The most recent game is Ys Origin, which I believe takes place 700 years prior to the rest of the series and has three playable characters. The language barrier isn't a big deal with the games, it's mostly action and there's very few spots you could get stuck not knowing what to do. Easily resolved as there are guides for both games. Oh, also if playing japanese versions, you need to change windows region settings to japanese, or use AppLocale. Here's a trailer video -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u_A6Ffpg-8 And that'll be all for my rambling about that.
There's an OLD pc game, I really enjoyed. An indie game, still being sold today, but I believe the game is uncrippled anyway. First exposure was one of those old CDs loaded with tons of DOS games. Much better than those discs sold today with lots of crap on them. It was called Excelsior (full title, Excelsior - Phase One: Lysandia) Very old-school style RPG, you create a character, pick stats and alignment, then you can pick a class (options based on what stats you have). It's definitely not for everyone, as the graphics are rather primative, but it was still fun, IMO. A few years back, the creator released a windows version of the game, still shareware. Also fixes a few bugs and adds a map (though IIRC, it's not entirely accurate, I believe two of the towns are swapped). There's some pretty tricky puzzles in the dungeons, I remember that for sure. Give it a shot, it's actually pretty decent. There used to be a fan site up and about for the game, and I used to chat with the owner of the site a lot and was a mod on her forums even (slow as they were.) It went down though, and as far as I know, it never went back up. And holy crap, I actually found a video for the game on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x69_TvbyMdk It doesn't quite do it justice, sound is nonexistant for part of the video, and the rest of it, the sound is a bit messed up I believe. No music in the game though. Official site for the game and download here:
http://www.nwlink.com/~dberke/ex1.htm They even made a sequel, better graphics, but in my opinion, it wasn't as good as the original. The second one I believe imposes a level-limit which registering disables. It's still possible to beat though, if you are *really* good and abuse the hell out of invisibility potions. Oh, there's no manual included with the first game, iirc, but there was with the original DOS game. If you are interested in the game, I recommend you track the DOS version down for the manual, it explains the races and spells and stuff. Hmm, it seems to run really badly on this computer - it crashes if I try to go fullscreen, and it animates absurdly fast. It might be better to play the DOS version with Dosbox. Just gotta watch for a situation that makes it impossible to complete - namely, do NOT do a certain thing with the rock and balloon until you know what you are doing with it.
Meh, that's all I can think of to say now, so I'm done.
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