The best, overlooked games, or things in games?

The first bit is easy enough. What are the games that you've enjoyed but have passed the rest of the world by, whether because of a lack of promotion, or flaws (real, or alleged but false) that kept others away?

e.g. “Escape from Butcher Bay” because it is very good and really immerses the player in the game.
“Armed and Dangerous” which is flawed but fun and funny (in a “put the leper in goal” kind of way).

The second: What devices or features, or even their omission, have stood out to you (even if the rest of the game was crap) but nobody else noticed and/or no new games took up the ideas?

e.g. minimum H.U.D. , no cross hair and no combos for hand to hand in “Escape from Butcher Bay” all really help the level of immersion.
The “Shark gun” in “Armed and Dangerous” because it still makes me laugh, and could be just thing to brighten up some games, say "Half-Life" or "Mario Galaxy".

"Stranger's Wrath" much overlooked. I can see why the maker of the game got so piss off with the lack of love for this game.

Gotcha Force, Capcom needs to make a sequel for this!!!!

So what made it good? I've found that critics didn't like it (some hated it) but gamers did like it (some liked it a lot), but as gamers tend just to say if something is good or bad, often using lots of capital letters and excessive punctuation, if it's good, and if it's bad, they do the same but using mainly four letter stuff.

Having said that I'd better say what was good (in brief) about "Oddworld Stranger's Wrath" which I think had the most fluid switch between 1st and 3rd person of any game I've played. Most games favor one or the other style but Stranger's Wrath did both to the same high standard.

Well, the combat was very intense but also very fluid with a crap-load of enemies at the same time. And offcourse the huge variety of droids you could use and collect.

The game did suffer from a series of technical problems (bad camera, lousy graphics, having only one song, very bare-bone presentation ect.) but it had its action-packed addictive charm to it.

Being able to make John Barnes and Paul Gascoigne play at the back while Mel Sterland played up front in Kevin Toms' Football Manager. Then being able to phone up Kevin Toms one boring Sunday afternoon and tell him about it.

Cheers

Tim

Sounds like a good candidate for a small sequel or getting brushed up for download.

Armed and Dangerous was also rather rough, but that became part of it's charm. I'm sure the main character wore a mask so you didn’t see the flappy jaw speach animation. Only problem was, jaw often came through the mask, however it still seemed to fit with the genral daftness of the game, especially at the end when they’er all singing.

The original Shinobi arcade game is a true masteriece. It's a game that forces the player to be super-fast and nimble, dealing with a higher level of two-dimensional spacial management than one might think given on the surface it looks like a generic 2D platform/action game. The close attacks, and how they have to balanced with managing enemies with the long-range attacks and magic, really work perfectly.

There's a full play-through here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=j8VkTq4eL4I - Done pretty badly which is good to see how tough the game is IMO.

As for more recent over-looked titles, Racing Gears Advance for GBA is a stunner that everyone managed to miss: http://spong.com/game/11038630

It's just old-skool isometric racing elevated to a new level and really very good indeed.

There's millions more, but I have to go to bed. To be continued...

Oh, and the single greatest synth guitar solo of all time:

http://vgmusic.com/music/other/miscellaneous/arcade/DD_Level1.mid

If VGM's linking-blocker kicks is, go here:

http://vgmusic.com/music/other/miscellaneous/arcade/index-af.html

And select Double Dragon Level 1.

Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio, etc all those true arcade games with complete originality at the time were greatly overlooked.

also the moonwalker level weher you drop babies from the balcony into the arms or a spoon bender!, oh wait thta one wqas an idea for a game!

Rubbish. Even speaking as a Sega fanboy, Space Channel 5 and JSR were not at all overlooked, the former being greatly over-rated. And the arcade games - I assume you mean from Sega during the Naomi boom. They all got as much attention as they should have, the exceptions being Monkey Ball arcade and Jambo Safari. Monkey Ball fell victim to arcade buyers who couldn't see why anyone would want to play a game with a giant banana for a controller. Jambo Safari was well-stocked, but totally dominated by the majesty of Crazy Taxi.

You could throw in Emergency Call Ambulance, though strictly that's a generation earlier. I think it ran on Model 4 [STP2.1] though I might be mistaken. That was a really amazing dark, weird game that was just forgotten. :-(

i was reffering to not the arcade board versions but the Dreamcast versions i would say more people are aware of Butcher Bay than Jet Set Radio, although that may be down to the install base of the Dreamcast, being a Sega fanboy life must be hard right about now, Sega have lost the plot, gone are the days of true arcadeness and fun, now its just sonic rehashes and movie licences.

Not the best, but one I'd to play again is Zarch/Virus.
I like 'feel' of the simple to grasp controls, and after the BBC Master at school, it seemed light years ahead. I guess the graphics wont have aged as well as the controls.

i think that the hole dreamcast was over looked every one wanted a ps2 even thow it took around 2 years for sony to sort them selves out and make games better than it