Best "Sleeper" Game of All Time?

What would you say is your best sleeper game of all time? Basically a game that you found to be awesome but either had poor sales and/or was panned by the general media?

For me, and this is going a ways back, I would have to say Battlezone 2 released in 1999. It had average reviews, and low sales, but the gameplay was excellent and the idea was a genre mish-mash of FPS, space combat, and RTS. It did it remarkably well and I put a lot of time into that game. There's even been a multitude of updates that make it play with modern hardware even. Worth a look IMHO.

What's yours?

EDIT:

Here's what's been noted so far (no consoles, PC master race only ):
Battlezone 2
Crimson Skies
No One Lives Forever 1 & 2
The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay
Alpha Protocol
Terminus
Tron 2.0
Vampire: The Masquerade
Enemy Engaged: Apache-Havoc / Comanche-Hokum
Bulletstorm
Nexus: The Jupiter Incident
Aces over Pacific
Brink
Brutal Legend
Condemned 1 & 2
Divine Divinity
Dark Seed
Remember Me
Armed and Dangerous

 

Too many, I can't pick just one.

Max Payne 1 & 2
No One Lives Forever 1 & 2
The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay
Beyond Good & Evil
Mafia
Rise of Nations
Icewind Dale
Planetscape: Torment
System Shock 2

Ironically all obtained at my local public library back in the day. The place was a marvel. The games section there was like a shrine to sleeper hits and forgotten classics from the years before online-only requirements and stringent DRM. Shelves and shelves of jewel cases filled with tattered or missing manuals and old, scratched-up discs that half the time I had to polish with toothpaste to get working.

Oh yeah and they had lots of great PSone games as well. I'll never forgive them for getting me hooked on games.

 

Alpha Protocol.

 

Great list! But I wouldn't call most of those "sleepers" though. Most of those received accolades in reviews and even most a number of sequels, although all are great classics worthy of a play even today.

Riddick is about the only one I'd call a sleeper.

Hmm. Haven't tried that one. Seemed to get average reviews but mainly due to some bugs. Maybe they've been squashed. Maybe worth giving a go.

 

IIRC none of them sold particularly well at release and they didn't receive widespread acclaim or even recognition until many years after the fact. Some of them are still hardly ever talked about or recalled fondly/nostalgically, being overshadowed by IMO lesser titles in their respective genres. They are classics now, but they weren't "instant classics," which is why I think they are sleepers.

 

One game that I find a lot of people have never heard of is sleeping dogs. It is a fantastic gta clone with more polish then most others.

 

Oh trust me, a lot of people have heard of/played Sleeping Dogs. Not a sleeper at all, but it is underrated.

 

Problem is that NOLF 1 & 2 are impossible to get ahold except through "alternate" means, which really sucks. I do own the games on DVD (or CD?) but it would be nice to have a proper digital version on Gog or Steam. Based on this though it looks like it won't happen any time soon if ever: No One Lives Forever - Game of the Year Edition - GOG.com

Basically ownership rights problems, but here it seems there is hope: Looks Like No One Lives Forever Is Finally Getting A Re-Release

I've never played through either of them but have played a little way in. I need to get back into them. Something great to play on a netbook.

 

They're the funniest shooters you'll ever play, trust me. In fact, they basically created an entire sub-genre, the comedy FPS. :laugh:

 

Terminus. Absolutely love it.

 

In all fairness it is a kinda average game, gameplay mechanics weren't polished so well, but I liked the story so much (sorta reminded me Borne movies, once you pass the first act it really begins to shine) that I've completed it two times. And I think I'll complete again some time in the future.

 

Just last year I was able to pick up good condition copies of NOLF and its sequel from fleBay and Amazon, respectively for about $5 each. Unless supplies have completely evaporated, it's not that hard to find both games.

Back to the topic at hand, my sleeper game would be Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. There wasn't a game like it when it was released and there hasn't been one since.


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Oh yes, same here. I had them when I bought my first ever laptop with Intel GMA 4500M - capable of only very old titles. Never finished them as I never played through them in time before I bought a new, much more powerful laptop - which then distracted me with new shiny games! Now it almost seems a chore to go back and play due to having to insert the disk everytime I want to play. But I must finish them sometime - I did love what I played through from the first half of the first game.

I agree wholeheartedly with Beyond Good & Evil and NOLF 1 & 2 that have already been mentioned here. I'd also like to add Psychonauts and Tron 2.0 to the list. Such awesome classic games that sadly never sold well.

 

Here's my "classics" games shelf in the back room in my basement (click to enlarge):

 

Two Worlds.. "looks like my in-laws!" Not sure of it's "classic" status but I liked it even with the poor reviews.

Nox was also a ton of fun. Diablo clone.

The Vampire games were also good.

 

Definitely Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem for the Nintendo Gamecube. Somehow my little brother ended up with the game by trading with his friends (I think he traded Aggressive Inline for it), but he never bothered to play it. One day I noticed the disc on the ground so I gave it a shot. I had as much fun with that game, if not more, than the high and mighty Metroid Prime, which also happened to be my first Metriod/Gamecube game.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem for GameCube Reviews - Metacritic

[video]http://www.g4tv.com/videos/36580/x-play-recommends-best-of-the-gamecube/[/video]

 

Hey! PC only.

Actually, besides some seminal PC titles, IMO the greatest games of the 90's were on Nintendo 64 AKA The Greatest Console of All Time. Time to redownload Project64!

 

Nice stash. I have a small stash at home as well. Too bad my mom always insist that I would throw all them games away.
Not happening, mom!

 

Exactly! Not going to throw out a part of history

And those spiral bound manuals on the top left shelf on the right side are the Falcon 4 manuals. I have the binder ones too, I think I still have two in shrink wrap. All the other spiral bound manuals were from Jane's sims. I miss those days. It was awesome to get a Jane's game and read all that material. Programming your HOTAS for the perfect setup. Flying sorties a few dozen times until you got it just right. Great fun.

 

Good ol' days. I had some manuals for Flanker 2.0, but it wasn't as much as you have there, maybe because back then I wasn't very seriously into flight sims. But nowadays, oh boy, I have plenty of tutorials, flight plans, airport plates laying around .
That reminds me, you don't happen to have some FCOMs and QRHs for Boeing 737 NG and Bombardier Q400? I would print them out, but unfortunately we are talking about thousands and thousands of pages...

 

No I was more into *REAL* flying like combat jets.

 

Oh you!

 

Along the lines of flight simulators, Apache-Havoc / Comanche-Hokum series were sleepers. I put in hundreds of hours into those sims. It had a dynamic campaign too, and very immersive environment. It really was better than Jane's Longbow 2 in many respects, and I'd say it was really the Falcon 4 of chopper sims.

 

The first good one I had was Falcon for the Amiga. I had some fun ones for C64 (F-15 Strike Eagle, f-19 stealth fighter, super Huey and some others) and IBM original FS and Jet.

 

I had one of those heli-sims as well. Oh boy, dem heli controls. Since then I never flew helicopter again, I just stick to fixed wing aircraft now .

 

Meh, rotary craft aren't that difficult. Someone like you with an understanding of flight should catch on real quickly. Just learn to hover and that's about the only difference. It's great to be able to move in any direction you want to.

 

Loved Apache-Havoc, spent many an hour in that sim... enjoyed Longbow 1&2 as well; I still swear that instructor pilot was Tommy Lee Jones ha

 

Did you ever play Aces Over Europe? That's about the only flying game I ever got into. My HS friends and I would play it all the time back in the day. Apparently it's abandonware now.

 

suikoden I and suikoden II both for playstation.

 

I'll open myself to murder here by saying Brink. I've *NEVER* seen a game get so bashed by critics, players, pros, casuals, literally everyone under the sun... and not suck. It had technical issues on Xbox 360, but it ran fine on PC (except the people who had an AMD card and got black-screen launches, who were refunded). Till this day I've never had someone actually tell me a real reason why it sucked, and every now and then I'll get someone who liked it and wonders why it died.

Also, you could kind of call it a sleeper game, because a lot of people don't know about it (though it was very well acclaimed critically): Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. It always surprises me how many people never heard about/play the game yet yell at me because I haven't played some mario games on the super nintendo (though I never had a nintendo console). I don't think it actually deserves to be called a sleeper, but I wanted to say it at least if only as an honorable mention XD

 

Brink sucks? Since when? Never heard that before. It's not terrific but it's also nowhere near sucky.

Another sleeper: Bulletstorm.

 

Mm. Amy Hennig before zombies and Sony. Good games with great writing.

Prime example of an eternal sleeper is Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. From the technical solution they've used in this game graphically, to have gradual detail on approaching space-ships, or to avoid the popping that new games still have. To the axis free movement and strategic battle. And to the writing, and the comprehensive starmaps of the solar system. This game still looks good graphically, it's not a 4x tug of war time waster, you're never embarrassed on behalf of the writers for the things people say in the game, etc. And yet, or perhaps because of that, it reviews like this, over and over again: Nexus: The Jupiter Incident- Rigid Space | Good Old Reviews | The Escapist

 

Yes, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident is a great game. It can be hard as heck though, and it's more or less just a linear mission based type game. But it is a great alternative to the likes of Homeworld-esque games.

 

This 1000x times.

 

bulletstorm was a fun little shooter. the transformer games are decent too and didnt do that well either.

brink was just plain awful, spent 60 dollars on a game that wasn't even beta ready. no wonder the price droped to 10dollars with in 3 month.

 

Loved this game. I played more of Aces over the Pacific, though. I think my AOE disks got damaged or something.

 

Ah I see. Brink "sucked" for the same reason BF4 "sucks." Thankfully I didn't start playing Brink until long after the launch bugs had been ironed out.

 

Probably not all of them, but here are those that come to mind (in chron-order):

Brutal Legend - PC/consoles
Condemned 1 & 2 - PC/consoles ***** My favorite "sleeper" series ever
Divine Divinity - PC
Dark Seed - PC
Wizards and Warriors - NES
Bruce Lee - Commodore 64/128

 

Divine Divinity is fantastic. +1

I'd have to lump Titan Quest into the Diablo clone list.

 

Closest thing I've found to Homeworld a few years ago. The difficulty curve is indeed rather unequal. Starts off relatively easy and then it gets pretty steep after the first few missions of the game. It is indeed a set of linear missions, but that didn't prevent me from enjoying it. It felt different having to micromanage a few ships down to weapons config, which weapons to activate and when, etc. rather than having to manage a huge fleet like in Homeworld. It can be somewhat hacked to run at modern resolutions too, but it does break cinematics.

The game is also available on steam and isn't that expensive if anyone feels like trying it despite the difficulty curve.

 

I (and most people I knew with the game) did not encounter any issues like that. As I did point out, it did have issues where a few AMD card users couldn't launch it, but they were refunded. The voice chat was very soft, but since this is PC and nobody ever used it anyway... nobody really cared. That's pretty much all the issues there really were. I played the game from Day 1 (as I had it pre-ordered) and I enjoyed it from start to game-death.

 

I don't know about the "of all time" bit, but if it counts as a sleeper, I quite enjoyed "Braid" when I played it

 

hmm its hard to give you greatest if alll time but here are my top 5 sleepers

legend of dragoon (ps1)
skies of arcadia (dreamcast)
condemned:criminal origins (360)
sleeping dogs (pc &console)
remember me (pc &console)

 

Armed and Dangerous (PC/Xbox) - The gameplay to this game was alright, but the dialogue and cutscenes were so hilarious I almost pissed myself during the following cutscene.

 

Well I got NOLF 1 up and running. But there's texture corruption everywhere. Gotta find a way to fix that. Quite horrible.

I also updated original post with the PC titles noted in this thread.

EDIT: NOLF 2 seems to work great though. Bummer because I'd like to play through NOLF 1 first. Maybe an XP VM will work well with it.
EDIT EDIT: Meh, seems it is an issue with Windows 8 and older DirectX:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icTU2K4PjO4
http://www.sevenforums.com/graphic-...ng-old-games-nvidia-very-strange-problem.html
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/626974/pc-components/630m-flickering-2d-elements-and-fmvs/

Stupid Microsoft can't even keep their own products compatible.

 

LOL @ "PC master race only."

 

Yeah, the tutorials for getting NOLF to work on a non XP machine haven't worked for me... I think I read that the XP VM works.

Here's hoping Night Dive Studios re-releases NOLF 1, NOLF 2, and Contract J.A.C.K. soon.

 

checking.. yep, made by the same guys who created Citizen Kabuto. Weird I never got around to playing this.

agree it's unforgiving sometimes. Then again, if you figure out how to.. well.. solve.. the missions, there are always different ways to win without taking very much damage. But yeah, if you make a mistake and don't understand why you were shot to pieces, or how to counter what you're running into, the game doesn't exactly explain what happened or even give you a tiny hint to help you along.

That, and how you could be doing fine, and then get shot to bits at the end of the mission. That can be annoying. So I haven't even tried to complete the game on hard, to put it like that.

 

That stinks. The game runs fine for me, but I'm on W7 and an AMD card. As much flak as AMD takes for its hardware and software, they are surprisingly adept at playing older games without hassle. When I had NVIDIA cards, I had to jump through hoops to get my legacy games to run smoothly. That's simply not the case with my machine now.

 

For me Indigo Prophecy otherwise know as 'Fahrenheit'