u/jasonite

For those who missed my thread earlier, I'm a blogger who is looking for great candidates for underrated, hidden gem PS1 games. The thread is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/psx/comments/1vr1cyk/looking_for_underrated_hidden_gem_ps1_games/

I really appreciate the feedback! I got about a hundred game ideas, which is awesome, so I've started going through them. I've weeded out several and come up with the first 10. I try to limit the games to 10 per page, and I've published it. For those interested the ones that made it are:

Azure Dreams

Future Cop: L.A.P.D.

Devil Dice

Carnage Heart

Speed Punks

Silent Bomber

Alundra

Brave Fencer Musashi

Jade Cocoon

Pandemonium!

If you want the link to my post where I do full summaries of the games and why they are there, along with my methodology, here it is.

I've got lots more game to sift through, so later this week, possibly early next I ought to have another page for you if you're interested. I want this to be a resource gamers can use to help tell the wheat from the chaff.

Hey guys. I'm looking to build a catalog/resource for high quality but overlooked games, like in the title. I've previously done this for PS2 games, 360 games, PS3 games, so that gamers like myself that are on the lookout can find good stuff. If you want to see what I'm talking about my gaming hub is here.

To be clear I'm not looking for games that nobody's heard of and probably aren't that great anyway. It needs to be a game that never got recognition, got overshadowed by something else, or that's kinda obscure but actually good or influential.

I primarily played the mainstream games back in the day, so FF7, Resident Evil, Tekken, etc. I've heard Alien Resurrection was good but never played it, for example.

What games should I be looking at? Any genre is fine.

I'm not asking about the "best films" in the Criterion Collection, but which ones you think gained the most from getting the Criterion treatment? Maybe a great film that was poorly preserved, an obscure title that Criterion helped more people discover, a movie that became more respected after its release, or one where the restoration or extra features changed your perspective.

For me, Chungking Express is Criterion introducing you to a movie. Arkadin is Criterion telling you what the movie actually is. Apu is Criterion making sure there's a movie at all.

Basically: what are Criterion's greatest success stories?

I have my opinions but I don't wnat to influence the conversation, I'd like to know the community's thoughts.

As some of you know I keep a list of the best underappreciated, hidden gem games on my site. I have pretty high standards for what games qualify, but with so many games out, at this point I'm up to four pages of them. If you're interested I wanted to let you know I've added a new one. Here is the write up I did about it:

Suikoden V came out somewhat late in the PS2 era and followed the disappointing Suikoden IV, which had already lost many fans. Because of its timing one of the series’ most solid and grounded games went unnoticed. The story takes place in the Queendom of Falena and follows an exiled prince dealing with a coup, political intrigue, and the dangerous power of the Sun Rune. Instead of focusing on a typical cosmic threat the game stays rooted in succession politics and statecraft.

This focus makes the series’ main feature, recruiting the 108 Stars of Destiny to build an army from scratch, feel more meaningful. The game also brings back the classic six-person combat grid and large-scale war battles that made Suikoden II so popular. It didn’t sell many copies and has never been rereleased, but it’s still one of the most rewarding JRPGs for players who prefer seeing a kingdom unravel because of politics instead of magic.

I created a 100-point model to rate every championship run from 1966 to 2026. Instead of just counting stars or following popular stories, I measured the difficulty using four categories: Opponent Quality, Adversity (comebacks and elimination survival), Road Strain (playing without home-court advantage), and Roster Burden (depth, workload, and team injuries).

Injuries played a role on both sides: if an opponent was missing key players, like Golden State was in 2019, their quality score went down. If the champion was banged up, like Kareem in the 1980 Finals, their roster-burden score went up, but I made sure not to count the same injury for both teams.

I came up with a total of 12 that were a cut above. Teams like the 2016 Cavs, 2011 Mavs, 1993 Bulls and 2004 Pistons all made the cut, but two teams stand out the most:

#1: 1995 Houston Rockets: Faced the toughest all-around challenge

As a #6 seed they played every round without having home-court advantage. They beat four straight teams that each won at least 57 games: Utah, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Orlando. They came back from two elimination deficits: down 1–2 in a best-of-five against Utah and down 1–3 against Phoenix.

#2: 1969 Boston Celtics: Road underdogs who faced big challenges in the Finals

An older #4 seed team did not have home-court advantage in any of their three series. They fell behind 0–2 against the Lakers, who had West, Chamberlain, and Baylor, but came back to win the series in Game 7 on the road in Los Angeles. They also earned credit for toughness, as John Havlicek played through a serious eye injury and Bill Russell dealt with major knee problems.

I can't give you the link to my post, but I'll list the rest of them in order:

#3 Tie: 2006 Miami Heat

#3 Tie:  1993 Chicago Bulls

#5 Tie: 2016 Cleveland Cavalier

#5 Tie: 1994 Houston Rockets

#7: 1977 Portland Trail Blazers

#8: 2019 Toronto Raptors

#9 Tie: 2011 Dallas Mavericks

#9 Tie: 2004 Detroit Pistons

#11: 2002 Los Angeles Lakers

#12: 1968 Boston Celtics

If I missed any big ones, let me know. If you do want to know how and why I justified my list, let me know.

One last time, for those not aware, I've been going through each adventure Dungeon produced in the 2e era, issues 18-81, and reviewing them. I most recently talked about it in this thread, which was part 2. The reason was because the 2e era didn't have a lot of classic TSR-published modules like the B/X or 1e era, even though Dungeon cranked out some truly great stuff.

I go over my process more on my blog site, but I rated each one on a scale from 0-4 on situation clarity, decision density, table usability, distinctiveness, and DM patch burden, and the final score is an average. Only those scoring 3.0 or higher were included.

I know there were some doubters out there when I started. I didn't realize the huge amount of working I was taking on. Still, I've just finished my third and final batch, and it's available for you to read on my blog right here.

I did my best and I think it turned out well. My goal was to have a permanent resource for GMs and players who wanted to run some great adventures, and I wanted to share it. It was a labor of love for me.

I recently read a Wikipedia article, calling the period from the 2000s to 2023 the "Golden Age of Television," due to a flood of high-quality or "prestige" shows. I don't agree with that, so I wrote a post about it. Over the past 25 years TV didn't really raise its standards, it just changed what quality meant, focusing more on darkness, cynicism, and explicit content. All with less episodes per season.

People often say that cable and streaming were needed to make TV more "realistic." But TV was already telling ambitious, morally complex stories long before TV-MA ratings came along.

All in the Family tackled race, class, and sex with total frankness, and it did it without stripping Archie Bunker of his humanity. Hill Street Blues started the whole gritty, serialized realism trend while keeping its moral center. In the 90s Picket Fences spent years on hard ethical questions without turning its town into a moral void.

The prestige era shifted this in stages: The Sopranos made a mob boss the emotional center, Dexter trained audiences to root for a serial killer, and Succession built a universe with no decent person in it, on the assumption that goodness just isn't interesting.

The same trend appears when people defend profanity, sex, and violence as "realism." Roseanne nailed working-class struggles and marriage problems with almost no swearing, while Yellowstone uses so much swearing that it loses its impact. Friday Night Lights created one of TV's most believable marriages with zero explicit content. Choosing restraint isn't a weakness, it's usually the harder and better creative decision.

You can read my full post, which covers the "Triple Cocktail," the difference between moral ambiguity and moral emptiness, and what all this means for audiences, here: https://sagaofthejasonite.com/problem-with-prestige-tv/

I'm curious whether people think the real problem is the darkness itself, or if it's the way darkness gets confused with depth.

I didn't want to upload a dozen images, but I figured one beauty shot was a good start.

For those who don't know me, I write a blog focused on the PS2 era, and I just wrapped up a deep dive ranking the absolute best licensed games on the console.

As you guys know, the majority of licensed games are trash that are grabs for cash. But there are some exceptions: games that really capture the mood and feel of its source material. The technical term is thematic integration. This post is about identifying the games that do the best job of this, AND are so well designed they are some of the best games on the console. Several very good games didn’t make the cut because they excelled as adaptations without quite reaching the level of the PS2’s elite.

Several good adaptations missed my top cut because, while great fanservice, they didn't quite hit that elite gameplay tier. Here is the final lineup that made the cut:

• 007: Everything or Nothing
• Def Jam: Fight for NY
• Hulk: Ultimate Destruction
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance
• Peter Jackson’s King Kong
• Spider-Man 2
• The Return of the King
• The Simpsons: Hit & Run
• The Warriors
• WWE SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain
• WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2006
• Honorable Mention: The Punisher

Here’s a sample write-up from the piece covering why Everything or Nothing took the Bond spot over Nightfire:

007: Everything or Nothing is way more than just a solid movie tie-in, it’s maybe the best Pierce Brosnan Bond film we never got, fully playable and totally original. Instead of adapting an existing movie, EA created a new Bond adventure with Brosnan investigating a plot by rogue KGB agent (voiced by Willem Dafoe), who wants to use stolen nanotechnology to threaten the world. It’s often considered a continuation of Die Another Day.

The game moves away from the first-person view made famous by GoldenEye and puts Bond in a cinematic third-person action setting. It mixes gunfights, stealth, gadget puzzles, vehicle chases, and globe-trotting scenes in places like Egypt, New Orleans, and Peru. With Brosnan, Judi Dench, and John Cleese returning to their film roles, a strong co-op campaign, and “Bond Moments” that reward good play, Everything or Nothing brings out what makes James Bond so popular: style, cleverness, adventure, and big action. It’s one of the best licensed PS2 games overall, and still the best Bond game on the PS2.

I go into full breakdowns for every game on the list over on my blog. Drop a comment if you want the link and I'll send it over

If you think I missed a big one let me know.

By that I mean a unique game: a solitary, first-person investigation of an abandoned town. Virtually no hand-holding, no real UI, tactile interaction with the environment, and spatial storytelling. No cartoony graphics. I got all the achievements except Completionist.

I think overall the closest might be The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Infra comes close. I'm going to play the demo of Anomalous Cleaning Detail which is released in the Fall, but I can't think of anything else.

Any opinions on Dragonlance 1e campaign vs the 2e campaign? Pros, cons?

People usually point to Beyond Earth or Pandora, but neither ever felt like they captured what made SMAC special.

I think it's because they copied the setting more than the design philosophy.

The core achievement of SMAC wasn't just the writing or the voice acting, it was that your faction's ideology dictated your strategy from turn one. Yang wasn't just an authoritarian in the lore, you were mechanically rewarded for governing like one. Morgan wasn't just "the capitalist guy", his bonuses pushed you toward that worldview. The mechanics were the argument.

Beyond Earth felt totally different because it reversed that pressure loop. You begin as a fairly generic sponsor and develop an identity through your tech choices. In SMAC, your identity shaped your decisions from really the first turn.

The writing obviously mattered, but I don't think that's the only reason people are still talking about the game 25+ years later. I think it's because the mechanics made each ideology feel totally different.

Am I missing a game that actually nailed this or is SMAC still standing alone?

Just curious what people thought of it if they have run through it

For those not aware, I've been going through each adventure Dungeon produced in the 2e era, issues 18-81, and reviewing them. I most recently talked about it in this thread.

I go over my process more on my blog site, but I rated them on a scale from 0-4 on situation clarity, decision density, table usability, distinctiveness, and DM patch burden, and the final score is an average.

I've just finished my second batch, and it's available for you to read on my blog right here.

Again, it was a massive amount of work, taking longer than I thought, but I did my best and I think it turned out well. I'll get to working on the third and final batch once I've taken a little breather.