Great Games You Never Played: Wizardry 8

Wizardry 8 is a first-person party-based dungeon-crawling three-dimensional open-world role-playing game. Released in 2001 as the final entry in the long-running Wizardry series (which began in 1981 as one of the very first computer-RPGs), Wizardry 8 completes the "Dark Savant" trilogy that began with Wizardry 6, throughout which you're trying to stop an evil villain known as the Dark Savant from gaining access to the Cosmic Forge -- the tools used by the gods to create the universe, which hold the power to create, destroy, or change anything in the universe by simply writing its history into existence. Despite being a continuation of the story from the previous two games (your save files can be carried through all three games), Wizardry 8 works fine as a stand-alone title, although you'll miss a lot of references and it might take you a little longer to understand the backstory.

As part of a game series borne of the 1980s, Wizardry 8 definitely has that vintage, old-school vibe to it, but with the advantage of a much more modern skin which makes it a much easier game to get into. That's absolutely crucial, because this is a truly great RPG that easily ranks among the best RPGs ever made. It's not perfect, mind you -- there's one crucial problem that made me almost want to quit, and it's a little rough around the edges due to developer SirTech's dwindling budget -- but it's got one of the most robust party-creation systems ever implemented in a video game, and one of the best turn-based combat systems of any RPG. Not to mention a fairly sizable open-world with an interesting blend of fantasy and science-fiction elements, and a non-linear main-quest-line that allows for a lot of rewarding exploration and discovery.

STALKER: Call of Pripyat - Review

STALKER: Call of Pripyat is the third game in the STALKER series, a trio of open-world survival-horror FPS games set in the irradiated "Zone" around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, following a fictitious second blowout in 2006. As a result of all the radiation (and other mysterious forces), the Zone has become an inhospitable place full of violent mutants and dangerous scientific anomalies -- small, localized spaces that defy the laws of physics, like gravity wells that pull you off the ground and rip you to pieces, or spots of earth that shoot fire when you step on them. Some of the mutants have even developed powers of telekinesis, invisibility, and mind control. The only people who venture into the Zone are scientists looking to study the anomalies, and treasure hunters known as "stalkers" hoping to find valuable "artifacts" contained in and around anomalies, which bestow their carriers with special powers like accelerated blood clotting or extra strength.

Call of Pripyat follows the events of Shadow of Chernobyl, in which you, as an amnesiac stalker known as the "marked one," managed to disable a device called the "brain scorcher," which had been keeping people from reaching the center of the Zone. With the demise of the brain scorcher, the Ukrainian government launched a series of helicopters to survey the area in preparation for a large-scale military raid on the CNPP. All five of the helicopters crashed in the Zone before reaching the CNPP. You play as Major Degtyarev, member of the Ukrainian Security Services, on an undercover reconnaissance mission investigating the helicopter crashes. You begin the game on the outskirts of the Zone in the Zaton swamps, before advancing to the Yanov Railway station and Jupiter manufacturing plant, and eventually, reaching the city of Pripyat itself.

Great Games You Never Played: The "No One Lives Forever" Series

Note: This article has been largely rewritten with updated/expanded thoughts after my replay in 2024. You can read the new version here, or watch on YouTube here. 

The Operative: No One Lives Forever and its sequel, No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in HARM's Way, are a series of first-person shooters developed by Monolith Productions in 2000 and 2002, in which players take the role of 1960s secret agent Cate Archer trying to stop a villainous criminal organization from taking over the world. Overshadowed by major releases like GoldenEye, Half-Life, Deus Ex, and Halo, the NOLF series achieved only moderate financial success at the time and was soon abandoned by Monolith in favor of new series like Condemned and FEAR. Fox Interactive since allowed the copyright to fall into no man's land, preventing the games from ever being made available for digital downloads via Steam or GOG, thus cementing the series' cult status in the annals of video game history.

I played these games for the first time in late 2006 and considered them to be some of the best first-person shooters I'd ever played. Playing them again now, 10 years later (and 16 years after the first game's initial release), I can definitely tell how much these games have aged, but the things that made them so novel back in the day -- the story, the characters, the atmosphere, and the humor -- are just as good now as they were then. Some of the gameplay elements feel a little outdated, granted, but these were somewhat groundbreaking games for their time, being some of the first first-person shooters to allow and encourage stealth, while their emphasis on using spy gadgetry to complete your objectives in a story-driven, swinging 60s setting makes these games truly stand out from the crowd.

Perhaps the biggest testament to NOLF's legacy is how well the series compares to other games of its time. When Half-Life came along in 1998, it forever changed the way shooters were made, yet in the years immediately following its release, few shooters adhered as closely to its lessons as NOLF1, which took the immersive gameplay and narrative-driven level progression from Half-Life and applied it to a more cinematic experience. GoldenEye was a defining genesis for console shooters; NOLF1 took its spy gadgetry and thematic objectives and gave them a more robust focus that, arguably, made NOLF1 a better James Bond game than GoldenEye itself. And when Deus Ex turned people's heads with its inclusion of RPG-style leveling and skills, NOLF2 did the same thing and vastly improved its own gameplay. All-the-while, the NOLF games were some of the first FPSs to allow players the freedom to choose how they'd go about completing a level, by allowing you to stealth your way past guards or to go in guns blazing.

In essence, the NOLF series takes the best elements of these iconic, classic games and blends them together with strong writing, interesting characters, a compelling story, an amusing sense of humor, and some of the most memorable level sequences of its time into games that are even better than the sum of their parts. It's even more impressive when you consider that there really are a lot of good parts to these games, with the wide variety of guns, the different types of ammunition, all of Cate's cool spy gadgets, the vehicles, the variety of mission types, and all the different locations. The story offers a solid premise with a lot of good twists and hooks, and the silly, lighthearted Austin Powers-esque atmosphere offers the series a uniquely refreshing flavor that will have you laughing at some of its more absurd moments, or else simply smiling at the realization that these games just want you to have fun, plain and simple.

Thief 1 vs Thief 2: Which is Better?

Thief II: The Metal Age is technically a sequel -- it's in the name, after all -- but it's so much like its predecessor, Thief: The Dark Project, that it doesn't really feel like a sequel. It's basically the same game, but with 15 new missions, a couple new items, and a few technical upgrades to the engine. I guess Looking Glass Studios realized they had a pretty good formula on their hands, and chose not to do anything too extravagant with the sequel. The two games are so fundamentally similar that people tend to lump them together as one collective entity, because if you like one, then you'll like other.

And yet, people definitely have their preferences, with some people liking Thief 1 more for its darker supernatural atmosphere, and others liking Thief 2 more for its more robust level design. Some people find the undead enemies in Thief 1 to be a turn off, while others think the same of the robotic enemies in Thief 2. Having played Thief 2 immediately after finishing Thief 1, there are certain things I like and dislike about it; it's a tough call trying to pick one over the other.

I'm not going to treat this article as a stand-alone review of Thief 2, because that would feel mostly redundant, since I've already covered all of the basics in my review of Thief: The Dark Project. Most of what I wrote in that article applies to Thief 2 as well, so I'd recommend you start there so you have an idea of my thoughts going into this review. I'm also not going to make this a direct side-by-side, in-depth comparison article, either, because the games are so similar I can't talk at much length about how they differ. Rather, this review will be a more simple look at Thief 2 and, in general, how it stacks up to its predecessor.

Looking Back at Thief: The Dark Project

I remember playing Thief II: The Metal Age about 10 years ago and enjoying it quite a bit. Alas, I only played a few levels before something drew me away from it. I mostly remember breaking into mansions, warehouses, and slinking through the city streets on my noble quest to liberate as much gold as possible from the city's aristocratic elite. I thought I knew what I was getting into by jumping back into the series where it at all started, with Thief: The Dark Project; I was pretty surprised, then, when I went into the first game and found myself descending into giant crypts and haunted cathedrals to sneak past and, more often, fight off platoons of undead zombies and skeletons, among other sinister, twisted monstrosities.

Developed by Looking Glass Studios and released in 1998, Thief: The Dark Project was a pioneer of first-person stealth gaming. Its design was years ahead of its time, with the advanced lighting and three-dimensional sound effects offering an unprecedented level of immersive feedback for would-be thieves trying to hide in the shadows and avoid detection. It's impressive, really, how well it holds up after all this time; games have come a long way in the past 17 years, and yet modern stealth games really aren't that much more sophisticated than Thief. It would not be that ridiculous to claim that no other game has handled stealth as well as the original Thief, with the possible exception of Thief II, but that's a discussion for another article. For now, it's time to take a look at Thief: The Dark Project (the Gold Edition, specifically) to figure out what's good and what's not good with it.

System Shock 2: A Classic Masterpiece

System Shock 2. The grandfather and holy grail of FPS-RPGs. It was so monumental back in 1999 that it shaped many elements of game design that have become standard practice over the last 16 years. Games like Deus Ex, Aliens vs Predator, Vampire Bloodlines, Doom 3, BioShock, Dead Space, and Fallout 3/NV, all owe their existence at least partly to the innovations established with System Shock 2. Even games like STALKER, Borderlands, and Portal have drawn influences from the almighty System Shock 2.

Despite its immense critical acclaim, winning numerous "Game of the Year" awards and frequently finding its way into modern "Best Games of All Time" lists, System Shock 2 wasn't much of a commercial success at the time. Falling between the cracks of Half-Life in 1998 and Deus Ex in 2000, its legacy was that of an obscure cult phenomenon that few people actually played -- but those who did loved it vehemently -- until BioShock came out in 2007 and renewed everyone's interest in its spiritual predecessor. Even then, finding a working copy was a little difficult, so the game remained largely unplayed and inaccessible until GOG and Steam released digital copies in 2013. Now you have no excuse not to play one of the greatest video games ever made.

The real question, however, as it always is with these "old" games, is whether or not System Shock 2 is actually worth playing in this day and age. After all, lots of old games just haven't aged very well, and why would it even be necessary to play System Shock 2 when there's already BioShock, a more-modern adaptation of virtually the same game design? The answer is simple: because System Shock 2 is a better game, and it still plays remarkably well, even after 16 years of aging. I'll get into more direct comparisons in another article; for now, I just want to talk about System Shock 2 as an independent game and how it's stood the test of time.

Deadly Premonition is Mind-Blowingly Awesome

You may have heard of Deadly Premonition, the open-world horror/thriller game from 2010 that proudly claims (on the back of the Director's Cut box, no less) to be "the most critically polarizing game of recent times." With a $20 price tag and review scores ranging from 2/10 on IGN to 10/10 on Destructoid, Deadly Premonition quickly earned a reputation for being "so bad it's good." Like a good "B movie," this was a game whose primary entertainment value seemed to derive from laughing at its failures and its generally awkward incompetence.

There's certainly plenty of reason to dislike Deadly Premonition. The graphics look 10 years out of date, the controls are clunky, the animations are ridiculous, the sound mixing is poorly balanced, the lip syncing is awful, and the music selection is often totally inappropriate. As a result of the clunky controls and the large open-world, the bulk of the actual gameplay feels pretty uncomfortable, and even a little boring, particularly in the beginning when you have very little reason to care about what's going on. Hidden beneath all of these superficial problems, however, is a comically bizarre, oddly fascinating, and uniquely surreal experience.

Planescape: Torment - The Best RPG of All Time?

"What can change the nature of a man? If there is anything I have learned in my travels across the Planes, it is that many things may change the nature of a man. Whether regret, or love, or revenge or fear - whatever you *believe* can change the nature of a man, can. I've seen belief move cities, make men stave off death, and turn an evil hag's heart half-circle. This entire Fortress has been constructed from belief. Belief damned a woman, whose heart clung to the hope that another loved her when he did not. Once, it made a man seek immortality and achieve it. And it has made a posturing spirit think it is something more than a part of me."

-- The Nameless One

Whenever people talk about role-playing games, Planescape: Torment  inevitably comes into the discussion as an example of how great RPGs used to be. Torment was largely overshadowed by the likes of Baldur's Gate and Fallout at the time of its release and was not much of a commercial success for developer Black Isle Studios, but it developed a cult following over the last 15 years and is now commonly regarded as the greatest RPG of all time. Its reputation has been so tenaciously uttered for so long that I suspect people just take it for granted without actually understanding why, and it's not uncommon to see someone name-drop Torment in online message boards as a way of validating their opinions and credibility. Over time, the shroud of Torment has grown from that of a cult icon to the holy grail of RPGs, taking on a mythological mystique entirely of its own.

It was about six or seven years ago that I played Torment for the first time. As a fan of old-school RPGs, I had to know what I'd been missing all these years, but my time with the game was cut short upon discovering that one of my discs was so badly scratched that my computer couldn't read the files, thus preventing me from progressing past a certain point. I liked what I had seen of the game, though, and have since considered it among the best RPGs I've ever played, even despite never finishing it. With its spiritual sequel Tides of Numenera on the horizon, I thought it was time to take another look at Planescape: Torment, to see what it is about this game that makes people speak its name with such passionate reverence, to figure out why, exactly, Torment is so often heralded as the best RPG of all time. 

Torment is without a doubt a unique and finely-crafted game that absolutely deserves to be near the top of any "best ever" list. It's one of very few games that takes full advantage of video games' interactivity to bolster its storytelling in unique ways that you can't get from books or movies. It's one of very few games that uses the "main character has amnesia" trope in a crucial way that permeates the very essence of the story and gameplay. The nature of the story, the way it's told, and your role in uncovering it (both as the nameless protagonist and as a person playing the game) are unlike anything I've seen in perhaps any other game. The story is Torment's best feature, but there's a lot more than that under the hood that consistently propels it into the discussion of being the best RPG of all time.

Great Games You Never Played: Alpha Protocol

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played. 

Formed from refugees of Black Isle Studios -- the development team responsible for some of the best RPGs in the golden era of RPGs -- Obsidian Entertainment has been making games for over a decade now. For the longest time they held the earned and much-deserved reputation of being "that game company that makes buggy sequels to other people's games," after releasing Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (a followup to BioWare's original Knights of the Old Republic) and Neverwinter Nights 2 (a followup to BioWare's original Neverwinter Nights). That reputation continued with Fallout: New Vegas (a followup to Bethesda's Fallout 3) and Dungeon Siege III (a followup to Gas Powered Games' Dungeon Siege I & II).

In each case, the games were maligned by critics and gamers alike for being buggy, unpolished, and in the case of KOTOR2, even unfinished, yet keen observers were able to look past those shortcomings to find games with a deeply rich soul and personality. In the case of KOTOR2 and FO:NV, the only two Obsidian games I've played, I actually preferred their versions of the game to their predecessors', since Obsidian's games showed a much deeper complexity and understanding in terms of RPG mechanics. I was easily willing to overlook the technical flaws in favor of their inspired and ambitious design. It's natural to say, therefore, that I hold a lot of respect for Obsidian and consider them one of the best designers of modern RPGs.

Alpha Protocol, released in 2010, was Obsidian's first attempt at creating an original IP, their first chance to establish themselves as a company that could do something worthwhile with an original formula instead of simply building upon other people's success (and, in the opinion of some gamers, ruining it with bugs). With this great opportunity before them, Obsidian failed big time and Alpha Protocol was gashed by critics. Besides the usual complaints of crashes, glitches, and it feeling generally unpolished, the game was criticized for its tedious and repetitive stealth-action sequences, its poor enemy AI, and its inconsistent game balancing.

Buried within this mess of a game is the soul of a good RPG, where your skills and stats determine your efficacy in encounters and where your decisions can lead to vast alterations in the course of the plot, complete with interesting characters and settings as well as one of the better dialogue systems in existence. It's clear that Obsidian know what they're doing when it comes to implementing compelling RPG mechanics in games, but it's also clear that the team had no prior experience with stealth-action gameplay. In most ways, Alpha Protocol deserves its bad reputation, but there's also enough here to enjoy if you're a fan of RPGs and want to experience one of the more unique RPGs we've seen in the past few years.

Great Games You Never Played: Afrika

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played.

Back in 1999, Pokemon Snap proved that games about photography can be just as engaging as an action-packed shooter, yet ever since then, games with photography as the central gameplay mechanic have been few and far between. Some games like Dead Rising have featured elements of photography, but Afrika (a PS3 exclusive released in 2009) is the only other game I know of where photography is the main and only point of the game.

In Afrika, you play as one of two photojournalists sent to photograph and document wildlife in an African conservation. Each day begins in your tent at base camp, checking your email and conducting any preliminary business before setting out on safari. Email is the source of your missions, with various clients requesting photographs of certain animals, sometimes in specific poses or in a particular setting. You're then free to roam about the African wilderness sandbox-style, taking pictures and completing missions at your leisure. At first you're limited to the nearby steppe region, but as you advance through the main missions, you gain access to a swampland, a large lake, a rocky canyon, and a green plains region.

Photographs submitted for missions are graded based on technique, and your pay is based on the picture's grade. The money that you earn can be spent buying new tools and equipment (such as a portable tent so you can spend the night in the field, instead of having to return to base camp at sundown), as well as upgrading your camera body and lenses for better pictures. Missions are split between sandbox-style side missions where you observe the wildlife in real time, and important main missions where you watch a more dramatic, scripted cutscene (such as a fight between a lion and an elephant) and take pictures of critical moments.

The photography in Afrika is rather satisfying, thanks to the breadth of options for getting the right shot as well as the game's emphasis on emulating real photography. For instance, you can unlock eight different lenses, and some are more suited for certain kinds of shots than others, and you have to worry about settings like depth of field, aperture, and shutter speed (among other things). While the photography aspect is great fun, there are, unfortunately, a number of really annoying things about the game's design that feel like noticeable blemishes on a great formula. Still, there aren't many photography games out there, so Afrika is easy to recommend if you're interested in that style of gameplay. More of my thoughts await after the jump.

Great Games You Never Played: Cryostasis

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played.

Cryostasis is one of the more novel takes on horror that I've played in the last several years. Set in 1981, you play as Alexander Nesterov, a geologist working at a North Pole research facility, who stumbles upon a derelict nuclear icebreaker, the North Wind, which has been floating around the arctic circle since 1968. The ship is entirely frozen over, parts of it wrecked and destroyed, with no power running through it, and with seemingly all of its crew dead or missing. As you explore deeper into the vessel, the past manifests itself before your eyes, occasionally letting you relive past events leading up to the ship's untimely demise, all-the-while being stalked by murderous monstrosities coming out of the metalwork.

A unique ability called the "mental echo" gives you the power to take control of a deceased crew member's memories and change the events of the past to alter the condition of things in the present. A section of the ship is flooded with ice, a dead man lying near the surface; touching him gives you a chance to succeed where he failed, to seal the emergency doors and prevent the flooding, thus clearing the way for you in the present. By using this ability, you're able to progress through the ship, piecing together the story of what happened and, should you succeed in your endeavors, alter the fate of the North Wind.

As a horror game, Cryostasis does a pretty good job of mounting tension and making you feel vulnerable. One of its unique twists is representing your health meter in the form of body heat, with the intense cold of the ship lowering your health to extremely low levels and forcing you to seek the scarce warmth of electric lightbulbs, steam valves, and turbines. The things attacking you can look pretty disturbing, and as an ordinary geologist you're stuck fighting them with improvised weapons (e.g., a loose pressure valve as a bludgeoning weapon) and antiquated firearms (like the bolt-action Mosin-Nagant 1891). Combined with the health system, this makes each encounter tense, as you try to survive on your way to the next heat source.

I hesitate to call Cryostasis a "great" game, however, because there are a number of flaws holding it back from true excellence. Glitches and performance issues aside, the game is almost detrimentally linear, there are too many instant deaths resulting from unconscious errors, and some of the mental echo "puzzle sequences" rely a little too heavily on trial-and-error. There are valid reasons leading to the game's mixed reception, but what it does well, it does incredibly well. The story and atmosphere are absolutely top notch, and the unique premise lends it a lot of personality. Imperfect as it may be, it's a novel game worth experiencing.

Great Games You Never Played: Painkiller

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played.

In the world of first-person shooters, Painkiller is a throwback to an earlier time in gaming history (back in the days of Doom and Quake), when shooters were all about fast-paced, cathartic action. Developed by People Can Fly in 2004, Painkiller tells the story of Daniel Garner; after dying in a car crash with his wife, he's sent into purgatory to battle Lucifer's army, in order to prevent a war between Heaven and Hell and to earn his passage to join his wife in Heaven. Alone against the armies of Hell, Daniel must fight the demons through different slices of history recreated in purgatory, before facing Lucifer himself in a final showdown.

In Painkiller, the main point of the game is to walk into a room and turn every moving thing into a shower of blood and dismembered body parts. The action is fast, the shooting intense and cathartic, and there are no other objectives besides "kill everything." As much as I enjoy more sophisticated shooters like STALKER and Deus Ex, I also hold a fond appreciation for shooters that can make mindless action fun and engaging. Thanks to the tight shooting mechanics, the wonderfully diverse and evocative level designs, the unique variety of weapons and enemies, and the colossal boss fights, Painkiller does the action very well with fantastic presentation.

(GGYNP) Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is one of the greatest RPGs ever, sharing many of the same gameplay elements that made the original Fallout games great. This should come as no surprise, considering that a good portion of VTMB's development team were the key designers behind the first two Fallouts. Developed by Troika Games in 2004 using Valve's Source engine, Vampire Bloodlines is a classic role-playing game with a unique gothic-horror setting.

Bloodlines begins just as you're embraced and join the ranks of the blood-sucking undead. As a new vampire, you learn the rules of the Masquerade -- a self-regulating system vampires follow in order to survive unnoticed in the mortal world -- and quickly become the new errand boy for the head of the Masquerade, Prince LaCroix. As LaCroix sends you on a mission to recover the sarcophagus of an ancient vampire lord, you become the focal point in a faction war to seize (or maintain) control of the Masquerade while preventing the vampire Armageddon.

As an RPG, it shines with a heaping serving of available side-quests and countless ways to customize your character. Choosing which vampire clan to be during character creation is one of the biggest choices you'll make, as each one has its own unique playstyle. Lots of quests have different ways to complete them, depending on your skills and how you want to role-play your character, and most of the decisions you make have some kind of tangible consequences. The dialogue is well-written and well-acted, and the atmosphere is just so rich and immersing.

Bloodlines is such a good game that people still talk about it on messages boards, eight years after its release. Fans love it so much that the community has pieced together an unofficial patch that's made it up to a whopping version 7.9. Bloodlines was Troika's last game, as they sadly went out business following production issues and poor sales. So if you've never played VTMB, then you owe it to yourself (and to Troika) to play this instant classic.

Great Games You Never Played: Pathologic

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played. 

Pathologic may be the most unique and remarkable game I've ever played. Developed by the Russian studio Ice-Pick Lodge in 2005, Pathologic plays kind of like a cross between Silent Hill and Morrowind. It takes elements from different genres (FPS, RPG, adventure, survival-horror) and blends them all into a uniquely weird, disturbing, glorious, compelling, brilliant, horrifying, surreal experience. Whereas most games strive to create bustling, life-like cities and locations, Pathologic instead offers a dying city.

You play as one of three possible main characters arriving in town just before a deadly plague breaks out. As the town falls into a quarantine state and the plague kills more and more people every day, your mission is to find a cure to the disease and escape with your life. You have 12 days to accomplish this, with each day bringing about new tasks and challenges that threaten your survival.

It's a wonderfully original premise that's also fleshed out with intelligent gameplay mechanics. The face of the city constantly changes as the plague sweeps through different districts and as people fall further into decay and madness. Your survival hangs on your ability to manipulate a brutally harsh economy while micromanaging limited resources. Staving off infection is not your only concern, however, as death can come just as easily at the hand of a madmen or from simple starvation.

The atmosphere this creates is simply phenomenal, with you really feeling (and seeing) the effects of the plague as you try to get by in this hellish scenario. I've never felt more vulnerable in even the most renowned of survival-horror games, and even the story offers a lot of intrigue and philosophical depth, if you can understand all that happens in this weird, twisted place. Pathologic is just such a monumental game, and it's a shame more people don't know about it. If you're in any way intrigued, continue reading to learn more.

Great Games You Never Played: The Witcher

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played. 

In a world where the standards and expectations for RPGs are set by industry powerhouses like Bethesda and BioWare, I always have to turn to the smaller guys whenever I want to play a true RPG. Piranha Bytes and Obsidian get a lot of my respect, but CD Projekt RED added their name to the list in 2007 with The Witcher, a true testament to the glorious PC gaming master race.

You play as Geralt of Rivia, one of the last remaining witchers---a society of monster-hunters who alter their bodies with mutagens to fight supernatural monsters. After an organized group of out-laws infiltrates the witcher stronghold and steals the supply of mutagens, you set out to recover the stolen goods and get to the bottom of the conspiracy, but not without encountering more monsters (both human and beast) and moral conflicts along the way.

What makes The Witcher so remarkable is that it puts a lot of weight on your actions, with many of your decisions having lasting effects on the entire game. Often times you make a seemingly-trivial decision in one chapter, and then it affects a quest in the next chapter. The moral decisions you make are complicated shades of gray with no right or wrong answer. The way you develop your character is important to how you'll play the game. There's a consequence for nearly everything you do. And all of this is done in a rich, mature setting that feels more real than it should.

The Witcher is already well-known among RPG enthusiasts, so there are reasonable odds that some of you may actually have played this one, as contradictory to the article title as that may be. Nevertheless, it's still overlooked by the mainstream and remains more of a cult hit, while getting a lot of criticism from people I would venture to say just don't "get it." So I've got more words on its brilliance (and why you should play it) in the full article.

Great Games You Never Played: STALKER

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played.

The STALKER games (in order: Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky, and Call of Pripyat) are somewhat unique in the realm of first-person shooters. Whereas most shooters are content to be linear corridor-crawlers with heavily scripted action sequences, STALKER goes for a non-linear open-world formula based on quests, inventory management, and exploration. This alone makes the STALKER games a rare gem, but they also feature some of the best atmosphere you'll ever experience in any game.

Set in the irradiated "zone" surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the radiation and fallout from its fictitious second melt-down have caused biological mutations in the local wildlife. All kinds of hazardous, supernatural anomalies litter the environment. The zone is a dark, hostile place that only scientists, scavengers, and mercenaries dare to brave. You play an amnesiac adventurer who has to venture into this twisted, mutated wasteland with one simple objective: kill a man named Strelok.

STALKER has it all: tight, sophisticated shooting mechanics; conventional RPG elements like quests, inventory management, exploration, and NPC interaction; and a rich, thick atmosphere that sucks you into its dynamic world that simply breathes with life (and chokes in decay). STALKER is an effort of ambition that's unmatched by any other game; it tried to be something different, and succeeded at being something more. If you've never experienced the glory of STALKER, then perhaps it's time you did. More after the jump.

Great Games You Never Played: Arcanum

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played.

If the words "Fallout" or "Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines" mean anything to you, then you owe it to yourself to play Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. Developed by Troika Games (the team that made Vampire Bloodlines, and many of the key designers who worked on the original Fallout), Arcanum is a steampunk role-playing game that plays much like the best of the classic RPGs.

Set during an industrial revolution, conflict pervades a society torn between sticking with the history and traditions of magic, and embracing the new wave of "heretical" technology. You play as the lone survivor of an attack on the maiden voyage of the IFS Zephyr. Initially tasked by one of the dying passengers to return a ring to "the boy," you set out on adventure to find out why assassins pursue you and, ultimately, to save the world.

As an RPG, it's among the best ever. There are tons of different ways to customize your character, not the least of which is deciding whether to follow the path of magic or technology. One path has you casting spells of all sorts, and the other has you building equipment from blueprints and fighting with firearms. The game changes and reacts to your decisions in ways that are still unsurpassed in modern games, with a open-world to explore and fulfill quests in a non-linear order. So if you like good RPGs, then you should definitely give this one a shot.

Great Games You Never Played: Killing Floor

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played.

On the surface, Tripwire Interactive's Killing Floor is a lot like Valve's Left 4 Dead series: multi-player first-person shooter survival co-op with zombies. Except that Killing Floor is actually much deeper than L4D, requiring more tact, strategy, skill, teamwork, and experience to succeed. Killing Floor boasts more enemy types that all function differently, a greater quantity and variety of weapons to use, and a class system that has players performing different roles in the group. To top it all off, Killing Floor has superior "in your face" gunplay that simply proves more cathartic than what you can find in any other co-op zombie-killing game.

Great Games You Never Played: Lineage 2

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played.

Lineage 2 may have been fated for obscurity from the beginning, if only for carrying the dreaded stigma of being a "Korean MMO," but it also didn't help that EverQuest 2 and World of Warcraft were just around the corner. Either way, L2 never achieved mainstream popularity in the West. If you were too busy playing some kind of sissy MMO, then you missed out on the most hardcore online game of them all: PVP everywhere, clan wars and politics, 400-person castle sieges, and a huge, huge level cap.

Unlike some other great games that you never played, where you can still go back and experience their glory, this one is too late to get into, as the online community is almost assuredly dead. If not, then the player-base is assuredly well over level 80 and it'll take you way too long to catch up. But L2 was an excellent MMO in its time, and deserves a retrospective spotlight for its unique gameplay accomplishments.

Great Games You Never Played: Gothic

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played.

In 2001, Piranha Bytes created the pinnacle of action-adventure-RPGs: Gothic. Set in a magically-encapsulated prison colony where criminals are sent to mine magic ore for the war against the orcish armies, the convicts have revolted against the King's guards and now run the colony in anarchy. You play as a nameless convict who's just been tossed into the barrier. Initially tasked with delivering a message to the magicians at the castle, you become a key figure in trying to bring down the magical barrier and in stopping an event that threatens to kill everyone in the colony.

Besides the wonderfully unique setting and premise, Gothic also boasts some of the most compelling gameplay ever. Carving your way up the ranks in a hostile dog-eat-dog prison, where strong beasts and monsters also roam, everything is dangerous and there's always a challenge waiting for you. It's a game that doesn't hold your hand, with death and treacherous enemies around every corner; leveling up and getting stronger is its own reward as you become better-equipped to brave the non-linear, free-roaming world of the colony. Its attention to detail also make it one of the most atmospheric, immersing game worlds ever.

If you're still not convinced of Gothic's supremacy in the world of western RPGs, continue reading for the more detailed description of its feats and strengths, with some embedded gameplay videos to illustrate.