Metroid kinda fits. While Metroid and Metroid 2 have their critical acclaim, specially in the recent years as people revisit them with a new perspective, Super Metroid was such a leap in art style, tech, and popularity to the point where it’s still considered the best 2D Metroid game by many
*Adding: Happy that my single comment is bringing back good memories. Many late nights and fun times for my siblings and me playing these games on Gamecube and PS2. Crash hard, fellow burners🤘
facts, still prefer 3 over revenge. paradise is still fun to drop into as well tho, but it’s such a departure from the others, basically Forza Horizon before there was Forza Horizon
I remember as a kid that revenge seemed like it was better at everything... But it didn't have any big cars like 3 did. Who cares about Crash mode if the biggest thing I can drive into traffic is a van? Preferred 3 way more because of it.
I played the hell out of 1,2 and London 1969. I had never seen anything like it. A game that allowed you to free roam an entire city and steal anything and kill anyone. Then III came out and I forgot all about them.
For me GTA2 was insanely good.
GTA Is more of a “normaly doodled horse (gta1), detailed fire epic horse (gta 2), and transcendent super saiyain horse in space ” scenario.
I actually like GTA2 a bit more than 3. It might be nostalgia but I feel like for the time period it was really a very well done game and the gameplay still holds up today.
Hell, it even had multiplayer, which GTA3 did not.
gta 1 and 2 were also iconic, we used to talk about them as 12 year olds like gta 5 today. How old are you if I may ask? GTA 1 and 2 were games we couldn't believe existed.
No way! You weren’t there in the DOS days then. Duke and Commander Keen ruled the roost! Duke becoming an FPS was wild to me back then but still very cool.
I had a lot of fun with the Duke platformers and Commander Keen as a kid, but I don't think I could go back to them now. But I play Duke 3D all the time lol
The first 2 Duke Nukem games are genuinely great, but they are absolutely products of their time. They’re a little clunky, but for early 90s shareware games, they’re great.
Chess 4 is dialing it up to uncomfortable levels based on the most recent trailer, but it has really interesting things to say about trans-rights in sub Saharan Africa.
Daggerfall should have spawned two entirely new gaming genres. Instead, it only created one route with Morrowind, prizing intricately detailed open world spaces instead of the generative massive world quest design of Daggerfall. Sadly, while Daggerfall creates incredible RPG experiences (especially with mods), it is not really feasible to create games of that size and have them be functional as graphics and sound improves.
Hell, I love Daggerfall now. I didn’t even play it until after playing Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, so I’m not biased as ‘it was the first one I played, so of course I love it’.
It's still my 2nd fave in the series after morrowind. These days I don't even do the quest. I just live my life becoming a rich warrior and property baron while committing loan fraud
This is one of the most significant examples imo, because of the dedicated art style of ALTTP, it's replayability far exceeds a lot of others mentioned here.
I get shit when I say it but BotW and TotK are some of the worst Zelda games to me. They spent so much time making the world they forgot to put anything but repeating little stupid mini puzzles.
TotK had one job in my mind. BotW but put the dungeons and unique loot back in. Instead we got more mini puzzles.
I just have to accept that if this is the direction Zelda is going in then Zelda just isn't for me anymore. Sad, but that's OK
As someone who played all three growing up I liked them all, but liked ALttP the most. As an adult playing them again, I think Zelda I holds up the least. Zelda 2 is a pretty good Castlevania style game.
While this is pretty much accurate, at the time i remember burning a whole summer playing gta on my friends computer giggling like, well… children at constantly mashing civilians into paste and doing burnouts in their blood. It was transcendent compared to what else was out there.
Sometimes my son will play a game with violence in it and the father in me wants to tell him not to do that but then I remember how I used to block off the hospital doors with a car in GTA 4 and shoot everybody in there as they tried to run out
Honestly, the original GTA games were pretty fun and were revolutionary for their time. People didn't consider them to be bad by any stretch, it's just that GTA 3 was such a huge shift in tone and quality that GTA 1 and 2 are only bad when in direct comparison.
Watching my older brother play GTA 2, hearing “Gimme your wallet, asshole!”, seeing the blood, hearing the screams. I knew that game was unlike anything else I had played before.
Witcher 1 and 2 were by no means bad games (ok, that might be overselling. Witcher 1 is pretty atrocious to replay) but Witcher 3 really was such an incredible jump.
I loved the first one and was really pissed they changed basically everything in Witcher 2.
I loved it so much that I won't play it again.. because I know I won't like it anymore.
Witcher 2 actually holds up very well, and honestly, the ONLY reason I like the Wild Hunt more is because it's a much bigger game. Witcher 2 is surprisingly short. Probably because it was designed with replayability in mind, with the two paths it has.
Witcher 1 however has aged quite poorly unfortunately.
Witcher 2 has an awesome story but atrocious combat. Witcher 1's combat sure is weird but once you get the hang of it, its dead simple and you'll never lose. Not so for W2.
Metroid, the original 1 and 2 are rough even by the standards of when it launched. Super is where the series hit its stride and started creating the metroidvania subgenre.
Stating that the original Metroid on NES is “rough even by the standards of when it was launched” is crazy to me. The original Metroid (1986/1987) was groundbreaking and had an entire genre named after it.
ETA: Striking through an afterthought so as not to distract from the main point since its nuance has become a hot topic and a dead horse.
I’ll say Mario 3 compared to Super Mario Bros. and Mario 2 and/or Mario The Lost Levels. The previous games were fine in their own right (except The Lost Levels) but Mario 3 is in a league of its own. It’s night and day, it still shares many of the same mechanics that are still present in newer 2D Mario games. It hasn’t aged poorly at all.
This thread has way too many examples of just "3 was the best one"/"3 was a big step up" when the meme image is straight up a stick figure for the first two.
I also can't help but feel like a lot of the examples very probably boil down to "1 & 2 were before my time, but 3 came out at the right time for me personally to really enjoy it"
While the first 2 are dated now, and 2 always had some very odd design choices, but the first Far Cry was big release and incredibly well received. The only reason it isn't held in as high regard these days is because Half Life 2 came out like 9 months later and raised the bar again.
Even still, up till Crysis launched, Halo, Half Life 2, and Far Cry were basically the default trio of must play single player FPS games on the PC.
As a DMC 2 fan I won’t say anything about your DMC 2 opinion BUT wdym DMC 1 is painful ? This game is genuinely so beautiful and really satisfying to play, the only thing that was bad is the camera angles but not as bad as DMC 2. I mean, that’s my own opinion after all
As someone who has only just started the series, DMC 1 is VERY of its time. And while I’m not at the point where I’d say it’s painful, it suffers from many flaws of its time
To me it was one of the most painful games I have played honestly. Getting hit constantly because you were just in the area where the camera switches from one angle to the other, or the platforming being insanely awful, or many of the boss fights being insanely wonky.
The first Devil May Cry is fantastic. The Gothic horror atmosphere and level design was never replicated in the franchise ever again. I can't agree with this.
Nah dude, MG2 was fire and added so many new ideas that MGS recycled
Don't get me wrong, i love MGS but MG2 is not that far off, even if it suffers from weird design choices like what do you mean there is an elevator in the women's bathroom
The first and second games are incomparable to Uprising. They are 2d side scrollers while Uprising is a 3d shooter. Most people (including myself unfortunately) haven't even played the first or second games in the series since Uprising was such a monumental step.
The witcher 1 as a game, is horrendous and it was bad even back then. Rpg wise it was... fine. But to say that the gameplay was good is just a lie. The story was still good however.
There is a reason they are remaking witcher 1 and not witcher 2.
I understand why, the gameplay can be clunky and the visuals are definitely dated, but I still have to strongly disagree. Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 are some of the best storytelling in video games, Larian just can't compete on writing. An online summary isn't going to do them justice and is going to spoil the experience.
BG1 and BG2 were masterpieces at the time and are still two of my favorite games, but bg3 is just a huge leap, but i think it's kind of unfair to compare a new game to 20 year old games although they still hold up and are timeless classics
Baldurs Gate 2 shadows of amn is still my favorite game of all time. Playing it on release was phenomenal, it blew everything else out of the water. The story is still to this day the best story ever told in gaming.
Ace Attorney (1) was good, yet not great. Justice for All (2) was one of the weakest of the series, but Trials and Tribulations (3) was peak cinema, indirectly making Ace Attorney (1) way better.
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u/chrisvelanti 22d ago
Metroid kinda fits. While Metroid and Metroid 2 have their critical acclaim, specially in the recent years as people revisit them with a new perspective, Super Metroid was such a leap in art style, tech, and popularity to the point where it’s still considered the best 2D Metroid game by many