Best Pleasant Surprise in a game? (Flipside to "disappointment")

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

I'll start the ball rolling:

Far Cry.

My machine had problems handling HL2 and I couldn't get it to play, Far Cry was about a year old already and bargain bin, great press, but no one seemed to talk about it anymore...

But I could get it to run. And I had about as much fun playing that game as any shooter ever. The look of the game and the FEEL of the interface (a natural, walk/crouch/prone type feel, as opposed to HL2 which felt like sliding around on skates on an iced over pond, even tho the graphics were supreme). The goofy easy going humor, and open ended levels.

Good times!

[NewHampshireDem]

1. Oh so many ...

System Shock 2 ... creepy scary, rather than Doom 3 'SURPRISE!' scary, with a great deal of fun and a lot of ways to solve the puzzles.

Syberia ... amazing graphics, puzzles that were just hard enough, and a fun little story.

Morrowind and its expansion packs ... Daggerfall was so ambitious as to be, at times, practically unplayable and it had so many skills that there was just no use for (like speaking Mermaid). Morrowind cut out the excess crap and made one of the greatest RPG's of all time.

[Guy Fawkes]

2. Agreed on all three...

I was new to the Elder Scrolls series, and I started a little while before the Bloodmoon expansion came out for Morrowind. A great game- and while I never played the second expansion, I bought Oblivion on the day it came out.

System Shock 2 (and I'm waiting for Bioshock!) was voted "scarest PC game" for a long time- and I'd bet that it still is. I love the different paths you could take (skill wise) and all the awesome extras- like the hand held games.

Syberia came with our first windows PC. That and BurnCycle- which had cool music- were the first two games I played on Windows. Looking back, I think games like those (and Sim City, another early release) were what put Windows on the gaming map, where Apple had previously dominated with series like Zork, HHGTTG, etc.

[Occulus]

5. TES4: Oblivion

Makes Morrowind look SO last era. Vastly improved everything. Oblivion.... rocks.

Seriously. Oblivion = Greatest RPG ever made.

Period.

[jayctravis]

9. OMG...SS2 terrified me!

And like you said...not in the "stuff jumping out" manner. The "can't play this with headphones at night" kind of scary.

My scariest moment was right after Polito explained that the cyber-equipment surgically implanted into your brain might pick up psychic energy that would appear as "ghosts". I saw my first ghost. Then had just read a log about the lab-monkeys going crazy. I'm edging slowly through this decimated lab hearing distant monkeys "eep! eep!" I turn a corner and painted on the bulkhead door in red blood is the word "RUN!"

Sounds really cheesy to describe it, but I had to shut down the computer for a little while.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

10. No, it's not cheesy.

I did the exact same thing when I encountered that wall.

I've only been able to finish System Shock 2 legitimately once.
Once.

I really wish they'd do a System Shock 3.

I know Irrational Games has a game coming out called BioShock which looks similar to SS2.
The game looks fantastic, but the lead developer who was giving the voice-over in the video I watched was very, very full
of himself: "Nothing like this has evern been done before!" "Getting away from the mundane FPS games..."

Game still looks great, though.

[jayctravis]

11. I've heard that EA is devoping SS3 on their own...

and will probably not get what is good about the series.

However the "spiritual succesor" to the System Shock series is being developed by Ken Levine. It's called BioShock and will be set in an underwater city called Rapture where all the "perfect" people went in the 60's and things have gone horribly wrong.

The movie I saw online looked really good.

[YOY]

3. Heroes of Might and Magic (all of them)

Divine Divinity as well...alot of lesser known titles that just never got the chance as well: the Jagged Alliance serries comes to mind.

[yellowdogintexas]

6. Heroes of M & M has been a mainstay in our house for years

we all play it I think the cats would too if we could teach them.

Heroes IV was my least favorite, and I am enjoying the heck out of V

[Guy Fawkes]

4. Throne of Darkness

What I thought was just a lame Diablo clone was actually a pretty good game. You can control several characters at once (Samurai), but the gameplay is best when you try to use just one. The game was definitely worth a lot more than the $1.05 I paid for it.

[semillama]

7. The latest pleasant surprise was in Prey

-the radio host transmissions. I won't spoil it for those who haven't played it yet, but it's freaking awesome. Prey would make a really good movie, actually. If you're a 360 player like me, go rent it. You can easily finish it in a weekend, and it's loads of fun to play.

[jayfish]

8. I Have Read That...

new content will be available soon. It will be free to boot. I played about %99.9 of the game in July and finished it up last-night. ...good stuff.

Jay