World of Tanks.

The premise is 15v15 tank battles, simple enough. You must penetrate the enemies' armour to inflict damage. Easy.

The core issue is that each tank can carry regular shells and shells that do the same damage and just simply have higher nominal penetration, but cost more in-game currency.

Like how the fuck does that make sense.

Cuphead

It is infuriating and I wouldn’t wish the frustration on anyone

The Movies (2004) is an incredible concept, with a lot of jank

Shining Force! A TTRPG from 1992. The music and character design are really about a decade ahead of everything else that was available then. If you level one of your characters up to lv 10, you can “evolve” them into a different sprite that lets them wield better gear. This was my comfort game growing up, and was remastered for GBA in 2004. If you like it, don’t play the prequel, only the sequel.

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura remains my favourite game ever. But it is showing its age, it looks much like one of many generic story-based isometric RPGs of its time, and it's hard to understand what the fuck is going on with the gameplay, but once you learn, you realise it's just that the mechanics go scarily deep, the story is astounding, multi-layered and genuinely inspiring. The voice acting is silly in bits, but overall very impressive, and same for the soundtrack. I can still just daydream about the infinite possibilities and characters from that setting. It's just.. so much more. I've played it through 10+ times.

I might go play it again now. I need to see what interactions happen if you get a high enough Charisma to gather all the voiced followers in one big party.

I have a huge soft spot for Capcom's Strider (Arcade, 1989) to the point that I have an actual PCB. Wildly ambitious in terms of design and worldbuilding...and incredibly janky. Also, it has a co-opted soviet council turn into a giant mecha-centipede wielding a hammer and sickle. Notably influential within Capcom's own devteams, having characters who influenced Street Fighter II's Chun-Li and Mega Man X's Vile.

Also fitting the bill more directly, we have Wolfteam's Earnest Evans (Sega Mega Drive/Mega CD, 1991). A lot of 16 bit games successfully played with segmented characters for an early form of skeletal animation - like a lot of well respected classics like Alien Soldier and Contra: Hard Corps - but Wolfteam tried to take things a step further with a entire platformer where the main character has sophisticated ragdoll physics. The end result isn't very playable, but it's pretty impressive for a platform that can't do hardware rotation effects. Also one of the all-time funniest speedruns imo.

Kileak: The DNA Imperative (a PS1 game i've played emulated on DuckStation)

its a real-time FPS dungeon crawler where you in a mech (power armor? kinda hard to tell, but i think its a small mech more than a armor suit) explore a tunnel complex full of cybernetic combat drones.

the gameplay is kinda wack, you have to shoot like 30 or 40 shots (in single shot with the base weapon, a lot of rapid button mashing if you want to survive) at basically every enemy to kill them, the other weapons are super hard to find ammo for, and the tank controls in first person are pretty wild (in a fun way. you can move diagonally super fast for some reason. controls remind me of armored core 2), but it has such a sense of atmosphere its like one of those haunted PS1 videogames. Its basically like a slower paced Doom clone with more simplistic level architecture, most levels are linear corridors with some 90 degree turns and 4x4 and 6x6 rooms spread around. theres no jump or crouch or anything, just forward, back, strafe buttons with either L1/2 or R1/2 buttons, and you can't look up or down except by holding R1 and L1 to look up and R2 and L2 to look down at pre-defined angles. it doesnt matter since the game has aim assist, the crosshair moves to lock onto the enemy nearest the center/closest to you (not sure which).

Everquest 1 and BDO

Nostalgia for EQ1 is so strong but unless you got friends trying to get into an old-style mmorpg now is painful

BDO because I actually love the combat style and gameplay but the k-mmorpg inspired upgrade system is just maddening also fuck microtransactions

A really obscure 90s title called Millennia: Altered Destinies. Unusable UI, but fuck the concept of guiding 4 alien civs through time travel to become peacefully co existing powers ready to defeat an alien invasion was amazing.

Tribes Vengence singleplayer was great and you can fucking fight me Tribes 2 fans I've been around since Earthsiege 2.

I actually liked doom 3

It's hardly obscure but Final Fantasy 14. They've actually shortened the grind to get to "the good part" significantly since the old days, but it's still way too long and I cannot in good conscience recommend a game where your choice is twenty hours of boring bullshit or paying $20 to skip it.

I would say Hinterland, but that game can be got for a couple bucks and really doesn't overstay its welcome if you wanted to just do a single run. Seriously, I love that game enough that I considered modding it, but there's just enough layers of encryption that it isn't worth bothering with for a low-tech guy like myself.

The "_________ of the killer" series by garmentdistrict. They're horror comedy walking sims with a dream-like soundtrack and art that looks like it was made in ms paint. I love the aesthetic and writing of it but most of the ppl I know just find it weird.