"Lesser Known" PC and Video Games?

[HeapThaumaturgist]

System Shock and System Shock 2 would be entertaining settings for a D20 Future game. Unfortunately I can't find my copies. I've been jonesing to play SS2 for over a year now, but I can't even find it in bargain bins and I don't want to order it online and pay darn-near full price for such an old game.

I still have Shodan as my home PCs sound scheme.

--fje

 

[Krieg]

System Shock and System Shock 2 would be entertaining settings for a D20 Future game. --fje

Crap I should have known someone would beat me to it!

SS & SS2 are probably the best PC RPGs no one has ever heard of.

Future horror on an empty spaceship?! You can't beat that with a stick!

BTW a review of SS2 can be found at The Underdogs abandonware sight, not to mention the game itself!

http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?gameid=3924

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

((EDIT: Wow. I'm an idiot. I guess they got the Abandonware/Not-Abandonware issue sorted out as the link is back and it works. I was there only two or three months ago and it had been taken down. Sweet.

YOU. Yea YOU. Go download it NOW. ))

Been there. SS2 is no longer Abandonware. It had been listed as such for a while, and somebody tipped me to it at Underdogs, but by the time I got there they'd taken down the links and people who had designed the game were griping that it WASN'T abandonware and that you should go buy it from some low-cost publisher that had rereleased it. But the only copies I could find were like 40 bucks and I couldn't see my way to paying that kind of money for an old game I already HAD bought which I'd beaten.

--fje

 

[Kaleon Moonshae]

Just to add to this, one you've missed here that I've already thought about converting is the X-COM series of games.

Alien infiltration, interception of UFOs, the hunt for alien bases, and researching alien tech so that you can turn their weapons on them all sound to me like ideal plot devices for PCs. Might have to be played a little fast and loose, but there's loads of background info in the first game alone, let alone the series.

that's called Delta Green

edit: Also, to a later poster, XCOM was based more on lovecraft than the british tv show, although there are parts of it in there too.

 

[Krieg]

Although I'm not sure if they count as "lesser known", another interesting possibility would be Julian May's Pliocene Earth books (The Many Colored Land etc). You would have to punch up the psi power level, but everything else is tailor made for modern/future D&D.... errr I mean D20.

Been there.

Well it was directed at the folks who have never played it!

 

[evildm]

I did my best to stick to lesser known games, but there's some really cool games that haven't been mentioned above that'd make awesome RPGs.

Silent Hill (any of them)
Beyond Good & Evil (this just begs to be an RPG)
Anachronox (I've considered using this as a setting a few times)
Nocturne
Battlezone (1 or 2)
Deus Ex
Ghost Recon/Rainbow Six
Kingpin
Mafia
No One Lives Forever (1 and 2)
Sin
Hitman (Any of them, though I'm not sure how you'd handle a group of hitmen)
Silent Storm

As for X-Com, I've run a few little short-lived games following the concept, and it's always been a great success. Now that there's stats for Greys in the Menace Manual, it'd be pretty easy to run one, I think.

 

[Piratecat]

I absolutely agree about System Shock and System Shock 2. I'm a little wierded out that the woman who voiced Shodan comes to parties at our house every once in a while (many of the players in my game are former Looking Glass employees who worked on SS, SS 2, Thief & Thief 2.) A great game, and one that would make a wonderful conversion to d20 Future.

 

[Thanee]

I wouldn't consider System Shock "lesser known", by the way, it was a milestone of the genre.

Jagged Alliance is also a fun game and could work well as a modern campaign background.

@PC: Heh. That's still from the time where the employees did the voices and not professional actors (like it's done today, usually), I suppose.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Wraith Form]

I'm thinking a remote research base in S. America that gets caught in a cross fire between American troops (the type that don't "exist", if you know what I mean) and some resistance fighter types. Then suddenly the aliens start popping up and all hell breaks loose in the ensuing chaos.

Yeah; they called that movie Predator.

 

[Ibram]

how about the old FPS Blood... that game rocked, and would make a good base for a horror campaign.