#7gamestoknowme
Seeing this going around, so...
1) Uniracers
2) Sonic Adventure 2: Battle
3) Contra: Hard Corps
4) G-Darius
5) Radiant Silvergun
6) Eureka Seven: Vol 1. The New Wave
7) Eureka Seven: Vol 2. The New Vision

Completely unironic about all of these, love over the top 00's games trying way too hard, love shmups even if I'm bad at them, love Treasure games, and who doesn't love Uniracers? (*crickets*) :P

(The E7 games try to do 500 things, are bad at all of them, and are fascinating.)

@gourdcaptain damn I wasn’t even aware there were Eureka 7 games, love that show.
@GungJoe #eureka7
The Eureka Seven PS2 games are wild in that they contain:
- Ground-based mech combat with vehicle modes.
- Aerial mech combat.
- Liftboard air surfing and racing.
- On-foot gun and melee combat.
And went to the trouble to design a game engine that allows all of these except air mech combat to seamlessly transition between each other, as you can get out of your mech, fire a pistol, punch a guy, sky surf to another mech, hop in, turn to a car, and drive off.

@GungJoe And they did all this while also implementing a real-time physics system for terrain objects during combat.

It is _absurdly_ ambitious.

_and it runs like the jankiest thing_, with framerates dropping to single digits during cutscenes in coffee shops from rendering too many coffee cups onscreen, weird animations, mechs being knocked over by tiny barrels flying into them, and none of the elaborate transitioning between modes is ever necessary more than like, twice.

@GungJoe As far as I can tell by Google Translate, Eureka Seven started as another attempt by Bandai to do a multimedia franchise in the vein of .hack across anime, video games, and others, but entirely internally. And they just did not invest in the games to the same degree as .hack to get them finished.

There's remnants of what's clearly an _open overworld_ in the first E7 game! (The second is much more paired back and functional, and kinda good, but less absurdly ambitious.)

@GungJoe All this on top of going full into multimedia franchise of the early 00's mode and the only E7 anime character to show up in the games in any prominence is... Moondoggie.

Yeah.

@GungJoe And the plot of the games just feels like it's based on a different revision of the series bible than the anime eventually went with, with weird setting details on military structure or such.

that said, the main protagonist mech of the games, the Terminus r505 rules

@GungJoe There's also an updated version of the first game (New Wave) in Japan, New Wave GRADUATION that was a pack-in with the E7 movie DVD?!? Can't find anything on it...

Games are like 50% cutscene, and I'll end on two notes about the plot in a spoiler tag..

@GungJoe The second game's plot explains what CFS, the system briefly in the series that causes Holland's compac drive to glow red and the Gekko crew worries about him using.

_It's the Zero System from Gundam Wing._ Really. Giving enhanced piloting skill with a computer in exchange for driving the pilot crazy and violent. welp

also it makes the main game villain scream about THE LIE OF CITIES AND TOWERS and go full metal gear villain

@GungJoe Also it's made out of weird red trapars found in a deep shaft that speak to people with the WILL OF CFS.

Given trapars and the Scub Coral have... so many questions?!!

Also the plot of the second game does briefly examine how weird it is that everyone's into surf culture around armed giant robots of war, lol.

@gourdcaptain I'll have to try and pick them up sometime. I just watched a bit on youtube and they look really fun!

@GungJoe Fair warning, the 1st game starts _rough_.

like "do almost the exact same mech fight 11 times in a row in the same arena with the same mechs and no weapon customization yet with the only interruption being the awful lift board races" rough

I was laughing hard at how absurd that was, but it feels like one of the more obvious signs the production of that game was on fire.

(The lift board races are the part of the game with the most issues, New Vision mostly cuts them.)

@GungJoe PRO TIP: You can hold the fire button for your gun in the LFO combat to do a multi-lock on shot, the first game never tells you about this outside of the physical paper manual, lol.