There are a fair few games to avoid for the moment from these suggestions. The Call of Duty entries will have their moment to shine in their 1001 posts, as will the likes of FlatOut and Football Manager. Some have already been played, including The 7th Guest and Star Wars: TIE Fighter, and I'm in no rush to go back to either. From what remains, one title did jump out, now that I'm more into my tabletop gaming, and that was Card Hunter.
In it, you play against Gamesmaster Gary in a game where the combat encounters of Dungeons & Dragons are played with handfuls of cards and unseen dice rolls.
I've actually reviewed it before, a long time ago, for BasedGamer, which now points to a site that definitely isn't about user-created game reviews, as was its intention. In that review, I eventually got to the point where I liked it, but it had its problems. Read on to find out what I meant.
This was more or less the first screen I saw when loading back into Card Hunter. It's my warrior character's deck and equipment and inventory, I think. I honestly can't remember, and I spent very little time looking at it before starting the battle. The important thing to remember is that those cards will have all your available actions, from moving and attacking to healing and defending. Some are passive, some are reactive, some get attached permanently while others are used and discarded. The key thing to remember is that if you buy or otherwise equip something, it'll come with cards for your deck, allowing you to switch cards in and out between sessions to tailor it to your liking.
Each step of the campaign is presented with a short introduction, often embellished by Gary, sometimes in an attempt to impress the Pizza delivery girl who shows up from time to time, but usually to just get across the fact that he is a Gamesmaster who really enjoys his job at the table. He is also your enemy and wants to win the battle as much as you do.
In this particular encounter, it is three versus three, my warrior, wizard and healer versus a useless servant, an annoying grunt of some description and a rather powerful champion.
Cards are dealt and played from your hand(s), each doing different things. You can - if you get the cursor just right, it seems - zoom into the cards to read them in full with the right mouse button, but often they'll include the bare minimum of rules and no descriptions of actions. You're required to know or remember what certain words or actions mean, so I knew this was going to be a tricky session, and not least because this was the wall I hit when playing it the first time around.
Some cards, notably armour and other forms of defence, trigger automatically in order to reduce damage or outright block attacks. The cards swoop in from their respective origins and disappear just as quickly, though I was probably clicking the mouse an awful lot and skipping the moments where I would otherwise have been able to read what was actually going on.
The important thing to note is that I was not using any form of strategy, and was getting nowhere fast in this battle.
When a card gets triggered that can jump in to aid you, such as a card that allows you to parry an attack for some counter attacks of your own, a random number generator whirs into gear to roll a dice in the background to see if the card effect even worked.
I'm sure there are some ways to nudge the results in your favour, but you don't even get a chance to see a bunch of dice getting rolled to determine your fate - something happens or it doesn't, and it spoils the mood a little.
It wasn't long before my wizard was wiped off the face of the Earth, and my warrior followed shortly afterwards, leaving my healer out there alone. She doesn't have many - if any - attack cards in her deck, so she was also done in rather brutally, giving Gary all the victory points he needed to end the game in a defeat.
So my second run through of Card Hunter was much shorter than the first, because I'm at a wall where I can't be bothered to grind for better gear, nor pay for better gear, nor do I want to invest the time into really learning the nitty-gritty of the cards and how best to use them.
Card Hunter is an old title now, and I believe it was based on a Flash game, long ago, so you can see where it has come from and what influenced it. The problem I have with it now is that I know of tabletop games that do the dungeon crawling or card gaming better. While a PC doing all the setup and calculations in seconds makes for a much smoother experience than a tabletop, if the game at its core isn't something you want to play, then it'll not get played.
Initially, I liked Card Hunter, but as time went on I grew to not like it so much. There are many games like this, or that do things in different ways but still evoke the idea of playing D&D with your mates, and as one of the first I was aware of, Card Hunter isn't too shabby. These days, though, it's not for me any more. Sure, I've not given it a lot of time or credit to relearn it this time around, but something about it tells me that I've moved on.
It's not bad, but it's not giving me that nostalgia hit that Steam thought it might. Good to revisit and compare my old review of it, however. I don't usually like reading what I've written, but that one wasn't too shabby. I don't know if it's still online. I doubt it. No great loss to the world if it isn't, and it's no great loss to your experience as a gamer if you don't play Card Hunter.