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By Gabe Gurwin on July 24, 2023 at 11:50AM PDT

Over the years, there have been a whole lot of acclaimed video game franchises, many of which have come to include enough games to keep you entertained for years to come. However, even the biggest game series can still have some unusual or forgotten entries. These range from games that didn't fit cleanly into the rest of their series' genre to games that are straight-up not available anymore, leaving them to fade into relative obscurity.

Some of them are obscure because they're just not any good, of course, but there are many others that just didn't fit with the rest of the series. It could be a change in genre compared to the other games, an experimental game mechanic, or even landing on a platform it usually didn't appear on. Would we expect a Sonic the Hedgehog role-playing game to be remembered as much as the platformers, or a Tetris game that focuses on sabotaging your opponent more than actually playing Tetris? Probably not, but many of these games are still worth playing, even if doing so isn't always so easy in 2023. Or, in some cases, practically impossible. Here are some big-name franchise games you might not have played--or heard of.

You have almost certainly heard of Red Dead Redemption, and its prequel Red Dead Redemption 2 was an enormous hit for Rockstar back in 2018. But even Rockstar seemed to acknowledge that Red Dead Redemption's predecessor, the 2004 game Red Dead Revolver, was not nearly as ubiquitous. After all, putting the "2" after Red Dead Redemption seems to imply that the previous game had started the franchise in the first place. It's true that Redemption set a much higher quality bar than Revolver did--it wasn't even a Rockstar project until partway through development--and Revolver doesn't have the same open-world freedom of the next two games. Still, it's worth checking out just to see how far we've come over the next two decades.

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If you don't have a big-name arcade restaurant chain like Dave & Buster's near your home, there's a good chance you've never even seen, let alone played Halo: Fireteam Raven. Taking place concurrently with Halo: Combat Evolved, Fireteam Raven is a rail shooter for up to four players (depending on the cabinet you're using) and equips everyone with a mounted machine gun or assault rifle. An enormous screen displays Covenant enemies and vehicles in front of you, and through careful strategy and lightning-fast reflexes, you can defend against the alien threat. There is even Halo Waypoint support so you can get some exclusive rewards once you're done. With the machines costing thousands of dollars, you'll probably not have one permanently in your home.

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Tetris Battle Gaiden is not obscure because it's a bad game. In fact, it's easily one of the best Tetris games of all time--it just happens to have never gotten a release outside of Japan. The Super Famicom game sees you playing a game of Tetris against an opponent, but the twist here is that both you and your opponent have special abilities that can be banked and then unleashed for a variety of special effects. You can use "wind" to push all the pieces to one side of the board, making it much easier to clear them. A personal favorite lets you scan and fax your own board to your opponent, and strategically playing "badly" before giving your opponent a garbage board is hilarious no matter how many times you do it. Bring it to the rest of the world!

Image credit: Giant Bomb

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If you buy Nintendo's systems on launch day, then the chances are high that you've heard of or played Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars--it was one of the only bright spots in a pretty terrible launch lineup for the 3DS. For longtime fans of the Ghost Recon games, however, the 3DS probably isn't the first place you expect to play a great entry in the series. But that's exactly what Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars is. Rather than try to replicate the tactical shooter gameplay of its big siblings, Shadow Wars is a streamlined XCOM-like directed by none other than XCOM series creator Julian Gollop. Sure, it's a bit weird that a 3DS launch title is one of the best Ghost Recon games--right up there with Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter--but the world is a strange place.

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If you're like most people, when you think of the earliest days of Castlevania, you think of the NES. That game, while a tad clunky by today's standards, is still a classic--its art direction and music somehow worked within the limited technical confines of the system to deliver something both fun and spooky. You'd think that a version remade for the arcade would be even better--but you'd be so very wrong. Haunted Castle is one of the most disappointing games you could ever play, taking the clunky quirks of the original console version and seemingly making them the focus of the game. It's almost impossible to control and in my estimation absolutely impossible to enjoy. At least it looks pretty.

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We're spoiled these days with fully featured console and PC games in the palms of our hands thanks to the Switch and Steam Deck, but it wasn't always this way. Back in the early 2000s, someone at Nokia saw a Choco Taco and thought that it looked like a great shape for a handheld gaming device that is also a phone. The N-Gage never took off the way Nokia hoped, but it did get a first-person Elder Scrolls game! Was it good? Not especially, with the grainy resolution of the N-Gage making it difficult to tell what was happening, but imagine being able to play this while you waited to go home and play the "real" Elder Scrolls games in 2004.

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R-Type remains one of the most legendary 2D shooter franchises of all time, and it's also one of the toughest. Using your reflexes, awareness, and carefully placed shots, the game demands everything you have in order to succeed. R-Type Command (R-Type Tactics in other regions), however, takes a very different approach. It still resembles R-Type in its visual style, almost to a scary degree, but a turn-based system with hexagonal tiles is used instead of real-time blasting. Short cinematics still play out to give you that feeling of intense space combat, as well, making it a great choice if you're in the mood to enter the R-Type universe but don't have the focus or hand-eye coordination to play a shoot-'em-up.

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It has been well over a decade since Portal 2 released, and it might seem to the average observer like we haven't gotten a new Portal game during the intervening years. That is sort of true, but the fantastic spin-off game Bridge Constructor: Portal shouldn't be ignored. Yes, it features the bridge-building and testing the other Bridge Constructor games are known for, but it also includes plenty of Portal DNA. Sending sections of bridges into portals and experimenting with physics-altering materials to complete puzzles makes it feel like a proper Aperture Science experience, and a collaborative effort that deserves to be treated as an official part of the Portal franchise.

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There is a good chance you have not played PT, but it's very likely you've heard of the game--if you can call it that--extensively. Short for "Playable Teaser," PT was intended as an introduction to Silent Hills, a horror game from Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro. Shortly after it was released, however, Konami canceled the project and removed PT from the PlayStation Store, making it so the game couldn't even be downloaded again if it had been claimed previously. As such, very silly people have sold PS4 consoles with the game installed for high prices, but PT is a very good teaser for a game we'll never play. It's truly terrifying, and the simple worldbuilding done in only one hallway and a bathroom is phenomenal.

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It sounds like something you'd come up with if you put a bunch of game franchises and developer names into a randomizer and created whatever it spat back out, but Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood really is an honest-to-goodness Sonic role-playing game developed by BioWare. Yes, that BioWare. Released for the DS just prior to BioWare being purchased by EA, Sonic Chronicles certainly has a brighter, less dangerous aesthetic than the studio's other games--both before and after--and there is also less minutiae in the combat. This should appeal to longtime Sonic fans more than if BioWare had gone with something like Knights of the Old Republic's system, but perhaps there was a reason that Sonic wasn't turned into an RPG before.

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The Silent Hill series has seen games of various quality levels over the years, with the general consensus being that the series was at its peak during its early years on PlayStation consoles. But while we may have seen some pretty mediocre games during the following years, there were a few absolute gems that may have slipped through the cracks. Chief among them is Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which initially released on Wii and eventually made its way to PS2 and PSP. Designed by Sam Barlow of Her Story and Immortality fame, it's a creative retelling of the first game's story, with a new cell phone mechanic and the emphasis put firmly on atmosphere and horror rather than action.

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Few games are more known and appreciated than Metal Gear Solid, but what you might not know is there was a completely different--and very good--game bearing that name on Game Boy Color. It's more comparable in its gameplay style to the original Metal Gear games than PS1's Metal Gear Solid, but this simplified approach makes stealth and combat much more manageable on the Game Boy Color's limited control layout. Codec conversations--albeit without voice acting--look very similar to the PlayStation version, but the game's story is completely different, making it a nice treat to discover now if you think you've gobbled up every bit of Metal Gear that existed.

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Following the success of Nier Automata, Square Enix opted to re-release its predecessor with a new coat of paint, a reworked combat system, and some bonus story content. This version is technically called Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487193… but is more commonly just called Nier Replicant, and it stars a young version of the main character. Back in 2010, however, this version was released in Japan while the West got Nier Gestalt, which stars an old version of the character. If you've played Replicant's re-release, it's closer to the Japanese version than what Western players got when the game originally launched. But in this case, that's not such a bad thing, as the new game's combat is modeled after Automata and feels much more like a companion piece to Automata than a 2010 game introduced to a new audience.

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