Crimelife 2 is a GTA clone made by one person, despite being very limited and basically killing and exploring the only you can do, I have played about 111 hours of it - I do not know why. I just like walking around and messing with all the NPCs and exploding a bunch of cars that I collected and smashed into each other. It isn't really that good at all, but I enjoy messing with it anyways,
yeaah i can see why you list that crimelife game as a "guilty pleasure". it.. looks.. pretty ... umm.. I won't say.
For me I guess the games I'd call guilty pleasures would be :
The Last Remnant for PC: despite all the warts on this game (stiff and looping animation cycles, poor voice acting in spots, dated graphics in spots, a terrible protagonist, kinda meh storyline, lack of complete control in battles, etc) I have killed almost 300 hours in the game over time because I just get so addicted to it. With a few tweaks to crank the display rez and certain extra visual details, it doesn't look as bad(turning on a higher FOV helps a TON) and I dunno.. between combat and the bajillion things to do in game.. i love it!
Alpha Protocol: This was kind of a hidden gem for me. I got it for less than $5 years ago and didn't expect much. What I got was a longer than expected and deeper than expected game with a surprisingly diverse set of story variety (as i played it a friend who also snagged it cheap played it himself and we compared story elements). It is buggy as hell, the controls are NOT ideal and whereas there is a lot of variety in how the story can play out, the depth for weapons/skills is not REALLY that big and so later in the game feels a little stunted. I guess what made me love it a lot more was the ability to use texmod.exe and tweak some textures so I could make the main character look almost exactly like me, swap images in the "safe houses" for pics of me and my wife and my own art, and so better "immerse" myself into the game. The base character generator/settings are pretty finite and so If I wasn't able to tweak it as I did, I likely wouldn't have gotten nearly as much out of the game as I did. So yeah.. love me that game, but I also know it's really not a GREAT game and most folk cringed at it when it came out.
[I am Evilkinggumby on DeviantArt and Steam if you want to looks me up!]
I think it's the whole 'less is more' gimmick - I know that it's a pretty overused term, but that's pretty much what I feel playing it. And because it's FREE, very easy to access and play.
And yes evil, it is a very big guilty pleasure. I could be playing any game I bought on Steam, but nope. Instead I'm playing this.... game. And I think I know what you were going to say because I think about it every time I load it up: the graphics are very 'MEH', just killing being the only game mechanic without any context is pretty... stupid. (didn't have a better word, so I feel pretty silly using that) And it's overall pretty glitch-y.
Alpha Protocol looks pretty good though, I think with a lot of changes it could be rereleased (if that's allowed) and some people who find it would enjoy it. And since you mentioned 'modding', Steam Workshop for a game like that would be great.
Sega published Alpha Protocol back in 2010, and I think it was not successful, so I can't imagine them working to improve the PC version, which was probably an afterthought, but who knows. Obsidian Entertainment (the developer) has gone on to get almost 4 million dollars for the Project Eternity kickstarter, so I think they'd want to invest their time in something they own. That's the great thing about kickstarter!
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
yeah with more polish Alpha protocol COULD have been a kind of "Mass Effect" of spy/FPS's. Sadly, it didn't do well, has some serious warts, and would likely never end up re-visited anytime soon. But in the days of repackaging, HD remakes, and reselling.. MAYBE... with enough drive.. it could happen.
[I am Evilkinggumby on DeviantArt and Steam if you want to looks me up!]
Winback: Covert Operations will always be this for me. It hasn't aged well at all. It has those weird, ghastly, empty-office-buildings-and-astroturf early 3D environments that feel really empty and make my skin crawl. I don't know what it is exactly, I only get that feeling in games made during one very precise time period, when arcades and dreamcasts still walked the earth, roughly around the transition between the playstation/N64 and PS2/xbox/gamecube generations. Something about being in those clean, vacant rooms and being under that big skybox makes me feel really agoraphobic, I don't know why. And just when I thought I'd never have to get that feeling playing a game again, Deadly Premonition comes out...
The AI is terrible, the character design is absolutely ridiculous, and the voice acting...good god, the voice acting...Still, I first played it when I was a young lad, and it holds a special place in my heart. The story's alright, but terribly written, sort of a Tom Clancy meets Resident Evil tale about terrorists taking over the facility for a laserbeam satellite, the counterterrorist operation immediately goes haywire before it even starts when their helicopter gets shot down, and the rookie of the squad has to carry out the mission while looking for his missing teammates as they get picked off one by one. Looking back, it actually had a lot of ideas that were ahead of its time. It had cover-based combat before Gears of War, and 360 degree laser pointer free aiming before Resident Evil 4. Although those games did their respective ideas about a hundred times better than Winback did, the ideas are still there.
Also, I would count Siren as this, for me. Although I didn't 100% it, I did beat it, which is quite an ordeal and took me 24 hours on my first playthrough (12 hours on my second playthrough, knowing the solutions to beating each stage. Still not a walk in the park, though). As such, I will be the first to admit that it's not an amazing game. It's not a great game, either, and it might not even be a good game. But, it's a very unique and special game, unlike anything else I've ever played before or since, and I latched right onto that with the veracity of a face hugger.
