I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
Never liked Armored Core, it's not a Mech game to me. Its an FPS arcade shooter with robot skins. Giant robots should not be zoomy-ass evengelion ballerinas engaging in sword combat. They should be unweildy tanks that casually stroll thru one-story buildings and fart artillery.
My first stompy robot game was Mechwarrior 3, and that's set my expectation of the genre ever since.
Giant robots should not be zoomy-ass evengelion ballerinas engaging in sword combat. They should be unweildy tanks that casually stroll thru one-story buildings and fart artillery.
I was also a big MechWarrior 2 enjoyer so I know what you're getting at and I like that too for different reasons.
Mechwarrior 2 was dope as hell. I had a computer teacher in middleschool who had MW2 set up on the school's lab. Used to stay after school like a nsrd to get my ass kicked in videogames and listen to him explain battletech lore.