   Further games you should play:  The interesting losers
  Historically the lessons learned by failure are as important as the ones that are learned from success.  The Games All Designers Should Play thread lacks a basic foundation in the also-rans of the respective idioms, including games which were summarily executed by the ones in that thread.  For example, Chess is relatively recent in board game terms.  It was preceded in much of what would become the Anglo world by variants of Tafl.  This game is an excellent course in "shallow" tactical complexity, emphasizing zones of control, over the "deep" complexity evident in chess, emphasizing synergy between units with different capabilities.  In some ways, the entire genre of adventure games is an also-ran in video game terms.   Its ideas have been coopted into several other "genres" by games like Deus Ex and even certain platformers.  At the same time, playing at least one of the old adventure games, with their extreme reliance on puzzles (to the exclusion of all other tools in most cases) is an object lesson in game design that is extremely valuable for designers not because the games themselves should be emulated but because their ideas are so valuableWhat's YOUR favourite also-ran?   
Beyond Good and Evil is interesting as the historical predecessor to Prince of Persia (which used the same engine). It had much the same jump a little/fight a little bifurcation, but combat was button-mashing rather than tactical (the ultra combo: Hit-hit-hit-hit-hit-hit). Its level design was somewhat more multilinear than PoP's rails (mostly because it actually had item acquisition) and there was somewhat more story development. The excision of the RPG aspect from PoP in favor of "pure" gameplay, and the enrichening of the combat model to support it, was interesting to see in retrospect.   ;  'The Nomad Soul' (Or 'Omicron') is an interesting title to look at. It was an action/rpg that attempted to bridge the gap between games and popular culture by bringing a famous musician - David Bowie, into Omicron as a virtual performer. It was a brave move by Bowie and the production team. Unfortunately, they were too ambitious; Omicron also featured a baffling story line and utterly linear gameplay in a wide open world with few clear landmarks. Perhaps due to bad budgeting and market research, the game ran horribly on most hardware available at launch and was subsequently crippled with 100 yard view distances and frequent, lengthily loading times.   