Now, I'm not talking about a regular game you got on the cheap, from a used game store or an online sale or something. I mean a retail game that had been made on the cheap, and was never sold at the usual price point for games on that system, even when new. I realize these things are becoming a thing of the past; now if you have such a game idea, you just put it on Live or PSN and cut out physical distribution. But from the PS1 era, where these things really began to take hold, to last gen, budget games were plentiful. And yes, largely terrible (oh Grudge Warriors, you were virtually unplayable even by $10 standards). But a few of them truly impressed with what they could do on small budgets. For me, the winner was definitely Phantom Dust, a bizarre and hard-to-categorize Xbox game from either '04 or '05, I don't recall. Best summation would be to call it a postapocalyptic action/customizable card game. The story wasn't well written (or translated, I suspect), but it had a couple of real high points, particularly one cinematic late in the game that was among the more poignant moments I've seen in a non-RPG game. The combat was addictive, especially once you can customize your own set of powers. Controls worked well with the powers being mapped to the face buttons, although the camera was a tricky bastard. Like any CCG, balancing the sets was both part of the fun and part of the challenge, and new types of powers were introduced frequently enough to keep it from stagnating. But unlike virtually every video game version of a CCG to date, it was not interminably slow; in fact it was frequently the opposite of that. Long story short: you could mentally fling a desk at someone in a second floor room, watch them roll out of the way, see it smash into the floor and cause the floor to collapse, leaving a gaping hole in the room and burying anyone on the first floor in damaging debris. Or jump 30 feet into the air and start spamming laser blasts like a DBZ reject while some punk uses the reverse power to send them heading right back for you. All kinds of crazy stuff in that game, and I still find myself pulling it out to play through some of the missions again in the simulator.
Runner ups would be Earth Defense Force 2017 for the 360; for all its faults, it sure can be fun as hell to fight truly gigantic hordes of truly gigantic bugs and robots with truly badass weapons, and the way in which it handles gradually strengthening your character in preparation for the later difficulties is inspired (and indeed, it's one of the few games I felt the urge to play on multiple difficulties; I've beaten every stage on Easy, Normal, and Hard, about 3/4 or so of Hardest, but only a handful on the dreaded Inferno).
Also, Evil Dead: Regeneration for the original Xbox. Not as good as Fistful of Boomstick to be sure, but it was budget, it was funny, it had a Raimi (albeit not the best one), and it's an ED game. 'Nuff said.
Runner ups would be Earth Defense Force 2017 for the 360; for all its faults, it sure can be fun as hell to fight truly gigantic hordes of truly gigantic bugs and robots with truly badass weapons, and the way in which it handles gradually strengthening your character in preparation for the later difficulties is inspired (and indeed, it's one of the few games I felt the urge to play on multiple difficulties; I've beaten every stage on Easy, Normal, and Hard, about 3/4 or so of Hardest, but only a handful on the dreaded Inferno).
Also, Evil Dead: Regeneration for the original Xbox. Not as good as Fistful of Boomstick to be sure, but it was budget, it was funny, it had a Raimi (albeit not the best one), and it's an ED game. 'Nuff said.
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