Unreal was really cheap when it was released. 25 DM I think. I guess for Epic it was just a way to show off the engine. It was especially beautiful on Voodoo cards. It would be years until other games would have a skybox that could rival Unreal's. Even Unreal Tournament's looked worse.

Parachute Joust, Amiga. I think it was free with a magazine. Very silly fun for two players. As the title suggests you fight over a parachute until it's time to pull the cord and the loser smashes through a barn roof.

https://www.lemonamiga.com/game/parachute-joust

I don't know the budget, but I see a lot of mobile games in Southend Interactive's catalog, so:

Deathrow

A 4v4 fictional combat sport title. It's fun enough to play for a day or so... but if you can find 3 other people to sit on the couch and play with, that's where it can be really fun.

Our strategy was to usually have 1 person be the forward, 2 people be enforcers who stomped the enemy into the asphalt, and the goalie would try to prevent any early scores until the opposing team was knocked unconscious.

Thomas Was Alone is low budget and an excellent game.

Cartoon Network Racing. Clearly mostly made to make money off yoing kids who like the CN shows they had included in the game. I'm talking about the PS2 version since I have zero experience with the DS version. Fun in its own way.

Similar things apply to the Ed Edd 'N Eddy Mis-Ed-Ventures gamecube port and PS2 port of Codename Kids Next Door Operation V.I.D.E.O.G.A.M.E. as well.

None of these games are more than tie in games with enough content to make the kids buying them not get bored quickly, but yeah, they're all fun in their own rights when doing a blind playthrough... something I wish I could do for these games again.

Audiosurf was the first game I ever bought on Steam. That was my first introduction to indie gaming and it’s still quite a fun game. Highly recommended to anyone with a large local music library.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

Like Just Cause, but the buildings are also destructible. Pure mayhem.

Cave story is a fun side scroller and an indie release, same with monster sanctuary & shovel knight. For older ones I think you'll find more plentiful on pc since consoles were both more expensive for an indie to develop for and less likely to print physical media games from an unknown person or team. Adventure games, fps doom and quake mods and clones, elder scrolls mods, myst/fmv clones like the journeyman project, descent clones were pretty popular too.

Katamari Damacy. It was just $20 on release and I didn't know exactly what to expect but loved loved it.

I picked up Summoner for PS1 forever ago and didn’t expect much. Turns out, it was pretty amazing.

Another was Phantom Fighter for NES. The music still gets stuck in my head lol.