Ask Lemmy

Most obscure videogames I ever played:

1. A 3D, first person pacman clone that I played on a 286 MS DOS laptop in the nineties. I don't remember its name and I've never seen it since.

2. A programming game from the early 2000s called something like Fleet Commander. (But none of the many games named something like Fleet Commander that I can currently find online are it.) This game had a VB-inspired, event driven programming language. You used it to command fighters, bombers and fleet command ships. Each ship had its own AI script it would execute.

There was a text based game sample pack on Apple II C that I can't remember the name of.

If you typed in a command too simple, it would give a preprogrammed response, apparently offended that you took the game for an idiot. You could look around, pick up items that it described, open and close drawers, go up and down stairs, unlock doors if you find the key, dig in the ground if you find a shovel, all through typing in actions and reading the text that came up in response.

There were at least 3 samples on the floppy disk, one an adventure on a crashed spaceship, one finding a buried treasure in a desert, and one centered around a white house (not the White House, but a house that was white.) All the samples ended just when it got interesting and advertised where to get the full games.

Edit: the whole idea of gaming on an Apple 2c seems foreign to every single person I have ever mentioned it to. Someone must have done it, because my family found 2 different computers at garage sales in the 90s that each came with stacks of games on 3 inch floppy disks. Some where educational games, I learned to type properly with one of those. Some were bootleg versions of popular games with handwritten labels. The original Maria Bros comes to mind as one of those, it was on a disk with Joust. Some were the original floppy disk from the publisher. Oregon Trail was one we spent countless hours on, and I especially liked Wings of Fury.

Has anyone seen the 80's animated series The Mysterious Cities of Gold? It took me forever to find it and before I did I started doubting if it even existed or if I made it all up in my head. It takes place in the 1500's and it follows this group that is looking for the lost cities of gold. At some point early on they find an ancient aircraft that is made of solid gold, solar powered and in the shape of a giant condor.

Operation Sandman, amazing movie with Ron perlman and also the adventures of Pete and Pete

This song I downloaded from a file sharing application in the early 2000s. I've been searching for the artist for about two decades, nothing (the forum posts that come up when you search for it are also me).

Nintendo game called Solomon's Key.

It was a great early puzzle game.

There was this old game called Twistingo that my grandma had on her computer. Made by a long defunct company called eGames, it was basically like if Zuma and Bingo had a child. There were balls with numbers that'd slowly advance down a track, and you had one or more bingo cards. If the ball had a matching number on your card, you'd click on the number and the ball would vanish. If the balls reached the end, you lost. Really fun game, I still have the old disc for it.

Back in the heyday of flash videos and before youtube, there was a clerks spoof featuring marvel comics heroes that I remember as being enjoyable, clever, and ultimately just a good tribute/ripoff of the source material. I have no idea how to find that again.

Piratenmassaker

Cherry Coke had a promotional game called something like The Lost Island Of Alanna they gave out in the mid 90s. There was a little attack of them in the waiting room of the principles office at my school.

It was a pretty well done short Myst-like.

When you beat it the reward was a guide to read secret messages that were hidden in the squiggles that covered the cherry coke label at the time.

Toomba 2: The evil swine return is a piece of nostalgia I can never share

How about Wally Gubbins? A series of silly skydiving videos. My father has a ton of them on VHS. I loved it as a kid. I just looked, you can even find them on YouTube. So maybe not that obscure.

In terms of software I remember having several ad games. So, games that are basically just an ad. I had a Bifi game. Some weird game about colours where I don't remember what it was for. And a "game" about Chesterfield Cigarettes. I remember that I had to install QuickTime Player to run it. It was basically like Google Streetview when you walked into buildings with a few interactive elements put in. No idea where I got it. Might even still have the CD somewhere.

Edit: I found the Chesterfield thing: https://archive.org/details/see_you

OK, I'll go all-in on this:

2000 AD Comics' Nexus, The computer game.

Made for the Commodore C128 computer (which oddly ran Microsoft Basic), it was a simple single-screen platform shooter with the twist that you could pile up the bodies of your enemies and use them as platforms.

In the 70s we had a cassette tape kids story about a wizard who lived in a mountain and kept all the winds in a box.

The story was about someone who went in and retrieved the winds.

It involved blowing up sections of passageways (the narrator talked of lighting the blue touchpaper), and the wizard woke up and chased the hero.

He had a walking stick so his steps were reproduced including that, and he was calling, "My wind! Somebody's stolen my wind!".

I think it was probably on the front of a magazine or something. I don't know if it's a traditional story or something written for that production but I thought it was brilliant at the time.

In honor of Xmas, I found this video a decade ago, and it is the version I hear in my head every year.

Last Xmas - Slugabed ruined it

There was this PC FMV game back in the early 90's where there's this woman doing all kinds of things that gets herself killed and all you do is flip the right switches at the right time and enter 3 digit codes.

One of the earlier games I had on a CD-ROM. Back then it wasn't a disc tray. You eject an entire disc jewelcase-like thing and put your cd inside the case and shove it back in like a floppy disk.

Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. Try and grow a city-state by strategically distributing resources. Poor distribution results in death by famine, disease or invasion. Good distribution keep state growing and eventually become king to win the game. I played it on a Commodore PET.

One Way Heroics (Plus)

Made by a guy in Japan. Uses a custom engine and has really intricate rpg elements, super cool and I'm a huge fan. Basically you're constantly moving right because a black fog is consuming the world and if you aren't fast enough then it'll consume you too. Kind of plays like a Roguelike, but runs can have the shorter objectives, or the really long ones.

Granted it's not perfect:

• It was made by one guy so after a certain amount of time you kinda see most things, needs mods (which doesn't exist) or more content.
• You only get one stat per level-up, and if you get like "carryweight" five times in a row, then you kinda just got low-rolled and are weak-af
• You can't actually determine what biomes you end up in so sometimes you just get volcano 3 times in a row and it kinda sucks, it would be nice to see biomes up ahead and chart a course
• There's some "degen weeb" dialogue that's funny about once and then kinda weird. (Characters simp hard af for you after your run if you get SSS rank in a category they rate you in, theres some "prefixes" that give alternate dialogue to npcs, so if you get a "Naughty" Dosey/Frida/Mila then all her dialogue is degenerate af for the rest of the run)

But I still love the game, and one of my first projects I plan on is making a hexagonal-grid version of the engine that would enable the above (gameplay) issues to be fixed, something might come out of it tbh.