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.

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).

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

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.

Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. It was a tex based strategy game on the TRS 80 written in basic. You played a feudal lord and tried to grow your empire. Each turn was a year. It was a text only game, but I'm pretty sure they had a graphics version at one point. When I say graphics, it was the upper half of the ASCII character set mapped over to block characters. This was in the 70's.

Nintendo game called Solomon's Key.

It was a great early puzzle game.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

My "Learn to Play Didgeridoo With Gram Doe" CD.

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.

A solar powdered handheld called something like Keep the devil rising.

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.

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.

Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret.

Given the amount of videos on these games you'd think they were super popular and well known, but when they were brand new nobody knew about 'em. To this day, I rarely find anyone who actually played them when they were first launched on an actual DOS computer and not through GOG and DOSBox.

Even today, it's rare that I run into people who know how awesome they are. They had it all; bitchin' graphics, insane action, amazing FMV with actual acting and costumes... Other than the controls, they still hold up today.