A German children's shoe brand called "Elefanten" had this wildlife protection marketing gimmick.
Out of it came this promotional game for the Amiga.
Like many German games of that era, it's a business sim. A very basic one where you manage a wildlife reserve with elephants.
Speaking of DOS games, I used to play a Sierra game called The Castle of Dr. Brain. We got to choose between that and Oregon Trail but I always preferred the aesthetics of Dr. Brain. Thankfully, if you're interested it's available as abandonware so you can play it if you've got DOSBox. I highly recommend it, though you'll need this PDF of the manual that I'm uploading for the "Ultra Top Secret Decoder Grid."
Check it out or let your kids play it, it's a good game that made me think a lot back then. It's still kind of a challenge now, I'm not sure how I beat it as a kid.
Found this piece of shit in a discount bin, it was the first video game purchase I regretted. As a kid I used to buy games on instinct rather than reading at reviews. Maybe it was luck or maybe I was really good at guessing whether a game was good by looking at the cover art and reading the back of a box but up to that point I had somehow managed to avoid buying bad games.
I thought it was one of those mascot platformers, which hadn't disappointed me yet, and instead it's some weird ass game with grid based movement. It's also way more violent than the 3+ age rating would imply.
Anyone else play Raw Danger? It was a survival game set in an artificial island where a levy bursts and the place is flooding. You have to manage things like body temperature, has several characters whose paths overlap. Kind of afraid to revisit it because it's in this haze of nostalgia for me.
Moop and Dreadly: I had the demo because it came with a box of cereal, and apparently it was yet another company Ron Gilbert founded, but it only made this one game before going bankrupt.
And it was episodic gaming before Telltale made it cool.
It was an adventure game, but like, even the youngest of autistic kid could easily beat this. It's charming as hell though.
Two forgotten/unsuccessful games with an interesting background should be mentioned, Heart of Darkness and Galleon.
Heart of Darkness is the game Eric Chachi made after Another World and if you like that game or similar games(Abe's Oddysee, Flashback) you should definitely play it(it's on PC and PS1).
Another World came out in 1991 and development of Heart of Darkness started the year after that and was released seven years later in 1998. It was first announced in '94 and what they demoed looks identical to the finished game, so production wasn't going smooth.
Things that fucked with development:
* Was developed for the 3DO (it was meant to be a CD-ROM game from the start) but development wasn't done when the 3DO died.
* Would have come out on the Amiga CD32 and Jaguar CD and same story as above.
* Got signed by Sega as a Saturn console exclusive and... same as above.
The game also features an insane amount of animated sprites and every screen of the game is unique, that takes time to create. It was a released on the pc/PS1 in 1998, at the height of the 3D craze, and that was a really bad time for a 320x240 hand animated 2D game. 2018 would have been more receptive to a game like this than 1998.
Images:
Prepare to die.
Almost an Assassin's Creed amount of climbing animations.
Prepare to die even more.
There's often a lot of things going on in each screen.
Galleon was a shit game and a complete flop but it had some cool ideas. It was created by Toby Gard, who created Lara Croft/Tomb Raider, flush with money he left after the first game to start his own studio. Production then began on Galleon and it was intended to be a Dreamcast game. Then the Dreamcast died.
It was eventually released in 2004 for the Xbox, finished by a skeleton crew in an otherwise empty office.
What makes it cool is that it pioneered the free-running system that can be seen in Assassin's Creed, the player just looks at where he wants to go and start running, the character then navigates obstacles to get there. Lots of climbing and jumping and swinging off of things in this game.
Images
[spoilers]
Can you tell that this game was meant for the Dreamcast?
I brought it up in another thread but an old educational dos game called Hidden Agenda, it's a junta simulator where you have to balance out the roles in your cabinet between the right and leftists and making promises to the people that you can uphold such as funding for hospitals and land distribution between the former serfs and big industrial farms. The best outcome you can seem to get is that you don't die in a coup and get elected out by your backed nominee.
I brought it up in another thread but an old educational dos game called Hidden Agenda, it's a junta simulator where you have to balance out the roles in your cabinet between the right and leftists and making promises to the people that you can uphold such as funding for hospitals and land distribution between the former serfs and big industrial farms. The best outcome you can seem to get is that you don't die in a coup and get elected out by your backed nominee.
I swear to god I cannot find anything about this game anywhere, and at this point I think it was just some kind of early childhood fever dream.
So because my mom needed to potty train me, and I had basic proficiency with computers at the time, she decided to get me a video game to encourage me to use the toilet instead of shitting in diapers.
All I remember about this game is that there's a part that involves a teddy bear sitting on a toilet, and flying through space. I cannot find a single god damn thing about this game, and I can't for the life of me remember the title.
I'm pretty sure I've made up the whole thing in my head, but I actually remember playing it for some reason.
EDIT: I think I've already stated this, but it's for PC (If that helps).
I swear to god I cannot find anything about this game anywhere, and at this point I think it was just some kind of early childhood fever dream.
So because my mom needed to potty train me, and I had basic proficiency with computers at the time, she decided to get me a video game to encourage me to use the toilet instead of shitting in diapers.
All I remember about this game is that there's a part that involves a teddy bear sitting on a toilet, and flying through space. I cannot find a single god damn thing about this game, and I can't for the life of me remember the title.
I'm pretty sure I've made up the whole thing in my head, but I actually remember playing it for some reason.
EDIT: I think I've already stated this, but it's for PC (If that helps).
Was it a point and click adventure game with pre-rendered graphics maybe? Came on cd-rom? If so, did you enter the (blue/turquoise?) bathroom from the right side of the screen? I remember a game like that, never played it just read an article/watched a video a couple of years ago. The reason I remember it was because it had some super complicated(and maybe not kid friendly) easter egg involving a big teddy bear on a toilet.
I played through the first mission. Then I decided life was too short to play atrocious games. Sold it back to GameStop because even what little they paid me for it was more than what it was worth.
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was probably one of the best GBA games. Dunno how popular it was but I've never met anybody who has played it.
You could play as any of the main characters and each one had their own campaign and playstyle. The difficulty scaled perfectly and the it was almost entirely faithful to the story.
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was probably one of the best GBA games. Dunno how popular it was but I've never met anybody who has played it.
You could play as any of the main characters and each one had their own campaign and playstyle. The difficulty scaled perfectly and the it was almost entirely faithful to the story.
