Obscure game you have played - What have you played that you think, maybe, nobody else here has played?

[X Pac Heat]

Phantom 2040 was a better Cyberpunk game than Cyberpunk 2077

1995 I think was when it came out. Only takes place at night. Very corporate dystopian setting. Actual choices. Actual branching paths. I might be biased but I think the soundtrack is even on par for the time.

I'm sad when people don't even know about the TV show let alone the way better game. Definitely worth emulating if you like platformers IMO

 

[Sandraker]

I always thought Monday Night Combat was better.

I'm a bit more pvp inclined so I tend to like smnc despite its clear short comings by comparison

It was better since it had more of an identity, before the devs shit the bed and hopped on the moba crazy that was prominent around that time.

It wasn't the worse of that bunch but you definitely felt shitted on if you liked the original.

 

[BrunoMattei]

I'm a bit more pvp inclined so I tend to like smnc despite its clear short comings by comparison

It was better since it had more of an identity, before the devs shit the bed and hopped on the moba crazy that was prominent around that time.

It wasn't the worse of that bunch but you definitely felt shitted on if you liked the original.

The original had a lot of potential to grow and not be a TF2 killer but definitely earn a silver medal. Especially if the devs brought out the mod tools but they fucked it all up as I said and went for F2P greed.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

...... Tell me more.

I only started playing the game but from what I can recall it expands upon language and European History hence it's name. It's one of these games that's gonna take a lot to get used to as you could really end up getting the bad endings. The more girls you unlock, the more likely you'll get to the true ending. From the looks of it, the game looks mostly based.

 

[CrippleThreat]

Live-A-Live. Japan-only game made by Square when they were still "soft."

Pretty good game.

 

[KokoroKoroki]

I remember a car combat game called Motorsiege: Warriors of Primetime

I don't remember all that much about it other than it being set in a futuristic world with pretty basic but fun car combat.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Small Soldiers: Globotech Design Lab (and Squad Command). They were both PC games and pretty solid, especially Squad Command (RTS).

I've never seen anyone ever even mention the games before.

 

[Dollar Store Sentai]

That was a good one. There was also Ripper with Christopher Walken.
View attachment 773804

I loved this game. I still hope that one day it gets the GOG treatment or is brought to steam. (Probably music licensing issue, considering Don't Fear the Reaper is used so often in the game.)

 

[The Great Citracett]

BarneySplat. When hating Barney was the big thing with kids, a friend had this for PC. Was a text game where you'd pick different ways to kill Barney, his friends, and even the kiddies on the show. It was like a choose-your-own-adventure book where you'd pick from multiple choices. Pretty sure my friend paid money for it. Easy to find online, you can play it here.

Same friend also had a weird game called Wyvern. I don't remember exactly how it was played, but the character was a purple wyvern, and the goal was to make him jump over a bunch of school buses between ramps, Evel Knievel style. Which made no sense because wyverns have wings. I'm sure it was probably made by someone as a joke, because it would have been totally normal and unremarkable if it had just been a guy on a bike instead of a big purple wyvern. Looked like typical 2D 90s graphics. Background was black. There was no animation. Just a jpeg of a wyvern ramping over buses. Can't find it anywhere.

 

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

Same friend also had a weird game called Wyvern. I don't remember exactly how it was played, but the character was a purple wyvern, and the goal was to make him jump over a bunch of school buses between ramps, Evel Knievel style. Which made no sense because wyverns have wings. I'm sure it was probably made by someone as a joke, because it would have been totally normal and unremarkable if it had just been a guy on a bike instead of a big purple wyvern. Looked like typical 2D 90s graphics. Background was black. There was no animation. Just a jpeg of a wyvern ramping over buses. Can't find it anywhere.

CD.TEXTFILES.COM: The Collection

No clue if it might be there, but it's worth a look anyways.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I always wondered what exactly killed this game cause I have a special place in my heart for smnc despite its major shift from the first one.

Honestly the game was too charming and its a really sad to see it be considered just a tf2 clone.

Despite being delisted, you can still people try logging in to play it again on the steam forums. Not too much you can do outside of organizing a match with the other deranged players or bots, but damned if I could play shit like Wascot or laughing at nearly everything the Sniper says.

Also the OG announcer was way better than smnc.

They briefly included a crypto-miner in the pc version of SMNC and that was not popular.

I also found this article from 2018.

Super Monday Night Combat will close down, citing EU’s new digital privacy law​

Six-year-old game runs on multiplayer software that is not GDPR compliant

Super Monday Night Combat will close down, citing EU’s new digital privacy law

Six-year-old game runs on multiplayer software that is not GDPR compliant

www.polygon.com

 

[StraightShooter2]

 

[Slap47]

EU Rome is surprisingly good. Not the best Paradox game, but its the only one that I have seen with techups and mechanics that are negative and designed around making the lategame harder.

See those uncolonized provinces? They spawn giant rebel armies that force you to permanently garrison your frontiers. They're weak unless they build up a critical mass of 40k-100k guys or get a rare legendary chief. Pretty great for training up armies and they give slave pops when beaten. They can sometimes surprise you and create a crisis on the frontier as their occupation destroys colonial provinces. Forts, defensive armies, and regular reinforcements from the populous core are necessary.

Game is all about balancing your pops in the longterm. You want citizens for tech, freemen for soldiers, and slaves for profits This is adjusted only with modifiers so you can end up with a late game where you simply do not have enough soldiers, but amazing tech or low tech, but many soldiers. Your many choices actually have endearing consequences.

Political system is insanely deep. You don't just pick parties. Most seats get it and every choice influences seats. The worst party is the populist party, and they can easily gain too much influence and establish themselves as a permanent party. Politics is a struggle and it adds alot of drama to a game. Amazing Populist faction general who wins lots of battles? Be careful, everytime he wins he makes the populist party stronger.

I would recommend it.

 

[Gay_Frog]

Intravenous, an Splinter Cell and Hotline Miami mix. That will probably fail because it was no publicity and the dev have some back bone in twitter.

Intravenous on Steam

Teeth-clenching stealth, followed by tactical hardcore gunplay for those not looking for a quiet way in. Intravenous redefines challenging stealth-action and will keep you on the edge of your seat!

store.steampowered.com

Edit:
Gameplay:

Interview with developer:

 

[Snakebottom]

Last Call - an early 2000s bartender simulator. Some kid at school lent it to me, I played but the shit out of it and became obsessed with perfecting the zombie drink, still haven’t found any bar that actually sells it. The drink, not the game.

 

[Seven Costanza]

Anyone who's into classic ARPGs (especially Ys) needs to play the Xak series pronto. Fun, fast-paced games, bump combat, cutesy and funny characters, phenomenal soundtracks. Some English fan translations too.

 

[WonderWino]

- Moraffs dungeons of the unforgiven (surprisingly good game for its day)
- Ports of call (this is now available on steam for like $5 and surprisingly good)
- Mordor 2/Demise: the rise of ku'tan (oddly enough I prefer the pre release beta version released in 1998 to the final product, but its so obscure most people have never heard of it, and also very, very, VERY difficult. I never even reached level 10 of the dungeon in the original beta after a few thousand hours of play)
- dink smallwood
- STUNTS (old 1990 era racing/stunt driving game, not well known today)
- Windows Elvis in Space (its....odd and virtually impossible to find a full version of)
- Eternam (available on steam and GOG for like $2.50 on sale, weird game from 1992 but pretty good and worth the price)
- Castle of the winds (fairly popular in its day but not many people seem to be aware it exists today, but a really good game for its era)
- Blake stone (available on steam and GOG, released like a week before the original doom so nobody really knew about it at the time. uses the old wolfenstein engine with some interesting enhancements, like food slots, and interrogation system for talking to npcs, moving between levels at will, etc..)
- Conquest of the new world (from 1996, not well known and difficult but a surprisingly good procedurally generated exploration and conquest game that lets you claim and name areas of the world like mountains and such
- Meridian 59, (first commercial 3d mmo, has since gone freeware and open sourced, but i'd avoid the steam official community if I were you, real sketchy stuff going on on the admin side of things that goes beyond in game shit)
- Ancients (an old game from the early 90s released by Epic back when it was still called 'Epic Megagames')
- Ancient evil (sort of a diablo cloneish by design but a surprisingly good rpg dungeon crawler released in 1998, with a good lighting system, interesting magic system and lots of puzzles. Only places i've seen it available are through a few old abandonware sites, also has a sequel)

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

- Meridian 59, (first commercial 3d mmo, has since gone freeware and open sourced, but i'd avoid the steam official community if I were you, real sketchy stuff going on on the admin side of things that goes beyond in game shit)

Really, what's going on there? Ports of Call is as a classic as well.

Young Merlin is somewhat obscure, it's a point and click adventure game made by Westwood Studios for the SNES. That's a weird combination of things. It was kind of ugly but I liked it.

 

[XMassAllYearRound]

Being a game collector I'm thinking of a few but all of them are easily accessible or emulated.

The Grid is not.

This is the spiritual successor to Smash TV, the point of the game being to kill other contestants or achieve certain goals within a time limit with narration in the style of a TV contest. The thing that makes the Grid impossible to replicate today, even if you emulate the game, is the multiplayer which in my opinion is the highlight of the game.

The Grid was released only in arcades somewhere in the early to mid 2000's which was not a very good time to release Arcade machines. Ergo Midway came up with a solution, force arcade owners to buy multiple machines at once to make your money back, and as such the only way to play the game in multiplayer is by daisy chaining several arcade machines together like this:

I would not mind another game made in a similar spirit to this, Super Monday Night Combat tried to do something similar but it was full to the brim with boring MOBA mechanics that ultimately made the game a tedious chore.

 

[Dysnomia]

Traverse: Starlight & Prairie. An early attempt at a open world type of game for SNES where you can do quests and recruit characters in any order you want. It doesn't have a fan translation. It seems like a lot of translations got finished during the pandemic because people had time on their hands. This unfortunately isn't one of them.

It's a sequel to Soul & Sword. That game also lacks a fan translation.