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

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.

I have a copy of Traverse! I've played a bit, but yeah, my weak Japanese skills quickly became quite the roadblock.

I became interested in it as it was developed by Pandora Box who also made the Rayearth Super Famicom RPG + Arabian Nights.
 
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This game probably isn't that unknown, but I pretty much never hear anyone mention it especially for how good it was. Granted, I haven't played it for a long time and I'm sure some of the mechanics have aged, but at the time I remember the ammo system being really novel to me and not something I had seen taken to that extent in a game. I'm sure it has progenitors though. It was like a combination of hitman and ratchet and clank. There would be a VIP you have to take out and he would be in a moderately sized open world for each level iirc, and there were a number of ways to take the guy out and a lot of fun crossbow ammunition with different functions you could use to do it. It's in the Oddworld universe but it's a spaghetti western kind of setting.


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Another one I've never heard mentioned. This one I never actually owned but played a lot at a friend's house when I was a kid. Not sure if I ever even played the singleplayer but what makes this game stand out to me was the multiplayer mode. It was a MOBA before MOBAs. I don't really play MOBAs, but I enjoyed the hell out of this game at the time. You and your opponent each have home bases on opposite sides of a symmetrical map. Your base produces a few little tank things every so often and the objective is to get these tanks to your opponents base to destroy it, or you could try to go destroy it alone iirc, but the base had turrets and your opponent could defend it as well. You could increase the production of these tanks, make them stronger, or produce helicopters that were also upgradable, by destroying turrets all around the map and getting points to spend. Tanks and helicopters would follow a set path to the enemy base. Multiplayer mode is pictured and you can see the red helicopter mobs.
 
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It's in the Oddworld universe but it's a spaghetti western kind of setting.
And then everything changes in a way you rarely, rarely see in games.
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.
That game looks awesome! There's a clock and dates and beautiful isometric graphics..
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How have I never heard of it until now?

"Release date: June 28, 1996" - That explains it, no magazine was reporting on Japanese SNES RPGs at that time.
 
I have two to mention:

-raid 2020 for nes. A truly shit game that dumb little kid me insisted on renting multiple times as a kid
-dungeon of doom which I received from a friend of my dad's in a case of pirated Mac 512k disks in my early childhood. It was a fun roguelike that I had crazy nostalgia for. I had a hell of a time tracking it down but recently did and played it again. Still fun but expectedly didn't match my nostalgia fueled expectations
 
Phantom 2040 was a better Cyberpunk game than Cyberpunk 2077
An obscure piece of culture with so much media. Kid's show, movie, 16-bit game.
Young Merlin is somewhat obscure, it's a point and click adventure game made by Westwood Studios for the SNES.
Young Merlin is weirdly charming. Endless lives, but no textual help.

 
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I'm surprised to learn the show had two seasons. I saw the pilot movie and it was grim stuff, indeed. I'd be lying if I said I was compelled to seek out more. Too labyrinthine, too ambitious for its target audience. Maybe too ahead of its time.

I'd still suggest playing the game. I played the game before I watched the show and I like the game a hell of a lot more. I've never actually finished the whole show tbh.
 
Ball 'N Kid Balloon Kid.


One of the earliest GameBoy titles. Your bro gets carried away by a shit-ton of balloons he was holding, so you have to rescue him. It's short, like most GB games, but the soundtrack is dope.
 
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The title is very misleading: it's a standard fantasy romp with a kid. Lush visuals and a relaxing soundtrack. It starts to fall apart in the middle, with those endless mine cart rides.

I had completely forgotten that the game had combat and bosses. Easy thing to do because the combat was just there, it was in now way a challenge and easy to walk past.
What I remember was collecting things in a point-and-click like fashion except with direct control over the character and way easier, then either using the objects on other things or giving them to characters to get new things. And the fucking minecarts...
 
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Mazes of Fate.

Originally released for the GBA in 2006 I think by a small Argentinian studio, they re-released it on the DS in 2008. The GBA version had you moving Legend of Grimrock style through labyrinths out of 3 classes. The DS version features a fully 3D engine, moving sprites, new classes. The thing is the GBA version was released just as it was being phased out and the DS version didn't pick up much traction
Apprantly they made games after this but I haven't heard of them and their twitter is pretty dead, I'm assuming this is their twitter.
 
Mazes of Fate.

Originally released for the GBA in 2006 I think by a small Argentinian studio, they re-released it on the DS in 2008. The GBA version had you moving Legend of Grimrock style through labyrinths out of 3 classes. The DS version features a fully 3D engine, moving sprites, new classes. The thing is the GBA version was released just as it was being phased out and the DS version didn't pick up much traction
Apprantly they made games after this but I haven't heard of them and their twitter is pretty dead, I'm assuming this is their twitter.
If I remember right with the gba version of the game. The blonde guy you can get for your party (I think he like a paladin or a knight or something like that. ), Can later be found around or in the end game dungeon to be recruited again, but you can have him in your party when you find him again, leaving to a funny moment where you kick him out of your party so he can then rejoin it at the same time. I don't remember if there more to triggering this bug, but it was really funny when I saw it 10+ years ago.
 
What Ace Combat is to fighter jet porn, this game is to naval warships. The voices are annoying as shit, there's only a scant few builds that are even remotely viable, and each stage has you fighting entire navies worth of warships..but the shooting is still solid and the ability to build your craft from the ground up is just too fun to care too much.

-raid 2020 for nes. A truly shit game that dumb little kid me insisted on renting multiple times as a kid
oh CHRIST, this one. I rented it thinking it would be like NARC, which was my favorite arcade game. You can guess my realizations 40 minutes later.
 
Chameleon (2005)

Basically a stealth game taking place in 1957 where you play a rogue CIA agent trying to track down the killer of his parents. Id say, its def a fun little game, though sadly it was released in limited editions, mostly in Eastern Europe and Russia. The devs behind it were also the team that made Mafia 1

Bratki

Its essentially a empire building mixed with turn based combat. The whole setting is set during 90s Russia type city, where it was common for various criminal gangs to take over and thus the player needs to make their mark. When it came to the global map, it was kinda like Gangsters 1, you give your guys orders and sent em out to claim property, while the combat was a simplified turn based battle, but your team stats did have a bigger role as a guy with say 60 str would do ton of damage in melee combat. Sadly, this game was also a very buggy and broken mess, so to get it running wasnt an easy task.
 
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Legal Crime for PC. It was a multiplayer only game that I got on a demo disc from the back of a magazine in the 90s. I've never heard anyone else talk about it before. It's an RTS that takes place in a big city and you collect money by sending units to shake down businesses for protection money. The only difference between the full version and demo was that game was that games were limited to 15 minute time limits in the demo. I never did have the full version. You unlocked the fullversion by I believe calling in credit card information to the developer and they would email or fax back an activation key, but I couldn't convince my dad to let me use his credit card to do it.


Internet archive:
Funny thing, this game was released in Russia. But what the Russian guys did was re-draw all the art, fully dub and translate the game and even made a whole campaign composed of 22 missions and it was renamed into Don Capone 1932 Chicago.
 
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What Ace Combat is to fighter jet porn, this game is to naval warships. The voices are annoying as shit, there's only a scant few builds that are even remotely viable, and each stage has you fighting entire navies worth of warships..but the shooting is still solid and the ability to build your craft from the ground up is just too fun to care too much.


oh CHRIST, this one. I rented it thinking it would be like NARC, which was my favorite arcade game. You can guess my realizations 40 minutes later.
I miss these games. I don't know why they don't make a more modern version of them.
 
My two absolute favorite games of all time which I never get to hear about anymore.

Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere
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Really sick Sci-Fi type fighter jet game. Something like 21 different planes, 32 missions plus 2 bonus missions, really fucking cool scenarios and goals. The art style was very surreal and the story itself was too. Only problem is the NA version of the game had so much content cut compared to the PAL/JP version which was basically an anime. It had fully animated anime style cutscenes, far more missions, critical choices, etc. Missions range from destroying orbital cannons in space, chimneys for factories, boats, insanely huge groups of enemies, Zeppelins and so on. The NA game version cut basically the entire story and turned it into a very mechanical military campaign. Probably not THAT obscure but obscure enough that I've never met another player.

Also what is it with late 90s games and incredible OSTs? Listen to that intro vid and tell me it's not better than 90% of shit produced anywhere today. Still gives me goosebumps.


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The other game I've not heard about is Ape Escape. Holy cow what a weird and fun game. So many levels, such a fun premise, really well designed content, and the soundtrack still is fantastic with so many different stylized levels bringing on a variety of musical styles. I don't even know how to explain this game to you. A white ape named Spectre gets ahold of a scientific invention that makes him hyper intelligent, so he gives all the other apes at his zoo a lesser helmet of intelligence and sets them loose across time to change history. Your job as a 12 year old spikey haired boy is to catch all of those apes across time and space because why wouldn't you?

I can't explain the game in a few paragraphs. Here's a video of the third level (I think) but the game goes so far beyond this.

The second or third level. Amazing soundtrack.

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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.
I loved this and Disaster Report as well. Still trying to get my hands on Disaster Report 4, as I didn't have the money to grab it when it came out.

As for obscure PS games, nobody talks about Incredible Crisis. I love that game, even though the last level is a bastard.


Also, the weirdest, most obscure game I've played is Zoku Segare Ijiri. It's by Enix, it was Japan only, on the PS2 and I have no idea what the fuck is going on in this game. Not my video, but literally the only one I could find on it.

 
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Looks like shovelware, but it's not, A neat indie game for the 3DS/PSVita (also on Android, here's a download to the APK). Released by the same publsher that released Fairune 2, Legend of Dark Witch, and Go! Go! Kokopolo 3. Basically you're a chick in a suit that can change light from red to blue. Plot is kind of shallow, basically some bad shit happened to you in the past and some dude is helping you to escape the cyberpunk hell you're currently in. The game is a run'n'jumper where you're continuously changing colors to avoid 1-hit deaths. Same color = lights/lasers/projectiles don't hurt you. Different color = death.
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Everytime you complete a level, you unlock challenges for that level, which are basically "collect all the letters and special pieces to unlock more modes". Later levels get ridiculous but not impossible. It definitely tests your reflexes. The end of each stage has a boss, some of them drag on for quite a while.

Fun Fact: One of the stages uses the same song that's on Scott Cawthorn's game "The Desolate Hope" (Viren Boss Battle Theme)
 
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Well I was going to say Iron Storm but two people mentioned it on page 1, so-- Soldiers of Anarchy, from like 2002. Strategy game were you control four soldiers emerging from 10 years in a fallout bunker after a plague wipes out almost everyone. It's kinda like Fallout except with disease instead of nukes. So you have to build a force, recruit people, capture equipment and supplies etcetera and defeat the Big Bad. You could eventually build up a force of tanks, BMPs, helos etcetera but you had to scrounge like a mofo because ammo was scarce. Had a lot of fun with it.

Also it's probably not obscure but I played the hell out of Tropico 2 and loved it.
 
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