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

[Lucky Wildcard]

Does anyone remember Body Harvest on N64?

I do! I bought the cartridge years ago. I think it was 5-7 dollars. It's a game that's clearly ahead of it's time.

Now, for my picks...

Battle Circuit - A Capcom beat 'em up that was never released in America (Sadly), you and up to three other people can take one of 5 bounty hunters in a futuristic setting. In between stages, you can purchase moves and power ups for your characters, and they all have amazing technique to them. My personal favorite brawler of all time.

Violent Storm - A beat 'em up by Konami and one of their last. It looks like a blatant Final Fight rip-off, but makes many improvements, with a big variety of moves and all three characters can be played at the same time. It's an affectionate parody of the beat 'em up genre with a great sense of humor. The soundtrack is amazing, too, one of my favorites to blast the volume up to.

Undercover Cops - A beat 'em up made by Irem (Best known from their R-Type franchise) in 1992. Has almost as many moves as Violent Storm and were made by the same people who would make Metal Slug. That being said, do NOT play the US or World versions of the game. The Japanese version is finished while the other versions were based on an older build. Half of the moves are missing, the music is of poor quality, background details are missing and a good portion of the voices are gone. An English version of this game known as Undercover Cops: Alpha Renewal version exists that has all of the features of the Japanese version, but it's rare.

 

[Xarpho]

Alter Ego, it's an old browser game where you control a character from birth until death. I've played through it more than once but haven't gotten a 'good' ending for it.

Actually, it's even older, Activision released it in 1986. I tried fooling around with the browser version a few years ago, but I thought it was too depressing.

 

[Overcast]

Well, there was this old game I played on the PS2 way back in the day:

You basically play as a dog named Jake, trying to rescue his love interest. It's kind of a weird mixture of a dog simulator and a collect-a-thon platformer. You complete tasks and solve puzzles by barking, sniffing, shitting, and (for some reason) switching bodies with other dogs to complete certain tasks. (i.e. switching bodies with a chihuahua to go inside a tiny dog door to grab a bone for you)

Honestly, looking back, I can't help but feel a bit fond of this game. It was an interesting concept, and had a variety of different locations. It was pretty low budget, and outright WEIRD at times, but I liked it. Plus, the music is very relaxing to me.

Plus, the end sequence of the game kinda horrified me as a kid.

Spoiler

Basically, the baddie at the end is kidnapping dogs and having them go through a machine that chops them up and turns them into cat food. The final challenge in the game involves shutting down the various parts of the machine to prevent Daisy from getting killed. If you mess up, it shows a short cutscene of a bunch of canned cat food falling into a crate. I remember my brother asking me "Where's Daisy?" during that cutscene. I didn't have the stomach to tell him.

Like that's seriously fucked up for an otherwise light hearted game.

 

[Van Darkholme]

Alter Ego, it's an old browser game where you control a character from birth until death. I've played through it more than once but haven't gotten a 'good' ending for it.

Alter Ego doesn't have a good ending. It's about living a life and at the end you die, although it's very possible to die before even reaching adulthood. Possibly one of my favorite games ever.

 

[Foltest]

Well, there was this old game I played on the PS2 way back in the day:

Dude! Me and my siblings played that one as well. Remember that we had a good time with it, even if the controls were backwards.
Anyway,

Stalin Subway.
So you are this soviet officer who gets chased by the police and the military and you have to make your way through the subwaysystem.
Never finshed it.
You can get it on Steam for the high price of 0,59 € in the summer sale.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/311140/

 

[Coldgrip]

From the PS1

Kartia- I don't remember much of this game in all honesty, but I remember wanting to play it because the artwork in the game was done by Yoshitaka Amano. I don't recall getting too far into the game.

Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth- I was hankering for a tactics game like FFT (strangely I had never played Ogre Battle) and me and my friend saw this game at I believe an EBs. The fact that your generic recruits would die permanently upon death made the game a bit more difficult than I had expected. I also wasn't too great at tactics games so there was that as well.

From the PS2

GrimGrimoire- Like I said, I wasn't great at tactic-style games but it's art was by Vanillaware, and goddamn do the produce some gorgeous images. The whole "groundhogs day" thing made me kinda paranoid that I wasn't doing things right and I'd wind up with one of the bad endings.

Undercover Cops - A beat 'em up made by Irem (Best known from their R-Type franchise) in 1992. Has almost as many moves as Violent Storm and were made by the same people who would make Metal Slug. It has a unique scoring system were That being said, do NOT play the US or World versions of the game. The Japanese version is finished while the other versions were based on an older build. Half of the moves are missing, the music is of poor quality, background details are missing and a good portion of the voices are gone. An English version of this game known as Undercover Cops: Alpha Renewal version exists that has all of the features of the Japanese version, but it's rare.

They also made Ninja Baseball Batman.

 

[Lucky Wildcard]

They also made Ninja Baseball Batman.

Oh yeah, I can't believe I let that slip. It's one of the best beat 'em ups ever made.

 

[Anchuent Christory]

I'm not sure of how obscure this game is because my knowledge of PC gaming is fairly minimal, but I'd like to nominate Original War.
I've never been a PC gamer, but I did share a house with a mate for a while who was one to a certain degree. His PC was in the alcove under the stairs so I had pretty free access to it.

I was either on holiday at the time, or it was the period when I found myself out of work, can't remember, but either way I was bored and had absolutely fuck all to do. I was browsing the web and started flicking through his PC game cases and spotted this one.
I'm not really the biggest fan of RTS games, outside of Relic's offerings, but reading the back of the box convinced me to give it a bash. You know when you get an itch or an urge just to play a very specific type of game? it was basically that.

So, Original War is essentially an small scale RTS, with the major difference being you can't produce troops. What you start with is what you have for the mission. If a guy dies, tough shit, he's dead (unless you save scum) You can encounter additional troops throughout a mission through a couple of narrative means, but they're still your most precious resource.
One of the reasons for them being so valuable is that they gain experience and level up their abilities in four categories. Combat (self explanatory) Science (healing a research) Mechanical (vehicle driving and production) and engineering (building and carrying crates)

You assign a role to a troop by moving them into the relevant building and choosing to do so. Your individual troops are responsible for every task, so sure you can build quicker if you reassign everybody to being an engineer, but of you get attacked, you're fucked because you have no soldiers to fight back. Even gathering the needed resources requires at least one guy to do so.

The narrative basically revolves around you being part of a team sent back in time to secure a new found resource by essentially changing its geographical location in the past so it belongs to America in the future. The time machine used doesn't just dump everything in one location, it scatters them in terms of both location and time, this is why everything in the game is at a premium. Once somebody arrives in the past, they quickly find out that they're not the only faction doing the same thing.

I love the game due to it's very sedate, zen like (to me) pace, I find it almost therapeutic in a way. It's just so satisfying gradually building up your troops and bases and researching each technology.

It's available from GOG if anybody's interested.

 

[Guardian G.I.]

Hooligans: Storm over Europe (2002)

Very old football hooligan strategy game. Judging by the campaign, they're more like brainless bloodthirsty gopniks than actual Ultras, but whatever. You lead a crew of thugs, attack enemy fans and police, rob ordinary people, their houses and shops to earn money. Each unit will only fight for you when sufficiently drunk or high - beer is bought in bars (units are also recruited there); weaponry and kush are acquired from dealers. You can try to rob them as well, but they are heavily armed and will tear through your squad with their shotguns like knife through butter. Nevertheless, at one point in the campaign, your crew attacks a gang-owned marijuana plantation to get some good shit. Said campaign is about terrorizing the whole of Europe for the hell of it, and occasionally supporting your team - you even attack the European Club Championship final in the end and steal the cup.

It's old, obscure, has some problems on modern systems (it took me a while to get it running on 32-bit Windows 7, from what I remember), but it's truly unique.

 

[Strelok]

Gremlins Inc, a wonderful little digital board game that I really wish was more popular. There's usually enough people to get a game going at least. It's got some great gimmicks in it's mechanics such as your ability cards also being your movement cards, and such. TB did a WTF is on it awhile back.

On the far more obscure front, Total Extreme Wrestling, a booking sim that I'm doing a Lets Sperg of at the moment, that I was genuinely surprised when I heard another kiwi had heard of it's predecessor.

 

[JacobVR]

The Game You Played. Two-year-old Tommy Basko goes missing from a popular inner-city playground. 6 months later, his parents begin receiving cryptic messages in rhyme about Tommy. The police don't believe the messages are from the abductor, but Tommy's mother Phoebe isn't so sure. She begins a frantic search for the writer of the rhymes, at the cost of causing her marriage to fragment. When the shocking identity of the message-writer is discovered, Phoebe's desperate race for the truth has only just begun. I recommend!

 

[captn_kettle]

I loved Nox. I got to play the multiplayer a little while it was still active. It was basically Diablo meets deathmatch and it was fun as hell since there was no progression or anything and you could drop giant fists on people all day. I don't remember if I've beaten the game myself but I've seen the ending and it's pretty funny. The whole game kinda had a sense of humor in the background that I appreciated.



The best part about this game isn't the game itself, it's that it got its own pants.

View attachment 107010
Anyways, Psychic Force 2012.

I stumbled upon this game out of nowhere at a Fred Meyer (Kroger to the rest of the US) electronics department and bought it on a whim back in like... 2001/2002 when the Dreamcast was still sort of around since I was probably like 13 and just getting into anime.

It's basically a weird fighting game where you float around this arena and shoot lightning bolts and whatever at your opponent. Every character had a different element and the story mode as anime as hell. Was it flawed and weird to play? Incredibly, but it was also loads of fun once you figured out how the controls worked and how the different characters handled.

I loved the original Psychic Force, completely rinsed that game until it stopped working. I remember my favourite character being emilio.

 

[Caddchef]

I loved Nox. I got to play the multiplayer a little while it was still active. It was basically Diablo meets deathmatch and it was fun as hell since there was no progression or anything and you could drop giant fists on people all day. I don't remember if I've beaten the game myself but I've seen the ending and it's pretty funny. The whole game kinda had a sense of humor in the background that I appreciated.



The best part about this game isn't the game itself, it's that it got its own pants.

View attachment 107010
Anyways, Psychic Force 2012.

I stumbled upon this game out of nowhere at a Fred Meyer (Kroger to the rest of the US) electronics department and bought it on a whim back in like... 2001/2002 when the Dreamcast was still sort of around since I was probably like 13 and just getting into anime.

It's basically a weird fighting game where you float around this arena and shoot lightning bolts and whatever at your opponent. Every character had a different element and the story mode as anime as hell. Was it flawed and weird to play? Incredibly, but it was also loads of fun once you figured out how the controls worked and how the different characters handled.

I have a copy of this for the PSX, in the UK it's just known as Psychic Force, the story voice acting is hilarious - makes it feel like the Playstation eras very own The Room.

 

[Dunsparce]

I'll throw my hat into the ring with a game I grew up with on the Game Boy called Battle Bull. Basically you are a dude in some sort of mecha-tank that needs to destroy all of the others mecha-tanks in a thunderdome like setting. Basically it's a top-down puzzle platformer where in every level you need to destroy X opponents by pushing blocks onto them withing the time limit. You can earn money to upgrade your mech.

You can upgrade your block-pushing plow and Motor for increased speed for both blocks and your actual mech, and there are two types of accessories that you cabn have only one equipped oat a time. One are springs that allow you to jump over enemies barreling towards you(since you die in one hit), and the other are guns you can use to kill enemies without needing to push blocks. Both have pros and cons over the other, but neither are needed to experience the full game.

Overall a fun, and relatively cheap to purchase, game for the system.

Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth- I was hankering for a tactics game like FFT (strangely I had never played Ogre Battle) and me and my friend saw this game at I believe an EBs. The fact that your generic recruits would die permanently upon death made the game a bit more difficult than I had expected. I also wasn't too great at tactics games so there was that as well.

Fun fact they remade that game for the DS, and it even came state-side under the name Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix. Very few changes, but one of the odder ones was replacing one of the male characters with a female one that pretty much played the same function-wise.

 

[fcgh vgcf]

worlds.com

 

[XYZpdq]

Obake, a Japanese freeware platformer thqt involved a ghost possessing enemies to use their abilities.

Spoiler

And if that doesn't sound enough like Kirby, juet wait until you see the final boss...

Wasn't that an arcade platformer and ported to a bunch of systems?

Regarding Psychic Force I remember hearing something about the team who made it doing a fighter for CLAMP's X on the PS1.

I played the hell out of Nightmare of Druaga for a while until I got sucked into WoW. Nightmare of Druaga was a Mysterious Dungeon game set in Namco's Tower of Druaga series of games. It was fun for when I had a long overnight shift.

 

[POWER IN MISERY]

E.Y.E. divine cybermancy is one of my favorite games and if you don't like it go cyberfuck yourself

 

[Optimus Prime]

Battlebots: Beyond the Battlebox for GBA.

Rather obscure, it was more or less your bog-standard robot gladiator TV show adaption where you could fight as one of a select few robots from each size class (mainly the winners from seasons 1 - 3 and a few of the quirkier robots like Mecha Mouser Catbot which always got the license deals somehow) or the actual game where you could enter the competition with your own robot in each size class built from a handful of parts that dictated attack type and strength (weapons) or various performance stats (armor, battery, tires, even the chassis type) even though there was no way to figure out what non-weapon or chassis stuff was best beyond price (fairly linear in that the more expensive stuff were better than cheaper crap all around), chassis amounted to a yes/no on if you wanted to be a spinbot (which strangely were not simply reusing the mechanics of the only licensed spinner bot in the game - Ziggo - because you could actually DRIVE with Ziggo), and all possible combinations of parts looked like unpainted pieces of shit because they didn't even allow you to customize the damn thing's basic color.

Actual gameplay was hilariously unrealistic - bots that in real life had no self-right mechanism could turn into the Tazmanian Devil for a split second to get back in the fight, damage was calculated for bits through unseen health gauges and a robot couldn't be incapacitated by its own wreckage, and the kill saws were about two feet in diameter so you could see the graphics were those of saws. Additionally all the weapons pretty much did the same amount of damage in terms of blunt force trauma EXCEPT the hammers which were spamable as fuck, so I cheesed the shit out of that exploit. Likewise, the only robot AI in the game actually challenging was good 'ol Diesector because HE hammer spammed too - he tended to be the closest thing to a final boss the game had anyway so I let it slide.

And then we actually get to the title, which the big feature was the arenas other than the Battlebox! By which I mean the game had four arenas - one obviously was the Battlebox anyway, while the others included an aircraft carrier flight deck, an oil platform, and an airplane junkyard. And they all pretty much were reskins of the Battlebox with maybe one or two unique hazards that tended to be more lethal than anything any bot could do - only one I recall off the top of my head is the junkyard's running 747 turbofan engine which pretty much sucked in robots, beat them up inside the cowling, and then pooped them out like a Yoshi shits eggs.

Looking back on it, this was fairly lacking in quality even by GBA standards (which in fairness were not rock bottom - we had Earthworm Jim titles back then!) but damn if it didn't keep me entertained as a child. Think I still have it stored away somewhere...

 

[cmcki]

Desktop Dungeons for PC. A roguelike dungeon crawler where you have to plan your movements pretty carefully because of the mechanics of the game.

Played that one. Good game.

The Three Stooges for the Commodore 64. There was a hand and it moved back and forth and you played a minigame depending on what it landed on but sometimes you landed on a mousetrap and it cut off a finger and I kind of sucked at it.

More recent: Derivative Clicker. A nicely designed, simple, straightforward incrementer that has no pretense about the fact that you're playing it to watch numbers go up.

 

[Johnny Bravo]

I don't even know the name of this game and am not 100% sure it exists, but I have memories of playing it quite often. It was kind of like ABZU or Endless Ocean but was on the PS1. Poor graphics, short draw distance, but it had a mysterious, sort of creepy atmosphere that kept me playing. I think it might have been about Atlantis? I remember lots of underwater ruins.