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

[Stasi]

This is one I played recently, think its pretty obscure or at least I've not heard anyone talk about it and it seems to have had middling reviews back in the day.

Its a game called The Red Star on PS2, got an interesting premise in that its a mix between a brawler and a shoot em up. Reminds me a little of another similar game I played recently called Cannon Spike on Dreamcast. In most stages you work through screens of trash mobs in a Streets of Rage/Final Fight type brawl with guns thrown in and these are interspersed with boss battles in a shoot em up style. Its not quite a bullet hell but some of the boss battles get pretty intense. I don't really like shooters but even I managed to get through it so you don't have to be great at these games to play this one. The beat em up action is pretty mediocre but serviceable. Game is worth checking out and isn't super long, about 3-4 hours to complete a single playthrough.

 

[Jason Wynn]

Game has a bit of a cult following but Sacrifice (early 2000s strategy game from Shiny/Interplay) doesn’t get talked about much. Game was quirky in that you play as a wizard who allies with one of 5 gods in their machinations to take down the other gods.

You don’t build strongholds or churn out resources like in typical RTS games, you kill enemy units, convert their souls to your side and use souls to summon your own creatures. The wizards are immortal in that killing them only makes them incorporeal until they get back to their shrine to recover. The only way to permanently kill them is by sacrificing one of your creatures on their shrine in a ritual.

Game was innovative and fun and had a quirky sense of humor to it. Tim Curry voiced the air god which was a plus.

 

[There Is Light At The End]

Ok, here's some really obscure stuff. Farscape the game. Diablo-esque isometric stuff with RPG elements

 

[AlmightyMagichan]

I felt like going back and playing the Ar Tonelico games again.

The only thing people know about this series are the fan service aspects. Much like those who said they read playboy for the articles, I do in fact like this game more for the plot and characters.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

This is one I played recently, think its pretty obscure or at least I've not heard anyone talk about it and it seems to have had middling reviews back in the day.

Its a game called The Red Star on PS2, got an interesting premise in that its a mix between a brawler and a shoot em up. Reminds me a little of another similar game I played recently called Cannon Spike on Dreamcast. In most stages you work through screens of trash mobs in a Streets of Rage/Final Fight type brawl with guns thrown in and these are interspersed with boss battles in a shoot em up style. Its not quite a bullet hell but some of the boss battles get pretty intense. I don't really like shooters but even I managed to get through it so you don't have to be great at these games to play this one. The beat em up action is pretty mediocre but serviceable. Game is worth checking out and isn't super long, about 3-4 hours to complete a single playthrough.

That's a great game. For a couple of years the only way to play it was by pirating the press review copy that had been sent out. Immediately after it had been sent to reviewers Acclaim(the publisher) went belly up. Rotten luck for that dev team, the game was finished.

The first part of the game is pretty slow in a tutorial like fashion but after that it becomes an interesting mix of gameplay styles. It could be compared to Nier: Automata in that way. It's also a co-op game.

 

[Calandrino]

View attachment 5392000
(This player is cheating hard - disabled timer, flamethrower and it's ammo% aren't showing in the "held" box [if you play legit you only get to hold one item at a time and ammo runs out  fast.)

Also, the player character is apparently canonically female (because there was a hot chick on the game's box), another thing I never knew until today.

Anyone else ever play this?

Yep and not so very long ago: both Saboteurs were brought to Switch, and there's even a new sequel.

I made an earnest effort of getting the good ending (all objectives complete) to one mission in Sab 1 before quitting in despair. I think it's just one level, didn't even realize 2 had multiple levels.

The Switch version's description reveals some surprising trivia that I bet you guys didn't know:

In 1987 Clive made the sequel Saboteur II: Avenging Angel - the first video game to feature a female protagonist - Nina - sister of the ninja from the first part of the game.

 

[Cyberpunk Panatela]

Yep and not so very long ago: both Saboteurs were brought to Switch, and there's even a new sequel.

I hope that they were at least released for free.

I made an earnest effort of getting the good ending (all objectives complete) to one mission in Sab 1 before quitting in despair. I think it's just one level, didn't even realize 2 had multiple levels.

The area is fucking huge, so I can't be dead certain on whether it's multiple level designs or just one fucking gargantuan one.

BTW, on sab2 you have only one main objective on each level (the other is "escape doing x").

Oh, and one level is total bullshit (I think the code to get there is "DIM MAK", so being bullshit is at least appropriate).

"Mission: Collect entire microtape": This requires scouring the structure and searching through every ammo box. In some of them you find an item labelled "?" - that is a tenth of a piece of a punch tape. There are only ten of these; like I said, the building is big; and you have the same timer as any other mission.

I think that is one of the few occasions where I raged at a computer game.

The Switch version's description reveals some surprising trivia that I bet you guys didn't know: In 1987 Clive made the sequel Saboteur II: Avenging Angel - the first video game to feature a female protagonist

Yes, I mentioned that - although I defy you to guess this fact through gameplay (Apparently it was mentioned on the box, which I don't have any more).

Oh yes:
I downloaded that game to play on my phone through Dosbox, and made some entertaining high scores:


("Rob El Boss" and "MA2" are placeholders I haven't kicked off yet. "Ethan Ralph" got kicked off and needs to be replaced. )

 

[Cougar Pump]

Bud Tucker in Double Trouble - 90s point and click adventure featuring voice acting by Rik Mayall.

 

[Need for Sped]

Mine is Hexplore (1998 ). It was part of the isometric RPG boom of the 90s, but this one was made with voxels, which allowed for 360º rotation of every level. While the graphics were not particularly cutting edge at the time (And depending on your taste, might have aged horribly), there was a surprising amount of variety: Forests, mountains, castles, middle eastern-styled palaces and deserts.

It was my first foray into isometric RPGs, so I was pretty impressed by it at the time, but upon revisiting it a couple of decades later, the gameplay is pretty damn basic. Even then, it has a certain rough charm.

Fun fact: The third level (Depicted here) takes place in a town called Troon.

 

[snowdunes]

I got one that is really obscure: Robinson

Released 1999, a Point and Click game (for kids) from Russia (made by "Nikita"), translated into the scandinavian languages by the Swedish publisher "Young Genius".

Can't find a non stutter audio gameplay.

 

[High Level Rad Waste]

Phantom Crash and Steel Lancer, its sequel. They're the best mech games I've ever played and it made shit like gundam, armored core, and similar boring.
I also remember Redneck Rampage, which was a shitpost by the Duke Nukem guys. You ended the level by whacking a buddy with a crowbar and you fought shit monsters from the sewers.

 

[Rembrandt]

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.

Replying to an old post, but Hooligans has been covered by a fairly good video game reviewer. His discussion of the game is very entertaining, it's worth a watch if anyone's interested. He finished the game from beginning to end and the title is surprisingly tactical and challenging for an eurojank RTS game. Besides gameplay there's some extra interesting information sprinkled inbetween, like the game's cutscenes painting the events as a real life documentary and how the developers had to self-distribute the game as it was otherwise banned from retail. Tehsnakerer also talks about British hooligans as a whole, their origins, their biggest battles (mostly against themselves) and even a hooligans movie that starred Elijah Wood. Insane ride from start to finish.

 

[Croaking Spider]

Operation: Inner Space. It's a top down space game where the levels are your PC's file directories and the files are the in-game objective to collect. They also serve as currency for buying and restocking weapons and buying new ships. The game has a pretty wide selection of space craft to choose from that you can customize with a decent amount of weapons.

Ships would be grouped into factions that actually had a form of a reputation system. If you attacked other ships of the same faction, their allies will attack you with varying degrees of aggression based on how much damage you've caused them of any of their faction you've killed. Likewise, if you assist them when they're being attacked, they will warp in to assist you when you're being attacked by factions they are hostile with. This includes a "police" faction, who will either make efforts to hook with you a tether and pull you out of a zone to make an arrest, or outright kill you if you resisted. It also had a racing mode and a pretty interesting (if not dickish) boss.

I played the absolute fuck out of this game on the family PC growing up and it seems like it never comes up in conversation.

 

[huesofmercury]

Ya'll remember mind zero? i bought it simply to piss personatards off since they call that game a rip off it while yeah it is i just bought it cause buying anything they don't like just to see them get salty gets me off rofl.

But for real i bought it cause of the music which is pretty dope imo overal 3/5 in my book.

 

[Dan of Steel]

I've been playing through Abomination: The Nemesis Project:

It's one of the most obscure games I've played that I've enjoyed, and it's weird how obscure it is since it was published by Eidos, a major publisher at the time it came out in 1999, and still is today. It's kinda buggy, the story doesn't make any sense, but it has a great sense of atmosphere and art direction that makes it worth your time. If you like squad based tactical games like X-COM or Jagged Alliance 2 I think you'll enjoy it. You control a squad of supersoldiers that have psionic powers (aka the game's magic system) that allow you to do things like light enemies on fire, healing for your squad, etc. It's certainly a unique game, and it's abandonware so it's free.

 

[X Prime]

That's a great game. For a couple of years the only way to play it was by pirating the press review copy that had been sent out. Immediately after it had been sent to reviewers Acclaim(the publisher) went belly up. Rotten luck for that dev team, the game was finished.

I do not believe that is quite true, I saw copies in stores back some years ago.

 

[Neodanthril]

Legend of legia. A ps1 jrpg who's gimmick was having to do very complicated inputs for attacks, Eg: up down up left up down up right right right up down right left. It was an interesting idea but jrpgs of this period needed no help padding out the length and making combat into a tedious affair certainly didn't help. Had kind of a cool story, never finished it though as when I first bought it I didn't have a memory card and by the time I did I didn't care to play it for whatever reason. I had one of those early ps3s with the PS1 emulator chips so I thought about going back and finally beating it, only to find out it was one of the rare games that had a game breaking bug that would destroy your save after several hours into the game on the PS3. I haven't tried emulating it on the computer yet because I no longer have the free time or patience to beat a jrpg which are famously long and padded out to all hell

 

[Scarthew]

Legend of legia.

I've heard of Legend of Legaia, ya know gaia, earth. There's 2 of those by the way it got a sequel it's about just as obscure as dark cloud which is to say its a jrpg that isnt SMT or FF. Also it's core mechanic of combo inputs is used in Lisa the painful rpg.

 

[Quijibo69]

Another Crab's Treasure I never herd about it until yesterday. It's pretty good for being a Baby's first Soul game. Really cute.

 

[Neodanthril]

turbo math maniacs was an educational game where you raced motorcycles in a pole-position style while solving math problems. all the characters were cows. it is true abandonware. never found a dl link for it. heres the amazon page https://www.amazon.com/Turbo-Math-M...0008GLWBW/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8