I used to play this beat 'em up game for the PSX called Crisis Beat. It's so obscure I can't find a post on Wikipedia.
Its premise was basically: "Die Hard in a Cruise Ship", one character I used to enjoy playing as is a waiter-looking dude named Keneth, whose fighting style was entirely leg-based, and has his hands in his pockets for nearly all of his moves.. For some reason that was ultra cool to me.
I used to play this beat 'em up game for the PSX called Crisis Beat. It's so obscure I can't find a post on Wikipedia.
Its premise was basically: "Die Hard in a Cruise Ship", one character I used to enjoy playing as is a waiter-looking dude named Keneth, whose fighting style was entirely leg-based, and has his hands in his pockets for nearly all of his moves.. For some reason that was ultra cool to me.
When I was younger I was super into horses, and my parents bought me a ton of horse video games. Some of them were lame, but some were actually pretty good, and some even had some really A+ graphics for the time. Even though outside of significant cutscenes, the characters’ mouths don’t move, and despite having a significant lose state (I’ll explain in a spoiler below), one of my favorites was Championship Dreams: First to Ride. You get three different locations to go to, the horse model wasn’t too bad and moved pretty realistically (again, considering), and the music was great. And! The story was actually pretty interesting.
tl;dr: random events can mess with your slotted activities and cause you to be unable to advance in the game.
So the game premise is basically your standard competitive horse game fare: you’re competing in three events, dressage, cross country, and show jumping, and you get a week to prepare for the competition. In that week, you have to manage your time. Each day, you plan the day by moving these little blocks into a schedule planner, and can do 5 per day. At the beginning of the week, you’d do grooming, practice for each event, and then likely the library (that’s where you learned dressage techniques you needed for the next competition). Each time you practice one of the events, you raise the horse’s stat in that event, and each week you have a minimum requirement for the stat.
Anyway, the game also has random events throughout the week that pertain to the story. This is where the lose states come in.
Losing a competition (failing any of the events) is a lose state, but so is not meeting the event stat for your horse. Oh and I forgot to mention that your popularity with your rivals/friends is part of it, so you can’t just focus on your horse. You have to do other activities during the week.
Here’s the kicker:
You’re not given any warning when the random events happen, obviously. But that means that if you’re banking on a specific activity you planned out to finish out the stat it’s for and the random event lands on it, you can’t advance. You can’t fix your schedule to make up for it; you’re just stuck. And it’s ruined a few playthroughs for me in what is a surprisingly long game (the game will take you at least 3 hours, probably closer to 5-6).
Sorry, this bit got long because now that I’m older, I understand the mechanics behind this, as opposed to when I was younger, and I enjoy explaining it.
I also loved Lucinda Green’s Equestrian Challenge (and I still play it from time to time), because of the graphics and the way the horse’s stat growth works. It’s all just really satisfying to play.
The last horse game I’ll mention is Barbie Horse Adventures: Wild Horse Rescue. Graphics were awesome at the time (on the PS2), but now when I play it I feel blind (same as me going back to any PS2 games anymore). Also I feel restricted because of how linear it is (I like linear games, but like many “open world-esque” horse games, wandering consists of traveling on paths between walls of “forest”, although WHR was better about it than some games I’ve played. Also it had local multiplayer for various races, which was awesome.
As for some non-horsey games, I’ve played Solace which was made by art college students. It’s a bullet-hell game that takes you through the five stages of grief while having each stage accompanied by sounds made by you and the creatures you “fight.”
I can’t think of any others off the top of my head, but I know they’re there. My childhood was basically Obscure Games: the Musical.
When I was younger I was super into horses, and my parents bought me a ton of horse video games. Some of them were lame, but some were actually pretty good, and some even had some really A+ graphics for the time. Even though outside of significant cutscenes, the characters’ mouths don’t move, and despite having a significant lose state (I’ll explain in a spoiler below), one of my favorites was Championship Dreams: First to Ride. You get three different locations to go to, the horse model wasn’t too bad and moved pretty realistically (again, considering), and the music was great. And! The story was actually pretty interesting.
tl;dr: random events can mess with your slotted activities and cause you to be unable to advance in the game.
So the game premise is basically your standard competitive horse game fare: you’re competing in three events, dressage, cross country, and show jumping, and you get a week to prepare for the competition. In that week, you have to manage your time. Each day, you plan the day by moving these little blocks into a schedule planner, and can do 5 per day. At the beginning of the week, you’d do grooming, practice for each event, and then likely the library (that’s where you learned dressage techniques you needed for the next competition). Each time you practice one of the events, you raise the horse’s stat in that event, and each week you have a minimum requirement for the stat.
Anyway, the game also has random events throughout the week that pertain to the story. This is where the lose states come in.
Losing a competition (failing any of the events) is a lose state, but so is not meeting the event stat for your horse. Oh and I forgot to mention that your popularity with your rivals/friends is part of it, so you can’t just focus on your horse. You have to do other activities during the week.
Here’s the kicker:
You’re not given any warning when the random events happen, obviously. But that means that if you’re banking on a specific activity you planned out to finish out the stat it’s for and the random event lands on it, you can’t advance. You can’t fix your schedule to make up for it; you’re just stuck. And it’s ruined a few playthroughs for me in what is a surprisingly long game (the game will take you at least 3 hours, probably closer to 5-6).
Sorry, this bit got long because now that I’m older, I understand the mechanics behind this, as opposed to when I was younger, and I enjoy explaining it.
I also loved Lucinda Green’s Equestrian Challenge (and I still play it from time to time), because of the graphics and the way the horse’s stat growth works. It’s all just really satisfying to play.
The last horse game I’ll mention is Barbie Horse Adventures: Wild Horse Rescue. Graphics were awesome at the time (on the PS2), but now when I play it I feel blind (same as me going back to any PS2 games anymore). Also I feel restricted because of how linear it is (I like linear games, but like many “open world-esque” horse games, wandering consists of traveling on paths between walls of “forest”, although WHR was better about it than some games I’ve played. Also it had local multiplayer for various races, which was awesome.
As for some non-horsey games, I’ve played Solace which was made by art college students. It’s a bullet-hell game that takes you through the five stages of grief while having each stage accompanied by sounds made by you and the creatures you “fight.”
I can’t think of any others off the top of my head, but I know they’re there. My childhood was basically Obscure Games: the Musical.
Evolution Worlds, a Gamecube RPG localized into America that was a compilation disk of Evolution 1/2 from Japan.
This game was actually kind of cool because there were a lot of cool minor features like characters speaking or reacting differently based on who you had set as your overworld front character, who would also be the same character that would speak on the main menu when you saved/loaded. Also everyone is named after a weapon.
Evolution Worlds, a Gamecube RPG localized into America that was a compilation disk of Evolution 1/2 from Japan.
This game was actually kind of cool because there were a lot of cool minor features like characters speaking or reacting differently based on who you had set as your overworld front character, who would also be the same character that would speak on the main menu when you saved/loaded. Also everyone is named after a weapon.
Worlds is pretty ass compared to the original Dreamcast versions of the games(both of which were released internationally, by the way).
By "Compilation" they gutted most of the first game, only keeping the first and last dungeons, so they can quickly move on to the 2nd game's plot.
Also the first game was ported to the Neo Geo Pocket Color, the only English version of that though was released in Europe and has an extremely shoddy, error-ridden translation. Plus being a 16-bit handheld system, the graphics are entirely different(entirely top-down 2D).
Probably the most bizarre and obscure game I ever played was this 1988 game called WhoDunit. The game was on a arcade machine that had one of those trackball controllers built in.
The game format looked like this:
Basically you "played" as the guy in the blue pants, but not really. The guy would move automatically from one side of the screen to another. What the player had to do was use the trackball controller to aim at enemies (your cursor was the blue cross hair). Enemies would pop out of every corner possible to try to kill you. It was quite annoying considering this protagonist was one of the types to die in one hit from literally everything. I think the point of the game was to look for some key in one of the areas, but I never found it.
I played a game called BOOM for the Macintosh. It was Shareware, and basically took the gameplay of Bomberman and gave it a Doom aesthetic. Had a cool soundtrack.
Rakugakids on the N64 came to mind, a game that wasn't released in the United States. The game played much like like a simplified Street Fighter game. The game revolved around 6 kids who find some magical crayons 8 in total and said crayons bring whatever they draw to life. The kids share the crayons amongst themselves and the remaining two and their box are stolen by the neighborhood bully.
You had your story mode, versus mode and training mode. HOWEVER, there was also a feature that utilized the gamepak. You could train your character of choice to fight for you in training mode as you would with an amiibo in Smash Bros. You would essentially teach it by fighting it and it would eventually learn your patterns and strategies.
You had 3 buttons to punch, 3 buttons to kick, 1 button for magic attacks and a button for taunting the enemy. There were also combos that you could put in with the D-pad on the controller.
The game was fun and light-hearted with the added ease of just picking it up and playing. The combos weren't difficult to master unless you had a fucky joystick on the N64.
Famicom Detective Club Part II: Tale of the Girl in Back
It's the 1998 remake version that I've played. If you want to play a really easy game that has a decent story, check this one out.
Story: You are playing as a 15 year old detective who is investigating the murder of a high school student which leads to him having to also investigate the origins of an old ghost story lurking in Urishimitsu Highschool- a tale about a blood soaked school girl who appears to students while faintly calling for help.
It's kind of spooky, but moreso for unsettling reasons.
Back in the 1990s, before The Sims was launched, EA bought Maxis and then turned it into a cash cow, there was a whole range of Sim games, from SimTower (build a skyscraper), SimAnt (build an anthill), SimCopter, and SimIsle. The latter of which I had and was possibly the most morally questionable of all the Sim games.
In SimIsle, you were the local boss of a multinational corporation who had exclusive construction and mining and development rights to a pristine, virginal tropical island somewhere in South East Asia. Populated by peaceful natives who lived in harmony with the flora and fauna of their ancestral island home. A friend of mine called is "Paradise Developed." Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to exploit the absolute fuck out of this island for fun and profit. Mostly profit. You would do this by sending employment agents to train the peaceful natives into disposable unskilled labour, set up logging camps and sawmills to cut down the trees, build airports and seaports and tourist traps, send explorers into the uncharted depths of the jungle to uncover its secrets (usually the burial caves and ancient ruined temples of the natives' ancestors which you could turn into tourist attractions, and rare wildlife which you could capture, fence in, breed, and sell), build coal mines and iron mines and heavy industrial plants which the natives were put to work in, and even turn your island into an industrial powerhouse fuelled by inexpensive labour. And then you could build towns and cities for the natives to move into and provide their inhabitants with bread and circuses, drill offshore oil rigs, turn the oil into petrol and plastic, and pollute the fuck out of the place for mega cashola.
There was an in-game encyclopaedia which pretended to be compiled from your employer's reports on the island. They referred to the locals as "worker-units."
There was also one level in which the natives were so annoyed with you that they took to growing opium for a drugs cartel - and yes, you could take a cut of their profits in exchange for looking the other way and not closing them down.
Oh, and the soundtrack started off with all these nice peaceful and harmonious New Age sounds and whalesong and suchlike and native chants and eventually turned into grinding industrial metal the more you developed it.
I remember when I was younger and when we'd visit my cousin I'd hop on their old ass computer (old at even those standards) and play Hellbender, which was a starfighter sim type thing made by microsoft. It was only a demo but I could never get very far because I have no flight ability and I would get lost all the damn time if I didnt die.
^ I don't think I ever played Hellbender but I did play the earlier Terminal Velocity from the exact same developers, Terminal Reality, and Hellbender looks to be very similar to Terminal Velocity except the computer in Hellbender is voiced by Gillian Anderson (Agent Dana Scully on X-Files).
I'm not sure if Terminal Velocity had a version with voices, I didn't have a PC with either a CD-ROM drive or a sound card at the time, so I only played the version that came on 3.5" floppy disks and heard whatever basic sounds they could pull off with an unenhanced PC speaker.
^ I don't think I ever played Hellbender but I did play the earlier Terminal Velocity from the exact same developers, Terminal Reality, and Hellbender looks to be very similar to Terminal Velocity except the computer in Hellbender is voiced by Gillian Anderson (Agent Dana Scully on X-Files).
I'm not sure if Terminal Velocity had a version with voices, I didn't have a PC with either a CD-ROM drive or a sound card at the time, so I only played the version that came on 3.5" floppy disks and heard whatever basic sounds they could pull off with an unenhanced PC speaker.
Hellbender was the sequel to Fury3 which was a reskin of Terminal Velocity and designed as a pack-in show-off for Windows 95 and its nascent DirectX. In fact, I believe that Fury3 and TV are actually binary compatible; you can rename the Fury3 data files and assets and stick them into TV and it will play the levels spot on. Not sure about Hellbender because that was slightly different gameplay wise but used the same engine.
