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

[thx1138]

a DOS game from the actual USSR called Perestroika.

 

[Hummingbird]

Neighbors From Hell: The graphics remind me a bit of the style used for the Wallace and Gromit series, but it's a game where your character plays these pranks to torment this jerk of a neighbor. Just a little twisted fun that has a sequel and some others made in another country.

 

[Niggernerd]

Siren for Ps2. It seems like it was heavily over shadowed by other games like the Fatal Frame series, Silent Hill 3-4,Devil May Cry and the like. But for good reason. It was pretty bad.

I remember playing the Nightmare Before Christmas game for GBA/SP when I was in 6th grade and no one in my town who was into that kind of stuff ever heard about it.

 

[GenociderSyo]

Siren for Ps2. It seems like it was heavily over shadowed by other games like the Fatal Frame series, Silent Hill 3-4,Devil May Cry and the like. But for good reason. It was pretty bad.

I remember that one.

Another one to add from the PS2 era: Rule of Rose. Game was very limit in its release since it was supposedly banned in areas since your pretty much a group of young grammar school students involved in murder and cultish behavior.

 

[Pocket Dragoon]

When I was in middle-school, my best friend's dad worked from home as a copywriter for a publisher of European software in the States, most of the Commodore-64 titles.

He also happened to be on of the most prolific pirates of games and movies I've ever met, along with being absolutely autistic when it came to the newest home-theatre electronics. I believe he owned one of the first laser-disc players before they were even on the market, thru his industry connections. As for them, while Terminator 2 was just being released in theaters, he brought us all down into his basement mini-theater, and we watched it on laser-disc with surround sound that would've made Lucas salivate.

Anyways, most of the European games he had copies of were on unmarked discs, thousands of them, a majority of them French. Neatly boxed, color-coordinated, shelved floor-to-ceiling along an entire wall.

So on weekends when I'd go spend the night, I'd get up super early, grab some coffee from the perpetual pot, and start working my way through that collection.

A lot of them were rip-offs of console games or barely-functional, but there were a few gems.

One was called "Wings", and it was a WW1 flight-simulator in an arcade style. Strafing/bombing runs were done in a 3/4 overhead, diagonal scroll, while dogfighting was done 1st person.
The game was extremely large, 6 discs iirc, with flyable aircraft limited to the SPAD VII, SE5a, & Sopwith Camel. But it had smooth aircraft & sweet gunfire/AA rendering, landscape graphics and historically accurate gameplay that far outstripped Microsoft flight simulators. Even though the player only had 3 flyables, the Boche had a dozen types to incinerate.

The other was a 2D sci-fi platformer called "Exile". Set on some alien world colonised by frogs but overrun by their really vindictive tadpole-lamprey spawn, the lone franconaut must explore and accomplish something discernable only to ribbitspeakers. Dialog boxes were only seen at the beginning of the game, so.

"Exile" had a difficulty that far exceeded my patience; not due to bad mechanics, but because of things like suit O2/CO2 levels that had to be balanced or refilled with extremely rare canisters, scrubbers, or permanent recharge stations, and realistic fall-height-orientation damage. If you jumped or stepped off a ledge, you'd ragdoll if the astrofrog's CG wasn't controlled with the mouse. The sheer size of the world's areas and only a compass made mapping a manual endeavor.

The game also interspersed areas of null-G and full-G, with gravitational vortexes that would literally rip the player and enemies alike into pieces and fling them (complete with blood-arc sprites) as projectiles with inertia & damage.
Other areas would either freeze you solid or incinerate, depending on nearby objects (malfunctioning generators, etc), location (inside/outside/underground/swimming), & the time of day, because the world was orbiting close to a sun. And thankfully, nights were longer than days.

That dark, abandoned-feeling, lonely & menacingly animated world with hyper-detailed character/enemy/effect sprites was also something I didn't see again until possibly the portables/FF Tactics timeframe.

*Edited for syntax

 

[JamFlowMan]

Prehistoric Man on the Snes was a fun platformer I never hear anyone bring up. Fade to Black was this terrible Ps1 game that felt stiff and clunky even back in those early days of 3rd person movement. Trigger Man was another awful game for Ps2 I got in a two pack with Bad Boys Miami Takedown.

 

[Pocket Dragoon]

a DOS game from the actual USSR called Perestroika.

One of my favorite DOS text & ASCII games was Мбр, ("ICBM"), which was essentially a random-number generator married to Battleship, modified with special weapons like SDI on the American side & something in Cyrillic for the Soviets.

Even cooler than being a fun Russian game, from a time when the Curtain was very much intact, was how my stepdad got it.

During that time he was active-duty Airforce, as a training wing maintenance chief; at the very beginning of glasnost, he was among the first to shake hands with his communist counterparts.

He immediately bonded with a fellow Russian chainsmoker & DOS game fanatic; they traded a few (the OG Rogue being one) before parting ways, and that is also how we got Tetris for our 8088.

 

[Pocket Dragoon]

Neighbors From Hell: The graphics remind me a bit of the style used for the Wallace and Gromit series, but it's a game where your character plays these pranks to torment this jerk of a neighbor. Just a little twisted fun that has a sequel and some others made in another country.

I've played a few which were like plagarized versions of Goblins, with the same claymation style.

Your comment reminded me also of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, along with Zak McKracken & the Alien Mindbenders.

Good times.

 

[Hummingbird]

I've played a few which were like plagarized versions of Goblins, with the same claymation style.

Your comment reminded me also of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, along with Zak McKracken & the Alien Mindbenders.

Good times.

My Girl Scout troop liked to play ZAMN.

 

[Zaragoza]

Siren for Ps2. It seems like it was heavily over shadowed by other games like the Fatal Frame series, Silent Hill 3-4,Devil May Cry and the like. But for good reason. It was pretty bad.

I remember playing the Nightmare Before Christmas game for GBA/SP when I was in 6th grade and no one in my town who was into that kind of stuff ever heard about it.

Dude, it sucked seeing Siren 2 and knowing that it was never going to come out in the US. I would constantly go to IGN and see the previews for the game being totally hyped up for it and then Sony saying "nah, you ain't getting it. lol"

 

[Niggernerd]

Dude, it sucked seeing Siren 2 and knowing that it was never going to come out in the US. I would constantly go to IGN and see the previews for the game being totally hyped up for it and then Sony saying "nah, you ain't getting it. lol"

It actually did look better than the first. I get pretty pissed how Japan does that alot Imho that's what seems to kill consoles when new ones come out other than it being obvious new gen . I think if they were to release these games for NA you'd probably still have people playing past consoles. It's the limited market that kills them.

 

[Absolute Brainlet]

Madness Retaliation - a turn-based RPG flash game based on the Madness Combat series. It kicked my ass as a kid, due to the combination of it being surprisingly challenging and myself being surprisingly stupid.

 

[Pocket Dragoon]

My Girl Scout troop liked to play ZAMN.

Was it even possible to beat that game?

The difficulty ramps up hard past level 50, and kept going forever, it seemed like.

Those quick little Chucky bastards were always the ones who did me in.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

Oh, where do I start?
Ballz 3d. Not very well known fighting game for SNES. Can't call it a masterpiece, but it was fun playing it with my friends.
Second Sight. Third-person shooter about psychics. I played it on PC, but it was obvious PS-port, so controls weren't very good. Also, I've had strange problem - after some time of playing it, I felt nausea and dizziness, so I had to stop playing. It sucked, because it has part's based save system, so no saves or checkpoints, only after you'll finish a part. That sucked, because there are not many games about psychics and it had some neet ideas.
Gay Psy Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. Also third-person shooter about psychics, but much more action-packed. You could use telekinesis and throw stuff at your enemies, throw them into fire, use them as meat shields etc. You could burn them with pyrokinesis or, you know, just shoot the hell out of them. Too bad there was no sequel and with death of Midway there won't be one.
Counter Strike: Condition Zero. Yep, stand-alone campaign for Counter Strike. Nothing special, but it had it's charm. And I had the same problem with it, that I had with Second Sight, seriously, what the hell?
Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents under pressure. I fucking love this game. Where else can you play pretty good beat-em-up with parkour, graffiti drawing, stealth elements, great soundtrack and decent story? I'm not even sure it is that obscure, because when it was released, all my small town was covered with "TRN" tags. Anyway, it deserves much more love and recognition, that it has.
Hard Time. Yeah, creator is a cow, but c'mon, this game is hillarious. I love how any prisoner can start shit with you and you will be the one, who will get increase in term, but you can do a local genocide and the judge will allow you to get away with it. Also, every texture is JPEG, so it's very easy to create mods.
Crime Life: Gang Wars. In the early 2000's Konami decided to suck all the fun from GTA formula and released this. It had ugly graphics even for the time, bad animations and boring shooting with auto-aim, but if you like the idea of thugs beating the shit out of each other with bare hands or improvised weapons, then play GTA: SA give it a try. Also, soundtrack is forgetable as hell, despite having D12 on a main theme.
Dungeon Lords. Third-person RPG in fantasy setting. Loved its Enclave-like combat and skill system. You could learn Acrobatics and do backflips, which looked funny as hell with my dwarf character. Also, the main theme is fucking epic.

Fallen Lords. Third-person adventure in fantasy setting, where you can play as demon, angel or undead. Had a massive battles for it's time, but fraction's units were reskinned copies of each other, so there isn't a lot of variety.
Blur. Long-forgotten racing game with realistic cars, but also with powerups. Basically, NFS: Underground + Mario Kart. Played the hell out of it, despite the fact, that I don't like racing games at all.

 

[Pocket Dragoon]

Ballz 3d; that's another one I used to play a lot, but haven't thought about in decades. It was one of the few fighting games I was good at, along with Primal.

If I ever find Buck Bumble though, I'm digging up a console to play it on. Bits of the soundtrack for that game have been earworms of mine to this day.

 

[ApatheticViewer]

Played this growing up. Fucking hate it then and now. Terrible jokes, terrible controls, terrible everything

Don't play this

 

[Trilby]

Played this growing up. Fucking hate it then and now. Terrible jokes, terrible controls, terrible everything

Don't play this

At least play the 1981 original.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I've played a few which were like plagarized versions of Goblins, with the same claymation style.

Your comment reminded me also of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, along with Zak McKracken & the Alien Mindbenders.

Good times.

I always used to mix up the titles of "Zak McKracken & the Alien Mindbenders" and "Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender".

An adventure game that most might not have played is "Hopkins, FBI" released in 1998. Adventure games never really died but for a number of years there wasn't much that resembled the games LucasArts/Sierra had made, Broken Sword 2 came out in 1997 and in my mind it wasn't until 2001/2002, with games like Runaway and Syberia, that the traditional style started to get some traction. (there was also The Longest Journey but that's a blind spot to me because I only ever saw that game sold in bookstores and you don't want to buy games there)

So, "Hopkins, FBI".

It's a traditional point-and-click adventure game:

As expected it has an inventory:

There are lightly animated cutscenes:

You play as an FBI agent so the thread of the game is centered around doing FBI things:

It becomes incredibly violent(wait what?)

There's a bunch of gory nudity
(ok this is not how games like these used to be)

Spoiler

aaaand halfway through the game you're actually killed trying to defuse a bomb(IIRC) and now you're adventuring in heaven

When I pirated and played the game I had never heard of it, I just heard it was a traditional point-and-click, so I was pretty surprised by the direction the game took.

 

[Antique Rice]

If I ever find Buck Bumble though, I'm digging up a console to play it on. Bits of the soundtrack for that game have been earworms of mine to this day.

Buck Bumble may not have been as fun as Star Fox or Jet Force Gemini, but the soundtrack was rad as Hell.

Spoiler

aaaand halfway through the game you're actually killed trying to defuse a bomb(IIRC) and now you're adventuring in heaven

Man, this sounds fucking amazing and I should look into this game.

Okay, another game from the N64 days that nobody ever seemed to know about was Hybrid Heaven. An RPG with a kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers plot where aliens are planning to kidnap the president of the US (among other important figures) and replace him with a clone under their control. The player shows up as a Hybrid who apparently goes rogue and sabotages a delivery of a double, then roams the underground alien base to dismantle the conspiracy. It is revealed around the midway point that the main character is actually a member of the Secret Service who's been disguised in order to take down the aliens from within. Are you a Bad enough Dude to protect the president from alien abduction?!

What made this game really interesting to me was the combat system. Characters face off in a simple arena which can be moved around in freely to jockey for position, get breathing room to use recovery or attack items, and charge up to perform attacks. Each attack is selected from a menu with a wide variety of grapples, throws, kicks and punches which expands as the hero witnesses new moves in combat and get more effective with practice, as well as improving the strength and defense of individual arms, legs, head and trunk. Once leveled up enough the player or enemies can use multiple stored moves to create combos, and there's a good amount of tactics that goes into encounters. The rest of the game was kind of unmemorable, but there was nothing else like it on the Nintendo 64.

 

[Dreamland]

I've never met anyone who played this gem:

I played the demo with one mission for the men and one for the women, felt very XCom: Apocalypse-like . The 'men mission' has you facing a gauntlet of mechs, grenade launchers and emplacements and not many shield rechargers while having to destroy the women's sperm reserves. The women's mission was ezmode just kill some incels and blow shit up before reinforcements arrive.

Who remembers: