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

[Takodachi]

Phantom Dust and Kingdom Under Fire
I've met like 3 other people in my entire life who have played or even heard of it, so I'm convinced at this point I was part of a glow in the dark operative to create super soldiers.

 

[Pargon]

Is Defcon 5 considered obscure?

This was the second PS1 game I ever bought, right after Alien Trilogy, when I was still trying to convince myself I was good at shooters. This was the wrong game to do it, too, because from what I understand it's a game that owes a lot to System Shock; there's puzzle solving, survival elements, hacking, and a very specific set of criteria you need to meet to get a win condition. It isn't really a "proceed from point a to point b and kill everything in your way" sort of game, and some of the things you need to do are fairly obscure. If I'm not mistaken it was a poorly-done port of a PC game and it shows. I never got very far into it; there are some turret-based defense sections that are goddamn impossible as far as I'm concerned.

Runner up would be another PS1 game, a space flight combat sim called Colony Wars. This game was fun as fuck; tooling around and being able to fly in any direction without fear of colliding with the ground was a blast, and the soundtrack is still fucking good:

Psygnosis, man. They knew what they were doing. What happened?

 

[Dick Justice]

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

Spoiler

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

Retsupurae did the game when they were still good and it's everything you could hope for. Good plan b if you don't want to go to all the trouble of playing the game.

Also has anyone mentioned Pathologic?

 

[Billy_Sama]

Phantom Dust and Kingdom Under Fire
I've met like 3 other people in my entire life who have played or even heard of it, so I'm convinced at this point I was part of a glow in the dark operative to create super soldiers.

I got those games on the Xbox but yet to play them. I bought a lot of OG Xbox games when they were cheap and I am still have a large backlog. I did manage to find a copy in the United States the Japanese only release of Metal Wolf Chaos, the most American game never to be released in USA. The corny dialogue and the Bush years plot makes it an enjoyable mech game.

 

[Antique Rice]

I got those games on the Xbox but yet to play them. I bought a lot of OG Xbox games when they were cheap and I am still have a large backlog. I did manage to find a copy in the United States the Japanese only release of Metal Wolf Chaos, the most American game never to be released in USA. The corny dialogue and the Bush years plot makes it an enjoyable mech game.

I was super juiced to hear there's finally going to be an NA release. Hope everyone is ready to mech America great again.

Another OG Xbox game that I found pretty amusing was Kung Fu Chaos. It was an irreverent fighting/party game that was built for local multiplayer nonsense. Stages were split between Mario Party minigames and Power Stone 2 four-way brawls on transforming arenas. The fighting mechanics were pretty shallow, but the real trick was abusing the opponents with taunts to build up your super attack. The whole thing is framed as a foreign chop-socky film in the making, complete with Chinese stereotype director and characters using wire-fu to make impossible leaps across impossible gaps in the levels. Was good for some laughs with friends, but not as good as a full fighting game or party game.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Runner up would be another PS1 game, a space flight combat sim called Colony Wars. This game was fun as fuck; tooling around and being able to fly in any direction without fear of colliding with the ground was a blast, and the soundtrack is still fucking good:

Psygnosis, man. They knew what they were doing. What happened?

Psygnosis had a bit too much success with WipeOut I think, being owned by Sony and having a hit like that probably put some expectations on what they should make and they should probably not make more Lifeforce Tenka or Lemmings Paintball(they should have made more Ecstatica though, that game was amazing). They then got merged into Sony and eeeh.

They were also a very eclectic developer but was mainly a publisher of other companies games, that went away when getting bought. Colony Wars was cool though, much better than G-Police.

Sentient was weird and is pretty obscure, that was one of their games. It was a first person adventure game that looked like MDickie made it set on a space station. It's mostly about wandering around and talking to people, it was and still is a novel concept, Consortium might be the only thing similar to it.

This is the difficulty selection:

Wikipedia on Sentient:

Sentient takes place in real-time. The player's actions in the early part of the game determine which path they will travel through later on. Which members of the crew are spoken to and what they are told plays a strong part in the plot's development. The player's performance through the game determines which of the nine endings they receive.

Mitch Gitelman of Pompeii Studios stated, "The organic transmission of information was one of our primary design goals, along with logical, nonlinear plot developments. Gossip and information transmission between computer-controlled characters takes the multilayered scenarios down many different avenues. It is our hope that this human interaction system will allow for maximum replayability without compromising the many stories in the game."

The most popular video on Youtube of the game, 7 years old and 16k views, so it's not exactly a well remembered game.

It's also complete ass.

 

[Iceland Heavy]

Real War: Air Land Sea, a 2001-vintage RTS that played like a shittier contemporary Red Alert 2/Tiberian Sun era Command and Conquer game. Its two selling points were being derived from the 'official' Joint Chiefs of Staff training tool and having R. Lee Ermey voice the advisor. I guess it also beat CNC Generals in exploiting the GWOT zeitgeist by a couple of years.

 

[Wendy Carter]

I'll bump this thread a bit, so maybe people can share some of their favourites. There are 2 games that probably not that many people know or remember - Ghost Master and Evil Genius.

Ghost Master is a puzzle strategy game where you play an eponymous ghost master, with your goal being to scare mortals. Along that goal you also sometimes have another goal, depending on the level - sometimes you have to lead a group of mortals through a forest into a basement of a small cabin to perform a ritual (a very obvious reference to Blair Witch Project), to make police reveal a murder case inside your haunting area. etc.
You can free ghosts trapped on levels and have them join you as you progress. Ghosts vary, including a cat killed by a short circuit, a monkey grinded inside a monkey organ, a native american with a hole in his chest, a spectral spider, a man tied to an electric chair and a horse with 2 legs who appeared in a someone's dream when he died. The game is somewhat clunky, but if you enjoy manager strategy games and aren't put off by old graphics, then you might like this game. It's available on Steam, but it's relatively short, so you might want to get it on a sale, if you're interested.

Evil Genius is a strategy game where you take on the role of an evil genius seeking world domination. The game is set in alternative 60-70's. It's graphical style is very reminiscent of various "secret agent" genre films, most notably James Bond and Austin Powers. and a lot of gameplay elements are very tongue-in-cheek: you build your base inside a mountain, one of the avatars looks like Dr. Evil, one of the actions your minions perform to interrogate enemy agents is to do a Michael Jackson pelvic thrusts and a moonwalk while going "SHAMONA!".
Gameplay is somewhat similiar to "Dungeon Keeper". You automatically recruit a minion every minute, but can speed up the process with money. You cannot control minions directly, only give them orders, such as giving enemies tags to capture/kill/confuse them, and wait for them to execute said orders. Basic minions are all builders, so you have to train them into 3 branches: technicians, guards and valets, with more tiers of said branches available as you progress. You also have henchmen, whom you can directly control, and who have 2 special abilities, each unique to them. The graphics are still pretty nice and easy on the eye, mostly because they're very stylised. There is a sequel being developed since 2017, so we might see some more of this game. It's available on Steam as well.

And no, I don't even like strategy games in general. Somehow quite a few games I liked when I was younger were strategy games.

 

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

I'll bump this thread a bit, so maybe people can share some of their favourites. There are 2 games that probably not that many people know or remember - Ghost Master and Evil Genius.

Ghost Master is a puzzle strategy game where you play an eponymous ghost master, with your goal being to scare mortals. Along that goal you also sometimes have another goal, depending on the level - sometimes you have to lead a group of mortals through a forest into a basement of a small cabin to perform a ritual (a very obvious reference to Blair Witch Project), to make police reveal a murder case inside your haunting area. etc.
You can free ghosts trapped on levels and have them join you as you progress. Ghosts vary, including a cat killed by a short circuit, a monkey grinded inside a monkey organ, a native american with a hole in his chest, a spectral spider, a man tied to an electric chair and a horse with 2 legs who appeared in a someone's dream when he died. The game is somewhat clunky, but if you enjoy manager strategy games and aren't put off by old graphics, then you might like this game. It's available on Steam, but it's relatively short, so you might want to get it on a sale, if you're interested.

Evil Genius is a strategy game where you take on the role of an evil genius seeking world domination. The game is set in alternative 60-70's. It's graphical style is very reminiscent of various "secret agent" genre films, most notably James Bond and Austin Powers. and a lot of gameplay elements are very tongue-in-cheek: you build your base inside a mountain, one of the avatars looks like Dr. Evil, one of the actions your minions perform to interrogate enemy agents is to do a Michael Jackson pelvic thrusts and a moonwalk while going "SHAMONA!".
Gameplay is somewhat similiar to "Dungeon Keeper". You automatically recruit a minion every minute, but can speed up the process with money. You cannot control minions directly, only give them orders, such as giving enemies tags to capture/kill/confuse them, and wait for them to execute said orders. Basic minions are all builders, so you have to train them into 3 branches: technicians, guards and valets, with more tiers of said branches available as you progress. You also have henchmen, whom you can directly control, and who have 2 special abilities, each unique to them. The graphics are still pretty nice and easy on the eye, mostly because they're very stylised. There is a sequel being developed since 2017, so we might see some more of this game. It's available on Steam as well.

And no, I don't even like strategy games in general. Somehow quite a few games I liked when I was younger were strategy games.

I think I got both of these from GOG but they're on my backlog. I'll have to move them up.

 

[A single cheeto]

Avalon Code for the DS. It had some dating elements, but the main mechanic was that you used a book to absorb information about monsters/npc/etc and used that to alter your core weapons. You also used it to fix the npc's problems, IE curing one of the npcs illnesses.

 

[BillyGoat2]

LSD: Dream Emulator was an obscure one i played way back when. back when i had an itch to look deeper into that Creepypasta thing when it was a fad
Here is the pasta video that led me to it

 

[Syaoran Li]

I was always a fan of the old arcade shooter CarnEvil, a blast from the past that should have stayed.

Way back when, I was utterly obsessed with that game when I was an edgy twelve year old in the early-to-mid 2000's, mainly because the mall nearest to me had an arcade with that game that was always in good condition and only cost a single quarter for a play, while all the other games were either 50 cents to play, or sometimes 75 cents or a full dollar to play in the case of the more expensive large cabinets like Time Crisis 3 and the Dance Dance Revolution games.

Not only did both of the main malls in my area have it in their Tilt arcades, but so did a local laundromat that was even closer to my house, and we frequently went to that laundromat on the weekends to wash heavy duty laundry like towels, blankets, and bed sheets or very large loads of regular clothes (my family had a washer and dryer at home, but it was cheap and old, so it couldn't really handle heavier laundry)

Needless to say, I was hooked and so were my younger brother and one of my friends I knew from church.

Like, we would talk about ideas for our own stages, monsters, and boss fights. I even remember reading the Wikipedia article for CarnEvil and seeing a lot of stuff that in retrospect was blatant fan fiction that remained on the page for years because of how obscure the game was (especially before stuff like video game long-plays became a thing on YouTube)

Heck, some of the Wikipedia fanon even entered into the "common knowledge" of the game, stuff such as Frank Welker doing voice work for the game or the player characters being named Jacob and Lisa to the point that even DeviantArt spergs codified a typical "look" for both of them, despite the actual player character being unseen and unnamed and intended as a generic self-insert for the game's intended teenage fan base.

However, I can kind of see why the game was able to attract a very small but devoted cult fandom despite its relative obscurity and the demise of arcade gaming in America.

The game was literally released on Halloween (October 31, 1998 to be exact) and unlike a lot of the fan lore surrounding the game, that was actually true (the creator of the game confirmed it in an interview, which I will link below at the end of this post) and was a surprise hit in the arcades, which were still relevant in the late 1990's, but were just starting to decline.

In fact, CarnEvil was one of Midway's top-selling releases that year, and is often quoted as Midway's most successful entry into the shooter genre ever. Despite its success, the game was never released to consoles although there were plans to do so, neither of which got off the ground.

IIRC, there were two known attempts at a console release.

The first was intended as a direct arcade port that was presumably shelved due to Columbine, given the time frame.

The second attempt supposedly involved Midway licensing the IP to a third-party developer and do an original survival horror game that was supposed to be a remake/re-imagining of the arcade original, and this one is mentioned briefly in the article.

Unfortunately, the game entered legal limbo following an unspecified rights dispute at Midway (possibly related to the second attempt at a console port) and the departure of Jack Haegar, the game's creator around the same time.

I've heard the game had a very brief mini-rivalry with House of the Dead at the time, as both were campy light-gun horror games that were popular in the arcades during the late 1990's.

Makes sense, given the similar premises yet very different styles.

House of the Dead had a lot of Sci-Fi elements and occult references (the bosses being named after Tarot cards) and was more clearly inspired by Japanese horror movies.

On the other hand, CarnEvil was a splatter-punk goofball thrill ride with a style that was as American as apple pie and bubblegum.

There's a certain kind of weird charm to CarnEvil, with its bizarre mix of violent bloody gore (that looked realistic by late 90's standards) and equally insane levels of surreal cartoon-inspired black comedy and gallows humor. Seriously, the game was like a crossover of Evil Dead, Scooby-Doo, and Looney Tunes.

If an obscure arcade game like that can still maintain a small yet dedicated internet following two decades after it was released, I'm curious as to how things would have been if CarnEvil was successfully released to consoles. Maybe it could've become a true franchise? Who knows?

Here's the article I mentioned, posted last Halloween for the game's 20th anniversary.

https://www.gamesradar.com/the-stor...led-the-most-twisted-video-game-ever-created/

 

[Manah]

Hellsinker. A completely bizarre and absurdly overcomplex shmup with a convoluted and Dark Souls-esque backstory. Even in the original language (Japanese) the plot is confusing, and it's even harder to understand in English.

Something about a human colony centered around a the Device that broke down, leading to widespread disaster. Small groups of survivors use parts of it to survive, and are trying to track down more parts of it to research. The protagonists are part of an expedition to an artifical island called "Paradise", where a part of the device fell into the "cardinal shaft". The last two expeditions were wiped out by hostile, immortal robots(?) called "Prayers".


Also something about a lost cat?

Hellsinker BGM - Menu Track 1

Track 00 - Menu Track 1 Hellsinker Released at C72 © RUMINANT'S WHIMPER If you want to download this track, use www.dirpy.com

www.youtube.com

Fantastic OST, though.

Evil Genius

I got that on GoG awhile back. The aesthetics were all really cool, but I got annoyed by how the island was set up (also I sucked at it).

 

[Billy_Sama]

I played the infamous Divine Sealing, a Japanese unlicensed game for the Mega Drive that used hentai to make up for the awful gameplay and headache inducting water effects.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I'll bump this thread a bit, so maybe people can share some of their favourites. There are 2 games that probably not that many people know or remember - Ghost Master and Evil Genius.

Ghost Master is a puzzle strategy game where you play an eponymous ghost master, with your goal being to scare mortals. Along that goal you also sometimes have another goal, depending on the level - sometimes you have to lead a group of mortals through a forest into a basement of a small cabin to perform a ritual (a very obvious reference to Blair Witch Project), to make police reveal a murder case inside your haunting area. etc.
You can free ghosts trapped on levels and have them join you as you progress. Ghosts vary, including a cat killed by a short circuit, a monkey grinded inside a monkey organ, a native american with a hole in his chest, a spectral spider, a man tied to an electric chair and a horse with 2 legs who appeared in a someone's dream when he died. The game is somewhat clunky, but if you enjoy manager strategy games and aren't put off by old graphics, then you might like this game. It's available on Steam, but it's relatively short, so you might want to get it on a sale, if you're interested.

Evil Genius is a strategy game where you take on the role of an evil genius seeking world domination. The game is set in alternative 60-70's. It's graphical style is very reminiscent of various "secret agent" genre films, most notably James Bond and Austin Powers. and a lot of gameplay elements are very tongue-in-cheek: you build your base inside a mountain, one of the avatars looks like Dr. Evil, one of the actions your minions perform to interrogate enemy agents is to do a Michael Jackson pelvic thrusts and a moonwalk while going "SHAMONA!".
Gameplay is somewhat similiar to "Dungeon Keeper". You automatically recruit a minion every minute, but can speed up the process with money. You cannot control minions directly, only give them orders, such as giving enemies tags to capture/kill/confuse them, and wait for them to execute said orders. Basic minions are all builders, so you have to train them into 3 branches: technicians, guards and valets, with more tiers of said branches available as you progress. You also have henchmen, whom you can directly control, and who have 2 special abilities, each unique to them. The graphics are still pretty nice and easy on the eye, mostly because they're very stylised. There is a sequel being developed since 2017, so we might see some more of this game. It's available on Steam as well.

And no, I don't even like strategy games in general. Somehow quite a few games I liked when I was younger were strategy games.

I'll have to check out Ghost Master.

Evil Genius was a decent game, it was very Dungeon Keeper like because the guy that founded Elixir Studios was from Bullfrog. His name is Demis Hassabis and he's super smart guy, brutally so, he's mostly known these days for DeepMind, the Alphabet/Google AI thing.
From Wiki:

Demis Hassabis CBE FRS FREng FRSA (born 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence researcher, neuroscientist, video game designer, entrepreneur, and world-class games player.

Really smart.

At Bullfrog he programmed Theme Park with Molyneux at the age of 17, I don't think he even had a programming background at that point but crazy man Molyneux always said that he could teach anyone to program in assembly in... was it days or weeks, it was a ridiculous claim either way, but Hassabis did it.

He tagged along to Lionhead before founding Elixir where their first game, Republic: The Revolution, was a hugely ambitious political RPG/strategy game about building up enough support to overthrow the dictator in a nameless eastern european country. Not just support from the general public, there were unions, other dissident factions with different political goals/ideologies, the mob, disgruntled politicians, politicians that saw a revolution as a way to advance their careers and the police to recruit from and set to work where useful.

It had crazy tech driving it. A city full of AIs, like a city sized The Sims household, with things unfolding in realtime and people/factions reacting to your decisions and things like that, it was dynamic and reactive. It shared that thing with Black & White where the player could zoom in from far away down to an apple and then look at the worm eating that apple, but it was better in Republic. Crazy game, very ambitious, very broken. The game runs just fine, even on Windows 10, but there's like a cog isn't close enough to drive another cog in this clockwork simulation, when playing you do things but are unsure if it had any effect or what's going on. Still, it's really cool and it's probably on GOG for a couple of bucks.


It's probably been mentioned but Startopia is a good game made by Mucky Foot, another studio full of ex-Bullfrog devs. Evil Genius and Startopia are the lineal successors to Dungeon Keeper/Theme Hospital/Theme Park so anyone that likes games like that should check it out. Mucky Foot also made Urban Chaos, not noteworthy in itself but the sequel Urban Chaos: Riot Response was the first game Rocksteady developed and it's the only non-Batman game they have made.

 

[CancerGoat]

The Scooby-Doo game for the wii

 

[Crichax]

Build N' Race for Nintendo Wii. It's one of my favorite arcade racers, but the build mode is ridiculously glitchy.

 

[loli]

Fairly certain I'm the only one on KF who has ever played this absolute gem.

It's one of the best games I've ever played, hands down, and I got it on sale for $12. I've probably put at least 2,000 hours on it, and it's not the kind of game you would expect to spend loads of time on; the campaign can be completed in probably 8-10 hours if you're not terrible at learning.

It has a very large learning curve for such a seemingly simple concept. 2,000 hours in and I'm still learning new techniques. If you like going fast, shooting stuff, and technical mastery, I urge you to try this game.

 

[PL 001]

Early 2000s PC rpg called Soulbringer. Objectively it wasn't a very good game. The controls were janky, the graphics a little subpar, even for the time, questionable voice acting, a very blase story...but there was something I can't quite put my finger on (I'd wager the atmosphere of the game) that drew me in. The dark, desolate landscape with a constant snowfall had an odd charm to it.

I bought it packaged with Planescape Torment, so it didn't get that much attention, but I would find myself playing it at night during the Christmas season on occasion.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Shannara, from Legend Entertainment in 1995.

Legend Entertainment, before they got swallowed up by Epic after being tapped to do the expansion to the original Unreal, had a background in text adventures and this turned into semi-graphic adventures with a word-list style text parser in the form of Eric the Unready and Spellcasting 101, and then full graphic adventures albeit obviously turn-based. They had some excellent artists and got a big break when Piers Anthony (in between coming up with increasingly iffy puns and being by his own admission a dirty old man) teamed up with them to do a Xanth game. Actually, he wrote the book "Demons Don't Dream," which featured a game called "Companions of Xanth" which Legend Entertainment then made for real, but which contained the parts of the book outside of the game as well, and the game was a game in a game. Confused yet? It makes sense in context. The game is certainly as pun-happy and twisted as the original book (i.e. if you find a bucket and kick it, you die, and you can open a door slightly to get a jar, and have Nada Naga put her hair into a bun, which you can then smear with mustard to frighten off a lava hound because it's a hot dog, and the lava hounds lava giant master is dressed as a firefighter because he's a fire man, and so forth.)

They then teamed up with Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman to adapt the Death Gate cycle in 1994. Yes, the same people who inflicted upon the world Dragonlance. Death Gate was an excellent game and an excellent novel series as well. With this pedigree of adapting games out of fantasy novels and doing quite a good job, they ended up working with Corey & Lori Cole (designers of Quest for Glory) and Terry Brooks (yes, that one) to adapt his Shannara series.

Result - this. If there was a word for it, it would be "underwhelming." It just feels phoned in and by the numbers. The art is quite nice but not on a par with Companions of Xanth or Death Gate. Also, it's just too easy and obvious in places. On the plus side, you did get a free copy of The Sword of Shannara in all its papery doorstopperiness with it.